In his traumatic passage from mono- to bilingualism, and perhaps to a future as a translator, Kugelmass is inserted not exactly into the foreign but into the intercultural, into the interstices between cultures, into what Friedrich Schleiermacher 1973: 63 derogates as the “unerfreuliche Mitte”, the “unsettling in-between” in which, as Anthony Pym 1995 rightly says, all translators live their professional and personal lives. This is, of course, how technical texts are typically portrayed by professors and students of the humanities: as devoid of certain humanizing qualities that make literary texts pleasant, even sometimes unimaginably beautiful, places to live in for a while. He is not happy with his second wife. The Kugelmass Episode by Octavia Selim on Prezi Setting One significant literary element within the story was the allusions that Woody Allen made to other novels that included some of the most famous adulteresses in literature. And its ratio with corruption and organized crimes. The novels Persky offers him are all English translations, but Kugelmass doesn’t exactly protest—it’s hard to imagine him whining, “Doncha have any originals in here!? I tried this rule out on my Spanish teacher, but she didn’t like it; it didn’t cover the subjunctive field complexly and comprehensively enough.
Surely this is an appropriate punishment for the ethnocentric reader as condemned by the entire romantic tradition in translation theory, from Herder and the Schlegel brothers through Antoine Berman 1984 and Lawrence Venuti 1995. Best alternative should be selected must be the best when evaluating it on the decision criteria. Far too often people think they deserve better than they have and in the pursuit of higher contentment, they often screw themselves up more than ever. Firstly, the introduction is written. This will be doubly important for students reading in a foreign language, where, depending on their exposure to the culture in which the language is spoken natively, it may be difficult for them to make the text “come alive,” feel vibrant and real. The point I’m leading up to here is that technical translators almost certainly do know how to see spiders in remedial Spanish textbooks—or, to put that more generally, that technical translators know how to make their texts come alive in a variety of highly imaginative ways, by visualizing, narrativizing, personifying, kinestheticizing them.
Translated by Douglas Robinson as “On the Different Methods of Translation. After Kugelmass meets Madame Bovary, literature students in South Dakota start wondering about the bald Jew on page 100 of the novel. He seems to be unfulfilled and bored with his life as a whole. Persky tosses a paperback copy of Flaubert's novel into the cabinet with Kugelmass, taps it three times, and Kugelmass finds himself at the Bovary estate in Yonville in the French countryside. Rare and valuable resources grant much competitive advantages to the firm.
The problem, this would suggest, isn’t with the texts, but with their readers: if a remedial Spanish textbook is boring, maybe that is because its reader doesn’t know how to see spiders in it. ‘First a strange character named Kugelmass, and now she’s gone from the book. This attitude is reflected in literary translators’ negative conception of technical translation as well, of course. Kugelmass has been married twice. Activity In groups of 3, analyze the characters and select one to discuss with the class.
In the beginning of the story, he speaks of having an affair with his ideal woman referring to her as beautiful and passionate. Vonnegut explores… A particular episode of The Colbert Report comes to mind when this topic is brought up. He tells Emma he will return as soon as possible, calls for Persky, and is transported back to New York. He wants a French lover, so he chooses Emma Bovary. The matter-of-fact treatment of these and other absurdities in the story expands the comedy of The Kugelmass Episode. The story ends were it begins: a year passes before the Professor escapes.
The irony shows up two times. He is a trying-hard magician who would create every trick to convince as many customers as possible. Finally, her husband convinces her that he is, in fact, faithful to her. In this allegory of reading, to borrow Paul de Man’s term and method, Kugelmass represents the target-language reader—and we would have to say that he is very much the kind of American masscult target-language reader against whom Larry Venuti inveighs in his work, a reader who is not really very interested in the otherness or the foreignness of Flaubert’s novel, but rather focused utterly on easy pleasure on his own terms. I deeply dislike the writing style and I feel there's more that could have been done with it.
Their affair continues for some months. Horrifically as the Spanish textbook is portrayed, it is certainly not a dull or unimaginative place: it is populated by great hairy spidery monsters! A technical translation is a dull, lifeless copy of a dull, lifeless original. In similarly-themed stories, the recipient of the three wishes usually ends up where he begins or even worse, the latter being unfortunately the case for Kugelmass. While speaking to his analyst, Kugelmass expresses his desire to have an affair since he cannot afford another divorce. He sets all kinds of rushing records. It is doubtful that there are too many readers that would be rooting for this character after reading the first few paragraphs.
Professor Kugelmass is a middle-aged teacher at City College in New York City. And it seems likely to me that some of the horror that Allen humorously paints for us in the ending stems from Kugelmass’s and by extension our own realization that he is no longer in the familiar world of the translated literary classic, but in a how-to manual of sorts, a technical text that “lacks” the “imaginative” and even “human” element of Madame Bovary. He wants to commit suicide or run away. People use chainsaws; a manual for the owner of a chainsaw is not mere words devoid of human context, it is at least potentially, in the imaginative reader’s mind a rich human narrative full of infinitely methodical care and insistently suppressed anxieties about bodily harm. In addition, it also helps to avoid activities and actions that will be harmful for the company in future, including projects and strategies. The humanists’ mistake lies in assuming that there are texts in which those connections are missing. At present there is frequently a tension in such programs between literary translators, who feel that their work is the only interesting kind of translation, and technical and other nonliterary translators, who feel that their work is the only commercially viable kind of translation.
It is natural to humanize a machine like that. A Patuxet, Squanto or Tisquantum was kidnapped from his tribe in 1614; he was “brought hither”—to the “New World” old for him , not to his tribe, not set free, as Bradford seems to imply, since he had to jump ship to return to his native region—four years later, in 1618; upon returning to Plymouth, he found his entire tribe wiped out by a European-introduced disease that had swept through the area the year before. I have never owned a chainsaw, and translating the manual I began to feel that I never wanted to, either, because I had always thought that you just pick the thing up, prime it, give it some choke, pull the starter cord, and start cutting. Is it so difficult to imagine, then, that translators of mathematical texts make those texts too come alive—that they conjure up subliminal narratives or other richly human coherence structures as they translate, and that those imaginative structures not only keep them interested and engaged in their work prevent them from burning out but actually help them to translate faster and with greater accuracy? Short stories are not neat little assemblies of beginnings, middles and ends. He had been projected into an old textbook, Remedial Spanish, and was running for his life over a barren, rocky terrain as the word tener “to have” —a large and hairy irregular verb—raced after him on its spindly legs. The same wonderment overcomes a Stanford professor.
Therefore there must be some resources and capabilities in an organization that can facilitate the competitive advantage to company. The real world is far too drab for his liking and so he sets out to change his life but ultimately ends up turning his world upside down. Professor Kugelmass is a middle-aged teacher at City College in New York City. It was found that only fourteen to twenty percent of schizophrenias hold competitive employment. On the other hand Sam did not make good decisions, he did not know how to make his team work efficiently, he wasted a lot of time demanding his team to do task the way he wanted them to.