science

Shaun Whiteside

Shaun Whiteside is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Shaun Whiteside rather than just read about it. In short: Shaun Whiteside (born 1959) is a Northern Irish translator of French, Dutch, German, and Italian literature. He has translated many novels, including Manituana and Altai by Wu Ming, The Weekend by Bernhard Schlink, Serotonin by Michel Houellebecq, and Magdalene the Sinner by Lilian Faschinger, which won him the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for German Translation in 1997.

Key takeaways

Shaun Whiteside belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Shaun Whiteside to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Shaun Whiteside from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Shaun Whiteside (born 1959) is a Northern Irish translator of French, Dutch, German, and Italian literature. He has translated many novels, including Manituana and Altai by Wu Ming, The Weekend by Bernhard Schlink, Serotonin by Michel Houellebecq, and Magdalene the Sinner by Lilian Faschinger, which won him the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for German Translation in 1997. Since May 2021, he has served as the president of the European Council of Literary Translators' Associations.

Life Whiteside was born in County Tyrone in Northern Ireland in 1959. He graduated with a First in Modern Languages at King's College, Cambridge. After he finished his studies, he worked as a business journalist and television producer before translating full-time. As he said in a brief interview, "Did I always want to be a translator? I certainly wanted to do something that involved travel and languages, but even when my work in television took me to far-off places, I kept coming back to translation, first for fun, and eventually as a way of earning a living." Whiteside is the former Chair of the Translators Association of the Society of Authors. He currently lives in London with his wife and son, Charlie, where he sits on the PEN Writers in Translation committee, the editorial board of New Books in German, and the Advisory Panel of the British Centre for Literary Translation, where he regularly teaches at the summer school. He has stated that he would like to "have a go at Uwe Tellkamp's Der Turm (The Tower), a massive great project but a worthwhile one."

Selection of translated titles The Wall by Marlen Haushofer, 1990 Lenin's Brain by Tilman Spengler, 1993 The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche, 1993 Magdalene the Sinner by Lilian Faschinger, 1997, winner of the Schlegel-Tieck Prize The Confusions of Young Törless by Robert Musil, 2001 Let Me Go by Helga Schneider, 2001 Payback by Gert Ledig, 2002 Auschwitz: A History by Sybille Steinbacher, 2004 Mourning, Murder and Melancholia by Sigmund Freud, 2005 The Bonfire of Berlin: A Lost Childhood in Wartime Germany by Helga Schneider, 2005 Napoleon's Exile by Patrick Rambaud, 2005 Manituana by Wu Ming, 2009 The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano, 2009 Altai by Wu Ming, 2013 Swansong 1945: A Collective Diary of the Last Days of the Third Reich by Walter Kempowski, 2015 Melnitz by Charles Lewinsky, 2015 The Giraffe's Neck by Judith Schalansky, 2015, commended for the Schlegel-Tieck Prize Malacqua: Four Days of Rain in the City of Naples, Waiting for the Occurrence of an Extraordinary Event by Nicola Pugliese, 2017 To Die in Spring by Ralf Rothmann, 2017 Serotonin by Michel Houellebecq, 2019 Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy by Wolfram Eilenberger, 2020 The Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil, and the Power of Philosophy in Dark Times by Wolfram Eilenberger, 2023 Annihilation by Michel Houellebecq, 2024 Killing Stella by Marlen Haushofer, 2025 The Fifth Year by Marlen Haushofer, 2026

External links Article and review by Whiteside for The Independent Interview with Whiteside by British Centre for Literary Translation (YouTube) Description of Altai at Verso Books Description of Manituana at Verso Books Description of The Wall at Cleis Press

References

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Shaun Whiteside

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Shaun Whiteside claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Shaun Whiteside before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Shaun Whiteside ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Shaun Whiteside

In research: Shaun Whiteside appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Shaun Whiteside in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Shaun Whiteside is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1959 births, 20th-century translators, 21st-century translators, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Shaun Whiteside outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Shaun Whiteside in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Shaun Whiteside means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Shaun Whiteside out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Shaun Whiteside in simple terms?

Why does Shaun Whiteside matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Shaun Whiteside?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Shaun Whiteside.