Cardiff University Postgraduate Conference, 27 May 2014, CFP deadline 31 March

The Translator: Competence, Credentials, Creativity 

 

Keynote speaker: Professor Theo Hermans (UCL)

‘The translator’ lies at the heart of much research in translation studies and other disciplines and yet closer inspection reveals ‘the translator’ to be an intriguingly nebulous concept. This conference invites postgraduate researchers from arts and humanities, social sciences and other fields to revisit and advance work on the figure of the translator and the criteria that contribute to our understanding of the protean persona, focusing on such criteria as competence, credentials and creativity. 

While we welcome any perspective on the translator, we also hope to showcase a strand of work on contemporary translators. For example, it might be revealing to explore the impact of technology and Web 2.0 on translators and to expand recent work on non-professional translators (e.g. fan translators, activist translators or natural translators). A conference hosted in Wales may also provide a particularly appropriate setting for the consideration of the translator’s role in (re-)constructing contemporary group identities, be it local or global, national, transnational or ‘post-national’. Another avenue of inquiry might concern the postmodern perceptions of the fluidity of borders between socio-cultural and artistic entities as well as media, and the resulting perceived overlaps between the figures of ‘the translator’, the migrant, the author, the artist and other socio-cultural agents. Finally, the discussion might be informed by the current trend to incorporate, broadly speaking, non-Western conceptualizations of translation and ‘the translator’. 

Papers may address questions which include, but are not limited to, the following:

-        Language and translation/interpreting competence

-        Technological competence and subject specialization

-        Translator/interpreter training and the profession

-        Bilingualism, biculturalism, code-switching

-        Non-professional translators/interpreters

-        The translator’s credentials and authority

-        The translator and group identity (local, national, global etc.)

-        The translator’s identity and visibility

-        The translator’s creativity and craft

-        Adaptation and inter-media translation

-        The translator and the artist (writer, musician, film-maker etc.)

-        The translator and the migrant

-        The translator and communicating between fields of knowledge

-        The translator: past and present

Please send a 300 word proposal for a 20 minute presentation along with a short biographical note at the.translator.pg.conference at gmail.com by 31 March 2014.

We will notify you of the results by 5 April 2014 (please contact us if you require an earlier response to be able to attend). Please use the same contact address for queries.

Please inform us if you would like to deliver a paper in Welsh: every effort will be made to provide simultaneous English interpretation. We would appreciate if you could supply an abstract in English (as well as Welsh if relevant).

Organizing committee: Dia Borresly, Lisi Liang, Esther Liu, Sara Orwig, Dorota Goluch

The event is kindly supported by the University Graduate College and the European School of Languages, Politics and Translation.

Our event coincides in time with another event co-organized by the European School of Languages, Politics and Translation, which might be of interest to our participants: it is the ‘Translation in Music’ symposium, held on 25-26 May 2014. Please see www.cardiff.ac.uk/music/translationinmusic for details.