Pre-Conference Workshops
Workshop A - 10.30am - 12.30pm
Translation and/or Creation in Multilingual Broadcasting
Mark Cummins, Content Manager and Pavla Hulova, Editorial Standards Manager, Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), Australia
Workshop B - 11.00 am- 12.30pm
Mind the Gap: A Practical Workshop on Translation Projects
Eva Hussain Director of Polaron Language Services and Vice President of the Australian Institute of Interpreters and Translators (AUSIT)
Workshop C - 1.30pm - 4.30pm
Analysing Translation Corpora
Michael Barlow, University of Auckland
Workshop D - 1.30pm - 4.30pm
AALITRA Literary Translation Workshop
Jeremy Munday, University of Leeds and Harry Aveling, Monash University and Vice-President of the Australian Association for Literary Translation (AALITRA)
Keynote Presentation 5.00pm - 6.00pm
Welcome Reception sponsored by John Benjamins Publishing Company 6.00pm - 7.00pm
Workshop A – Tuesday 7 July, 10.30am-12.30pm
Translation and/or Creation in Multilingual Broadcasting
Mark Cummins, Content Manager and Pavla Hulova, Editorial Standards Manager, Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), Australia
SBS Radio, with its 68 language programs, is the most linguistically diverse broadcaster in the world. Based in Australia, SBS relies on English but its unique diversity inevitably generates specific editorial, production and evaluation challenges. This workshop was designed to introduce some of them:
- Do we ‘translate’ the news from English to languages or do we ‘create’ the news in languages?
- What is the role of translation in multilingual media production?
- What are the benefits of common language as a tool for achieving editorial integrity? And what are its limits?
- Is translation always helpful when evaluating a program in a language unknown to the assessor?
- To what extent does common language mean common content?
- 68 languages, many more cultures and yet only one Charter – does it work?
Unlike other multilingual media based usually in one country and broadcasting to several different audiences abroad, SBS produces content in the opposite direction. Apart from the Australian coverage, we bring stories from dozens countries of origin to our local multicultural and multilingual audiences in their languages. This fundamental difference in SBS’s apparent similarity to other broadcasters provides a great platform for discussion about similarities and differences in the use of language between SBS and other multilingual counterparts.
Workshop B – Tuesday 7 July, 11am-12.30pm
Mind the Gap: A Practical Workshop on Translation Projects
Eva Hussain Director of Polaron Language Services and Vice President of the Australian Institute of Interpreters and Translators (AUSIT)
This hands-on, practical workshop will explore misconceptions, beliefs and gaps that develop between translation project participants: the client and the translation business. Using a real-life case study, the workshop will also cover some strategies to bridge the gap and manage client expectations, by putting the translators into the customers’ shoes. While everyone seems to hide behind the ‘high quality, professional translation services’ label, many language services providers, be they large corporations or solo practitioners, deliver translations that are barely adequate. The key to success in what has become a highly competitive global market seems to be to position yourself apart from the rest by delivering consistently high quality work and managing often conflicting demands. Translation business owners wear many hats, including those of salesman, marketing executive, educator, bookkeeper, secretary, IT specialist, cleaner and CEO. At times, the translation itself comes last on the To Do list. So how do you juggle all these jobs, maintain your sanity, make a decent living and produce fit-for-purpose translations? How do you sell them? If you often make promises you can’t keep, under-quote on a regular basis and wish that you could spend more time on what you do best – translating – this workshop is for you!
Maximum 30 participants
Workshop C – Tuesday 7 July, 1.30-4.30pm
Analysing Translation Corpora
Michael Barlow, University of Auckland
The aim of this hands-on workshop is to explore the potential of viewing translated texts as parallel corpora. We will introduce and practise the application of corpus analysis tools and techniques to translation and contrastive studies. The bulk of the workshop will focus on the use of a bilingual concordancer, ParaConc, which is used to search for patterns in aligned parallel corpora. We will concentrate on pairs of texts, but the software can be used with up to four parallel strands, for example, an original text and up to three translations. We will also use a term (collocation) extraction program, Collocate, in conjunction with ParaConc. The structure of the workshop will be as follow:
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Introduction to parallel corpora and parallel concordancing
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Demonstration of ParaConc
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Practise with simple bilingual searches and frequency information
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Identification of translations
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Practise with parallel and advanced searches
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Use of Collocate to identify useful terms
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Alignment of parallel texts
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From research question to text analysis
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Wrap-up
Participants will learn practical techniques in corpus analysis during the workshop and will also gain an understanding of the wider issues relating to the use of parallel corpora in research and translation studies.
Maximum 30 participants
Workshop D – Tuesday 7 July, 1.30-4.30pm
AALITRA Literary Translation Workshop
Jeremy Munday, University of Leeds, and Harry Aveling, Monash University and Vice-President of the Australian Association for Literary Translation (AALITRA)
This interactive workshop will be coordinated by Jeremy Munday and Harry Aveling. The format of the workshop will be structured so as to achieve maximum benefit for participants, who will need to register for the workshop in advance (by 1 May at the latest). The workshop will begin with a brief talk by Jeremy Munday on literary translation, after which the participants will break into smaller, language-specific groups (max. 10 particpants), in order to discuss participants' translations of a work selected in advance. Participants will need to submit their translations in advance so that copies can be made available to other members of their group. The groups will be led by a number of experienced literary translators. The aim of discussion will be to provide participants with insights into the processes involved in literary translation, and with constructive criticism of a small sample of their own work.
Languages available (subject to numbers, maximum 10 participants per language): Chinese, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese and Spanish.