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lectures > lectures spring 2000

Creative Translation

Speaker: David Pendlebury
29 April 2000

In a lecture that could equally well be entitled 'the Impossible Task of the Translator', David Pendlebury will explore some of the problems and issues which make accurate translation so doomed to failure. He will take a look at metaphors which don't carry across from one culture to another, multiple meaning, unnoticed allusions, concepts without counterpart, and irony. He will ask whether something always has to be sacrificed.

David Pendlebury is of mixed (Anglo-Scottish) parentage and this and frequent moves in childhood probably contributed to a lifelong interest in language and cultural issues - as did a family environment where some knowledge of foreign tongues was taken for granted. He obtained an MA in modern languages at Cambridge University. Early jobs included a year as translator/interpreter with Vereinigte Deutche Metallwerke and working on the team that produced Harrap's Standard German Dictionary. More than a quarter of his life has been spent abroad, predominantly in the Islamic world. He has translated books from French, German, Persian and Arabic. In his mid-forties he began to extend his interest in language to include communication with machines and in 1988 he obtained an MSc. in Information Systems. Since then he has played a role in software engineering whilst continuing to maintain his former interests.