Tuesday, November 28, 2017

Un hivernage dans les glaces de Jules Verne

I'm currently studying Jules Verne's approximately fifty-page novella/long story Un hivernage dans les glaces, which was translated into English (very competently) by the Victorian translator William Struthers, a translator upon whom the late Dr Norman Wolcott, US Verne scholar and expert on Victorian renderings of Verne and Victorian-era translators of Jules Verne's literature into English, has written at length, including, for instance, in the 2008 republication of The Tour of the World in Eighty Days (1873/2008). 

The reason I'm reading this story at present, in its original French, is that I've been asked by my friends in the North American Jules Verne Society (NAJVS) to write a short piece commenting on the nature (form and quality, etc.) of the Struthers rendering of this less famous Verne story in English, as it is planned to republish Struthers' version in a forthcoming number of the NAJVS journal Extraordinary Journeys. By coincidence, I'm simultaneously carrying out a similar descriptive translational analysis on various recent English renderings of Vingt Mille Lieues Sous Les Mers, for an article on translation of literary classics.

 My particular interests at present are in investigating the ways in which translators manifest their unique, individual literary creativity within their translations, through myriad strategies including novel choices of target language synonymy, interpretation, expansion, reduction, and many other translation shifts. 

Getting back to A Winter's Sojourn In the Ice, as Struthers titled his rendering, I'm currently nearing the end of reading the story in French, and I'm enjoying it immensely - if you are a fan of Jules Verne, I would wholeheartedly recommend this quintessentially Vernian story of exploration in the icy Arctic wastes and of human endurance of extreme climatic conditions, a characteristically Vernian trope which finds similar expression in so many other novels from his pen, including such works as Five Weeks in a Balloon and Mistress Branican, to cite but two examples.

A group of sailors from Dunkirk in the north of France set off on a mercy mission, a voyage to the North Pole, in the depths of the icy midwinter, to find and rescue some of their missing crewmen; accompanying these brave men is the fiancée of their missing captain, while at their head is the sixty-year-old father of the said captain, convinced his son is still alive. When the group of rescuing sailors reach their Arctic destination, they must fight for their very survival in the face of temperatures plunging to lower than minus thirty-five degrees, the threat of suffocating in an icy prison of snow and ice hemming them in from all sides, hence their enforced period of wintering in the icy wastelands, often reminiscent of the poems of Canadian poet Robert Service, dwindling provisions of food and fuel, and the murderous treachery of some of their crew members. Will this courageous, loyal 'band of brothers' live to tell the tale, and will there finally be a 'happy ever after' wedding back in Dunkirk for the captain, Louis Cornbutte, and his devoted fiancée, who has bravely and selflessly risked her life to come to the rescue of the man she believes is still alive at the North Pole? 

As for Struthers' English rendering, from what I have seen of it thus far, it is highly accurate and complete, and thus a worthy, notable exception to the many truncated Verne renderings of Victorian times, when that author was less-valued than he is today. It is couched in formal, literary language which seems at times somewhat archaic by 21st-century standards, and is also, at times, quite imitative of the syntax and lexis of the source text, but combining such imitativeness with a generally idiomatic target language usage. 

I look forward to finishing this exciting Verne tale and to writing about Struthers' rendering, and I expect to conclude that he was, indeed, a fine translator, just as more recent Verne translators such as William Butcher, David Coward, Frederick Paul Walter and Walter James Miller have produced equally excellent translations of the more famous novels of Jules Verne. 

Wednesday, November 15, 2017

Teaching classic literature as part of the EFL curriculum

In my proficiency level English class this week, I had students explore some classic English literature, viz. literary extracts from the works of Thomas Hardy and Charlotte Bronte. I was happy that the students in question really enjoyed those classes. 

