Translation slam
Moderated by Hugh Keith, Janet Fraser and Paul Boothroyd go head to head translating the same text and defending their choices. Just how different will their translations be?
Hugh Keith went to school in Glasgow and Belfast before studying Modern Languages at Oxford and training as a teacher at York. After teaching English at a German university and in a secondary school in London he returned to his Celtic roots, settling in Edinburgh, where he joined the Heriot-Watt University Languages Department and discovered the wonderful world of translation and interpreting. After twenty years of teaching, he hit mid-life crisis, broke free and floated himself as a freelance interpreter and translator, though he continued teaching part-time on the postgraduate translation course at Heriot-Watt.
For the past ten years he has also organised regular English workshops in Edinburgh for professional interpreters and translators from European countries. He has been external examiner for a number of UK universities, convenor of the ITI Scottish Group, and has also served on the ITI conference committee.
As a freelancer he has worked for major German automotive companies as well as various political and trade union organizations.
Paul Boothroyd M.A. Oxon, MITI, read Modern Languages at Oxford, trained in service industry marketing, and from 1984-1991 was Head of Language Services with translators’ cooperative InTra eG, Stuttgart. In 1991, together with his wife Monika (Dipl. Übers.), Paul founded Bauer-Boothroyd Übersetzungen in Schorndorf, southwest Germany. BBÜ translates between English and German, specialising in corporate communications in the fields of automotive, management, marketing, HR, and sustainability, working entirely for direct clients. A co-author of '101 Things a Translator Needs to Know', Paul first addressed the ITI Conference back in 1990 on the topic of 'Translation Cooperatives'.
Janet Fraser FITI studied translating and interpreting at Heriot-Watt University in the mid-1970s followed by a year teaching students of translation at Leipzig’s Karl-Marx-Universität. She then worked as a staff translator in both the private and the public sector and as a multilingual journalist.
Between 1988 and 2010, Janet was Senior Lecturer in Translation at the University of Westminster, where she taught German-English and French-English translation and editing skills and launched the Developing Professionalism for Translators module.
For the past 11 years, she has been freelancing as a translator, reviser and editor. Janet has Masters qualifications in sociolinguistics and modern German studies, but her proudest linguistic achievement is mastering Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs well enough to decipher funerary inscriptions at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
