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.
