I really liked Julia Sanches, much much more than I thought I would. I think her presentation was the first where I almost cried during it. I still have some questions about the narrative voice in Slash and Burn, but I think most of the other translation related nitpicks I had were all answered during the presentation. I liked her running thesis of translator as guest and not as diplomat, and I thought her solution to the ambiguity in the Spanish of the "she" paragraph that we talked about in class was really great. Her slides on Mounzer's "War in Translation" was one of my favorites--on transplanting a feeling, on how your personhood is only granted to you in "the mediatized narrative" by the "exceptionalism of your life or the spectacle of your death."
Peter Constantine I have significantly more reservations about--first, I guess, for assigning us a reading like this, but also for some of his stylistic choices. Other than the more obvious reason, one of my biggest issues with the text was how inconsistent the translation seemed to be, especially near the beginning. At the start, when the text was more narration and less dialogue, Constantine seemed to go for a more foreignized, Ken Liu-esque style of translation, where he kept some of the phrases that possibly sounded natural in German but may have read a little awkwardly in English. Later on, he seems to prioritize reading experience more, going for a Susan and Chad style of domesticization, which made for a very disorienting reading experience--and not for the reasons I think he might have been going for.
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