Thursday, November 9, 2017

Doras DCU Open access

Just a quick note, before I hit the hay - the Dublin City University DORAS website provides open access to DCU researchers' output, including articles, books, theses and dissertations. If you log on to doras.dcu.ie and type the names of an author or topic into the search fields you will be provided with immediate and unrestricted access to relevant research outputs. So, for instance, my M.A. dissertation on the translations of the novels of JK Rowling into French is on DORAS, as well as my monograph, an online journal article on translation theory and my doctoral thesis on Verne retranslation into English. 
And on another note, again related to academic research: next week at Griffith College Dublin's Institute of Language where I currently lecture in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and General English (to speakers of other languages), from lower levels up to advanced and proficiency, I am about to give some lectures on citing and referencing according to the Harvard style. For those interested in learning more about this topic, I would recommend two excellent authoritative sources: one, the DCU Library's section on training and resources; the other, the Anglia Ruskin university's online guide to citing and bibliography construction. As my colleague Dr Simon A. Thomas puts it, citing, referencing, paraphrasing and summarizing are all planks against plagiarism, enabling researchers to acknowledge the work of others in their writings and to giver the sources of the ideas they refer to, through direct or reported speech. Following a lecture on avoidance of plagiarism charges, students will be give various practical tasks to complete on how to cite and reference, how to summarize, how to evaluate other writings to decide if they display plagiarism or not and how to paraphrase. These tasks are taken from EAP course books published by Cambridge University Press. 
I'm really enjoying my lecturing work at Griffith College and my ongoing research into Verne studies, literary studies and translation studies.  

4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster

Having recently finished reading Anne Bronte's novel Agnes Grey, I decided to take a break from 19th-century Victorian classic literature and, before getting stuck in to that same author's other novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, I've decided to read a contemporary novel instead. 
The work I chose is Paul Auster's 2017 Man Booker prize-shortlisted novel 4 3 2 1, in which the picaresque David Copperfield-style narration of the life story of the central character, Archie Ferguson, born in 1947, offers a bildungsroman with a difference: in this novel, not only is the reader presented with one version of Ferguson's life story, but in addition, there are three other alternative, parallel versions of how that life story would have differed through different choices or events having had disproportionately larger consequences for the characters. So the reader is constantly being presented with these alternate realities - four different versions of the hero's life story. The book is divided into groups of four chapters, within which each chapter offers a slightly (significantly?) modified version of events ... slight differences initially, which have much more significant repercussions subsequently. I'm only in the early chapters, so it is as yet too early to comment on how the book ultimately unfolds, or how this very original, creative idea of four alternate realities ultimately succeeds or otherwise by the end of this (very long) tome. 
Critics have been reminded, by this novel's premise, of Robert Frost (name-checked in this book) and his poem The Road Less Travelled: '... two roads diverged in a yellow wood ... and I took the one less travelled ... and that has made all the difference'. A concept we can all identify with as we reflect on our own life journeys. 
This novel also reminds me of a short story I read over forty years ago in my Intermediate Certificate English anthology of short stories Exploring English, edited by the late Professor Augustine Martin of UCD, a story entitled The Story of the Widow's Son by the great Irish writer Mary Lavin. In that story, two versions of the son's life are recounted, to very moving, haunting effect ... I would highly recommend that story. No matter which of two courses of action the son decided to take at a critical juncture in his life, the outcome in each case was tragic. 
I look forward to finishing Auster's novel and posting a proper review of it here in due course. (And perhaps to eventually studying it in French translation!)

Wednesday, November 1, 2017

The Bronte sisters

I read Wuthering Heights in 2005, but it was only last year that I returned to the Bronte sisters by reading Charlotte Bronte's novel Jane Eyre. I have to admit that the latter was much more to my taste than the former. I think one reason that spurred me on to reading Charlotte's most famous novel was that at the time, on my favourite soap opera EastEnders, one of the characters was studying that novel for her GCSEs in English literature. I thoroughly enjoyed Jane Eyre. I therefore went on to read, and equally enjoy, Charlotte Bronte's other, less celebrated but to my mind of comparable quality, works viz. Villette; Shirley and The Professor. What is most interesting, to me, about this authoress (as she would have called herself, using as she does, the feminine forms of many occupations, forms little used nowadays, and more's the pity, such as authoress, directress and instructress) is that so much of her apparently fictional writings are so grounded in her own experiences, and can thus be described as partly - or significantly - autobiographical. 

Having studied the works of both Emily and Charlotte, I've now begun to read the novels of the third, the youngest, and perhaps least celebrated Brone sister, viz. Anne Bronte. At the moment, I'm into the opening chapters of her own largely autobiographical short novel Agnes Grey, in which the eponymous heroine recounts her experiences as a governess in 19th-century England, the incidents and feelings she describes reflecting those of Anne Bronte herself. 

