In 2016, we sought entries on the theme of One Planet, One Humanity: Postcards from New Zealand to the World. New Zealand secondary school students were invited to submit an image and two versions of a caption to that image. The two captions had to be in different languages, so that one was a translation of the other. These three things made up a "postcard". We asked students to use this postcard as a message to the world around them and to tell us something that mattered to them.
The submission deadline was 5 November. Submissions are now closed.
You can read more about the aims of Moving Words below.
The submission deadline was 5 November. Submissions are now closed.
You can read more about the aims of Moving Words below.
When we think. When we speak. When we write. When we sign. Even when we remain silent.
Consciously or unconsciously, we translate all the time, every day.
Consciously or unconsciously, we translate all the time, every day.
From 2014 to the present, the Moving Words project has aimed to explore and celebrate the act of translation. Translation – the transfer of meaning in all its forms: from one language to another or from one sign system to another – is arguably the most complex, fascinating and rewarding act of communication. To understand and perform this process means to be able to understand and share our similarities and our differences, negotiating ideas, values, emotions, and behaviours beyond our culture-specific individuality and intentions.
Janet Frame ONZ CBE (1924-2004) – one of New Zealand’s most distinguished writers – has gifted us an insightful and moving appreciation of literary translation:
“While I explored the settlement of tragedy, as a reader I found in foreign territory among Russian, French, Norse, Italian languages, an English boarding house where the translators lived. How faithfully they worked, going out every day, foraging alone, directed by scholarship and individual taste, bringing home (however cramped in English briefcases) the masterpieces of foreign literature! When other writers may have their reward by feasting with the Gods, the translators, who have given so much, will be sitting down as usual to their dull boarding house tea watched over by the boarding house rules pasted on the four walls of their dining room. English readers however familiar with Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Dante. Kafka and others, will know that to each of the translators the writing on the wall is a personal illuminative text into which the rules have been absorbed as if, written at first with invisible ink, they had been held before the flame, had been made visible, then had returned beneath the surface to light the new text of imagination: out of sight, like glowworms. From these translators with their briefcases and boarding house tea I drew inspiration as exploring reader. I ‘breathed in’ the works they brought home to the English language. How does one survive on such shadow oxygen unless it is that survival depends on the basic forma of the shadow and the reality. and not upon the surroundings from which they are drawn? The oxygen may lack its original distinctive flavour but if one is desperate to go on living one cannot wait to take part in the full tragedy of ‘smelling the air’—or of tasting it: it is enough that it is pure, perfect O.”
(In Memory and a Pocketful of Words, Times Literary Supplement, 1964)
The New Zealand Centre for Literary Translation and Wai-te-ata Press at Victoria University of Wellington, in partnership with the New Zealand Society of Translators and Interpreters, invite submissions to this year's Moving Words competition. For this year's competition, entrants must translate between their own images and their own words.
Reflecting New Zealand’s multi-ethnic and multilingual society, Moving Words aims to celebrate literature, languages, and cultures in secondary schools and to inspire and reward excellence in literary translation by secondary level students.
We gratefully acknowledge the practical support and advice of the following:
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