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Reading Trafalgar (Small Beer Press Podcast 17)
Readers of this blog know I love reading aloud. So I jumped at the chance to read for Small Beer Press‘s podcast series. More than jumped–I asked for the chance. One of those self-invitations. Then I hesitated at the suggested story. Yes, the story’s in English now, but some of the words are still hard.…
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Blog shift, format, wine & word
So much at once, right? For a couple of years now, I’ve been blogging at ¿Se enseña aquí? — a blog begun partly in the hopes of encouraging students to study abroad (in particular in the program in Rosario, Argentina, where I was about to teach) and continued as a way to talk about translation, language…
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11 Odd Things Learned in the Course of Translation
–tidbits picked up in translating Beyond the Islands (Alicia Yánez Cossío) and Trafalgar (Angélica Gorodischer)– Some days, translation is like a treasure hunt, a sanctioned scavenge after curious words and unfamiliar allusions. (Happily, I’m a fan of dictionaries and reference books; my dictionary stand is a prized possession.) When the project’s finished, some of those definitions and…
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Proofreading and Second Chances
It has never yet happened that, reading proofs, I haven’t found some dreadful if trifling error–often after 20 or 30 error-free pages, when I was beginning to wonder whether the task was, indeed, worthwhile. But there it will be, the third i in the middle of a word, the second however in a row. No…
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Time and Place: Past/Present/Spring/Fall
I’ll be teaching in Rosario in the fall. I always say “fall” when I announce this plan, though it will be spring in Argentina. It is almost impossible for me to think of October as anything other than autumn–I can imagine the month with different weather than that of Oregon or Michigan, but it’s hard…