MCLC: parallel publications

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: parallel publications
***********************************************************

Source: Dissertation Reviews (n.d.):
http://dissertationreviews.org/archives/9143

Parallel Publications: Translation Banks, Little Magazines, Online Venues
By Nick Admussen

Many scholars of East Asian Studies who are preparing dissertations based
on archival research encounter, sooner rather than later, occasions for
translation. Historians, political scientists, and literature scholars who
are publishing outside their research language can rarely depend on prior
work—Western-language communities simply have not translated a sufficient
amount of material to allow for dissertations and monographs that
exclusively cite previously completed translations. Some projects only
require the scholar to summarize a few documents, or translate a sentence
or two. Others translate so copiously that they serve as anthologies—for
instance, one senses that Michelle Yeh’s 1991 monograph Modern Chinese
Poetry: Theory and Practice Since 1917 required a substantial portion of
the work that would turn into her 1994 Anthology of Modern Chinese Poetry.
This Talking Shop piece will give some options writers might consider,
both during dissertation research and after, to make as much as possible
out of the contribution that translation represents—even for those who
don’t consider translation a stand-alone part of their intellectual or
academic profile.

Because I study literature in part as a communication process between
readers and writers, I tend to work backwards when organizing my
translation activities. I try to answer the following question first: who
are the potential audiences for translations drawn from the kind of
research I do? For me, the answer is mainly people who read literature,
especially poetry, and sure enough there are ample, albeit non-paying,
venues for translated literature, especially in translation-only journals
like 

Asymptote <http://www.asymptotejournal.com/>,
Circumference <http://circumferencemag.org/>,
the Center for Translation’s Two Lines
<http://www.catranslation.org/two-lines>,
Princeton’s Inventory <http://inventoryjournal.tumblr.com/>,
or Iowa’s Exchanges <http://exchanges.uiowa.edu/>.

My estimation is subjective, but in each of these publications, Asian
languages appear vastly underrepresented, and many editors have an
explicit desire to increase the global balance of their magazine.There are
also language-specific journals that engage in translation, such as

Renditions <http://www.renditions.org/>,
Pathlight <http://pathlightmag.tumblr.com/>,
or the Kyoto Journal <http://www.kyotojournal.org/in-translation/>.

Magazines can appear and disappear quickly: in the past four years, we’ve
seen closure or hiatus at Peregrine, Cerise Press, and Full Tilt. It is
always worth taking a fresh look at a magazine before submitting—sometimes
websites outlast editorial boards and magazine funding, and most magazines
try to spell out what they’re looking for on their websites (one practical
wrinkle is that unlike scholarly journals, literary magazines often
consider submissions that are simultaneously being submitted elsewhere).
Really, though, almost every literary magazine accepts translations, and
many general-interest literary magazines seek them out, from the humblest
e-zine to the Paris Review <http://www.theparisreview.org/>. Translators
of poetry, fiction, and essays have a broad set of options.

Literary audiences, however, are not the only people who read
translations. A number of websites and journals feature non-literary,
translated material. My list here is intended to demonstrate the breadth
of opportunity, rather than to be comprehensive, and is limited to the
field with which I’m most familiar, 20th-century China studies:

Danwei <http://www.danwei.com/> translates and summarizes news about the
PRC media scene; 
chinaSMACK <http://www.chinasmack.com/> focuses on the translation of
internet commentary and the netizen zeitgeist;
the China Heritage Quarterly <http://www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/>
often featuring significant new translations of the scholarly and
historical. 

Some individuals translate news, opinion writing, and research-related
work on their own blogs: Roland Soong
<http://www.zonaeuropa.com/weblog.htm> was an early innovator in this
vein, and Bill Bishop <https://sinocism.com/>’s newsletter, with its mix
of curation and translation, has 16,000 subscribers. It is a rare
full-time dissertator who could translate at the volume and speed
necessary to keep abreast of the news for long enough to accumulate such
sway, but these online figures and groups have connected with (and helped
to create) substantial audiences, which can also be reached by scholars
through group and individual blogs, guest posts, and social media.

It is ultimately up to the individual scholar, though, to decide how and
to whom they want their translations to speak, and the ease of publication
on the Internet gives us all the opportunity to create audiences that do
not yet exist—as can be seen in Martin Winter
<http://banianerguotoukeyihe.com/>’s unique Chinese/English/German
translation blog. With an audience in mind, even if abstract or novel, it
becomes possible for scholars to double-read the subjects of their
research, to ask not only does this text affect my critical argument but
also who might like to read this text? In situations when that answer
includes people who read in translation, I copy the original, plus any
flash translations or commentary I’ve already generated, into a file
exclusively set aside for translation work. My research can then move past
the text at hand, with the piece still there for me to pick up or pursue
later as a translation. I find myself surprised at how often I move back
and forth between the two parallel threads: in some ways, the poems and
prose in my translation file are the pieces I end up understanding best,
and have the strongest connection with. This leads me to move a certain
number of translation projects into my research, as well as moving
research texts into my translation file.

That connection is one of the best reasons to engage in translation
alongside research. Translation requires intimate interpretation; it
prevents the kind of selective blindness that excerpts can create; it
rewards active participation in a text. Elements we may overlook—say, the
tone of a passage in a dynastic history, or the formality of the diction
of a heavily plotted short story—are decisions necessary to the production
of a translation, and it’s rare that I finish a piece I regret having
translated, even if I never manage to secure its publication. Translation
isn’t the only way to read, and it is a highly specialized, intercultural
way to read, but it is a chance to linger over a text, inhabit it, and
make certain concrete decisions about how it sounds, how it feels, and
what it means.

Perhaps the most substantial reason against engaging in translation for
publication during one’s dissertation process is the consistent
devaluation of translation in the discipline of Asian Studies. Outside
formally delineated translation programs, few departments give incentives
to translation work that are equal to the incentives provided to authors
of peer-reviewed, English-language research, and copyright issues
surrounding the dissertation process can provide measurable (although
surmountable) complications to basing a dissertation on substantial
amounts of translation. More concretely, it doesn’t matter (to the
academy) how many translations you have published if you don’t get your
dissertation finished in the first place. But these institutional
challenges exist for us to subvert and ignore, and profit in doing so: our
moment in history is one in which distant cultures and distant phenomena
are increasingly relevant, and one in which our academic institutions tend
strongly towards a static, putatively transparent interoperability of
European languages. To engage in translation even though there is little
profit in it is to counter that dominant, temporary trend; it is also to
steal time from the metricized, atomized hierarchies of the academy and
apply it towards the social and political goals through which many of us
justify our work in the first place.

These idealist goals—which in my case involve the kind of intercultural
understanding upon which trust and honest exchange can be based—are
obviously unfinished, as is the work to translate important texts from
Asian languages. If you know of an outlet that publishes translations (of
any kind, from any Asian language), or even if you host or frequent a blog
that welcomes the contribution of translations, please leave a comment and
a link below.

Nick Admussen
Assistant Professor of Chinese Literature and Culture
Department of Asian Studies
Cornell University
na347 at cornell.edu