Lost and Found in Translation

Having Hairs on Your Teeth? - Throughout our daily lives, we all rely on communication to express ourselves and connect with others. However, when trying to convey an idea in a different language, the message can get lost in translation. Although a dictionary may help untangle the word puzzle, some ideas are difficult to translate from one language to the next. In this presentation, I will discuss how some culturally-rooted sayings and concepts require artistic liberty and creativity when being translated. I conclude that translation requires more than word-for-word equivalency. It entails linguistic creativity and deep knowledge of the source and target cultures.; Lost in Translation - "What gets lost in translation?" Anyone that has ever attempted to translate a text or speech would know that it is nearly impossible to replicate a sentence word-by-word in a different language. As a trilingual speaker of Italian, English, and Spanish, I have come to appreciate and understand how different people express themselves across languages and cultures. In this presentation, I will use my language background to illustrate some challenges presented in translation, especially when the translator has to consider dialectal differences in Spanish texts. Some difficulties in translation originate from the fact that cultures have different ways of expressing themselves, and lack of cultural equivalency can occur even across different Spanish dialects.; Translating Gender - How do translators translate gender in languages that are not gender-specific? The use of grammatical gender in a language varies greatly, which makes translating gender a challenging and abstract task. Spanish is a language where gender plays a significant role in its grammatical structure, whereas English is not-gender specific. The main challenges of translating gender from Spanish to English (or English to Spanish) arise due to the differences in nouns, adjectives, and pronouns. In this presentation, I will discuss some of the challenges of translating Spanish, a gendered language, into a not gender-specific language (English) and vice versa, and explain how I, and my translation team, resolved these issues.; The Nuances of Translation - I will examine the lack of cultural equivalence in translation that I, as part of a translation team, encountered while translating various chapters from Ãngel A. Rivera's novel, La rabia útil de los muertos (Una novela de zombis), and the application form for Liberty Partnerships Program (a collaboration of 46 higher education institutions across New York State to support at-risk middle and high school students in their academic, social, and emotional development.) I will discuss our process of translating the novel, and how we worked as a group, using intimacy, original and authorial intent, and cultural significance as our guiding principles when making group decisions. I will explain unexpected difficulties for translators that appear in the form of culture-based lingual inequities, such as choosing between the more literal "word" equivalent versus the potentially briefer, protracted version that better captures the significance of the original word or phrase. I will discuss the benefits of each choice, and explain how and why we ultimately decided to translate certain parts of the texts the way that we did.; Found in Translation: Language, Meaning, and Global Citizenship - The study of translation constitutes interdisciplinary learning par excellance. It showcases the creative power of heterogeneity, most effectively in group settings which model the complexity of human experience. Translation study requires critical analysis of the source language, the target language and the creative space in between, revealing as much about home culture and language as other cultures and languages. Engaging with translation fosters a humble assertiveness, grounded in the ability to see oneself truly.