2008 Conference Speakers:

Katherine Silver, Translator, Berkeley
Katherine Silver has translated the works of many Spanish and Latin American authors, including Antonio Skármeta, José Emilio Pacheco, Elena Poniatowska, Martín Adán, Pedro Lemebel, and Jorge Franco. Last year she received her second NEA fellowship for her translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness, for which she also received a PEN Translation Fund grant. Her collection of modern and contemporary Chilean fiction, Chile, A Traveler’s Literary Companion, was published by Whereabouts Press in 2003. She has translated plays, screenplays—some for major motion pictures—and a wide assortment of academic and other nonfiction books. She also works as an editor and publishing consultant/manager, and lives in Berkeley, California.

Kurt Beals, University of California, Berkeley
Kurt Beals is a graduate student in the German Literature and Culture program at the University of California, Berkeley. He studied Philosophy and German at Oberlin College, and spent one semester abroad at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. After graduating from college, he worked in New York as an editor at New Directions Publishing and a freelance translator before returning to school. He has translated authors including Ernst Jandl and Alexander Kluge for publications such as n+1, The New York Times, and Dimension2. He received his Master's Degree in fall 2007.

Melissa Vivian Cameron, MLCS, University of Alberta
Melissa Vivian Cameron: I am a second year graduate student in the Modern Languages and Cultural Studies Department. I am doing a Masters degree in Translations Studies, working from Spanish into French. My research interests include 19th century Ecuadorian literature and human rights literature.

Louise Ladouceur, Campus St. Jean, University of Alberta
Louise Ladouceur teaches at the University of Alberta’s Campus Saint-Jean and is the French Associate Editor of the journal Theatre Research in Canada. Her research is primarily concerned with Canadian theatre, theatre translation, and French theatre in Western Canada. Her monograph Making the Scene : la traduction du théâtre d’une langue officielle à l’autre au Canada published by Éditions Nota bene was awarded the 2005 Gabrielle Roy Prize and the 2006 Anne Saddlemeyer Book Prize. She has also translated seven plays and was previously a professional actor interested mainly in experimental and feminist theatre. Her presentation is taken from a larger SSHRC-funded study focusing on theatre translations done by Michel Tremblay.

Simon Lasair, Religious Studies, University of Alberta
Simon Lasair is in the process of completing his PhD in Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Manchester, UK. Focusing on the Aramaic Targums to the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, an ancient Jewish kind of translation literature, one of Mr. Lasair's research interests is the application of translation theory to this corpus of ancient documents. He has presented papers on Targum as a kind of translation literature at conferences in Washington DC, Ljubljana Slovenia, and at the University of Alberta. In addition to completing his PhD, Mr. Lasair is currently employed as a sessional instructor for the Religious Studies Program at the University of Alberta.

Lazer Lederhendler, Translator, Quebec
Lazer Lederhendler has been translating professionally for over 30 years. He was nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation in 1999 for The Sparrow Has Cut the Day in Half by Claire Dé, in 2002 for Larry Volt by Pierre Tourangeau, and in 2006 for Gaétan Soucy’s The Immaculate Conception, which was shortlisted for the 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize and won the 2007 Quebec Writers’ Federation award for translation. He has also published poetry, short fiction, and non-fiction in various Canadian and Québecois journals. He holds Arts degrees from the University of Ottawa and Concordia University (Montreal) and is currently an instructor in translation at the Université de Sherbrooke (Québec). He is presently on sabbatical leave from the Collège international des Marcellines in Westmount, Québec, where he has taught English for many years. Mr. Lederhendler lives in Montreal with his wife Pierrette and his son David.

Elisabeth Le, MLCS, University of Alberta
Elisabeth Le is Associate Professor at the University of Alberta. She works in Discourse Analysis especially on political, media and intercultural discourses.

Anne Malena, MLCS, University of Alberta
Anne Malena is Professor of Francophone and Translation Studies in the department of Modern Languages & Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta. She is interested in the area of Cultural Translation and is currently documenting the history of translation in Louisiana. She has translated into French two novels by Kristjana Gunnars (The Prowler and Zero Hour) short stories by Claudine Potvin into English and occasionally ventures into poetry.

Janice Mathie-Heck, Calgary
Janice Mathie-Heck was born in Jasper, Alberta, Canada, in 1950, and now resides in Calgary. She is a teacher of English as a Second Language to adult immigrants, and is a poet, translator, editor, and literary critic. Her articles and poems have appeared in The Gauntlet, Freefall, Le Chinook, filling Station, Jeta e re, Illyria, Phoenix, Tempulli, and on the Frontenac House website. Two of her forthcoming articles will appear in Transcript and Translation Review. She collaborates with Robert Elsie in introducing, translating, and editing many works of Albanian history and literature. Refer to: website 1 and website 2.

Teresa Murja, Theatre, University of Reading


He Ning, English, Nanjing University
He Ning is an associate professor at English Department, School of Foreign Studies, Nanjing University. His research interests are British and American literature. He has published several articles including “Thomas Hardy and China” and “The Modernity of W. B. Yeats”. Currently he is serving as the vice chair at English Department.

Lynn Penrod, MLCS, University of Alberta


Iryna Tsobrova, Comparative Literature, University of Alberta
My field is twentieth century women's poetry. I am working on my Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta. My thesis focuses on the vision of history in the poetry of Margaret Atwood, Anna Akhmatova, and Lina Kostenko. I have articles published on American science fiction, humour in Charles Dickens's novels, and Anna Akhmatova’s poetry. I am teaching Canadian Literature at the University of Alberta.

Yao Yuan, English, Nanjing University
Yao Yuan is a teacher of English at the English Department, Nanjing University, China.She has translated books by authors including Michael Ondaatje, Yann Martel, and Joseph Conrad.