Thanks to the generous support of Creative Scotland, we were privileged at SUISS to welcome Isabel Hurtado de Mendoza and Margaret Rigaud, two fantastically talented and experienced professional translators, to our Text & Context programme this summer. As in previous years, a key component of the Fellowship is for our translators to deliver presentations on their practice as part of our Translation Showcase event. This year the event took place on Zoom, and we’re very pleased to be able to share Isabel and Margaret’s presentations here for those that missed the event. Isabel’s presentation focuses on the thorny issue of translating cultural reference points, while Margaret’s picks up on some of the same ideas in its exploration of the translation of vernaculars. We hope you find their presentations as illuminating and entertaining as we at SUISS did, with our thanks again to Isabel and Margaret for sharing their energy, enthusiasm and expertise.

Isabel says:

I was one of the lucky awardees to have received an Edwin Morgan Translation Fellowship in 2021. This fellowship is addressed to professional translators with an interest in twentieth-century and contemporary Scottish writing, and its goal is the promotion of Scottish literature abroad.

I have been a translator for over 20 years and have recently started translating fiction. I lived in Edinburgh for ten years, so I have a strong bond with Scotland and, seeing how popular it is as a tourist destination and the fascination it holds for Spaniards, I thought that this fellowship would give me the opportunity to link my two passions by helping Scottish works reach a Spanish-speaking audience through translation.

With support from Creative Scotland, SUISS offered me the opportunity to attend the four-week Text and Context course (Contemporary British Literature and Scottish Literature) online. Even though the course was quite demanding in terms of compulsory reading, watching lectures, giving presentations and participating in seminars, I found it of very high quality. I am normally quite difficult to please when it comes to my professional development, but SUISS exceeded my expectations. I also thoroughly enjoyed the programme because SUISS managed to gather a very interesting and diverse group of students. In fact, I am seriously considering attending the school again next summer if the programme is updated. I only wish it can be in person this time!

As regards the main goal of the fellowship, I believe the knowledge I acquired will definitely help me in my career. I plan to keep up to date with news and developments in the publishing industry in Scotland and, who knows, maybe one day I will have the opportunity to translate a Scottish author into Spanish! In the meantime, I am already promoting quite a few of them among editors in Spain, so keep your fingers crossed for me!

Apart from attending the course and promoting Scottish literature in my country, another requirement of the fellowship consisted in giving a presentation about any aspect of translation that would appeal to an international audience like SUISS students, who might not be familiar with my craft. Since I am passionate about intercultural communication, I decided to talk about how to translate culture-specific elements. I touched on what translators actually do and how their output compares to automatic translation. I also described some specific strategies we need to use when dealing with tricky referents, like some that are specific to Scottish culture and that I chose to illustrate this point. Hopefully, after watching my video, you will have a better understanding of the value of human translators 😉

Margaret says:

I wish to thank SUISS and Creative Scotland for awarding me one of two 2021 Translator Fellowships. I relished the opportunity to spend the summer discovering new writing from the British isles. As a reader and a translator, I am always on the lookout for new voices and was especially curious to find out more about contemporary Scottish writing. It was lovely being a student again and, as a translator, SUISS provided me with some interesting leads which I hope to follow in the coming months. Fingers crossed!

Biographies:

Isabel Hurtado de Mendoza is an English into Spanish freelance translator with over twenty years’ experience. A Qualified Member of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting and a member of ACE Traductores (the Spanish association of literary translators), Isabel’s translations include Ann Cleeves’ novel Silent Voices, published as Almas silenciosas by Ediciones Maeva, and El invasor, for Matamua Books.

Margaret Rigaud is a freelance literary translator and College Research Associate at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Her translations into French include James Pennebaker and Joshua Smyth’s Écrire pour se soigner, published by Markus Haller, while her translations into English include Filippo Bonini Baraldi’s Roma Music and Emotion, published by Oxford University Press, and Pierre Bordieu’s Manet: A Symbolic Revolution, with Peter Collier, published by Polity.

