In Others' Words Notes on Translating Myself

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Painting of a female form standing with one knee bent, holding a wooden sword in right hand angled downward. A blue dragon head is at their feet. The figure wears a white cat mask and stands on brown rocks. A wave rises behind them. A volano errupts in the background over their left shoulder.
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Published: Jan 11, 2023
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15763/issn.2688-9595.2023.3.2.29-37
Keywords:
L2 writing translation language teaching ESL EFL translanguage

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Michael Spooner

Abstract

Translating a paper for a conference in Mexico led me to explore translation theory and to search the ethical nuances of presenting in my L2. Moments of cognitive weirdness in the transit from one language to the other illuminated some troubling theoretical problems, such as the invisibility of the traditional translator, the cultural “smoothing” of texts, and the revisionist tendency of translation itself. These in turn led me to query my position as an L1 speaker of English addressing in Spanish an audience in Latin America, and to question even attempting it. Was I an imposter speaking in others' words, or was Spanish gradually becoming my language, too? Along the way, I found myself comparing notes on my emotional relation to Spanish with the writer Jhumpa Lahiri's description of her relation to Italian, her own L2. 

Article Details

Issue
Vol. 3 No. 2 (2023): Writers: Craft & Context
Section
Articles
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Author Biography

Michael Spooner

Director, Utah State University Press (retired). Michael Spooner’s many refereed articles, book chapters, and conference papers address the fields of writing theory, L2 writing, editorial work, scholarly publishing, and poetry. His work is known for innovation in form and voice, as well as for its scholarly contribution. Michael is also the author of fiction and poetry for the juvenile market.

Under Michael’s 24-year leadership, the USU Press gained a national reputation as a publisher of research in writing studies, folkloristics, Western history, natural history, and as the home of the May Swenson Poetry Award—a twenty-volume series of poetry books by emerging poets from across the United States. 

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