The use of English language by the Bronte sisters is a delight. 

Monday, October 30, 2017

www.academia.edu

For the past few years, I've been subscribing to the above website, www.academia.edu, and have uploaded several of my articles on translation theory onto this platform of scholarly exchange. More recently, I upgraded to the premium package of this website. This site helps to make one's research outputs more visible to a much wider, global audience of fellow researchers, to increase citations of your writings, and to enjoy greater access to other writings in your field of research, as well as offering the benefits of exchanging ideas with fellow researchers. 
So it was that, this past weekend, I made contact with Professor Ernst Wendland, a South African translation scholar and Bible translator, who was a friend and mentee of Biblical translation scholar Eugene Nida, one of the outstanding translation theorists of the 20th century. Having begun reading some of Ernst's articles, I've realized that his writings have much to say about literary translation approaches and that we have similar areas of research interests. 
I would wholeheartedly recommend this academic publications and networking website. 

Thursday, October 26, 2017

Textbook in EAP (English for Academic Purposes)

Today, at the library of Griffith College Dublin, which has a very good English section - containing as it does diverse materials on aspects of learning English as a Foreign Language, learning General English, Business English, examination English (IELTS, Cambridge etc.) and English for Special Purposes (ESP)/English for Academic Purposes (EAP), together with Graded Readers of such classic English literary works as Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and many complete, unabridged English novels and anthologies together with a section on literary criticism - I located a very good course book which will prove useful in teaching the Academic English (EAP) modules here at Griffith, viz. a book entitled English for academic study: Extended Writing and Research Skills Course Book by McCormack and Slaght, published in 2005 (revised most recently in 2009) by the University of Reading's Centre for Applied Language Studies and Garnet Education, Reading. 
For my purposes, the most immediate benefit to be derived from this course book is that its chapter on Introductions, conclusions and definitions (Chapter 6) contains many valuable exercises on analyzing sample introductions and conclusions to actual student essays and projects at the University of Reading, and on helping students to write their own introductions and endings on a trial basis, preparatory to their writing their own essays and other assignments in academic English at Griffith. 
Today, I met the Head of English at Griffith College, Clare Watson, for the first time. Clare is from Durham and has most recently lectured in EAP at the University of Glasgow, prior to taking up her current post at Griffith College, where she co-ordinates the Griffith Institute of Language (GIL) for all three campuses of the college, viz. Dublin, Cork and Limerick. 
So far, I'm really enjoying Griffith College. Tomorrow I'm due to teach a class on using features of academic prose (such as the passive voice, linking words etc.) in practical exercise-type applications. Next week, we are due to look at the features of Introductions and Conclusions before then going on to put them into practice using the above course book materials. 

Friday, October 20, 2017

Griffith Institute of Language (GIL), Griffith College Dublin - English for Academic Purposes (EAP)

I've been lecturing at Griffith College Dublin for the last two weeks, in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) as well as teaching occasional classes in General English as a foreign language. In EAP, the focus in this semester is on offering students (who come from such disciplines as computing, business, finance, accounting and law amongst others) for whom English is not their mother tongue, insights into academic writing, particularly with a view to essay composition but also in anticipation of writing theses and dissertations. We're exploring characteristics of academic writing as opposed to less formal styles within other types of discourse, and putting the use of those features into practice through exercises and examples. Students are also being shown how to plan essays, carry out research, draft and revise essays, write paragraphs, introductions and conclusions, and how to cite and reference according to the Harvard system of bibliographical referencing.
In the second semester, the focus will be on listening skills and note-taking in lectures, and on speaking skills as applied principally to the delivery of presentations. 

I'm really enjoying teaching EAP at Griffith. I'm using some examples of my own academic writing within translation studies, to give instances of academic prose. 
So the first two weeks at GIL have been a very positive teaching and lecturing experience - long may it continue. 


