Upcoming Literary Translation Events

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• 2025 Translation Slam!

  • When
    06/04/2025
  •  
    17:30 - 19:30
  • Location
    Folio, the Seattle Athenaeum, 93 Pike Street, #307
  • Spaces left
    36

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  NOTIS’ Northwest Literary Translators present:

  Translation Slam 2025!
  
  Date, time, and location: Wednesday, 6/4/2025, 17:30 – 19:30 @ Folio, the Seattle Athenaeum, 93 Pike Street, #307

  This year, four intrepid NOTIS translators battle over the best take on three challenging pages of a 2009 comic by the Russian artist Lena Uzhinova, "Kliuch' produkta." What does it all mean? That's what we're trying to figure out...

  
  Portraits by Anna Avetisyan; poster by B. Salinas

  Join us at Folio for everyone's favorite NWLitTrans event of the year as we talk language, visuals, and even document formatting at our first Translation Slam based on a comic. Audience participation is strongly encouraged and no knowledge of Russian is required. Refreshments will be provided by the contestants. 

  Featuring battling translations by:

  - Elizabeth Adams, a freelance translator of legal and business documents who loves a good book

  - José Alaniz, a UW professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and
  Literatures and the Department of Cinema and Media Studies (adjunct) who has published academic books on Russian/Eastern European comics and is also a novelist and comics artist

  - Veronica Muskheli, a nearly native speaker of English born in Leningrad, USSR, who specializes in consulting with translators from Russian and other languages of the post-Soviet world on all things Russian and Soviet.

  This year's slam will be umpired by Shelley Fairweather-Vega, co-founder of the Northwest Literary Translators and freelance translator from Russian and Uzbek. 

  
  

  Cost:  $5 for NOTIS and Folio members | $15 general

  Questions? Accommodations? Contact NOTIS 

  
  
  

  
  

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• Mia Spangenberg presents Backlight

  • When
    06/10/2025
  •  
    19:00
  • Location
    Third Place Books Ravenna, 6504 20th Ave., Seattle, WA

     
  Mia Spangenberg presents ‘BACKLIGHT’ by Pirkko Saisio

  
  WHEN:  June 10, 2025, at 7:30 p.m.
  WHERE:  Third Place Books Ravenna
  6504 20th Ave., Seattle, WA, 98115

  Northwest Literary Translator Mia Spangenberg returns from her new base in Finland to join fellow translator Elizabeth Denoma to celebrate the release of the third installment of Pirkko Saisio's autofiction trilogy, Backlight. This event will include a public signing and time for audience Q&A. 

  Tickets: This event is free to attend. Registration is required in advance.

  Check out this link for more event information and to order the books!

  
  About ‘Backlight’
  

  Pirkko Saisio, now a teenager, can't decide which she hates most: God, her father, or her growing breasts. Grandpa has moved into the room long promised to her, and Mother, overworked and distant, tries to keep the peace between her headstrong daughter and husband. When she's not escaping into her books, Pirkko has fun getting into trouble. That is until her Finnish teacher suggests she might have what it takes to be a real writer, but only if she is willing to work hard and make certain sacrifices.

  Years later, Pirkko spends the historic summer of 1968 working at a Swiss orphanage. The world is shifting around her, and to make matters even more complicated: she's homesick. At the orphanage no one understands her German, and away from home for the first time, she struggles to make sense of her suppressed queerness. In Backlight, the Finlandia Prize-winning author looks backward and inward, once again emerging, in Mia Spangenberg's sensitive translation, with an intimate portrait of a life lived in language.

  
  About Third Place Books
  
  Founded in 1998 in Lake Forest Park, Washington, Third Place Books is dedicated to the creation of a community around books and the ideas inside them. With locations in Lake Forest Park and Seattle's Ravenna and Seward Park neighborhoods, Third Place Books is proud to serve the entire Seattle metro area. Learn more about their event series at thirdplacebooks.com/events.

  
  

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• Book discussion: Language City by Ross Perlin

  • When
    06/24/2025
  •  
    14:00 - 15:30
  • Location
    Online via Zoom

  Join NOTIS member Wendy Call in a discussion of Ross Perlin's account of linguistic diversity in one city:

  Language City

  The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York

  by Ross Perlin

  Half of all 7,000-plus human languages may disappear over the next century and—because many have never been recorded—when they’re gone, it will be forever. Ross Perlin, a linguist and co-director of the non-profit Endangered Language Alliance, is racing against time to map little-known languages across the most linguistically diverse city in history: contemporary New York. In Language City, Perlin follows six remarkable yet ordinary speakers of endangered languages deep into their communities, from the streets of Brooklyn and Queens to villages on the other side of the world, to learn how they are maintaining and reviving their languages against overwhelming odds. He explores the languages themselves, from rare sounds to sentence-long words to bits of grammar that encode entirely different worldviews.
  

  More from the publisher

  No need to register here - just complete this form to receive the Zoom link.

  ***Please note that NOTIS is not organizing or sponsoring this event.***

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