In a seminar on multilingualism, we discussed Nancy Huston’s Losing North: Musings on Land, Tongue, and Self (Nord Perdu). In this collection of essays, Huston reflects on her identity as a Canadian transplant living in France and on her changing relationship to her mother tongue, English, and to her acquired language, French. While […]

Just a quick note to announce an online report about minority languages in Europe, produced by FranceInter, passed along to me by David Rafoni. 46 million Europeans speak a language that is considered “regional” or “minority.” These languages are protected by the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, but in France […]

This past July, I had the privilege of participating in an NEH Summer Institute on the Centrality of Translation to the Humanities at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. For three weeks, we discussed issues of translation with numerous experts in the the field, including renowned translator Gregory Rabassa. (The full program and reading list are available on the […]

While my colleagues ventured to Latin America and Europe over the summer, I headed to the middle of this country to spend three weeks at the University of Illinois participating in a National Endowment for the Humanities summer program on the centrality of translation. Over the course of the institute, we examined the question of […]