Saturday, September 30, 2017

Creative writing in my childhood and youth

Ghosts, vampires, werewolves, old black and white horror movies starring Christopher Lee and Vincent Price; anthologies of ghost stories published by Pan and edited by Rosemary Timperley; the chilling stories of Edgar Allan Poe and especially his poem 'The Raven' and the film version of his short story 'The Masque of the Red Death' starring Vincent Price as the evil Prince Prospero in medieval Italy, where Death in a red hood and cloak is the uninvited midnight guest (an iconic moment in horror creation, for me) ... as a child the above were an important part of my reading, and viewing, material. 
Little wonder that the first short story I wrote, at age eleven, was a ghost story - called 'The Haunted Bedroom', it was published in my secondary school magazine 'Voice' in Autumn 1975, and was well-received by teachers and classmates! I followed it up over my years of secondary school with several other stories in a similar ghostly or macabre vein - 'The Strange Secret of Moor Castle', 'Last Confession', 'Josephine' and a story whose title escapes me about a 'black widow' living it up on the French Riviera having bumped off no fewer than ten wealthy husbands and (obviously) gotten her evil hands on their fortunes - in retrospect,  this story was embarrassingly camp, cheesy ... while the ghost stories of my eleven year-old self were probably quite stereotypical and not hugely original (yet the English was good and English was - with French - my favourite subject in secondary school). 
Going to work as a Clerical Officer at age eighteen in Irish local government and thereby following in my father's footsteps, managed to stifle whatever literary creativity and imagination, and inspiration, I might have possessed in my childhood and teens. Nothing like a permanent and pensionable pen-pushing post to stultify one's creative impulse. 
Nevertheless, I did pen a play at age twenty called 'Not Dead But Sleeping'. Not a ghost story as the title might lead one to think - but an aspiring Tale of the Unexpected based on the TV programme of Roald Dahl. 
Followed by a novel at age twenty-two - a children's novel based on actual children I knew at the time. I wrote it for those kids, now adults with children of their own (just as Lewis Carroll wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland for a real girl, but with more success). My own children's novel, begun in the summer of 1985 on a week off work and completed a year later, was entitled Danger by the Sea. 
Written long before the personal computer and Microsoft Word, I wrote it - as I had written all my previous oeuvre - in longhand, with much enjoyment it has to be said, but a friend typed it for me on an electric typewriter and I presented it to the children on whom it was based (real people in a fictional adventure, inspired by Enid Blyton's Famous Five and Secret Seven which I'd read in my primary schooldays). 
I toyed with the idea of trying to get it published but that notion has long been abandoned. 
I sometimes wonder if it would have been accepted by a publisher.
However, at age thirty-five I left local government on career break, to study languages and marketing as a mature student. Suddenly I was back to my youthful love of language, study and writing. After a long absence, I was studying literary works in French, writing essays - and the creative juices were flowing once more. 
Finally, after my PhD graduation in 2010, I published my thesis as a monograph, so at last I had an actual ISBN publication. At the same time, I began translating French literature (Jules Verne and Michel Verne) into English for the North American Jules Verne Society, and publishing those translations with accompanying critical material and notes I'd written, so I now have several books to my name - not actual self-authored fiction, but an academic work, literary translations, essays, and some academic articles and book reviews. 
What got me writing this blog post on my creative writing of many years ago, was my current research into literary translation as a form of creative rewriting. 

David Coward, translator of Jules Verne and of many other French writers

I've been studying David Coward's 2017 translation, from source language French into target language English, of Jules Verne's classic mid-19th-century novel Vingt Mille Lieues Sous Les Mers. I'm analysing certain chapters from the viewpoint of descriptive-explanatory translation studies, in order to ascertain the overall concept of translation evident in Coward's rendering; the norms of translation to which he adheres; the multiplicity of interacting reasons for/causes of his translation choices, and the types of creativity evident in his rewriting of this Verne classic. 

The reason I'm carrying out this research is in order to write a forthcoming article, and later monograph, on creativity in translation. 

Coward's translation is highly accurate, couched in non-imitative, natural, idiomatic target language expression, and displays creativeness largely through inventive synonymy, syntactic modification, explicitation, expansion, some reduction or simplification, and, especially, interpretation and slight shifts, at low levels, in source text meaning, while preserving global semantic accuracy. Creativity is equally displayed by David Coward in his detailed Introduction and his endnotes and footnotes, which fulfill the exegetic and didactic functions of the translator. 

