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MICATA Symposium 2011: Laura Kanost - A Translation in Every Cereal Box |
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Thursday, 17 February 2011 11:11 |
 It's time to gear up for MICATA Symposium 2011. Little time left before the biggest event of MICATA takes place and as always, we try to get in touch with the speakers to get a bit more information on them and their presentations. This year we would like to start "Meet the speaker" series of posts. Our first respondent is an amazing person, ATA-certified translator, assistant editor of the journal, visiting assistant professor of Spanish at Kansas State University - Dr. Laura Kanost.
TranslationPerfect.com: Dr. Kanost, please take a moment and introduce yourself to our readers.
Dr. Kanost: I am an ATA-certified Spanish to English translator specializing in literature and literary criticism. In my job as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish at Kansas State University, I teach a variety of language and culture courses and I study contemporary Latin American literature, U.S. children’s literature in Spanish, and service-learning in language teaching. I am also the Assistant Editor of the journal Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature, which deals with recent literature published in Spanish, French, German, and Russian.
TranslationPerfect.com: What brings you to MICATA Symposium this year?
Dr. Kanost: I’ve attended the MICATA Symposium many times in the past and have always found it to be a great opportunity to interact with other local translators and interpreters and learn useful information. This year, I am serving on the MICATA Board of Directors, and so I have a new appreciation for all the work that goes into planning the symposium.
TranslationPerfect.com: Your presentation at this year MICATA symposium has a very "yummy" subject. What inspired to link translation and food often associated with breakfast?
Dr. Kanost: In my talk, I highlight the bilingual books that have come out in the Cheerios boxes for the past several years because I think this is a memorable example of the relative abundance now of English to Spanish translations for children that are of variable quality and that efface the identity of the translator. The bilingual books in the Cheerios boxes are identified as “specially printed in English and Spanish” - as if translation were a mere matter of printing - and often the translator’s name does not appear anywhere in the book.
I first became interested in the translation of children’s literature when my daughter Lily was a baby and I began reading to her in Spanish. Almost all the books were translations, and many were books I already knew well in English, so—especially after reading the same short book several times—my attention was drawn to the choices made by the translator and the publisher in creating a Spanish or bilingual version. There are some excellent translators working in this field, but there are also many flawed translations published, and either way, the translator receives little credit. There seems to be a perception that books marked as translations won’t sell. Interviews I conducted with some of the best U.S. translators and publishers of Spanish and bilingual picture books helped me to understand this better.
TranslationPerfect.com: You are working on a project that dives deep into (virtually) unknown subject in North America - Mexican women screenwriters. Can you tell us more about it?
Dr. Kanost: Screenwriting traditionally has been a male-dominated field in Mexico, but the women who have managed to break in have created fascinating work that deserves wider attention. In my research as a literary scholar, I am interested in how literature can both reflect and change conventionally held ideas about gender, disability, and ethnicity. The five screenplays that I am translating for the creation of a bilingual anthology of Mexican women screenwriters are a great example of this. These translations have been a fun challenge for me because of the tremendous variety of language they include, from film terminology to early 20th-century rural Mexican slang, botanical terms to cockfighting jargon, ballads to tongue-twisters. My colleague at K-State, Dr. María Teresa Martínez Ortiz, has interviewed the most influential Mexican women screenwriters in the process of writing a book on the subject, and she had the idea for the anthology and obtained the screenplays and permissions. The texts are: La negra Angustias [The Negra Angustias] (1948) by Matilde Landeta, El imperio de la fortuna [The Realm of Fortune] (1984) by Paz Alicia Garciadiego, Serpientes y escaleras [Snakes and Ladders] (1990) by Busi Cortés, Cilantro y Perejil [Recipes for Staying Together] (1994) by Cecilia Perez Grovas and Carolina Rivera, and Acosada (de piel de víbora) [Cornered, Made of Snakeskin] (2000) by Marcela Fernández Violante.
TranslationPerfect.com: You also teach Spanish at Kansas State University. In your opinion, how does learning Spanish affect the lives of your students?
Dr. Kanost: One of the reasons I love my job is that I am certain that studying Spanish has a positive effect on many aspects of our students’ lives. It is difficult for a monolingual person to really appreciate what languages and cultures are, or to understand what a great challenge it is to learn a new language and adapt to a new culture. Our Spanish students gain linguistic and cultural proficiency that allows them to communicate effectively in a major world language that is also spoken right here in our own community. In the process, they also become more careful readers and precise writers. These skills will be useful no matter where life takes them.
TranslationPerfect.com: We would like to thank Dr. Kanost for her time and encourage everyone to attend her session at 1:30 pm on March 26, 2011. |
