Dictionary Films Managing Director Chris Rossiter Rides Into the ... - Little Black Book - LBBonline - Dictionary

The Cutters Studios family, which includes hundreds of talents across partner companies Cutters, Dictionary Films, Flavor, and Another Country, are about to say goodbye to yet another legend: Longstanding Dictionary Films Managing Director Chris Rossiter is set to retire at month’s end.

A creative-industry titan who spent 25 years with Leo Burnett Chicago prior to joining Dictionary a decade ago, Rossiter’s internal announcement was filled with gratitude and high praise for his outstanding colleagues. Before he disappears into the sunset, the company’s leadership engaged him in this historic exit interview.

Q> After 25 years with Leo Burnett, from the position of EVP/Executive Director of Production, you joined Dictionary Films. What attracted you?

Chris>  I started at Burnett at 22 as an officially titled 'junior producer.' A few of us quickly realised that meant 'almost professional,' and after some lobbying, our titles became associate producer. Less than 20 years later, I was running the department, having merged what had been four production departments across two agencies (Arc WW and LBC) into one. Seeing that everything we produced was either motion-based or still-based, and that implementation and delivery were the only real differences, combining the talents introduced a lot of efficiencies, helping us work faster, better manage tight schedules and budgets, and grow talent into new delivery models.

When it became time for a new challenge, I felt done with the agency side of production. Going a bit further on this, my passion was for helping bring creative ideas to life, and I had specific ideas about streamlining production and post to the benefit of everyone involved. That’s when Tim McGuire and Craig Duncan asked me to come aboard. In a nutshell, the vision they shared was helping Dictionary Films grow and contribute more toward Cutters Studios’ emergence as a collective powerhouse. I’d already known Tim and Chris Claeys for many years, and though Craig and I were pretty new to each other, we became close really fast.

From the very beginning, everything about what they wanted felt like what I wanted... and that’s still true today.

Q> After joining Dictionary, how long did it take for you to feel you’d made the right decision?

Chris>  Two minutes. Simply the welcoming I got from people across the companies and the different offices.

Q> What Dictionary project is your single most favourite of all time, and why does it stand out?

​Chris>  Every project I did with Chris Hafner. I miss him every day.

Q> Is there a specific project you’d like to discuss in a bit of detail?

Chris> We were shooting a project for a liquor brand, a product shoot in a loft with some holiday decorations and extras, etc. Toward the end of our last shoot day, we heard a huge crash outside. A few of us ran to the scene and saw that an SUV had crashed and was flipped over on its side. As I helped one of the passengers to the curb, we were told there was a woman in the vehicle and she couldn’t get out. The hood was smoking and I watched as one of our crew vaulted in one leap up onto the top of the heap. He reached in and with one hand and in one move, pulled the driver out and got her to safety, unhurt. I’ve truly never seen someone move so fast and with such disregard for himself. Afterwards, he just went back to work on set. I marvel at it to this day. Amazing!

Q> Is there one or more career achievement that you will forever hold dear?

Chris> I’d like to think I had a hand in helping some people grow into and learn to grow within this business. I had great, great mentors at every step, and I hope I passed on some goodness to others.

Q> When you look over the Cutters Studios constellation today, what are you most proud of?

Chris> I think we really were a leader in truly combining top-drawer production with an absolute A-list of post-production services and talents as one cohesive company. A lot promised this feat prior to us, but they were really just creating strategic partnerships. A lot more actually provide it as one company now, but we pioneered this process from a multi-office, shared-service standpoint.

Q> What is something that most people don’t know about you or Dictionary?

Chris>  How much it hurts when they don’t choose one of our directors for their projects. There’s immense pain every time.

Q> What advice would you pass along to the next generation?

Chris>  The first was given to me, right from the start: Don’t be afraid to ask questions; nobody knows it all and pretending you know what you don’t is really dangerous.

The second is something I learned managing projects and people along the way: Don’t ask the same question over and over. Doing so might be a clue that either you don’t want to get better or perhaps aren’t a good fit for your job. In either case, you should find something else to do.

Last of all, and most importantly, be active in growing your experiences and the people you meet and work with. It’ll help your work, your soul, and the world.

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Jennifer Croft Knows a Good Translation When She Reads One - The New York Times - Translation

What books are on your night stand?