This post is by way of a very succinct report on my initial research findings in this investigation I'm doing into various contemporary renderings/retranslations of Verne's above-mentioned novel. The forthcoming article will, of course, provide some pertinent examples of Coward's various translation strategies, trying to describe and explain them. The focus of the examples (of coupled pairs of replaced and replacing segments, to use Toury's 1995 DTS terms) will be on highlighting Coward's resourcefulness, originality and creativity as a translator. Some of his translational language is modernizing and informal, which is also the case in another Penguin publication of a Verne translation, viz. Michael Glencross's 2004 rendering of Le Tour du Monde en Quatre-Vingts Jours (1873/2004). 

In contrast, William Butcher's 1992 translation of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea differs from Coward's in its more imitative approach, though Butcher revised this rendering to make it more idiomatic, though preserving many of his original translation choices. 

On the other hand, Walter and Miller's 1993 rendering of the same novel is, at times, more informal than the Coward or Butcher versions. It is equally idiomatic, well-researched and creative in its choices of synonyms. 


Villanova University, USA

Villanova University in the United States was founded by the Augustinian order of priests. They recently advertised for an Assistant Professor in French and Francophone Studies so I said what the heck, I might as well throw my hat into the ring. It seems as though my application to the University of Liège in Belgium has been unsuccessful as, though I've heard nothing, the job is to begin on 2nd October! 

Villanova University has a very good online application system, very user-friendly. 

Time will tell ... Am also applying to various Dublin colleges (despite already working in one of them) ... 


Current reading material

So, as usual, I've got a few books on the go at the moment: 

Still reading Sebastian Barry's novel Days Without End (2016); Amélie Nothomb's Biographie de la Faim (2003) (translated into English as A Life of Hunger) and Charlotte Bronte's Shirley (mid 19th-century) which I just treated myself to yesterday - it was payday - and have recently finished reading the French translation of Stephen King's contemporary horror classic The Shining. All the foregoing books are very enjoyable but I would say my two favourites from this list are Nothomb and Bronte. Both are superb stylists, the former in French, the latter in English. They are both worth reading for their use of language alone - though content is equally engrossing. To be at the start of a Bronte novel - a rare and thereby precious gem - is an unparalleled delight. 

I still haven't begun reading Margaret Atwood's 1985 dystopian classic The Handmaid's Tale, currently adapted as an acclaimed TV series which I haven't seen as yet either, but will hopefully get stuck in before too long. I'd also like to read - in the same science-fiction (or anticipation?) apocalyptic genre, a book I saw yesterday in Chapters' Bookstore in Parnell Street Dublin, viz. PD James's The Children of Men. 

I recently completed the translation from French into English of a French novel from 1929 for a private client - the translation is due to be published next year. I can't say anything more about it for now, owing to client confidentiality but all will be revealed in the fullness of time. 


Saturday, September 16, 2017

Market Leader - an excellent course book for Business English to Speakers of Other Languages

As I'm currently teaching Business English as a Foreign Language, I recently invested in the Upper Intermediate course book with audio CDs, Market Leader, published by Pearson. Last week I began using some of these CDs, which cover such topics as communication, international marketing, job satisfaction, team building, management styles and qualities, and effective presentations. Students have found the content very helpful and enjoyable. A highly recommended set of course materials, covering all levels from Elementary to Advanced. 
Here are the few book reviews i've written for Amazon.com.

Martin Chuzzlewit (Penguin Classics)
by Charles DickensEdition: Paperback
Price: $11.05
Availability: In Stock
62 used & new from $1.89

The magical universe of Dickens: Review posted to Amazon on October 14, 2009



My late father, Frank O'Driscoll (1927-1994), had a wonderful, inherited collection of old, dusty volumes of classic English literature, a home library with which I grew up and from which I developed a love for reading and discovery. Almost all of Dickens' novels formed part of this personal library. Yet I came to Dickens later in life.


As a child, his formal, florid, Victorian prose seemed to me to be a little offputting. Yet I loved television and stage musical adaptations of such classics as 'Oliver Twist' and 'A Christmas Carol', both of which were produced as school musicals at my secondary school in the 1970s and in which I took part.


I think the images and characters created by Dickens are part of the collective cultural consciousness, on a par with the contemporary impact of Harry Potter, for example. Dickens' novels have proved, over the decades, to be a fecund territory for screen adaptations.


