Non-Epic Fail

In an attempt to enrich my corpus I went last Friday to a lecture on translating the Greek mythological thinking. Enjoyed it a lot (no irony meant!), but – alas! – the lecture was in Portuguese! Obviously there was no difficulty for me as a fluent speaker of Spanish in understanding the lecture, but I can’t possibly transcribe it or use for the purposes of my investigation.

As I said to Sally, I’m afraid our corpus is becoming uncontrollably diverse.

Anyway, just a couple of notes because I think such an outstanding experience as being exposed to academic discourse in a language you (think you) don’t know and understanding it deserves being mentioned, if not in the investigation itself, at least in the blog.

The lecturer was very formally dressed up, while the audience (mostly students) were looking quite casual.

There was very little talking per se: the lecturer had prepared a 10-page handout which he simply read out to us, thanks to which we understood it very well. Very articulate indeed, I guess it had taken him several weeks to prepare a text so impeccably academic and, at the same time, so easy to understand for speakers of a kindred but still different language.

Of course in such a situation there is very little room for humour or interactive elements which could, if they occurred, obstruct the communication.

A phrase to be engraved in every translation textbook:

EL COMENTARIO ES LA DERROTA DEL TRADUCTOR.

Which means:

A footnote is the defeat of the translator.

By way of introduction

So let me tell you why I am doing all this and what I expect to be the outcome of this activity.

I’m a PhD student at the University of La Laguna, Spain, and I’m currently doing a research project on spoken academic discourse. As, I suppose, any PhD student (or, indeed, any student taken in the broadest sense of the word), I come across various difficulties, puzzles and problems in my so-called work. There are several reasons why I say ‘so-called’, but I hope to be able to explain them later. At the moment I’m interested in talking about those problems in a public place (such as a blog) and try to present solutions, as well as find out what others think of this or that problem. I suppose most of the EAP/ESP professionals, Applied linguists and Genre theorists have stumbled (are stumbling) upon similar problems, and they might like to be able to exchange ideas.

Especially that there is, as far as I'm aware, no such public place on the web where we applied linguists and linguists in general, can get together and discuss whatever we are interested in.

My initial idea was to set up a forum (not a very difficult task indeed) and send out invitations to register and talk, but then I remembered that a similar idea had failed a couple of years ago when the organisers of the PPRIISEAL conference invited everyone to come to the forum and discuss issues related to the conference (the conference itself was a great success). In fact, no one came except a few enthusiasts, and these were too few to keep the forum going. Now I thought I could start with something less effort-taking than a forum and see if we can become an organised and consistent web-community.

To tell the truth, I'm envious of Physicists and folk like them, who have vast virtual spaces dedicated to them alone, where they conduct discussions and have a lot of fun, too, and even - only think of it! - publish their papers ABSOLUTELY FREE OF CHARGE, so that their colleagues don't have to spend loads of money on keeping themselves up to date. There's a trick to it so that they don't violate any copyright issue: they publish one of the final drafts, but not the very final one, so that there are minor divergences between the hard copy and the internet-version, but this is still a great help to those who are interested in what's going on in the field. Afterwards, if they feel like it, they can go to the library and read the full paper, or buy the book, or borrow it, but they are aware of the new research that goes on in their field, even if they don't belong to any academic community which is powerful enough to provide its members with an access to the treasures of intellectual property. We linguists – again, as far as I'm aware – have no such possibility, and it makes me desperate!

So this is one reason I want to speak about what I'm interested in. Another reason is purely pragmatic: with the help of this blog I hope to gain sufficient proficiency in writing in English and make it easier for me to write academic texts. It might be redundant to mention that I'm not a native speaker (writer) of English, and sometimes I feel awkward and extremely self-conscious about my language, both oral and written. I find myself archaic and sounding funny and sort of out-of-place. Maybe I could manage to adopt some discourse practices from discussions in this blog. In fact, it takes me ages to write a single sentence in English, and each register and variety is problematic in its own way. I can't sound colloquial since I've never lived in any English-speaking country, I can't sound formal since my formal register tends to get more and more pompous and pathetic, and I can only pretend to sound academic, while the true 'academism' is something to be gained together with professionalism which is still nowhere near me.

I also hope, with the help of this blog, to resolve my doubts regarding my work and enrich my personal and professional background. My experience may be of use to other PhD students or professional linguists, and I think it’s worth sharing anyway.

I’ll divide the blog into several sections, such as ‘Current readings’, ‘Tasks’, ‘Dubia’, ‘Thoughts and reflections’, ‘Book review’ ‘Red tape’, ‘Do-it-some-day’, ‘Other projects’, etc. I’m currently involved in 5 large projects (all related to different aspects of my professional life), and there might be more coming up. Truly, I don’t know how I’m going to manage them all, but I’m very keen on each of them, and so something must be done to carry them out!

I hope this blog will be useful and/or interesting to linguists and linguistics students.