University College London, Tuesday, July 12, 2011, DION 106, 12:00 p.m.

The UMass Dartmouth Summer Program in Portuguese is now in its 18th year of offering intensive courses in Portuguese language, Portuguese-English translation, and Lusophone literatures and cultures at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. With the aim to encouraging our international group of students to consider careers in translation, the Program has invited a number of scholars in the field of translation studies over the past few years to meet with students and present their research; past guests have included Prof. Edwin Gentzler, well-known specialist on theories of translation, and Prof. Donaldo Macedo, English translator of the works of Paulo Freire, seminal figure in Brazilian liberation pedagogy.

This year we are honored to be able to welcome Prof. Moira Inghilleri from University College London, who will give a talk on the following topic:

Communicative ethics, translator visibility and linguistic/cultural borders

Translators of spoken and written language operate in contexts which can foster ambiguity, contradiction and misunderstanding, all of which are resolvable only in relation to the different communicative objectives at play amongst the participants involved. The notion of the impartial and neutral translator has long been a crucial guiding ethical principle of the profession. However, particularly in contexts where communicative objectives are tied to specific social, political or economic agendas, maintaining impartiality can work against the goal of mutual understanding. In this seminar, I present an alternative view of ethical communication which, instead of encouraging translators to remain interactively invisible, calls for a greater recognition of the crucial link between ethical practice, translator visibility, and more
mutually-effective dialogue amongst linguistically and culturally diverse speakers and texts.

Bio: Moira Inghilleri is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Intercultural Studies, University College London. She is the author of Interpreting Justice: Ethics, Politics and Language (Routledge, available November 2011) and the forthcoming Sociological Approaches to Translation and Interpreting (St. Jerome Publishing). She is co-editor of The Translator: Studies in Intercultural Communication. Prior to joining the journal as co-editor in 2011, she guest-edited two special issues: Bourdieu and the Sociology of Translating (2005) and Translation and Violent Conflict (2010, with Sue-Ann Harding). Her research has appeared in Translation Studies, The Translator, Target and a number of edited collections.