But it is only in the last few years that I have finally begun to read his novels in earnest, and have thus far enjoyed such treasures as 'The Pickwick Papers', 'The Old Curiosity Shop', 'David Copperfield', 'Nicholas Nickleby', 'Dombey and Son', 'A Tale of Two Cities', 'Great Expectations' and, of course, 'Martin Chuzzlewit'. With each long novel, Dickens creates a fantastic, varied universe of characters, plots and sub-plots. All of human life is paraded in each novel, and his works rival Shakespeare in their beautiful use of language, their engrossing plots and their studies of human nature, with characters ranging from the most virtuous to the basest and most despicable. However, one difficulty I have with Dickens is that so many of his characters seem caricatural.


In 'Martin Chuzzlewit', some characters have no redeeming features and are completely egotistical and malicious, e.g. Jonas Chuzzlewit and Mr Pecksniff. In contrast, other characters are almost completely virtuous and less believable in consequence of their perfection, e.g. Tom and Ruth Pinch and Martin Tapley. On the other hand, the eponymous hero, Martin Chuzzlewit (Junior) does trace a personal journey from selfishness to greater kindness and consideration for others.


Just as the characters are very diverse, so too are the themes and tones of this and other novels by Charles Dickens. There is much humour in the form of irony, satire and hyperbole, much sadness and much stinging social criticism. Dickens' novels speak on different levels to different readers, and fulfil multiple purposes, from entertainment to social commentary. The latter is often intended to bring about change, e.g. Dickens paints a witheringly denunciatory portrait of the Chancery legal system of the 19th century in Britain in 'Bleak House', and of the savagery and corruption of the so-called schools such as Dotheboys Hall, Yorkshire, in 'Nicholas Nickleby'. Much of his criticism in 'Chuzzlewit' is reserved for Americans; Dickens had travelled throughout the USA, and was displeased by some aspects of its society and people at that time. Chuzzlewit and Tapley thus serve as reflectors for Dickens' animosity towards the USA, as they journey to the States and encounter hypocrisy and underhand business dealings which leave them penniless and in broken health.


Like all of Dickens' novels, 'Chuzzlewit' is long and involved, with frequent changes of scene and complex sub-plots which gradually merge into each other and resolve themselves.


The language is engaging, but it does require concentration. Effort on the part of the reader reaps its own rewards. Airport or beach fiction this is not. My father once said of Dickens that each of his novels could be read and reread, at least twice; one could firstly enjoy the plot, and later savour the delicious prose. Book sales and continuing adaptations of his novels testify to the fact that Dickens' literature has stood the test of time. And deservedly so, on the evidence of 'Martin Chuzzlewit' alone.


Sugar Stories

A couple of years back, I translated, from French into English, a so-called 'photo roman' called Sugar Stories about the lives and loves of a group of young gay Paris-based guys. After I had translated a number of seasons of episodes, the makers of this series became too busy with other projects to continue with their on line photographic comic strip and, sadly, it was abruptly discontinued. 
However, last week, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Sugar Stories has reappeared with equal suddenness on the Web. 
A new episode has been posted. 
It's an interesting series and worth checking out at www.sugarstories.com. 

Feels good to be back!

After six years absence from this particular blog - during which time I had started a couple of different blogs - it's good to be finally back to this my original blog, the one I personally prefer. 
In my last post to this blog a few moments ago, I spoke about an interview I had to do recently in French. To prepare for that interview, I had a one-to-one class at the Alliance Française here in Dublin. 
I would recommend their French native speaker teachers highly. 
Their library of French-language resources is also excellent. And their film club and other cultural events throughout the year. 

