FEATURED NEWS

International Symposium to Explore China-West Translations, April 7-8

As the world-wide trend of globalization has drastically shrunken the geographical distance between countries and cultures, translation has played an ever increasingly important role in the cultural and economic exchanges among nations and regions that use different languages. This is even more so in the area of China-West studies. To promote translation studies in this area, the Center for Translation Studies and The Confucius Institute in The School of Arts and Humanities at The University of Texas at Dallas will be jointly holding an international symposium on "Translating China into the West" on April 7-8, 2009 on UT Dallas campus.

The objective of the symposium is to focus on a broad range of topics, among them the translation into Western languages of pre-modern and modern Chinese literature, intellectual thought, and the theory and craft of translation as these appear in various aspects of culture and art. The symposium has gathered together over a dozen internationally renowned scholars from countries and regions around the world, including China, Germany, England, Canada, Sweden, Hong Kong, and the US. After the symposium, selected papers will appear as a special issue in the scholarly journal Translation Review, published by the Center for Translation Studies.

The Symposium will be a two-day event. It will begin on April 7 at 9 a.m. in the McDermott Suite located in the University's Library with presentations all day until 5:30 p.m. in the afternoon. It will re-open in the same venue on April 8 until noon. All the sessions are free and open to the public.

Click here for a Schedule of Events (PDF)

For more information, please contact:
Sharon Yang, Assistant Director of the Confucius Institute,
Ph: (972) 883-4860
Email: Xiaohong.yang@utdallas.edu

2009 American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) Travel Fellowship Award

ALTA is pleased to announce that applications are now being accepted for the 2009 ALTA Travel Fellowship Awards. Each year, approximately 4 or 5 fellowships in the amount of $1,000 are awarded to beginning (unpublished or minimally published) translators to help them pay for travel expenses to the annual ALTA conference. This year's conference will be held November 11-14 in Pasadena, California.

At the conference, ALTA Fellows give readings of their translated work at a keynote event, thus providing them with an opportunity to present their translations to a large audience of other translators as well as authors and publishers from around the world.

If you would like to apply for a 2009 ALTA Travel Fellowship, please send a cover letter explaining your interest in attending the conference; your CV; and no more than ten double-spaced pages of translated text (prose or poetry) accompanied by the original text to:

Applications must be received by May 15, 2009 in order to be considered for this year's fellowships. We look forward to receiving and reviewing your translations, and we hope to see you at this year's conference.

For more information about the conference and about ALTA, please visit our website at www.literarytranslators.org. For more information about the Travel Fellowships, please contact Lindy Jolly (lindy.jolly@utdallas.edu).

2008 National Translation Award Winner is Richard Wibur

Pulitzer-winning poet and translator Richard Wilbur was honored with the prestigious 2008 National Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association during the group's annual conference on Thursday, Oct. 16, in Minneapolis.

Each year, the National Translation Award honors the translator whose work, by virtue of both its quality and significance, has made the most valuable contribution to literary translation during the previous year. The award was conferred on Richard Wilbur for his translation of French dramatist Pierre Corneille's The Theatre of Illusion.

Richard Wilbur is a Pulitzer Prize winner for his books of poetry New and Collected Poems (1988) and Things of This World (1956). He is the former president and chancellor of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and has won the National Book Award, the PEN Translation Prize and two Bollingen Prizes. He served as the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1987 to 1988. A Chancellor Emeritus of The Academy of American Poets, Wilbur currently lives in Cummington, Mass.