2018/19 Seminar: Translation

Seminar Theme

This year’s seminar explores themes including, but not restricted to,

  • direct engagement with the epistemologies, ethics, and politics of translating from one text, language, or culture to another, as well as from oral to written discourses;
  • translation across any number of real or fictive spaces (e.g., public/private, dominant/subaltern, normative/transgressive), spheres (economic, social, legal, cultural, aesthetic), or media (print, visual, digital) within a social formation as well as across different social media platforms and genres; translation back and forth between academic and general public domains;
  • the ‘trans’ aspect of translation – the movement, crossing, or transgression that may be bound up with transsexual, transgender, translocal, transnational, and translational processes, practices, subjectivities, situations, objects;
  • translation as a relational practice and process that has social, ethical, and political dimensions and the situations of proximity and encounter that characterize translation;
  • how translation may entail relations of subordination and domination or reciprocity and dialogue, discord or concord, misrecognition or understanding, colonial hierarchies or solidarity projects; ways that translation may reinforce divisions, allow for non self-evident connections, or actually produce new subjectivities, identities, imaginations, formations;
  •  translation across different historical epochs, historical epistemologies, temporal frameworks; translation as a temporal category;
  • debates within translation studies or raised by translation processes and practices about transparency and incommensurability, universality and singularity, containment and opening, the dangers of reduction and opportunities for dissemination and ramification;
  • attempts to think beyond dyadic and unidirectional models of translation by attending to complex fields of translation in which multiple, multi-directional, and multivalent translation practices unfold simultaneously;
  • translation as the norm (for thinking, knowing, communicating, relating), within languages as well as across them, rather than the exception;
  • and finally, translation as an epistemological, ethical, aesthetic, and/or political concept, phenomenon, or object.