Call for Papers

Since the foundation of the academic discipline of Translation Studies after World War II, the asymmetries and anisomorphisms of cultures and languages have been recognized and well articulated as a central theoretical issue for Translation Studies and as fundamental challenges for practicing translators and interpreters.  The translation of categories and concepts brings these issues to the fore.  Categories and concepts sit at the intersection of cultural and linguistic asymmetries and anisomorphisms:  they are the foundation of cultural dispositions and practices, as well as cultural structures.  At the same time categories and concepts are normally expressed in language:  they are signaled, recognized, and taught in significant ways through linguistic means, and their contrastive boundaries are delimited by linguistic contrasts, semantic fields, and usages.

This panel explores productive ways to think about, approach, and model cross-cultural categories and concepts (such as the concepts literature, language, game, and translation itself) when such concepts themselves move across cultural and linguistic boundaries in translation, interpreting, and other cross-cultural forms of interface. Among other things, the panel will further explore the question of whether prototype theory can be utilized or whether in cross-linguistic situations (assuming independent linguistic and cultural traditions) one must turn to a cluster-concept approach.

Presentations are invited that discuss both the macrolevels and microlevels of such questions pertaining to concepts and categories, drawing from cognitive science, neuroscience, and just plain common sense.

Chair

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. is author of Translation in a Postcolonial Context:  Early Irish Literature in English Translation (1999) and Enlarging Translation, Empowering Translators (2007); with Edwin Gentzler, she is editor of Translation and Power (2002).  Her most recent publication is the edited collection Translation, Resistance, Activism (2010) and Neuroscience and Translation is currently in progress. Professor Tymoczko has published widely on translation theory and on translation as an engaged social practice; her articles have appeared in major collections of essays about translation and in many translation studies journals.  She is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.