Marjorie Salvadon's Lecture

 Salvadon offered us a new and final perspective on translation – the one of a translator who gets to choose what she works on. Salvadon has been able to work on texts that she is passionate about and which share a series of characteristics: they are written by feminist authors, they have complex characters, and they present the impact of French colonization and its legacy. The way she talked about the text she translated really reflected the passion she has for these texts, the way she connects with them, and how they offer different and complex views on the impacts of colonization. The biggest example of how she connects deeply with the texts was when she broke down when reading the last paragraphs of her latest translation project Désirée Congo. In the final pages of the novel Haiti has finally won its independence and the silhouettes of the colonizer's ships can be seen on the horizon as they leave the island. The fact that she isn't able to read this scene without crying no matter how many times she returns to it, shows how incredibly connected and moved she feels by the works she translates, and I found that really inspiring and beautiful.

The tips she shared for cultivating freedom as a translator were also very interesting. The first thing she suggested was translating with someone else. I had the chance to engage in an exercise of collaborative translation once, and I can attest that it was a challenging but very rewarding experience. In these experiences, you get an even better understanding of the text that when you are working by yourself since you get to appreciate different interpretations and readings and try to incorporate them all (when possible) in your translation. The second thing she suggested was to take risks even if others disagree with your choices. I really liked this advice because when reading translation reviews and seeing how vicious they can be one might feel discouraged or even paralyzed in trying to translate, so standing by one's choices even if others disagree feels like an important step to get over this initial fear. The third advice was to read "literary companions" to your translation in your source language which I feel is a great tip and I would add that it might also be important to find literary companions for the translation in the target language.  The final tip was to translate a multivoiced novel which I found very interesting because I had never thought about how much of a challenge this entails. I definitely want to try all of these tips! The final phrase of her Q&A was an amazing ending for this year's translation series "Translate what you love" since I believe all of the speakers embodied this ideal in one way or another. 

– Lia 

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