Photo credit: Gary Walkow/Jules Selmez

Creative Writing Group

I didn’t think about my students when I was in Edinburgh this summer.  I meant to, of course. But I didn’t. I didn’t think about them when I was investigating every cafe that JK Rowling might have written in, when I was attending poetry readings in large white rooms with abstract black and white art, or when I was being drenched with rain while we all climbed Arthur’s Seat.  I didn’t think about them when I was writing for hours in any cafe that would have me, or when I was falling in love with everything my peers had written, or when my friends and I would walk into pubs with freshly signed books of poetry clasped in our hands. I didn’t think about them at all.

I didn’t think about my students at all this summer.  But when it was time to start attending those ever so inspiring day long meetings at the end of August, when it was time to arrange desks in my room and figure out how to work the new smart board, I did not have the same sense of anxiety that normally creeps in during the first week of August.  I did not mourn the summer, or wonder aloud where all the time had gone. I knew where it had gone. It was in cups of coffee from Brew Lab, it was in Fringe posters that lined any available surface in Edinburgh, it was on the table that my seminar group gathered around three times a week, it was in the snooze button that could only be pressed once because there was so much fun to be had and so much work to do.  It was in the first four chapters of my novel.

I didn’t think about my students at all this summer.  But when school started again, the first thing I told them about myself was that I spent the summer writing in Edinburgh.  I told them about the poetry evenings, how I *almost died* when I went hiking in Glencoe by myself, and how they are seniors and they could absolutely spend their next summer what I had just spent my summer doing too.  And when we started writing our personal essays I brought out poems and flash fiction that we’d studied in seminar. And when we had one on one appointments I told them to “let all the verbs and nouns do the heavy lifting” and I told them to take out their sentences that were only a six or a seven so that their nines and tens had full range to shine.  Everything that I had learned this summer while I was absolutely not thinking about my students came spilling out into my classroom.

This summer, I recommend that you don’t think about your students.  Not for one single second. Instead, think about yourself. Pour your attention into your own work.  Read new things. Discuss it all with new people. Also, do it all in Edinburgh. Art and literature are what keep the cobblestones glued together there.  Fall in love with writing and with literature all over again. Fall in love with your own work. When you come home you will feel fresh, and it will all come pouring out into your classroom.  I promise.

Edinburgh Fringe Festival

When I learned about the ESU scholarships and SUISS program in Theatre and Performance, I knew I had to go for it. I am in my 11th year as a Theatre and English high school teacher on Long Island, and I have been eager for an opportunity to broaden my knowledge. From the moment I arrived at the University of Edinburgh dorms, I was warmly welcomed by the staff and our student leaders. I was pumped for a new experience, and eager to get settled and see what was in store for me. When I made my way to my room and opened the curtains, I found myself face-to-face with Arthur’s Seat, an extinct volcano at the edge of Edinburgh. This was the moment where I realized this experience was going to be more than I had expected.

Too often for teachers, the professional development we experience is chosen for us. It is not often (at least for me) that we get to decide what to study and to be able to go in-depth with those studies. Applying for the Theatre and Performance SUISS program and the scholarship available through ESU was one of the few opportunities I have found to take charge of my own professional development.

This program provided me with the chance to both learn about different viewpoints on modern theatre, but also give me the space to see how these can be applied to my own teaching. In our daily seminars, I got to be a student again, listening and engaging in conversations about theatre that I have not been able to have in years. Teachers are still students at heart, so I am always eager to listen and engage with others. A few times each week, we participated in various workshops throughout the two weeks. These workshops focused on such topics as acting, clowning, playwriting, and storytelling, all run by professionals in the field. Each workshop gave me ideas to bring back to my students, whether it was the “15 Rules of Acting” from Ali D’Souza and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, or clowning activities with Tim Licata from Plutot la Vie, this program served as a refresh button on my theatre teaching practices.

One of the best parts of this program was meeting other teachers and growing and learning with them. I found a small teacher tribe here, and while we all teach at different schools around the country, as theatre teachers, we are often part of very small departments, or even one-person departments working alone. Here, we had other people who knew all too well the struggles we all face. We commiserated, as well as discussed all the different ways we could implement what we were learning.

One of the biggest takeaways for me came in our workshop with playwright Jo Clifford. Jo told us “theatre is a gymnasium of empathy.” If my theatre classes can teach students empathy as they go out into the world, then I will consider myself a successful teacher. SUISS provided me with the chance to develop new ideas for teaching and sharpen the tools I already have.