As an international meeting point of different cultures and a hub of political experimentation and business development, Barcelona is an ideal location for the 7th IATIS conference. Under the theme of Translation Ecology, the conference will explore interactions among both human and non-human organisms in translation and between translation and interpreting and its physical environment. These interactions may be explored from multiple angles: cultural, social, environmental, political, literary, technological, and ethical, among others. Wherever not specified, we use the term "translation" in this call to include written and audiovisual translation, and interpreting.

The inspiration for the theme comes from a recognition of the growing importance of multiple forces that impact and are impacted by the work of translators and interpreters. One such force is globalization, including the spread of global literatures, global literary and cultural trends, global digital cultures, as well as evidence of resistance to global forces in the economic and political fields in particular. Other forces include digitization (especially in the area of machine translation and artificial intelligence), climate change, migratory fluxes, nationalism, the dynamics and effects of traditional and social media, live subtitling, multilingualism and multiculturalism, and the evolving relationship between global, national and minoritized languages. In all of these areas, the translation profession, its actors and academic counterparts have an important role to play. Thus, researchers and professionals need to further develop awareness of translation as a global phenomenon and a critical practice that can work for and/or against sustainability, climate change, animal rights, new technologies and human rights, including the rights of various minorities and disadvantaged groups in society.

Scholars such as Michael Cronin, Esperança Bielsa, Jianzhong Xu, Gengshen Hu, and Liudmila Kushnina have all highlighted the important relationship between cosmopolitanism, ecology and translation and revealed some of the many angles and approaches from which an ecological awareness of translation can be developed, including but not limited to environmental awareness. Translation here is understood in its broadest sense to encompass adaptation, localization and transcreation and to include oral, written, audiovisual, multimodal, inter-linguistic, semiotic and cultural modes of transfer, in both conventional and non-conventional contexts.

This conference will focus on the socio-political, literary, ethical, theoretical and methodological questions raised, from around the world, by the theme of Translation Ecology. Topics of interest include but are not restricted to the following:

▪ Questions pertaining to translation and ecological awareness, in the sense of awareness of the evolving relationship between different elements and practices over time; issues of interest here might include soft and hard activism, crisis situations, short- and long-term policies.

▪ The impact of translation (including various forms of interpreting and audiovisual translation) on the relationship between individual and society, in terms of the construction and negotiation of identities, patterns of survival and extinction, and processes of mediation between humans and digital and other technologies.

▪ Translation peripheries and centers (geographical and otherwise): the impact of practices such as crowdsourcing, fansubbing, fandubbing and activist and volunteer translation and interpreting on various communities, the economy, and the political order.

▪ Translation, sustainability and social responsibility in and beyond the mainstream.

▪ The role of translation in the growing international movement in support of animal rights.

▪ The role of translation in the interdisciplinary study of (world) literature and the environment (ecocriticism), of women and the environment (ecofeminism), and of the evolving conceptualizations of gender and sexual identity.

▪ Translation and knowledge ecology: multi-, inter-, trans-disciplinary approaches to the role of translation in different fields of knowledge, including the Humanities, the Social Sciences, Computing Sciences, Medical Humanities, and other areas.

▪ Translation and spatiality studies: new approaches to interactions among writers, readers, texts, and places.