Tuesday, October 13, 2015

Take the survey! QUESTIONNAIRE on Autotranslation and Multilingual Writing

The survey below is for authors, and my focus is mostly on contemporary poets, who write in more than one language fluently and who also translate other writers. The focus is auto-translation vs translation by others. I am interested in the process of translation, self-translation and re-writing across languages as related to creative process, receptivity, invisibility, diaspora, translocality, transnationality, collaborative translation and collaborative writing, distribution, the sense of the contemporary engagement in translation as a form of writing and rewriting and multilingualism as a visual-textual mode of expression. I thank you for your time in answering any of the questions below, and also for passing this along to authors you think would like to answer it. Please return your completed questionnaire as a Word or PDF file to Jennifer K Dick at fragment78 at gmail.com 

Name :
Email: (If you would like to receive a copy of any resulting paper from this questionnaire):
Languages you speak/write fluently:
Number of books published:
Genre(s) you write in :


TRANSLATION:
Genre(s) you translate writing by other authors in and works translated (if you are an extensive translator, select a few key translations please):

What is it that drew you to the first books/works you translated? And what draws you to a particular work today?

How does a translation you completed of someone else’s original work feel to you in comparison to a completed book of your own original writings?

Have you worked on collaborative translations? If so, could you share a few thoughts on how the process of collaborative translation differs from translating on your own?

Has your own work been translated by others?
Into languages you speak or languages unfamiliar to you? (please name the languages and whether you speak them, too)

If your work has been translated into other languages which you speak/write, why is it you have preferred to have the work be translated by others?


AUTOTRANSLATION / WRITING IN ANOTHER or MULTIPLE LANGUAGE(S):
On the topic of writing your own creative work in more than one language, first, do you?
If so, could you share some thoughts on how writing in each language differs for you, or some insight into your process (as in, do you tend to proceed in one then the other language, or do both simultaneously?). If you do not write in more than one language; could you address the reasons you have for using only one of your languages (ie: distribution, living in that language, it being your own “private” language if you live in another language, audience, to keep a language alive, etc.)?

If your work is written in one single language, do you translate or rewrite your own works into other languages? If so, what is this experience like for you? How do you proceed (if you have a particular method)? Do you tend to do so alone or in collaboration with others?

What do you seek or what speaks to you in the process of writing in another language?

Do you ever use translation as a revision method? If so, how, & what does it give to the process?

Do you mix languages in single works? If so, could you share some thoughts on how this has worked for you?  Also, if so, if the work is translated later into a second language, do you include multilingual translations to incorporate multiple languages in the target text (ie, if the original is dominantly English with French moments, do you reverse translate and put the original French into English in a French translation, or in some other way maintain that cross-lingual experience?)

Again, thank you for your time!!! AND please add anything you like on this topic.

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