from Brennan

I unfortunately found Carlos Rojas very hard to listen to. I was preoccupied with the way he seemed to be rushing through his presentation, which jumped between all eras of Chinese literature. He did not discuss The Disappearance of M, so we had no idea what motivated his "vertebrae" and "whereupon". That being said, he made interesting points about how to translate literature which is itself about translation. He said that A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers was not translated into broken Chinese that would have mimicked the main character's broken English. This would seem to eliminate one of the major elements of the character's voice. 

I thought Peter Constantine made very good points about how to do translation with a time gap; translating with 1800s English sounds elegant and appropriate, but Chaucer's English would be contrived, and finding an "English" to match up to Ancient Greek would be impossible.

I also like Constantine's practice of relying on his younger informants to understand both the currency of the source language and the target language. He readily admits that he is not natively fluent in the most up-to-date slang. This is interesting when translating from German because of the sheer number of English words that have been borrowed into the language.