Volume 12, No. 1 
January 2008

 
 



 
 

Front Page

 
 
 
Select one of the previous 42 issues.

 

Index 1997-2008

 
TJ Interactive: Translation Journal Blog

 
  Translator Profiles
Doing a Hard Job Right
by Kirk Anderson

 
  The Profession
The Bottom Line
by Fire Ant & Worker Bee
 
Do We Really Need Translation Standards After All? A Comparison of US and European Standards for Translation Services
by Gérard de Angéli
 
Ethical Implications of Translation Technologies
by Érika Nogueira de Andrade Stupiello

 
  Translators Around the World
American Translators Association Surpasses 10,000 Members
by Joshua Rosenblum

 
  In Memoriam
In Memoriam: Rosa Codina
by Verónica Albin
 
In Memoriam: Dr. William Macfarlane Park
by Andrew Park and Ann Sherwin
 
In Memoriam: William J. Grimes
by Isabel Leonard
 
In Memoriam: Leslie Willson


 
  TJ Cartoon
Great Moments in Languages — The Punctuation War
by Ted Crump

 
  Translation Theory
Good Translation: Art, Craft, or Science?
by Mahmoud Ordudary
 
¿Es la traducción una ciencia o una tecnología?
Macarena Molina Gutiérrez

 
  Translation Nuts and Bolts
Übersetzung elliptischer Strukturen aus dem Französischen und Portugiesischen
Katrin Herget, Holger Proschwitz

 
  Translation of Advertising
New Zealand in Translation: Presenting a Country's Image in a Government Website
by Zhao Ning

 
  Arts and Entertainment
The Contact Between Cultures and the Role of Translation and the Mass Media
by Juan José Martínez-Sierra, Ph.D.

 
  Book Review
Double the Pleasure: The Complete Fables of Jean de La Fontaine Translated by Norman Shapiro
by Robert Paquin, Ph.D.
 
Review of "The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary" by Robert Alter
by Alexandra Glynn

 
  Chinese
An Integrated Approach to the Translation of Special Terms with Special Reference to Chinese term lüse shipin (green food)
by Zhu Yubin

 
  Cultural Aspects of Translation
Hindrances in Arabic-English Intercultural Translation
by Adel Salem Bahameed, Ph.D.
 
Unique Korean Cultural Concepts in Interpersonal Relations
by D. Bannon

 
  Literary Translation
Chinese Translation of Literary Black Dialect and Translation Strategy Reconsidered: The Case of Alice Walker's The Color Purple
by Yi-ping Wu and Yu-ching Chang
 
A Study of Persian Translations of Narrative Style: A case study of Virginia Woolf's The Waves
by Somaye Delzendehrooy

 
  Translators' Tools
Technology and the Fine Arts
by Jost Zetzsche
 
Generating a Corpus-Based Metalanguage: The Igbo Language Example
by Enoch Ajunwa
 
Translators’ Emporium

 
  Caught in the Web
Web Surfing for Fun and Profit
by Cathy Flick, Ph.D.
 
Translators’ On-Line Resources
by Gabe Bokor
 
Translators’ Best Websites
by Gabe Bokor

 
Translators' Events

 
Call for Papers and Editorial Policies
  Translation Journal



 

In Memoriam: Leslie Willson

1923 - 2007

 



mos Leslie Willson, Jr. was born on June 14, 1923, in Texhoma, Oklahoma (where the hospital was, though his family lived in the Texas part of town at the time). He died on December 28, 2007, in Austin, Texas.

With his parents, Amos Leslie Willson and Richie Hobgood Willson, and sister, Patricia Mae Willson, Leslie moved from town to town within the Texas panhandle during the Great Depression before settling in Amarillo, where he graduated from Amarillo High School. He was a voracious reader and, contemplating a writing career, entered the University of Texas at Austin to pursue a degree in journalism. World War II interrupted his education, and he joined the Army, where he discovered he had a gift for learning German and quickly became fluent.

Toward the end of his three-year military service, Leslie was assigned along with other German-speaking soldiers to a top secret operation at Fort Hunt, Virginia, known only by its mailing address "P.O. Box 1142"—an operation only recently declassified. He and the other men of P.O. Box 1142 lived with and interrogated high-level prisoners of war with knowledge of Germany's then-superior submarine and rocket technology, gleaning information that changed the course of the war. After being ordered never to talk about their mission, the Brotherhood of P.O. Box 1142 is finally able to reminisce, and Leslie was interviewed about those days just days before his death.

After the war, Leslie returned to the University of Texas but switched majors to Germanic Languages. While attending graduate school at UT, he met Margaret Jeanne Redrow, of Cincinnati, Ohio, a fellow graduate student in German. Jeanne and Leslie were married in 1950 in Cincinnati, then moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where Leslie had been admitted to the graduate school. Hermann Weigand, a Sterling Professor of Germanic Languages at Yale, advised Leslie in his acquisition of a PhD; his dissertation, A Mythical Image: The Ideal of India in German Romanticism, was later published by Duke University Press.

While in New Haven, Jeanne and Leslie had a son, Brian in 1951, and a daughter, Juliet in 1953. After being awarded his PhD, Leslie taught briefly at Wesleyan College in Connecticut and Northwestern University in Illinois, before returning to Austin to accept a teaching position at Texas, where another son, Kevin, was born in 1959.

Leslie then taught at Duke University and Penn State University before settling again in Austin as a full professor in 1966, where his family moved into the house he still occupied just before his death. In the intervening years he became a highly respected educator and translator of contemporary German literature, befriending many top German writers along the way, including Günter Grass. He served for eight years as chairman of the German Department at UT and for 20 years published a groundbreaking German literary magazine Dimension. He was recognized for his scholarly work with awards from the Goethe Institute and the German government. He retired as a professor emeritus in 1992.

For many years, Leslie served as the editor of the American Translators Association's newsletter for literary translation Source and, between 1991 and 1993 as President of the Association.

In retirement, Leslie continued to be a voracious reader and corresponded actively with friends all over the globe. Preceded in death by his wife, Jeanne, on May 11, 2006, Leslie died with their beloved German shepherd-husky mix, Thekla von Wallenstein, one of the many dogs they owned during their years together, curled up at the foot of his bed.

Leslie is survived by his three children, Brian, Juliet, and Kevin, six grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.