Thursday 19 September 2013

Translation Studies For Free



There's a great blog called FilmStudiesForFree which collects open access materials for film studies researchers. It's always seemed like a brilliant idea to me, and I thought it could work for Translation Studies as well. So I am trying it out on a very small scale by inaugurating a 'translationstudiesforfree' tag on this blog.

I am partly inspired by the fact that a journal I really like, the euphoniously-named Linguistica Antverpiensia, has just opted for open access. You can now find all journal content from 2002 to 2008 in pdf form at the journal's website. This includes Dirk Delabastita's and Rainer Grutman's lovely themed issue on fictions of translation, interpreting and multilingualism from 2005, and the special issue on audiovisual translation from 2007, edited by Aline Remael and Josélia Neves (this is a topic very close to my heart, and this issue all the more so as I was lucky enough to have an article in it). As I understand it, the journal will have a rolling firewallpaywall, so watch the site for more recent issues in due course.

Linguistica Antverpiensia isn't the only translation journal which offers open access content. There are many more, some of which are listed here, on the website of the European Society for Translation Studies. A new one which just started this year is L'Écran Traduit, published by the French audiovisual translators' association, the ATAA.

Other free translation resources I'm very attached to include
  • the bibliographical translation research database BITRA, hosted by the University of Alicante
  • the SubtitlingWorldwide Youtube channel, with nice examples of good and bad subtitling of the same clip
  • The Bottom Line, the wise words of Fire Ant and Worker Bee, a long-running agony column for translators published in the Translation Journal. Here's an example.   
  • Translation in Practice, which is an excellent short introduction to literary translation as a professional practice. It can be bought in hard copy here, but it is also available as a free download. (The link seems to have vanished, but can be retrieved via the wonderful Wayback Machine if you type in http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/resources/download.cfm?GCOI=15647100138250&thefile=Translation_in_Practice_book.pdf.)
I hope readers of this blog find some of these resources useful. All further suggestions for good free resources for translation studies are most welcome.

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