Call for Papers

In recent years the study of media in/and translation has grown significantly since both enable communication across languages and cultures, promote people's mutual understanding and dialogue, document human civilization and culture, and record the progress and development of human society. As many research scholars have demonstrated so far, translation means more than just a linguistic exercise. Rather, it is a critical keyword that speaks in diverse ways to media cultures as it stands out as a conceptual lens and metaphor for the interlaced and often contradictory set of transformative processes at work when media objects, policies, and economies traffic across geographic borders, cultural institutions, and technological platforms. This synergy between media and translation occur in a wide range of contexts (e.g. the press, advertising, television, cinema, and the world wide web or other information channels) where both disciplines seek for new translative possibilities in their creative processes.

In order to provide a common theoretical platform on these challenging issues, we invite participants to figure out the implications of the interrelationship between media in the widest sense and translation and to discuss the following key-questions:

• How do mass media enable communication across language and cultures?
• How are language and translation issues manifesting in media today?
• What is the role played by translation in international news reporting?
• Can multilingual bloggers act as ambassadors for reaching multilingual audiences?
• What is the relationship of regional news to multilingual sources, and what efforts can be made to bridge that divide?
• How can we undertake the analysis of ideology as reflected in the media and translated across languages and cultures?
• What exactly happens in the complex processes of reformulation across linguistic, cultural and ideological boundaries?
• Which transformations occur from the original source text to its (mis)representation, for example, in another language and culture or through other communication media?
• What effects do these transformations have on readers and their perception of information and knowledge?
• How do choices made at the various levels in the process of producing texts (i.e. choices concerning which information to include or exclude, what to make explicit or leave implicit etc.) result in different interpretations of the 'same' event by readers in different countries and even in political conflict?
• How do socio-cultural and historical conditions, primarily in the recipient socio-culture, influence information transfer and translation behaviour?

These are questions to which we cannot yet provide a definite answer, since they have not yet been investigated in sufficient depth and breath and are just beginning to attract more attention from Linguistics and Translation Studies scholars. This panel is thus intended to bring this recent and multi-layered interdisciplinary interest to the investigation of the language of the media. To this end we invite submissions for 20-minute papers and/or 20-minute creative project presentations that consider the stakes of translating media from diverse methodological, disciplinary and creative approaches (e.g.: Discourse Studies, Cultural Studies, Translation Studies, Psycholinguistics, Marketing Studies, Mass Communications, Visual and Performance Studies, etc.) with the aim to reach an important crossroads in the understanding of information transfer across languages and cultures, as well as of the impact the media have on individuals and societies, their tastes, aspirations, attitudes to other languages and cultures and their responses to socio-cultural and political developments.

Chairs

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. is a researcher and lecturer in English Language and Translation at the University of Bari. Her main research interests are in Applied Linguistics, Specialized Discourse and Corpus-based Translation Studies. She has published an article which provides a brief summary of ESP (English for Special/Specialized Purposes) from a historical perspective. Her PhD dissertation together with her other articles focus on the use of domain-specific parallel and comparable corpora specially collected in order to investigate English and Italian Medical Purposes and how medical discourse enters the realm of fiction. Her new research area includes fashion theory, in general and language transfer and cultural communication in fashion advertising, in particular a topic on which she has published a paper entitled "Moving across languages and cultures in Vogue fashion advertising" (2009). Her recent publications are Understanding The Language of Medicine (2009) Aracne, and English4Fashion (2010) Wip Edizioni.

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. is Assistant Professor in English and Translation Studies at the Faculty of Education, University of Bari (Italy). Her areas of research include women's and gender studies, translation theory and practice, contrastive linguistics, comparative cultural studies (Chicana literature; Afroamerican language and literature). She has translated Pilar Godayol's works (Spazi di frontiera. Genere e traduzione, 2002; Voci Chicane. Mericans e altri racconti. 2005). She has published several articles and authored The Languages of the ghetto. Rap, break-dance e graffiti art come pratiche di ®esistenza (Aracne, Roma, 2005) and Pratiche traduttive e Gender Studies (Aracne, Roma, 2006). She has edited Translationscapes. Comunità, lingue e traduzioni interculturali (Progedit, Bari, 2009), a collection of academic essays on interculturality and/in translation by some of the most influential scholars as Mona Baker, Moira Inghilleri, Paul Bandia, Chris Larkosh-Lenotti, Paola Zaccaria, Pilar Godayol.