Tom Cheesman

Tom Cheesman ( b. 1961 in Liverpool ) is an English senior lecturer, literary critic and literary translator.

Life

Cheesman grew up in Durham. Today he lives after he temporarily lived in Germany and France, in Swansea and is Professor of German at the university there.

The doctor of philology has numerous contributions ( books such as journals ) published in particular in the field of intercultural literature and also published books himself. Articles appear partly in German language. He is also the initiator of the project Visualising Version Variation: Case Study On Translations Of Shakespeare's Othello that investigated by means of advanced technology, how and why different translations of the same original text often differ significantly from each other. In the initial stage, the project team concentrated its investigations on works of William Shakespeare.

Why Shakespeare

Many literary works are always recompiled and in many different languages. The translations often have for broadly identical to original strong differences. In order to investigate how and why these differences come about, the staff of the research team to focus on the works of William Shakespeare. These are especially suitable for research of this kind, as some of them were translated in up to 100 languages ​​and there are more than 80 different Shakespeare translations only in German language.

Team and working methods

In the initial stage of the project, the studies focus on a small section of Shakespeare's play Othello. On a specially created website The project team professionals, students, translators and all others who wish to contribute demand to on to send them translations of the following two lines of verse, have asked the translator has always been ahead of special linguistic and interpretive challenges:

If virtue no delighted beauty lack,       Your son -in-law is far more fair than black. Dr. Tom Cheesman said: " If you are an Othello translation in your bookshelf, or discover in the town library, then please send us these two lines together with a literal translation into English. We have 150 versions in 22 languages ​​, with which we work. We hope to gather more than 300 versions in 100 languages. With the help of this ' crowd-sourcing ', we can create a global snapshot of when, where and how Othello recompiled. Then it is possible for us to create animated visualizations, so that people can browse online in different versions. "

Examples of the versions currently commercially available:

If it must be recognized as a beautiful virtue, /       Shall ye not ugly your son in law call.       If virtue is the most brilliant beauty,       so your daughter man is more white than black.       If you do not want to deny beauty of virtue, /       Is your son not dark, but gold!       Gäbs light skin for gallantry as the price /       Then your son would rather black pure white.       As long as male virtue is more important than blemishes, you can say,       Her son is more noble than black. The crowd-sourcing should also help to form an online community of students and professionals who are interested in the topic of translation variants. With the advancement of the project there will be more and more opportunities to cooperate.

To implement the project technically and to analyze the differences between Shakespeare translations, the research team at the University of Swansea developed tools for visualizing data. Digital visualization to reveal hidden patterns in text, make new additions to a text, and may in turn be veritable works of art. In the Internet there are examples like Ben Fry's work to Darwin's Origin of the Species ( Origin of Species ). As these technologies have not been used until now for the analysis of translation variants, Visual Ising version Variation: Case Study On Translations Of Shakespeare's Othello a completely new and innovative way of research in this area since.

The versatility of this case study calls for a team of merits fields. Experts from the fields of Modern Languages ​​, Translation Studies, media, politics and cultural studies and computer science at the University of Swansea (Wales ) working on the project.

Team: The team leader Dr. Tom Cheesman and his deputy Dr. David M. Berry, Professor Andy Rothwell and Dr. Robert S. Laramee, the research assistants Alison Ehrmann and Zhao Geng; in collaboration with Stephan Thiel (Berlin).

Translations of the two verses are so far located in the following languages ​​on the website of the project

• Albanian
• Catalan
• Various English languages
• Finnish
• Friesian
• German
• Greek
• Hungarian
• Italian
• Kiswahili
• Macedonian
• Norwegian
• Persian
• Plautdietsch
• Polish
• Russian
• Spanish
• Ukrainian

Bibliography

• Novels of Turkish German Settlement: Cosmopolite Fictions (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2007), ISBN 978-1-57113-374-8, pp. x 232.
• (edited by Grahame Davies and Sylvie Hoffmann), Gwyl y Blaidd. Ysgreifennu Ffoaduriaid yng * Nghymru / The Festival of the Wolf. Refugees Writing in Wales 4 ( Swansea: Hafan Books / Cardigan: Parthian Books, 2006 ), ISBN 1-905762-20-8, vi 210 pp.
• (edited with Eric Ngalle Charles and Sylvie Hoffmann), Soft Touch: Refugees Writing in Wales 3 ( Swansea: Hafan Books, 2005 ), ISBN 0-9545147-3-4, 128 pp.
• (edited with Eric Ngalle Charles and Sylvie Hoffmann), Nobody's Perfect: Refugees Writing in Wales 2 ( Swansea: Hafan Books, 2004 ), ISBN 0-9545147-1-8, 96 pp.
• (edited with Eric Ngalle Charles and Sylvie Hoffmann), Between a Mountain and a Sea: Refugees * Writing in Wales ( Swansea: Hafan Books, 2003 ), ISBN 0-9545147 -0-X, 96 pp.
• (edited with Karin E. Yesilada ), Zafer Senocak, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003, ISBN 0-7083-1811-8 / ISBN 0-7083-1810- X, xi 187 pp.
• (edited with Sigrid Rieuwerts ), Ballads into Books: The Legacies of Francis James Child, Berne: Peter Lang, 1997, ISBN 3-906757-34- X, 283 pp, . 2nd rev. edn 1999, ISBN 3-906761-67-3.
• ( ed. ) Recent Ballad Research: The Language of Ballads and Other Topics. Proceedings of the 19th SIEF Ballad Commission Conference ( Freiburg, 1989), 2 vols, London: Folklore Society (Library Pamphlet 4/5), 1990, ISBN 1-871903-10-6 / ISBN 1-871903-15-7.