“Landscapes,” by Christine Lai, “Glory,” by NoViolet Bulawayo, “La Migración,” by Pablo Maurette, “Time Shelter,” by Georgi Gospodinov and Angela Rodel, Sara Baume’s “Seven Steeples,” a little book about Paul Gauguin’s “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?,” by George T.M. Shackelford, and “Goodnight Moon” — the board book edition — by Margaret Wise Brown.

What’s the last great book you read?

I just finished reading “Chain-Gang All-Stars,” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, which is a masterpiece. He is brilliant and sensitive, and he manages to write about things that matter (to him and to us) while drawing on a panoply of influences, from hip-hop to anime to 19th-century Russian literature, which enables him to deeply engage the widest possible audience, an ability I very much admire.

Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).

Translated novella, hammock, oaks.

Which translators working today do you admire most? And which writers in other realms — novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets?

There are so many great translators working into English right now — we’re so lucky — that I won’t even be able to scratch the surface, but here are three who are also writing fiction, plays and nonfiction, respectively: Anton Hur (who translates from Korean), Jeremy Tiang (who translates from Chinese) and Frank Wynne (who translates from French and Spanish).

As for writers in other realms, I adore Angie Cruz, who is quietly reinvigorating the English language by infusing it with Spanish, and who is so deft at voice that her characters feel like family by the end of every book. Jamel Brinkley’s prose is so graceful and entrancing. Idra Novey’s political poetic novels pack such a fantastic punch. Maaza Mengiste is a genius. I hope Paul Yoon wins the Nobel Prize, unless there is a better prize by the time he’s old enough to win the Nobel Prize, in which case I hope he wins that. I’ll be happy to read anything by Virginie Despentes, who writes in French, László Krasznahorkai, who writes in Hungarian, and Yoko Tawada, who writes in German and Japanese. Novels originally published outside of the United States are often less heavily edited, and I like that freshness, that uniqueness and sometimes that slight chaos.

For children, Yuki Ainoya writes and illustrates oneiric little masterpieces translated from Japanese by Michael Blaskowsky.

Which writers in other languages do you wish had a wider audience in English?

I recently nominated the Senegalese writer and activist Boubacar Boris Diop, who writes in French and Wolof, for the Neustadt Prize, which he won, but I think he still hasn’t reached the readership he deserves. I especially love “Doomi Golo: The Hidden Notebooks,” translated by Vera Wülfing-Leckie and El Hadji Moustapha Diop.

What makes for a good translation? Can you (or anyone) recognize a good translation from a language you don’t read?

In general, there has to be chemistry between form and content for a book to be good. What translators do is create new forms for the same content in order to bring readers great books they wouldn’t otherwise have access to. If a translated book reads as great — if the chemistry is there, which does not necessarily mean the book sounds like it was originally written in English — then the translation is great. You don’t need prior knowledge of, say, Iceland or Icelandic in order to appreciate Victoria Cribb’s translation of Sjón’s “Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was.”

Your novel “The Extinction of Irena Rey” (coming next year) is about a group of translators contending with the disappearance of the author they translate and trying to figure out who they are without her. Should we surmise that you see translators as parasites on a host organism?

The central metaphor in “The Extinction” is amadou, a once widespread product of the fungus Fomes fomentarius, which starts its life as a parasite but becomes, after killing its host tree, a decomposer. As such, it enriches the soil and ensures the ongoing vitality of the forest.

Translators overwrite originals, making texts in other languages visible and invisible at once. Without translators, literary traditions and even languages might rot in isolation. With translators, the literary ecosystem keeps up the diversity it needs in order to flourish.

Fomes fomentarius embodies the clash between alarming and awe-inspiring that I think makes translation unique among literary forms. Amadou, meanwhile — the treated flesh of that fungus — was how humans started fires before the invention of safe and reliable matches. (One common name for Fomes fomentarius is tinder polypore.) That technology went extinct, but I don’t think our relationship with Fomes fomentarius is over. It could replace some forms of plastic. It can stand in for leather now.

Do you count any books as guilty pleasures?

Listening to audiobooks doesn’t make me feel guilty, but it does give me a lot of pleasure, and it does seem to make some people feel guilty. I love Aoife McMahon’s narration of Sally Rooney’s “Normal People” and “Conversations With Friends.” I love getting a feel for the Irish rhythms of Rooney’s prose, and I find listening to those books, likely as much thanks to McMahon’s voice as Rooney’s, very soothing. When stressed, I frequently also return to Merlin Sheldrake narrating his own gorgeous book about fungi and connectedness, “Entangled Life.” And I will listen to literally anything narrated by Edoardo Ballerini.

