Danica Seleskovitch

Danica Seleskovitch (born December 6, 1921 in Paris , † April 17, 2001 in Cahors ) was a French conference interpreter , lecturer and translation scholar . She founded the interpretative translation theory.

Live and act

Danica Seleskovitch was born in Paris to a mother from the northern French bourgeoisie and a Serbian father, philosopher from a long line of Yugoslav intellectuals. At the age of four she lost her mother and now turned all her love to her father and maternal grandmother, with whom she grew up together with her older brother Zoran until the father brought them both to Berlin in 1931, where he - meanwhile remarried - taught at the university. She received all of her secondary education in Germany. After the outbreak of war in 1939, she moved with her family to Belgrade and stayed there until 1945. Then, with a grant from the French government, she returned to Paris to escape the communist Tito regime.

Danica Seleskovitch spoke three languages ​​from childhood: her mother tongue French (French was always spoken in the family), German (which she spoke like a German) and Serbo-Croatian (her father's language). As an adolescent, she acquired a good command of English, which she continued to perfect during an extended stay in the United States from 1950.

After returning to Paris in 1946, she studied German and English at the same time at the Sorbonne and successfully completed both subjects after three years with a license. Then she registered for the Agrégation (state selection process for teachers in secondary schools), but had to give up this course after a short time due to lack of financial resources; the French government scholarship ran out and her father in Yugoslavia was unable to support her financially. It was then that she learned of the existence of a conference interpreter training course at the HEC commercial college, which she completed in 1949/1950.

When her father died in the spring of 1950, she had just passed her conference interpreting diploma. She applied - with success - to a recruitment process by the US State Department in Paris for French-speaking interpreters to accompany the "productivity missions" organized under the Marshall Plan in the United States; this six-week program was designed to enable French people from different backgrounds (trade unionists, entrepreneurs, journalists, architects, etc.) to learn about the background to American productivity. In the spring of 1950, she left for Washington with her grandmother. The stay in the United States lasted until 1953.

After a short time in France, Danica Seleskovitch then took up a position in Luxembourg as a conference interpreter at the European Coal and Steel Community ( EGSC ) initiated by Jean Monnet and Paul-Henri Spaak , where interpreters with German were needed. She stayed in Luxembourg - again with her grandmother - until 1955, when she finally returned to Paris. She now worked as a freelance conference interpreter and joined the International Association of Conference Interpreters (AIIC) in 1956 ; From 1959 to 1963 she was the executive secretary of this organization.

At the very beginning of her career as a conference interpreter, Danica Seleskovitch began to think about how interpreting works and how meaning is transferred from one language to another. From the 1960s onwards, she also put her thoughts on paper. Her first book, L'interprète dans les conférences internationales ,problemèmes de langage et de communication, was published in 1968 (under the title The Conference Interpreter: Language and Communication, later also published in German translation). Langage, langues et mémoire, étude de la prize de note en interprétation consécutive followed in 1975, based on her doctoral thesis, completed in 1973, with a foreword by Jean Monnet . Together with Marianne Lederer , she developed the “théorie du sens”, which later became known as interpretative translation theory (Théorie interprétative de la traduction, or TIT for short). In contrast to the linguistic approach that has prevailed up to now in translation studies, this theory, based on the findings of psychology and cognitive science (which was still in its infancy at the time), assumes that the translation activity (and of course interpreting) consists of a statement , d. H. to understand their meaning and then to reproduce what has been understood in another language - taking into account the language level and stylistic effects of the original, but detached from the pure wording.

From the 1980s onwards, Danica Seleskovitch increasingly withdrew from active interpreting practice and, as head of the École supérieure d'interprètes et de traducteurs (ESIT), Université Paris III - Sorbonne Nouvelle, devoted herself primarily to teaching interpreting and research in translation studies. During her teaching and research career, she trained countless students and followers of her theory all over the world, through which her ideas are carried on today.

Danica Seleskovitch died at the age of 80 on April 17, 2001 in Cahors.

Danica Seleskovitch Prize

In 1991, colleagues, friends and former students of Danica Seleskovitch founded the Association pour le Prix Danica Seleskovitch (Association for the Danica Seleskovitch Prize), renamed Association Danica Seleskovitch in 2011. According to Article 2 of the Articles of Association, the purpose of the association is “to continue the intellectual work and activities of D. Seleskovitch, in particular by awarding the Danica Seleskovitch Prize for special merits in the conference interpreting profession or as an award for outstanding research work on the Field of translation studies ”. The award is usually given every two years on the recommendation of an eight-member jury.

List of winners since the Danica Seleskovitch Prize was founded:

year	Award winners
1992	Walter Keizer
1994	Philippe Sero-Guillaume
1996	Gérard Ilg
1999	Jungwha Sohee Choi
2002	Marianne Lederer
2005	Jennifer Mackintosh and Christopher Thiéry
2007	Renée Van Hoof-Haferkamp
2009	Miriam Shlesinger
2012	Ingrid Kurz
2014	Christiane Driesen
2016	Myriam de Beaulieu
2018	Luigi Luccarelli
2020	Barbara Moser-Mercer

Publications

• L'Interprète dans les conférences internationales. Problems of language and communication. Minard Lettres Modernes, Paris 1968, ISBN 2256908232 .
• Langage, langue et mémoire. Minard Lettres Modernes, Paris 1975, ISBN 225690752X .
• Interpreter pour traduire. Didier Érudition, Paris 1984, ISBN 2864600528 .
• Together with Marianne Lederer: Pédagogie raisonnée de l'interprétation. Didier Érudition, Paris 2002, ISBN 2-86460-640-2 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Anne-Marie Widlund-Fantini, Danica Seleskovitch. Interprète et témoin du XXe siècle , éditions de l'Age d'Homme, 2007
2. ^ Official website of the Danica Seleskovitch Association