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How to Talk about Languages You Haven't Learned: Comparative Translation Pedagogy and Children's Literature

2021; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 45; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/uni.2021.0030

1080-6563

Carl F. Miller,

Translation Studies and Practices

How to Talk about Languages You Haven't Learned:Comparative Translation Pedagogy and Children's Literature Carl F. Miller (bio) While I have presented at a number of translation studies conferences and events in my career, I tend to begin these talks by admitting that I am not a true translation scholar. Though I have proficiency in a trio of languages beyond English, my anxiety of being an imposter in the field of translation scholarship is palpable, largely out of respect for the dedication and competency of those who do it best. In Pierre Bayard's fascinating 2007 text, How to Talk about Books You Haven't Read (itself a translation by Jeffrey Mehlman), he stresses that "the books we have read form an integral part of our image, and we call that image into question when we venture to publicly announce our . . . inner limits" (128). However, while we might readily profess familiarity with a book we have not read, we would likely be much more hesitant to do so with a language we have not learned—particularly while at the head of a class. Much like myself, so many children's literature colleagues consider language learning vital and are consequently reluctant to work with foreign languages and translation out of respect rather than indifference. Much as Bayard reminds us that "even a prodigious reader never has access to more than an infinitesimal fraction of the books that exist" (3), this just as surely applies to language proficiency. Yet out of such limitation emerges a legitimate opportunity for innovative teaching and scholarship driven by a pair of central questions: How do we talk about languages we haven't learned, and how do we productively integrate them into existing and developing courses involving children's literature? The project I have used to address these questions in my undergraduate children's literature courses has evolved (since I first assigned it in 2015) into perhaps the highlight of the term. Students are required to select a [End Page 332] children's book from another country and in a language other than English. They then prepare a four- to five-minute visual class presentation on this book while considering the context, technique, and theory necessary for its linguistic and cultural translation. While this assignment is seemingly straightforward, there are a few considerations and challenges necessary to document. First, I always stress the rigor required of effective translation and comparative literature scholarship, and I consequently offer students a basic critical and methodological foundation prior to this assignment. I devote a week of class to cover scholarship from some of the most prominent academics in the field(s)—including Emer O'Sullivan,1 Maria Nikolajeva,2 and Gillian Lathey3—and require that students produce a short essay critically engaging their non-Anglophone book selection with one of these significant scholarly works. Second, once we have preliminarily discussed this critical material, we take a collective look at a few different exercises in translation. For example, in my most recent course I first had the class view Jennifer and Terence Tunberg's Latin translation (Cattus Petasatus) of Dr. Seuss's The Cat in the Hat, emphasizing the myriad decisions involving formal and/or dynamic equivalence required for even the most concise of children's books. We then covered the end of Carlo Collodi's Le avventure di Pinocchio in the original Italian before looking at a pair of English translations (by Nicolas Perella and Carol Della Chiesa, respectively) that take differing approaches to the book's final message. While each of those first two source texts were familiar to most students, we finished with Marjolaine Leray's generally unknown French picture book, Avril le poisson rouge, along with an entertaining online feature in The Guardian by Sarah Ardizzone,4 who translated the book into English as April the Red Goldfish. These examples allow students to develop an initial set of translation considerations for their own text, as well as providing a presentation model from which to begin. Third, given the hegemony of English language children's literature in the United States and the United Kingdom, it can actually be difficult to locate a children's book originating...