Has a book ever brought you closer to another person, or come between you?

I fell in love with my husband, Boris Dralyuk, as he was translating Mikhail Zoshchenko’s “Sentimental Tales” from Russian. He wooed me by recounting the tales every evening on my doorstep as he picked me up for dinner, carefully, paragraph by paragraph.

How do you organize your books?

I like to let them organize themselves.

You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?

Bolesław Leśmian, Bruno Schulz and Gershom Scholem. I’d record their conversation, publish the transcription, and convince Edoardo Ballerini to narrate the audiobook. At no point in this scenario would I cook.

What do you plan to read next?

“Reproduction," the new novel by Louisa Hall.

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TWTS: Dictionaries are defined by their editors - Michigan Radio - Dictionary

What’s the name of the book you use to look up words you don’t know?

For many of us, the answer to this question is simply “the dictionary." However, that suggests it doesn’t really matter which dictionary we use to look up a word, and that’s just not true.

Different dictionaries have different approaches, which is why Professor Anne Curzan consults multiple dictionaries when researching your questions.

Curzan was recently at the biennial meeting of the Dictionary Society of North America. The keynote speaker at the conference was David Skinner, author of The Story of Ain’t: America, Its Language, and the Most Controversial Dictionary Ever Published.

The dictionary in question is the 1961 publication of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary. The dictionary had a new editor, Philip Gove, who took a more descriptive approach to the language. Gove took out a lot of usage labels that might have been seen as making judgements about particular words.

When this dictionary was published, it was widely condemned. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and Life Magazine are just a few of the publications that went after this dictionary with phrases like “radically permissive” and “downright irresponsible.” Critics were especially focused on “ain’t” and whether the correct usage labels were used.

The American Heritage Dictionary was actually created in direct response to the controversy over Webster’s Third. Part of that response included a usage panel that Professor Curzan served on. For more on that, listen to the audio above.

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TWTS: Dictionaries are defined by their editors - Michigan Radio - Dictionary

What’s the name of the book you use to look up words you don’t know?

For many of us, the answer to this question is simply “the dictionary." However, that suggests it doesn’t really matter which dictionary we use to look up a word, and that’s just not true.

Different dictionaries have different approaches, which is why Professor Anne Curzan consults multiple dictionaries when researching your questions.

Curzan was recently at the biennial meeting of the Dictionary Society of North America. The keynote speaker at the conference was David Skinner, author of The Story of Ain’t: America, Its Language, and the Most Controversial Dictionary Ever Published.

The dictionary in question is the 1961 publication of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary. The dictionary had a new editor, Philip Gove, who took a more descriptive approach to the language. Gove took out a lot of usage labels that might have been seen as making judgements about particular words.

When this dictionary was published, it was widely condemned. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and Life Magazine are just a few of the publications that went after this dictionary with phrases like “radically permissive” and “downright irresponsible.” Critics were especially focused on “ain’t” and whether the correct usage labels were used.

The American Heritage Dictionary was actually created in direct response to the controversy over Webster’s Third. Part of that response included a usage panel that Professor Curzan served on. For more on that, listen to the audio above.

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Italy's Creative Words Acquires Local Boutique Translation Agency Opitrad - Slator - Translation

Sometimes a bold approach — and patience — pays off. This was the case for boutique Italian language service provider (LSP) Opitrad, whose Owner and MD, Annalisa Occhipinti, met and pitched a would-be acquirer of her business at an Italian language association event back in 2021.

Some two years later, Creative Words announced the acquisition of Opitrad. Creative Words’ CEO and Founder, Diego Cresceri, told Slator that he was “intrigued by her proposal from our very first talk.”

Such was the draw that no external consultants were engaged by either company and the two then proceeded to “hammer out the details of the deal,” Cresceri said.

Although the terms of the transaction, which closed on June 22, 2023, are undisclosed, Cresceri revealed that the purchase price was based on Opitrad’s average revenue for the previous three financial years and took into account “the growth patch Opitrad was in.”

Creative Words generated EUR 2.2m (USD 2.4m) in 2022 revenues. Combined with Opitrad, which had revenues of ca. EUR 0.4m in 2022, the company is aiming to achieve a topline of EUR 2.9m (USD 3.2m) in 2023. The joint organization employs 24 full-time employees (FTEs). 

