This year marks the 40th anniversary of the founding of the New York Circle of Translators. On September 28th we will celebrate this milestone with a symposium featuring a keynote address by industry leader Renato Beninatto and a panel discussion with NYCT members who will reflect upon the Circle’s evolution over the years. The reception which will follow will be an excellent networking opportunity and we hope to see all our readers there.
The event, which is being co-sponsored by the Mencius Society for the Arts, will also serve to mark International Translation Day, which is celebrated every year on September 30th. The International Federation of Translators (FIT) chose this date to celebrate the pivotal role that translation plays in communicating ideas across international boundaries. September 30th was originally the feast day of Saint Jerome, the first person to translate the Bible into Latin from the original Hebrew. St. Jerome is considered to be the patron saint of translators.
I think it is also appropriate to mention that August was Women in Translation month. Since we did not publish in August, I am including my write-up of a September event at which the translator Minna Proctor read from her new translation of Natalia Ginzburg’s novel Happiness as Such. Acclaimed author Vivian Gornick also read one of Ginzburg’s most famous essays at the event.
I would like to thank the following women whose work is featured in this issue: Deborah Lockhart and Andrea González, who co-authored an article on multi-language subtitling; Kate Deimling for her write-up on Jon Ritzdorf’s machine translation presentation; and Renata Stein, who shared her translation experiences with me in a recent interview. Last and not by any means least, I am also including my interview with Alex Gross, one of the Circle’s founding members, who shared his fascinating and extremely varied translation career with me.
I hope you enjoy this issue and look forward to seeing everyone on September 28th.
