Promoting and supporting the teaching and study of Scottish literature and language
Ellen Beard earned a law degree at the University of Chicago in 1977 and worked as a government labor lawyer for almost thirty years. She then retired and moved to Scotland, where she studied Gaelic and traditional music and earned a PhD in Celtic at the University of Edinburgh in 2016, with a dissertation titled Rob Donn MacKay: Finding the Music in the Songs. She recently published a new edition of 100 of his songs (texts, translations and music).
Unlike the companion articles on translating Scotland to the world, this one addresses translating Scotland to itself, not metaphorically but literally, from English to Gaelic and Gaelic to English. I begin with an illustrative example, follow with a brief history of Gaelic translation practices, and conclude with a few reflections on my own experience as […]
Tartan is simultaneously a material object, a design template, and a symbol with multiple referents. As a patterned textile, it features straight lines, right angles, bright colours, and no ambiguity; as a symbol, its lines become fuzzy, its angles circular, its colours muddied, and its meaning polysemic (Brown, 9). While this paper addresses the significance […]
If you are reading this article, you are obtaining information in a second-hand form, translated at least once from oral to written, from aural to visual, and from Gaelic to English. That is why reading is not enough to understand and appreciate eighteenth-century Gaelic poetry and song. To illustrate this thesis, consider the following example […]