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conference and associated silliness
It takes 11 hours to drive from Kent to Amherst in a 15-passenger van. There were 8 of us driving out, and of course one overslept on the morning we were leaving, so we left 45 minutes late. The drive to Amherst went well, and we got there at about 7:00, checked ourselves into two different hotels and went off for dinner, at which point I discovered that Dr. Koby (who teaches German translation) has a marvelous sense of humor and has the same talent I do for coming up with puns on the spur of the moment. (He also started singing the Man of La Mancha at me, and I had it stuck in my head for the next two days.)
Friday morning I got up early and went off to the conference. (Bless the conference organizers for including pads of paper in the conference materials!) I went to 12 presentations on Friday, on everything from neurolinguistics to the suppression of erotica in Hebrew publishing to issues in translating black southern vernacular into Spanish to reading Virginia Woolf in Chinese. Major brain overload, but fascinating. I wound up taking an hour off in the afternoon for a nap, but all I missed was a discussion on translation theory, which I didn't really want to go to anyway.
Friday night there was a dinner at the house of one of the conference hosts. Fortunately the house was very large, because there were 80 or 90 people in it. I had, of course, thought of something to ask one of the presenters about ten minutes after her presentation ended, so I asked her at the dinner, and it turns out I was right. Heh. (My question had to do with whether putting in pronouns in Spanish where convention says to leave them out would be the equivalent of leaving them out in English where you're expected to put them in. It does. I was right. Heh.)
Saturday I got up early and went to breakfast and three more presentations. The one I remember was a talk on translating poetry in general and Emily Dickinson in particular. After that, I went off to find a bus stop to take me into downtown Amherst, where I hung around for a couple of hours and had lunch (and got sucked into Newbury Comics' used CD/used DVD section) before I met up with whuffle. We went back to my room and got the dress fitting done, and then went out to Northampton and went window shopping (fortunately neither of us had a camera, or there would be some amazingly silly pictures of me wearing amazingly silly hats), and went into an art gallery that had paintings by Dr. Seuss, and went to dinner and had sushi. It was nice to give my brain a break, and the weather was just dandy for tromping around Northampton.
Sunday I got up early again, packed, checked out of the hotel and went over to the UMass Amherst Translation Center, which was where the day's presentations were. The previous two days were in the same building the hotel is in. Anyway, the KSU contingent had wanted to leave at 11:00, which gave me time to go to three more presentations and scare a presenter from Texas. He had done a presentation on translating Pablo Neruda into English and changing some of the details of one particular poem so that instead of being set in the Orient, it was set on Wall Street. I scared him by mentioning afterward that I thought it was interesting that he hadn't mentioned the theory behind communicative translation in his presentation. It turns out he's not a translator; he's working on a Master's in English, so he hasn't had any translation theory. I think I might have gotten him interested in it, though.
Anyway, we finally got everybody from KSU collected in the same place at about noon, and took off for Kent again. We only encountered one accident on the way back, and it didn't actually stop traffic. It's still a long trip, though. I keep forgetting how much of Pennsylvania there is when you're driving across it the long way. I got back into my apartment again at 11:58 last night and promptly fell over, and here I am again. I'm glad I went to the conference, and I'm REALLY glad the ATA conference in October is in Toronto and won't take 11 hours to drive to.
Friday morning I got up early and went off to the conference. (Bless the conference organizers for including pads of paper in the conference materials!) I went to 12 presentations on Friday, on everything from neurolinguistics to the suppression of erotica in Hebrew publishing to issues in translating black southern vernacular into Spanish to reading Virginia Woolf in Chinese. Major brain overload, but fascinating. I wound up taking an hour off in the afternoon for a nap, but all I missed was a discussion on translation theory, which I didn't really want to go to anyway.
Friday night there was a dinner at the house of one of the conference hosts. Fortunately the house was very large, because there were 80 or 90 people in it. I had, of course, thought of something to ask one of the presenters about ten minutes after her presentation ended, so I asked her at the dinner, and it turns out I was right. Heh. (My question had to do with whether putting in pronouns in Spanish where convention says to leave them out would be the equivalent of leaving them out in English where you're expected to put them in. It does. I was right. Heh.)
Saturday I got up early and went to breakfast and three more presentations. The one I remember was a talk on translating poetry in general and Emily Dickinson in particular. After that, I went off to find a bus stop to take me into downtown Amherst, where I hung around for a couple of hours and had lunch (and got sucked into Newbury Comics' used CD/used DVD section) before I met up with whuffle. We went back to my room and got the dress fitting done, and then went out to Northampton and went window shopping (fortunately neither of us had a camera, or there would be some amazingly silly pictures of me wearing amazingly silly hats), and went into an art gallery that had paintings by Dr. Seuss, and went to dinner and had sushi. It was nice to give my brain a break, and the weather was just dandy for tromping around Northampton.
Sunday I got up early again, packed, checked out of the hotel and went over to the UMass Amherst Translation Center, which was where the day's presentations were. The previous two days were in the same building the hotel is in. Anyway, the KSU contingent had wanted to leave at 11:00, which gave me time to go to three more presentations and scare a presenter from Texas. He had done a presentation on translating Pablo Neruda into English and changing some of the details of one particular poem so that instead of being set in the Orient, it was set on Wall Street. I scared him by mentioning afterward that I thought it was interesting that he hadn't mentioned the theory behind communicative translation in his presentation. It turns out he's not a translator; he's working on a Master's in English, so he hasn't had any translation theory. I think I might have gotten him interested in it, though.
Anyway, we finally got everybody from KSU collected in the same place at about noon, and took off for Kent again. We only encountered one accident on the way back, and it didn't actually stop traffic. It's still a long trip, though. I keep forgetting how much of Pennsylvania there is when you're driving across it the long way. I got back into my apartment again at 11:58 last night and promptly fell over, and here I am again. I'm glad I went to the conference, and I'm REALLY glad the ATA conference in October is in Toronto and won't take 11 hours to drive to.
no subject
I thought you were in Amherst, OH, not Amherst, Massachusetts.
Although why that makes sense, since there's nothing IN Amherst, OH, really, I don't know.
Cool!