UNLV hoping program translates to success

Monday, Nov. 1, 2004 | 11:07 a.m.

UNLV has long been nationally known for its basketball program and its hotel college. Now it is rapidly gaining international prestige among literati.

The university's International Institute of Modern Letters played host last week to the American Literary Translators Association annual conference, an event that ties into the institute's launching of Rainmaker Translations, a partnership with several major publishing houses to produce six to eight translations a year. The first two books are due in the spring.

Translation "is a growing area for UNLV and one of those things UNLV can do that will distinguish it from other universities," said Douglas Unger, the institute's co-founder and director of grants and acquisition. "There aren't a lot of universities that focus on translation, and we could be one of the leaders in that."

UNLV's role in hosting and organizing the conference shows the clout the four-year-old institute has gained in the translating world, Unger said.

"UNLV increases its prestige tremendously by becoming one of the first and becoming one of the most important (universities for translation) by putting such an important focus on translation as a discipline," said Unger, who is also director of UNLV's International Master of Fine Arts program. Las Vegas was the first U.S. City of Asylum, taking in writers in exile from other countries, he noted, and UNLV is the only MFA program in the country to mandate students spend at least one semester overseas and complete a major translation project, he noted.

Funded through grants and by private donors such as Mandalay Resort Group president and institute founder Glenn Schaeffer, the institute pays for several doctorate fellows at UNLV and a professorship in creative writing that is currently held by Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, a Nigerian playwright. The institute also provides funds to the International Center for Writing and Translation at the University of California, Irvine.

One of the more recent feathers in the institute's cap was the publication UNLV foreign languages professor Giuseppe Natale's "TransScribe," an annual teaching translation journal that highlights the work of students and faculty.

And on the horizon, the institute's Rainmaker Translations is due to deliver two books early next year, including English translations of the Chinese exile Bei Dao's "Midnight's Gate" and of Russian author Yuri Rytcheu's "Dream in Polar Fog," Unger said.

Considered the Bob Dylan of China, Dao fled his home country after students sang his poems during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, and "Midnight's Gate" chronicles his journey through several international cities, Unger said. "Dream" explores the life and culture of the Chukchi people, Siberian natives, in a historical novel set at the turn of the century.

The books the institute is helping to translate are first and foremost good, interesting literature, Unger said, but through the literature the authors explore individual lives and culture, record history and make political observations.

Preserving and recreating these books in English is important, Unger said, "because otherwise Americans become exiled" from the rest of the world.

When the institute was founded in 2000, only about 271 books out of 70,000 published worldwide were being translated into English, Unger said.

The data, compiled by the National Endowment for the Arts, "rang an alarm in the world of thinking people about what's going to happen in our culture, if we turn our back on the rest of the world," Unger said.

The results of not paying attention to other cultures and other languages became painfully apparent after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when officials could not find enough translators for intelligence work, Unger and others at the conference said.

"Translation is essential to understanding people and cultures, and you get into a lot of trouble when you don't," David Ball, president of the American Literary Translation Association, said. "Literature can tell us a lot of things about how people live and feel."

Unger said it was appropriate for the institute to do its work from Las Vegas and to host the conference here, because Las Vegas is now an international city with a diverse mix of ethnic groups and cultures and 5 million to 8 million foreign visitors a year.

"That translation is important here really makes sense," Unger said.

Natale and Unger talked up the institute with the more than 100 international translators who were in town for the conference last week.

"We have translators here from all over the world, and our UNLV faculty and our students are getting to rub shoulders with and listen to the best translators in the world talk about what they do," Unger said Thursday.

Conference presenters included such prominent names as Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Algerian writer and filmmaker Assia Djebar, as well as Los Angeles Times Book Review editor-in-chief Steve Wasserman, Unger said. Translators discussed the difficulties inherent in their work as well as the worldwide importance of translation through several discussion panels and keynote speeches at the Alexis Park Resort.

Keynote speakers wa Thiong'o and Djeber were the highlights of the conference.

Both authors epitomize the importance of translation, having been persecuted in their native countries, wa Thiong'o for his promotion of tribal languages and for speaking out for human rights and Djebar for writing about Muslim women in French after the country's liberation and the ascendance of Arabic as the national language.

As director of UC Irvine's International Center for Writing and Translation, wa Thiong'o works with UNLV's institute to promote the translation of foreign literature into English and American literature into other languages in order to promote a global consciousness and to promote cross-cultural exchanges, he said. The author also writes in his native Kikuyu and in Swahili in his efforts to preserve what wa Thiong'o calls the "marginalized languages of the world."

The dominance of English due to the global economy has benefited communication, wa Thiong'o said, but only the preservation of all languages can lead to true cultural understanding.

"Monolingualism has blinded nations into a monoview of reality," he said.