Zoom-Link to the Symposium
Jene reine Sprache, die in fremde gebannt ist, in der eigenen zu erlösen, die im Werk gefangene in der Umdichtung zu befreien, ist die Aufgabe des Übersetzers.
Walter Benjamin
The first 20 years of the 21st century in Vietnam have witnessed the rise of literary translation practices from various languages into Vietnamese. Translation, thus, is considered not only the most fundamental factor in the publishing industry, but also the creative realm where translators work as artists who perform and recreate the original language, as Benjamin points out.
Even though many outstanding writers have been translated into Vietnamese and are well enjoyed by the readers, their translators are mostly standing in the dark. Moreover, the lack of the theoretical framework on literary translation makes it difficult for Vietnamese translators to raise their individual voices. It is this challenge and neglect that we set out to tackle in our project: to shed light on the vital role of literary translation and translators by holding a symposium and a workshop where famous translators gather together to discuss the art of translation and where newcomers to this art and profession have a change to meet up and learn from their peers.
Participants
Quyen Nguyen
holds a PhD in English from NTU, Singapore. She is the chief editor of Zzz Review, an online literary journal in Vietnam. Ms Quyen Nguyen will act as the MC.
Dang Thu (Tran Duc Tai)
is a famous translator of English language literature. He has translated
The Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens,
The Golden House by Salman Rushdie,
Wars with the Newts by Karel Čapek into Vietnamese.
Mrs. Thuan
based in Paris, is a well known writer and translator of French language literature. Five of her other novels were translated into French. As a translator, she is best known for bringing Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Mots (The Words) into Vietnamese. Her other translations are
Extension du domaine de la lute by Michel Houellebecq,
La Position du tireur couché by Jean-Patrick Manchette,
Le Silence de Mon Père by Doan Bui.
Ms. Toan Q. Nguyen
based in United States, is a PhD student at University of Notre Dame, focusing on (Neural) Machine Translation for low-resource languages. She is focusing on literary translation and transcription of instrumental solo music, the writer-translator equation and the differences between being a writer and a translator, Artificial Intelligence and literary translation.
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