Summary
Josie Long presents short documentaries and audio adventures about translation, interpretation and ideas that resonate in the gap between words - from the connection between one man and his translator, through Benjamin Clementine's interpretation of Satie, to the work of an ASL/English interpreter.
In Translation Featuring Miwako Ozawa and Hiromitsu Shinkawa A version of this story first appeared in the BBC World Service documentary Found in Translation made by Whistledown Productions https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03l3jxj Produced by Rose de Larrabeiti
Gymnopédie Featuring Benjamin Clementine Produced by Mooj Zadie
The Go-Between Featuring Christopher Desloges Music: Scorch by Nctrnm from the Free Music Archive Produced by Aliya Pabani
Series Producer: Eleanor McDowall.
A Falling Tree production for BBC Radio 4, first broadcast in March 2019.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:05.6 | Hello, I'm Jacey Long and welcome to the podcast version of shortcuts. |
| 0:09.8 | And today's episode is about translation. |
| 0:12.9 | And what's funny is I had a baby nine months ago, which I'm sure you may or may not know. |
| 0:19.0 | And reliving almost a year now of quite extreme sleep deprivation. |
| 0:23.2 | It's been the first time in my life where every time that I speak, I feel as if I am translating |
| 0:28.6 | into English from another language. But I really only speak English and pretty poor French. |
| 0:35.3 | But I really do only speak English English and I find myself conceptualising words |
| 0:40.6 | and just desperately searching for them like, oh like the bus, the long bus, the long bus, |
| 0:47.1 | that's the train, that would be the train, or just put her in the seat, the big, the seat that she goes in. That would be the bed. Your brain just cannot cope. You lose all your words. Anyway, that's not really what today's episode is that much about, but that's my life. |
| 1:10.4 | This is Shortcuts. |
| 1:11.6 | Brief encounters, true stories, radio adventures and found sound. |
| 1:19.6 | Today, between the lines. |
| 1:22.6 | Today's episode is about the nuances of translation and interpretation |
| 1:28.3 | and about the things that fall between the gaps when we try to express ourselves in a language that isn't our own. |
| 1:34.3 | But it's also about how we bridge them with one another. |
| 1:38.3 | When the 2011 tsunami hit Japan, Hiramitsu Shinkawa was 60 years old. |
| 1:47.0 | He made a last-minute decision to try and save some things from home and was swept away. |
| 1:53.0 | He was found two days later, floating on the tin roof of his house as a makeshift raft. |
| 1:59.0 | He was 10 miles out to sea and was discovered almost by chance. |
| 2:04.6 | A few months after he was rescued, he met Mewako Ozawa, |
| 2:08.6 | when she was working as a translator to an American journalist |
... |
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