Mon 07 September 2026

A decade ago, I took a graduate course called "The Art and Craft of Translation" that really opened my eyes to just how beautifully messy and interpretive the act of translation actually is.

Like a lot of people, I had very surface, black-and-white preconceptions of what translation is. I thought there were literal translations and more interpretive translations, but what I really didn't expect to learn was just how hard it was to translate a text, even a simple one, from one language to another (even somewhat close neighbors like English and French), and my experience in translating texts showed me that there really is no such thing as a "literal translation." Literalism is one of many variables in the decision matrix, and no matter how literal you might want to make a translation, it is limited by many outside factors, such as the nature of the text being translated (such as a casual text message conversation vs. some poetry that's densely packed with nuance and multiple layers of meaning), and the relative nearness or compatibility of the two languages involved.

Other than the my final project at the end of the class (which was to translate four french poems and provide a "trot" showing how the translation was formulated), the biggest eye-opener of the class was reading Christian Bök's translations of Rimbaud's "Voyelles." (PDF here)

The reason I was thinking of this was that when I went through my mail last night, I saw a postcard from the university celebrating my Translation Studies professor's career. He had recently retired after fifty years in that university, and was the Director of that department in the school of Humanities.

I was honestly just glad that it was a retirement notification, because a couple other professors I had in grad school had recently passed away. ☹️
I honestly didn't connect with grad school and my professors there the same way I did with undergrad (one of the reasons why I never finished), but I remember my professor in the translation class for his wit and sparkling blue eyes. The other students were honestly incredibly stuffy and pretentious (although not as cold and back-stabby as some of my other classmates in other classes), but the professor himself was quite warm, and even took an interest in me because of my background in technology. I had some ideas in how to develop applications for the interactive exploration of forms of translation, but unfortunately, I never quite got that far.

Still, I'm super thankful for that experience, and hope the good professor is enjoying his retirement. :)

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Category: Philosophy
Tags: Beauty   Language   Life   Monthly themes   Non-religious post   Non-technical post   Personal favorites   Philosophy   Translation