Slator 2022 Language Industry M&A and Funding Report

44-pages on 2022 translation and localization industry acquisitions and translation startup investments, with valuations, deal rationale.

Discussing the rationale behind the deal, Cresceri said he sees a number of upsides, such as Opitrad’s customer base in Europe and among localization buyers, which are key growth areas for the company.

Moreover, in addition to add-on services, such as interpreting, the Opitrad acquisition will allow Creative Words to scale further as Occhipinti is staying on with the company in a business development capacity.

Lastly, he said, “we are looking into leveraging our tech stack and highly-automated processes for Opitrad’s clients […], which would improve their experience and help us differentiate ourselves from competitors.” Currently, Opitrad mainly uses Trados Studio, while Creative Words uses a number of third-party tools — of which Phrase is used most extensively.

For him, the synergies do not stop there, with synergies expected to benefit HR, internal processes, and customer service. 

As for retaining Opitrad’s brand and website, Cresceri said no decision has been made yet. Creative Words plans to revisit the matter after analyzing the SEO performance of both company’s websites. 

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A small dictionary of Cha Bubo a vernacular from Butembo in the Democratic Republic of Congo - Global Voices - Dictionary

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A small dictionary of ‘Cha Bubo,’ a vernacular from Butembo in the Democratic Republic of Congo  Global Voices

Essay: Constance Garnetts love of Russian literature and radical politics - The New York Times - Translation

The radical politics of Russian literature’s most famous English translator, Constance Garnett.

“Have you ever killed anybody?” a journalist asked the visitor from Russia. The reply, The New York Times reported the next day, was a no as emphatic as you would expect from someone yet to be caught for killing the head of the Russian secret police. The man went by the name Stepniak, a revolutionary nom de guerre — Russian for “man of the steppe.”

Stepniak, whose real name was Sergei Kravchinsky, was in New York in December 1890 preparing to lecture on nihilism at the Metropolitan Opera. Proceeds from the event were to benefit the Society to Befriend Working Girls, a charity, but this was primarily a hearts-and-minds trip, Stepniak told The Times: “We realize that foreign opinion of our country has a tremendous influence. In the sentiments of other people than our own we have found a lever which we may use to great advantage in our work.”

A year and a half later, Stepniak would meet his mightiest lever yet in the form of a 30-year-old English woman and new mother, who, desperate to pass the time while pregnant, had taken up Russian. Her name was Constance Garnett, and she is now known as the indefatigable translator of over 70 volumes of Russian literature. If you’ve read a Russian classic in English, you’ve likely read Garnett. D.H. Lawrence recalled seeing her toss finished pages onto “a pile on the floor without looking up” — a pile, he claimed, that rose “almost up to her knees.” Gary Saul Morson, a Russian literature scholar, once wrote: “I have often thought that what I do for a living is teach the Collected Works of Constance Garnett.”

There are more opinions of Garnett’s work than there are horses in “War and Peace” (which she nearly went blind translating). In a piece of fan mail, the writer Katherine Mansfield wrote: “I felt I could no longer refrain from thanking you for the whole other world that you have revealed to us through those marvelous translations from the Russian. Your beautiful industry ends, Madam, in making us almost ungrateful.”

Add clairvoyance to Mansfield’s talents. Over time, Garnett’s detractors would make her out to be a prim and proper smotherer of the wild (male) Russian soul. Nabokov described her translations of Gogol as “always unbearably demure.” The Soviet writer Kornei Chukovsky complained that she dulled Dostoyevsky’s “convulsions of syntax,” reproducing “no volcano, but, rather, a flat lawn mowed in the English style.”

It’s true that Garnett could be strait-laced. When she first met Stepniak, she was aghast at one thing above all else. “To my horror,” she wrote in an unpublished memoir, “I found that he habitually carried books out of the British Museum reading room at the lunch-hour, and I could not make him feel it was a crime, since, as he said, he always took them back.” Yet the image of Garnett as a buttoned-up Victorian bookworm hides, much like a corset, her true shape. A socialist, Garnett understood her role as a translator to be revolutionary in the most literal sense: as an act of infiltration, a way of sneaking subversive information across borders.

