Why Translate into Welsh?

06 August 2013

Aberystwyth University stand will be alive with talk of literatures and languages on the Tuesday of Eisteddfod Week between 10 and 11am when Mererid Hopwood, Sioned Puw Rowlands, Dewi Huw Owen and others will make a series of micro presentations on the topic ‘Why Translate into Welsh?’ drawing on their personal and professional experience.

This will be followed by Ned Thomas’s adjudication of this year’s Wales Translation Challenge and the associated awards ceremony.

The event is organised in the context of a research project currently running at the Mercator Institute at Aberystwyth University, funded by the Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol to create a descriptive online catalogue of translations into Welsh in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Dewi Huw Owen will talk about his own research on the three Welsh translations of Hamlet, and Sioned Puw Rowlands about the translations’ supplement which she has edited for the literary periodical Taliesin.

The 2013 Translation Challenge organised by Translators’ House Wales is to translate three poems by one of Cuba’s most remarkable poets, Victor Rodriguez Núñez. Join the judge Ned Thomas as he announces the Challenge’s winner, and presents them with a Bardic Staff carved from a tree in the Llanystumdwy area.

The event is sponsored by The Association of Welsh Translators and Interpreters. Translators’ House Wales is a partnership between Wales Literature Exchange and Tŷ Newydd: the National Writers’ Centre for Wales.

On Wednesday, another translation-related event will take place at 12 noon in Theatr y Maes when ‘Carnifal’, Jan Piette’s Welsh translation of the original Breton drama, ‘Meurlarjez’ by Roparz Hemon will be performed by the “Frenigen Mercator” student company from Aberystwyth.

This one-act drama was rediscovered by the Cataloguing Project and the sparkling stage production is directed by Roger Owen of the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies.

Why Translate into Welsh? Tuesday,6th of August at 10am on the University’s stand at the National Eisteddfod.

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