Translation as Collaboration

Call for submissions

Opening up the theme of translation to broad interpretation, The Poettrio Experiment are commissioning collaborative translations from all creative disciplines: writers, translators, artists, musicians, filmmakers…

Find a collaborator and translate each other’s work within or across different media.

Translate a text into an image, an image into a text, an Instagram picture into a poem, a Tweet into a film, an object into a short story, a poem into a composition…

Translate between different languages or translate between Englishes: translate an ‘English’ poem or prose into your English voice filled with your experience, or Scouse, or Scots or a Diasporic English. You could change the location, the scenery, the slang, the voice but somehow… translate.

Translate from a language you don’t know: read it like code and carry its graphic patterns into a new translated text or medium…

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: 1^st July 2017

Performances of texts, films and compositions should last no longer than 5 minutes.

Public performance open to all in Newcastle University on

Thursday July 20^th2017

DISCUSS your translation process on a new podcast for translation & creative disciplines at the University of Newcastle.

Email queries to: rebecca.johnson3@newcastle.ac.uk

Twitter: @poettrios

If you want to participate but don’t have a collaborator, contact us and we will find you one!

The Poettrio Experiment is an AHRC-funded project researching translation trios based at Newcastle University, with The University of Roehampton.

WHAT IS A POETTRIO?

A ‘Poettrio’ is collaborative process between:

a poet who has written a source text
a language advisor who is an expert in the source and target languages
a poet who writes in the target language.

In our research we are working with Dutch and English poets who have been widely published, and language advisors who are experienced translators.

The poets are not experts in each others’ languages, though, the impact of English as a global ‘lingua franca’ means that the Dutch poets have (at least) conversational English.

The trio work together (in person) to translate source poems, with language advisor facilitating communication between the poets and assisting with language comprehension and choices.

The trio draw on a printed ‘interlinear’ text which is a line-for-line literal translation (as far as that is possible), giving explanations of culture-specific content if necessary. The interlinears are produced in advance of the trio session by language advisors.

OUR RESEARCH

We filmed and recorded two weeks of trio translation workshops from English to Dutch (in Rotterdam) and Dutch to English (in Newcastle).

Using qualitative and quantitive methods we are investigating how trios translate in a workshop context, how the different roles function and how creative processes take place in trios.

We are aiming to build a rich ethnographic picture of how poet-advisor-poet workshops function.

We are also looking at how trios translate compared to solo poetry translators.

Tag: intersemiotic