Marina Kurtén, MA, Translator
Contact information
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University of Helsinki Department of Computer Science PO Box 68 FIN-00014 University of Helsinki, Finland |
Responsibilities
- Translation and language consultation (English, Swedish)
If you need my assistance with translation or language checking, please read the recommendations for handing in jobs to me. That page also contains a list of some common errors and other observations.
Absences
- 6-14 April 2010 holiday
Research Interests
Though, at the moment, I'm working at the Helsinki University Computer Science Department, I'm a Master of Arts, and I majored in English philology. My research interests lie in so-called 'new literatures in English,' which includes immigrant literature, literature from the peripheries of the former British empire, and literature by indigenous peoples. I wrote my Master's thesis on Hanif Kureishi's novels The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album with Mark A. Reid's Postnegritude theory as starting point. I am a postgraduate PhD student at the Helsinki University Department of English, and a member of the research group Cross-cultural Contacts: Diaspora Writing in English. It is headed by Mari Peepre, Professor in Postcolonial Studies at Royal Roads University, Canada, and Professor Mark Shackleton at the Helsinki University English Department
During autumn 2001, I was working on my PhD thesis with the help of a grant from the Swedish Culture Foundation.
In addition to my day job, I also do some freelance translation; from Finnish to Swedish, from Finnish to English, and from Swedish to English to Swedish (whew!). I've translated a number of Finnish short stories for the Finnish-Swedish sci-fi and fantasy magazine Enhörningen (the unicorn): in 2003, I translated Johanna Sinisalo's short story "Lentävä hollantilainen" into Swedish (Den flygande holländaren). The following year, I translated Boris Hurtta's "Perilliset" (Arvtagarna in my translation), and in 2005 I translated Pasi Jääskeläinen's "Missä junat kääntyvät" (Där tågen vänder).
Another of my larger freelance clients is North-by-northwest, for which I have translated several screenplays from Swedish and Finnish into English since year 2000. I also translated the English web pages of the Osprey Project carried out by the Finnish Museum of Natural History.
Personal
Björn Kurtén
Links to some pages about my father:
- Short bio and select bibliography (in English, though not very good English)
- A review of his novel Dance of the Tiger
- Columbia University Press presenting On Evolution and Fossil Mammals and How to Deep-Freeze a Mammoth and more under Paleontology
- A list of Unesco Kalinga prize winners (see 1988)
- Current news: the Spanish language edition of Dance of the Tiger (La danza del tigre) has been published in Spain by PLOT Ediciones in Spring 2001. They are also interested in adapting the novel to film. The translation of the follow-up, Singletusk, into Spanish is under way.
Interests
- Literature (surprise, surprise!); everything goes, as long as it gives food for thought or a sense of experiencing something new
- Theatre (Shakespeare as well as Stoppard, not to forget Beckett or Brecht)
- Cats. I have two of
them: Miranda, a Russian Blue born 30 November 2004, and Caliban, a brown tabby moggie, whose mother was
rescued from the streets of Tallinn in Estonia. Pictures galore available in Webshots, Photobucket (the most current ones), and their very own site (under construction).
In loving memory of their predecessors/contemporaries, my two black-and-white moggies, Frank, 27 November 1987 - 8 December 2005, and Nikki, mid-August 1988 - 22 May 2005. Please see Flippy's Cat Page if you want to read some anecdotes I've written about Frank and Nikki. - Music too, but I'm not listing everything I like, let's just say it's a wide range from classical to contemporary.
- Semiotics - I've taken several university courses in it, and each lecturer gives a new definition of it, so I'm intrigued, especially since most of them agree it's about creating meaning
- The Great Outdoors. First and foremost at our summer cottage on an island in Hitis, in the archipelago of SW Finland.