Cfp: Who’s Afraid Of Translator Studies? The Human Translator in Focus

 A conference for postgraduate, doctoral and early-career researchers

Where? : Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation, University of Dublin

When?: May 12-13, 2022

Call for Papers

While Translation Studies continues to evolve, entering into dialogue with diverse disciplines and following multifarious directions, translators still represent the underlying and essential agency that makes such evolution possible. However, it seems that translators often remain behind that notorious shadow line, which delimits their visibility and heightens their risk of being misperceived as disembodied or anonymous entities. This conference, therefore, aims to highlight their centrality in the translation act as human beings.

The conference aims to explore translators manifestations across a variety of fields, ranging from the media to history, from literature to popular culture, specifically taking into account their humanity, and investigating the human touch in areas where it may not always be apparent such as machine translation. Rather than considering the technical, textual dimension to their work, this conference seeks to draw attention to the staging of the translational self, the fictional representations and literary portrayals of translators, their role throughout history and social movements so as to rediscover translators as people with their own subjectivity and individuality.

Although they are not always named on book covers and may still not be under the spotlight of public perception, translators remain fundamental mediators. Can we get to know them better? Can we finally visualise them as flesh and blood or are they inherently invisible? The organising committee invites proposals to engage with these and related questions. Topics include but are not limited to:

• Human translators in the digital age
• Translators as agents throughout history
• Staging and fashioning the translational self
• Representations of translators in literature and fiction
• Celebrity translators
• The lives, welfare and working conditions of translators
• Self-translation and the multilingual writer
• Ethical dilemmas: who tells whose story?
• Translators in socio-political contexts

SUBMISSIONS

Please submit abstracts (no longer than 300 words) using this online form by 29 October 2021 for papers of 20 minutes. 10-minute Q&A sessions will follow each talk. Proposals will be assessed on their relevance to the central theme of the conference, their contribution to knowledge, and the methodological approach they outline.

KEYNOTE

The event will open with a keynote address by Professor Michael Cronin, Director of the Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation and 1776 Professor of French at Trinity College Dublin.

If you have any queries, please email tclctphd@gmail.com. You can also keep up to date with the conference following the TCLCT’s social media as well as @TCLCTPhDs on Twitter.

Source:
https://translationstudies.org/cfp-whos-afraid-of-translator-studies-the-human-translator-in-focus/ 
https://www.tcd.ie/literary-translation/assets/doc/CfP_The_Human_Translator_in_Focus_Oct2021.pdf

Update Bibliography on self-translation

The bibliography on self-translation has been updated (40th update, June 2021). To download the pdf-file please click here. If you have any suggestions for further entries, please leave a comment.

CfP: EST22: Advancing Translation Studies

The EST22 Call for Papers is open from July 1, 2021 until October 15, 2021. 
EST22 is taking place June 22-24, 2022 - Oslo, Norway at Oslo Metropolitan University and University of Oslo

The topic of panel 33 organized by Spencer Hawkins and Lavinia Heller is "The Self-Translation of Knowledge: Scholarship in Migration Conveners". 

Recent surges in conflict and oppression have led to an influx of refugees to Europe, which has in turn prompted us to reexamine traditional associations between nation and identity. These reexaminations have not left Translation Studies unaffected. During the last decade, Translation Studies has devoted new attention to the geographic relocation of human beings as a driving force behind interlinguistic transmission of loan words, exotic concepts, translated texts, and appropriated traditions. Throughout the migrational turn in Translation Studies, literary output has become paradigmatic of migrant cultural ambassadorship. Privileging the literary over other forms of discursive participation, however, risks obscuring the centrality of academic migrants who influence their host cultures through the complex work of self-translation within institutional spaces of knowledge production. For migrants to continue research abroad requires a complex process of translation and self-translation, not only into a new academic language, but also into a new academic and intellectual culture and these self-translations do not leave the host discourses and cultures unaffected. An intellectual history of academic migration has the complex task of investigating why certain self-translations achieve influence by accounting for social, linguistic, discursive, disciplinary, and philosophical mechanisms of adaptation, integration, and advancement. The study of (self-)translated humanistic scholarship promises valuable insight into the extent to which, for example, academics do in fact show consciousness of the conditions for the success of their self-translation. Such research could also reveal what academics in exile consider translatable in their lives and work, for whom those elements are translatable, and which specific rhetorical resources they must mobilize, as well as questioning whether the success or failure of academic self-translation depends on linguistic factors at all, or whether other factors are far more decisive: such as one’s social and academic prestige and the suitability of one’s work to academic research trends and the political climate within the university culture.

We welcome paper proposals that discuss: case studies of the emergence of specific texts by voluntary or involuntary migrant scholars in the context of their translated lives the challenges and fruits of self-translation or exophonic scholarship for academic discourses theorizations of the migrant scholar, like Edward Said’s “Reflections on Exile” rhetorical habits of academic migrant self-translation: including inventive loan translations and conceptually generative periphrasis, but also losses of complexity through the reliance on more easily mastered cliché and simplified arguments the capacity of an academic lingua franca to orient migrant writers’ destinations and their deviations from the local languages of their displacement the effect of an academic lingua franca on international cooperation the asymmetries of scientific internationalism the geopolitical center of gravity around anglophone metropoles. We welcome also papers that mark the dichotomies and methodological (in)compatabilities between: forced and voluntary academic migration successful and unsuccessful adaptation to new academic languages and cultures “hard” sciences and “soft” sciences ancient, medieval, and modern cases of academic migration migration in eras where one lingua franca predominates in the sciences and migration in eras of “Scientific Babel” (Gordin) explicitly migration-related translation theory concepts—like self-translation and exophony—and broader theories of translation—like skopos theory migration from the “semi-peripheries” (Bennett) to the metropoles of academia and the opposite movement, especially the migration of native English speakers to Asian educational institutions.

References
Bennett, Karen. The Semiperiphery of Academic Writing: Discourses, Communities and Practices. London: Palgrave Macmillion: 2014.
Gordin, Michael. Scientific Babel, Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press: 2015.
Inghelleri, Moira, Translation and Migration, New York: Routledge, 2017.
Polezzi, Loredana, “Translation and Migration”. Translation Studies 5(3): 345-356, 2012.
Weigel, Sigrid, “Self-Translation and Its Discontents” Migrating Histories of Art Self-Translations of a Discipline, ed. Maria Teresa Costa and Hans Christian Hönes, 21-35. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019.

For more information, please visit: https://www.hf.uio.no/english/research/news-and-events/events/conferences/est22/