Funded places on translation/transgender workshop, Arizona

Recently circulated, and may be of interest: 

The University of Arizona College of Humanities, Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry, and Institute for LGBT Studies seek self-nominations for two funded slots at a small, four-day collaborative workshop and salon on Translating Transgender, January 5-10, 2015, in Tucson, AZ. A 250-500-word Statement of Interest, a current CV, and a translation (or piece of translation / transgender scholarship) pertinent to the topic should be sent to Prof. David Gramling at dgl at email.arizona.edu by June 1, 2014. See workshop description here:

Translating Transgender: A Scholars’ and Practitioners’ Workshop at the University of Arizona

Rationale:

Translation practitioners and scholars know from experience that translating (and being translated) has more to do with the immutable dynamics of translingual betweenness than with the mere accurate rendering of “x” from one language to another. This de-norming and de-substantializing of translation, as well as the productive debates about language(s) that have emerged from these processes over the past two decades, share a great deal with the de-norming of gender, the body, and identity at the heart of Transgender Studies.

Meanwhile, due to the stigma on researching non-normative genders throughout history, few primary and secondary texts about transgender lives and ideas over the centuries have been translated from language to language in any formal or systematic way. Meanwhile, precisely this stigma has meant that queer and transgender thinkers and artists have tended to become translators, travelers, exiles, and multilinguals in greater numbers and velocities than their heterosexual and cisgender counterparts. The result for us today is that the accessible literatures in transgender studies (and related fields like LGBT Studies and Queer Studies) remain more Anglophone, more monolingual, and less translated than they historically ought to be, while the subjects who produced those literatures have often been archetypes of transnational and translingual border-crossing.

The Workshop and Salon:

On January 10-15, 2015, we will assemble in balmy Tucson a small group of national and international scholars and practitioners in the fields of translation studies and transgender studies to explore together the methodological and epistemological relationships between these two domains of inquiry and practice—through semi-structured salons, discussions, and readings. In the evenings, we will open the group up to a more public audience for 'translation slams' and readings in the vibrant Tucson arts community. The atmosphere, we hope, will be informal, collaborative, speculative, and rejuvenating for the upcoming Spring Semester 2015.

In preparation, invited participants would be asked to undertake and circulate among the group a new translation (long or short, from / to any language, in any genre) in the weeks prior to the workshop that explores some aspect of transgender embodiment / enlanguagement, gender variability and transition, etc., and how those phenomena are dynamized or problematized by translation process and practice. This new piece would serve as an entry point for other participants to get to know each others' current work. Ultimately, we would also invite participants to contribute (after the workshop) to a special issue of the Duke University Press journal Transgender Studies Quarterly on "Translation / Transgender"—whether in the form of a scholarly critique / essay or poetic / literary contribution. 

Please send self-nominations (see criteria above) by June 1 to Prof. David Gramling, dgl at email.arizona.edu.

David Gramling, PhD

Director of Graduate Studies & Assistant Professor
University of Arizona  |  Department of German Studies 

Faculty Affiliate, SLAT, CMES, & LGBT Studies
Co-Editor, Critical Multilingualism Studies  |  cms.arizona.edu 

1512 E. First St.  |  301 Learning Services Building
Tucson, AZ 85721  |  520.822.6251  |  www.livelongday.info

ARTIS symposium programme now available

The first symposium of ARTIS (Advancing Research in Translation and Interpreting Studies) is happening next month on 13 May in Manchester, and the programme is now available online (click here to download).

It's on performative and cognitive approaches to TS research, and the programme is mostly early-career researchers, with a smattering of more experienced speakers. Looks fascinating. Looking forward to it!

There is no charge for registration.

This looks an interesting event, for readers within hollering distance of London: 

‘Affective Translations’
A CCWW Cross-Cultural Seminar
Saturday 10 May 2014, 2-4 pm, room G21a, Senate House, University of London

Organiser/Chair: Michela Baldo (CCWW/IMLR)

Round-table participants:
Aoi Matsushima (Translator/Writer, Japanese-English)
Sian Reynolds (French Scholar/Translator, French-English)
Isabel del Rio (Bilingual Writer/Linguist, Spanish-English)
Cristina Viti (Translator, English-Italian)

The aim of this translation seminar is to investigate the role of affect in translation, looking at how translating affects translators in the same way that translators affect translations. In the last 15 years, Translation Studies as a discipline has witnessed an increased interest in the agency of translators, from Venuti’s (1995; 1998) advocacy of the visibility of translators in the late '90s to the more recent sociological turn in the discipline which sees translators as ethical actors. However, more research needs to be carried out on the role of affect in translation. Translator and scholar Carole Maier (2002; 2006) identifies the visceral effect that translation might exert on translators and how translation can affect the translator’s body as a disease, a contamination that the translator is not immune to.

On the other hand the analysis of affect has recently emerged in a number of other disciplines. According to Latour (2004) to have a body is to learn to be affected, to be put into motion by other entities, human and non-human, to shift one’s affect into action. Affect arises in the in-betweeness, in the relationships between bodies and objects. Given these points, this seminar aims at understanding how translators are emotionally affected by their translations (and their translation tools) and capable of affecting others, of creating networks of affection.

The format of the seminar will be a round-table discussion, comprising female translators/authors living in the UK, who will introduce their work and answer questions on the above issues. For further info, see here.

All welcome. If you plan to attend, please advise gill.rye at sas.ac.uk

Professor Emerita Gill Rye,
Director, Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing,
Institute of Modern Languages Research,
School of Advanced Study,
University of London,
Senate House,
Malet Street,
London WC1E 7HU,
U.K.

French translation of 'Subtitles for People Who Really Like the Film' now online!

I got some lovely news today from the fantastic blog Les Piles Intermédiaires. Unto them is published this day a French translation of a MATSnews blog post called 'Subtitles for People Who Really Like The Film'. 

The French translation, titled as it were in the optative, is called 'À quand des "sous-titres pour ceux qui aiment vraiment le film"?' When you have finished reading it you might like to check out some of the other posts by Les Piles, who, when not translating, writes with more irony than should be legal about translation. Among other things, LP hoards screenshots of subtitles about translation, just because. Check out the list of posts.

Poem about translation 19: 'To the Translator, Somewhere in New England, on the Road to Far Cathay'

This latest instalment in the poems about translation series is by the Chinese-English translator Steve Bradbury, from the excellent online literary magazine Cipher. 

I was drawn to the title, 'To the Translator, Somewhere in New England, on the Road to Far Cathay' partly because I spent some time in China recently for work - an extraordinary experience, whose extraordinariness was experienced partly through language (and the lack of it) and partly through the cultural prism of Arthur Waley's translations of Chinese poetry, which I got to know as a child.

The poem speaks for itself, so I won't comment further here.

For more from Bradbury about translation see his translation of three poems by Shang Qin here and his translation and comment on a quatrain of Li Bai, also known as Li Po, here. This quatrain has been most famously translated - why do I want to say 'covered'? - by Ezra Pound.

Pound's translation, from the collection Cathay, can be read on the Poetry Foundation website. It's free verse, rather than the metrical, rhyming quatrain that Bradbury favours - but then, as he observes in his address to the translator, how do you follow Pound?

For more of Bradbury's comment on translating Li Bai/Li Po, see issue 66 of Translation Review which is still freely downloadable at time of writing here. For more versions of Li Bai's poem, see here, here, here and here.  

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.