The English, fresh from the Crimean War, saw Russia as the land of the czars, home to an autocratic regime and uncouth brutes obedient to it. Literature, Stepniak believed, could unveil a Russia full of doubters and dissenters, a nation of many voices, not all speaking the same language. In Garnett, he found a translator who could remain faithful to both the words on the page and the world he wanted to build beyond them.

Garnett was born Constance Black, to a middle-class family in Brighton in 1861, the same year that Alexander II abolished serfdom, putting her on something of a crash course with translation history; in 1895, she would translate a “A Sportsman’s Sketches” (1852), Ivan Turgenev’s searing fictional portrait of Russian peasants living in bondage. In Russia, the abolition of serfdom was part of a series of reforms meant to stave off revolution. But the country’s radical youth were not satisfied with mere reform: They were anarchists and socialists, and they were organized and armed. In 1878, 19-year-old Vera Zasulich shot the governor of St. Petersburg in a case that shocked Europe. Stepniak wrote a profile of Zasulich for his book “Underground Russia” (1882), a study of the country’s new revolutionaries. In England, “Underground Russia” was a smash hit, going through three printings the year it was translated. The whole nation was fascinated by these dynamite-happy young radicals and the land they hailed from.

Garnett arrived in London in 1884; her sister Clementina already mingled in leftist circles (she was friends with Eleanor Marx, Karl’s youngest daughter). Like many of her generation, Garnett frequented radical social clubs, including the Fabian Society and William Morris’s socialist league. She took a job as a librarian in London’s poor East End — not far from where thousands of Russian-Jewish immigrants had settled after fleeing pogroms — embarking, she reflected later, on a “new interesting life that seemed intensely romantic.” Soon she met Edward Garnett, an aspiring literary critic and editor. Edward was more skeptical than his girlfriend when it came to revolutionary politics. In a 1991 biography of Constance, Richard Garnett, the pair’s grandson, writes that “the young lovers had a row about Land Nationalization.”

But love conquered all. In 1889, the two married and moved to a cottage in the country. Two years later, Edward, who was in London for work, sent Constance a letter: “I have met a man after your heart — a Russian exile — and I have asked him down for a weekend.” The man was Felix Volkhovsky, a revolutionary who had escaped from Siberia, but who had made his way to England. “He had no home,” Constance wrote in her memoir, so “it was arranged that he should make our cottage his headquarters.” Volkhovsky suggested that Constance learn Russian. He gave her a dictionary and set her to work translating Ivan Goncharov’s novel “A Common Story” (1847), a tale of a provincial nobleman horrified by the cold commercialism of the capital. Constance learned Russian by translating novels, a few pages a day.

Volkhovsky introduced Constance to Stepniak, who was editing Free Russia, a magazine devoted to documenting the scourge of autocracy and the romance of revolution. The meeting was “one of the most important events of my life,” Constance wrote in her memoir: “Stepniak read my Goncharov translation, undertook to go over it with me, urged me to finish it.” Stepniak put her to work in other ways as well. Always in need of “innocent-looking emissaries,” as Richard Garnett put it, Stepniak enlisted Constance to travel to Russia, bearing “letters and books that could not safely be sent through the censored mails,” as well as, perhaps, money he had collected that would “help Russian political prisoners and exiles to escape.” During a nearly two-month stay in 1894, she managed to wrangle a couple meetings with Tolstoy, though not without some logistical difficulty. “These prophets,” she wrote in a letter home, “are dreadful people to deal with.”

At Stepniak’s urging, Constance had begun translating the complete works of Turgenev. She went in order, first tackling his debut novel, “Rudin” (1856), the story of a progressive intellectual who believes society must change but struggles to take action. Stepniak was to write the introductions, but their collaboration was cut short by a freak accident: In 1895, lost in thought, Stepniak walked in front of a moving train, dying instantly — a scene out of “Anna Karenina,” which Constance would translate six years later.

Despite the death of her mentor, she persevered as both translator and agitator. Her work on the Russian “greats” paid the bills, and garnered awards, but Constance also applied her labors to revolutionary materials. “I have done two days at translating Sophia Perovskaya,” she wrote to Edward in 1906, referring to the woman who helped plot the assassination of Alexander II, “and feel so cheered.” In 1908, she translated an eyewitness account of a worker’s revolt on a ship docked in Odessa, the Battleship Potemkin.

In March 1917, Nicholas II abdicated. For Constance, it was the culmination of everything she had worked for and dreamed of. “There is nothing — outside personal life — I have ever cared for as much,” she told Edward.

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