a culture of language and thought

I’ve been incredibly busy for the last couple of months.  My work days have been 10-14 hours, 6 if not 7 days a week.
In the meantime, Jon redesigned my site (if you hadn’t noticed, take a look around!), and in every e-mail I found the time to write, I asked friends and family for their [...]

If it wasn’t already apparent, I’m Canadian. All of the works I have ever translated have been for U.S. publishers and, while I think that has been very much to my professional advantage, that I am excluded by the Canadian system does bother me at times.
We have a wonderful but terribly underfunded agency, The Canada [...]

I had to share this post on Publishing Perspectives by Alex de Campi, a graphic novelist. She and her co-novelist, Christine Larsen, are to be congratulated for their approach to new media, publishing, and translation… In my opinion they have done *everything* right:
* They have embraced a new model of publishing, providing readers with various [...]

What exactly are the limits of my job as a literary translator? I’ve been asking myself this question for the past seven years, ever since I got my first novel contract. You’d think I would have a tried and true answer to it by now, and yet I don’t… not entirely, anyhow.
Every single project is [...]

What exactly is “literary merit”? And how is it defined? More importantly, who defines it?
These thoughts have been swimming around my head for months now, in part after the ALTA Conference in Pasadena, where I found the divisions/strata/hierarchy of profs versus poetry translators versus literary translators versus pulp fiction translators versus commercial translators almost more [...]

In a few short minutes I’ll be jumping in the car, off to the airport and winging my way to Pasadena, California for the American Literary Translators Association annual conference. I’ll be giving a workshop with Lisa Dillman on Defining and Capturing Style on Friday, November 13 from 3:00 to 4:15 pm, and sitting on [...]

This is a wonderfully useful and interesting little book edited by Gill Paul that I came across one day when I was reading Words Without Borders and surfed over to the Dalkey Archive Press site to find out more about it. I ordered a copy right away and it arrived the next week.
Based on a [...]

For the past several weeks, I’ve been finishing a novel translation for HarperCollins. As each day passes, and the delivery date draws closer, my anxiety level rises higher, reaching Mount Everest proportions. (At this point, apologies are in order to everyone who had to deal with me, particularly Jon who had to *live* with me.) [...]

Ever since my translation of The Book of Destiny came out, many of my Spanish-speaking friends and colleagues have been asking where they can buy the original Spanish. I’m sorry to say that there is no published Spanish of the translated English.
The author, Carlos Barrios, published a book in Guatemala in 2004, titled Ch’umilal Wuj: [...]

Wendy Nind, Sacha Thoman & Juan Miranda! I’ll be in touch with each of you by e-mail to find out where to send your copy of The Book of Destiny. Thank you so much to everyone who posted… I was thrilled to hear from you all!
So far there have been no official reviews of the [...]