"Meaning & musicality: striking a balance in poetry translation"

Presented at the 5th Annual Interdisciplinary Conference of the Graduate Students Association of the University of Ottawa, February 2002

In adopting the genre of metred, rhyming poetry (as opposed to 'free verse'), the poet is making a conscious decision to let her expression, her choice of words, be governed not by semantic considerations alone but also by the sounds, syllables and stress-patterns they happen to contain.  This might be termed the 'musical' (or 'artistic') dimension of the poem, which in this particular genre is as integral to the poem as its semantic meaning.
  In translating such poetry between languages there is an inevitable trade-off between the two criteria, and the balance in many cases seems to be weighted in favour of meaning and against musicality.  But if the poetic translator is to be faithful to the whole range of dimensions of the original, he must apply the same principles governing word-selection to the translation as the poet applied to the original work and choose his words with as much respect to their sounds, syllabic content and relation to other words in the poem as to their semantic signification; otherwise his translation will be only partial and unfaithful to the original genre.
  For a display of the graphics (originally shown on overhead during the conference presentation), please go to: http://kanadacha.ca/academic/feb02.html

An Analysis of the Audio-Lingual Approach As Applied to Methods of Teaching Russian.--

Language and culture: a communication continuum

Paper presented at the autumn 1973 conference of the Ontario Modern Language Teachers' Associaion, University of Waterloo

Language and culture, rather than being two separate units which happen to co-incide in time and place in communicative acts, may be considered a continuum of means of communication, the middle part of which comprises a broad band where linguistic and cultural (contextual) elements not only interact but often fuse together in the process of communicating concepts among human beings.