University of Liege, Belgium

Last month, I got the chance to visit, for the first time, the beautiful Belgian city of Liege, near Brussels, and, in particular, the University of that city, as I was called for interview for the position of Teaching Fellow in French-English Translation Studies. 
The post would involve lecturing in such subjects as French-English practical translation activity (general and applied translating, thus translating texts in a variety of textual and discursive genres, including, presumably, literary and business texts among others); teaching Translation Theory (for me, one of the best general introductions to all aspects of the dynamic and complex discipline of Translation Studies is Jeremy Munday's Introducing Translation Studies - Theories and Applications the third edition of which dates from 2012 and which is accompanied by an excellent website (a companion website), though other excellent texts useful to both students and lecturers alike include Williams' Theories of Translation (2013)); teaching Anglophone contemporary society and civilization; English-French contrastive linguistics, and English to Speakers of Other Languages especially Academic English. 
The Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Liege is in the historic town centre, in a lovely building which is a former Jesuit college. The university celebrates its two hundredth anniversary this year. 
On the day of the interview, I had first to translate from French to English a book review, then give a presentation to faculty on how I would teach the translation of that text, and finally do an interview in French. 
I felt it all went well and I was happy with my performance. They told me it would take a few weeks before a decision would be communicated to candidates. Still waiting to hear. 
I continue to teach English at a private languages school in Dublin, Englishour. As well as teaching General English to Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) at all levels, I also teach Business English and exam preparation English. 
I have two new publications forthcoming in the USA with the Palik Series of the North American Jules Verne Society (NAJVS), both containing translations of Jules and Michel Verne's work from French to English, with notes and introductions. 
I also recently translated a French novel for a private client. 
As for current reading material: am enjoying the French translation of Stephen King's The Shining; Days Without End (2016) by Sebastian Barry; Biographie de la Faim (2003) by Amélie Nothomb and The Handmaid's Tale (1985) by Margaret Atwood. 
I also continue to watch the programmes of France 24 and France Infos on line, especially their news bulletins, almost every day, and to read the French press (especially Le Monde but also other sources on line, especially Libération.

Creativity in Translation

I'm currently very interested in the whole area of creativity, especially as manifested by literary translators. I'm therefore reading various articles on translatorial creativity and, more generally, on creativity studies which analyze and try to explain the origins and nature of human creativity within the arts, science, academia and so on, from philosophical and psychological standpoints. I'm also researching the ways in which some contemporary translators of Verne into English have shown unique, individual creativity. 
The purposes of such research are twofold: it is being conducted firstly for an article on translation of the classics which I'm writing and, secondly, for a future monograph on creativity in translation . 
Within translation studies, scholars such as Boase-Beier and Delisle have written on the ways in which translating is a creative process. Outside the specific confines of the discipline of Translation Studies, an excellent collection of seminal articles on creativity studies is the 1976 book The Creativity Question edited by Rothenberg and Hausman, published by Duke University Press. I've also recently come across an interesting article by an ESL Lecturer in the Middle East who discusses how we might evaluate creative writing by English language students, and her assessment rubrics and criteria are, I feel, usefully applicable to assessing translators' creative outputs. 
For me, translation - especially literary, including poetic translation - is creative by definition, as transferring a text inter-lingually from one language and culture to another involves, not code-switching, but trying to represent the source text in the different worldview of the target language and culture. Translators therefore are obliged to solve problems at every turn, coming up with inventive synonymy, explication, non-imitative renderings, cultural equivalences and individual interpretations. They are unavoidably saying something different to the original. Poetry translation is probably the most creative genre of translating activity, but all genres of text in translation require creative translating. 
For my article and later monograph, I'm interested in how contemporary renderings in English of Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas demonstrate varying individual creative solutions by the problem-solving, inventive translators, and in how translators of other Verne novels, as well as translations of J.K. Rowling, Lucy Maud Montgomery and the Grimm Brothers, and Verne as an adapter to the theatre among others, manifest creativity. 
In sum, translation may be more than Malmkjaer's 'derived creativity' - Jean Delisle and Jean Boase-Beier, among others, see translating as completely creative and original rather than somehow derivative or secondary. 
Models of the creative process - such as Wallas's model of creativity as entailing preparation, incubation, inspiration and revision - will be applied by me to the specific creative processes engaged in by literary translators. Creativity as part of the efficient cause of the individual translator's self-inscription on her translated text is the principal cause of translation forms. 
But what might cause creativity itself within human beings, creativity being defined as the production of something novel, original and valuable? Theories of the causes of creative products are both genetic and teleological in nature, and there are certain psychological attributes of creative people which have been advanced by certain theorists, and which have specifically been found to exist in translators, such as openness to experience, a concern for discovery, etc.
For me, an important part of creativity is divergent production, so that translators in their problem-solving can brainstorm a variety of original solutions. 

PS I have recently uploaded, to academia.edu, a draft article on Adaptation Studies.