ALTA45 Roundtable: Ethics in Translation: Does the End Justify the Means?

Is it the author, translator, publisher or editor? Or are issues resolved by compromise: no one is completely right, and no one completely wrong? How disagreements are resolved contain an ethical component. Common disputes include:

• authors who think their English is better than it is and want to “improve” your translation;
• translators who want the author to change the original text in order to “improve” it;
• authors who want to retain their original punctuation though it doesn’t read well in English.

Copies of examples will be distributed among the participants; discussion and debate will ensue.

Format: Organizers will share their thoughts about thorny ethical dilemmas in translation. Participants are invited to share examples from their own work, then move to break-out rooms for deeper discussion. All reconvene to share negotiating tactics.

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Organizers

Barbara Goldberg, poet, translator and speechwriter, is the author of Breaking & Entering: New & Selected Poems (The Word Works). The recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, she has also translated and edited anthologies of contemporary Israel poetry. She is Series Editor of International Editions for the Word Works. Nancy Naomi Carlson is a poet and translator whose translation of Khal Torabully’s Cargo Hold of Stars: Coolitude (Seagull, 2021) won the 2022 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Decorated with the French Academic Palms and twice a recipient of NEA literature translation grants, she is the translation editor for On the Seawall. Keyne Cheshire is Professor of Classics at Davidson College. His publications include original poetry; a textbook on Alexander the Great; scholarship in Hellenistic and Greek lyric poetry; and translations of Homer, Sophocles and Catullus. His current projects include a Latin text, commentary, and translation of Ovid’s curse poem Ibis.