In a world that seems continuously to be stretching the line of what is acceptable to the inhabitants of specific linguistic and cultural contexts, this interdisciplinary conference acknowledges the importance of investigating taboos and their reinforcement/breaking in various areas of language, culture, literature and society, and across different cultures. We propose to explore the delicate balance and subtle boundaries between the need for inclusion and respect for different ethnic, religious, sexual backgrounds – which seem to be at the basis of modern multicultural societies – and a conscious (or unconscious) push towards the breaking of existing taboos, for example for shock value, as in the case of comedy and art. In such contexts, investigation of the linguistic, cultural, social, institutional and personal implications of taboo reinforcement/breaking appears of extreme value.

For its 5th edition, the Taboo Conference series will specifically address the intricacies of taboo in language, culture, literature and communication in its various occurrences from the points of view of production, performance, and perception/reception. The subject of taboo in language, culture, literature and communication seems to have become especially relevant in the last few years, in which political correctness at both the institutional and individual level has been seen, on the one hand, as a crucial tool in protecting people from verbal abuse and in preventing the reinforcement of stereotypes and, on the other, as a set of measures and a way of thinking which significantly curtail free speech in many aspects of the public sphere.

The 2020 conference seeks to explore the shifting boundaries of the acceptability of taboo in their various incarnations as produced and perceived in today’s multicultural society, from cinema and television, to news, videogames, literature and different kinds of online content. The study of taboo in the past, for example through the medium of literature, is also relevant to the conference. Possible areas of inquiry include, but are not limited to, political orientations and political satire, identity and gender politics, ethnic stereotypes, different kinds of non-normative behaviour, political correctness and the discourse surrounding it, and the debate between real and perceived offense through comedy.

Deadline for submissions: 10th February 2020

For more information, click here

The times and epochs have passed, but meaning in translation – elusive and fascinating, precise and pragmatically relevant – remains the main focus of translation studies. The issue of accurate representation of meaning across the languages has become particularly topical in the era of digitalization, proliferation of MT and CAT tools, evolution of neural machine translation networks, and the changes in the way information is generated, stored, processed and transmitted.

This year, the main focus of the conference is “Translation Studies in the Era of Digital Humanities”.
We hope that the conference will bring together researchers and translators, academia and students, practitioners in language services and technologies and language policy makers and will become a forum for promoting dynamic and constructive debate, networking and research cooperation.

The fourth international scientific conference “Meaning in Translation: Illusion of Precision” is aimed at exploring themes from the theoretical and practical perspectives covering a wide scope of topics: Terminology standardization and harmonization; Pragmatic, semantic and grammatical aspects of meaning in translation; Translation of sacred, legal, poetic, promotional and scientific and technical texts.

Deadline for submissions of abstracts: 31 January 2020

For more information, click here 

PACTE (Process of Acquisition of Translation Competence and Evaluation) is organising the Fifth International Conference on Research into the Didactics of Translation (didTRAD), which will be held at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 8-10 July, 2020.

This conference aims to provide a forum for researchers in the field of translator training.

Plenary Speaker: Don Kiraly, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz

Conference Topics

Teaching translation: introduction to translation, legal translation, scientific translation, technical translation, literary translation, audiovisual translation, localization, inverse translation, etc.

Teaching interpreting: simultaneous interpreting, consecutive interpreting, community interpreting, etc.

Teaching signed languages interpreting and translation.

Teaching technologies for translators and interpreters.

Teaching language for translators and interpreters (L1 and L2).

Teaching professional aspects.

Assessment in translation and interpreting teaching.

Cross-cutting aspects of curriculum design: tutorials, final-year dissertations, placements, etc.

Applications of empirical research in translation and interpreting teaching.

Deadline for submissions: 19th January 2020

For more information, click here

Our contemporary world is characterised by mobility and migration. People are on the move for various reasons: to flee war and persecution in their home countries, to get reunited with their families, to work and live abroad. Movement always involves a displacement of individual people who find themselves in a new socio-cultural context and a new linguistic environment. Overcoming linguistic and cultural borders and facilitating communication often requires some form of mediation, which is often practised in institutional sites of contested discourses. Translating and interpreting narratives of migration as told by migrants entail the (re)construction and transformation of these narratives, and affect the representations of ‘self’ and ‘other’ as well as policies of social inclusion and community cohesion.

The proposed issue intends to explore the role of language, translation and interpreting in constructing narratives of migration. It invites contributions from the perspective of different research fields (translation and interpreting studies, linguistics, journalism studies, sociology, political science, etc.) on topics such as the following:

Which policies and practices are in place to use (or reject) translation and interpreting for engaging with narratives of migration?What factors influence the construction of narratives in interpreter-mediated events (e.g. asylum hearings)?How are narratives (re/de)constructed and transformed in processes of translation and interpreting?What types of narratives are constructed and (re/de)constructed (narratives of difference, of belonging) and how do they influence the representations of ‘self’ and ‘other’?What are the implications of rendering narratives of migration for translators and interpreters in respect of professional ethics?Which approaches and models are suitable for investigating such questions?

Call for abstracts: 16 December, 2019

Notification of acceptance: 23 December 2019

Call for papers: 16 March, 2020

For more information, click here

CLINA: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Translation, Interpreting and Intercultural Communication.

Translating and Interpreting between Chinese and Spanish in the Contemporary World. Research, Training, Professional Practice.

Following in the footsteps of recent issues published by the Journal, which have focused on translation and interpreting contexts that have so far received less attention from academia, this special issue will be devoted to examining the ins and outs of translation and interpreting involving Chinese and Spanish. The aim is to offer new insights into the state-of-the-art in the threefold dimension of research, training and professional practice.

Both Chinese and Spanish are undoubtedly amongst the most widely spoken languages in the world. According to the latest report by the Cervantes Institute (2019) on the role of Spanish at a global level, these languages occupy the first and second place, respectively, in the classification of languages as determined by the number of native speakers, and the second and third place, behind English, according to the total number of speakers. On the other hand, as the Elcano Report on Spain-China relations (2018) also highlights, concurrent with the significant development experienced in their national contexts, in recent decades there has been a remarkable intensification of bilateral relations between China, Spain and the rest of the Spanish-speaking countries, as well as an increasing interest in learning the Chinese language and discovering Chinese culture in Spanish-speaking contexts and vice versa. In spite of this, the volume of research devoted to studying translation between these languages in various specialised fields, to identifying the specific difficulties faced today by those who carry out translation and intercultural mediation tasks involving these languages in different professional contexts, and to reflecting on the challenges faced both by practising translators and by those who have the responsibility of training future professionals can still be described as scant.

In this context, this special issue of the journal Clina aims to serve as a platform for disseminating studies that will deepen our knowledge of the realities and challenges of the practice and teaching of translation between these two intrinsically “poly-” or “pluricentric” languages (Quesada Pacheco 2008; Rovira Esteva 2010: 271; Amorós-Negre and Prieto de los Mozos 2017) which, from “super-central” positions, interact within a system whose “hyper-central” position is indisputably occupied by English (Moreno Fernández 2015: 5). For that purpose, the concepts and approaches offered by contemporary theories of translation and other related disciplines and developed by researchers located both in the vast geography of the Spanish-speaking world on both sides of the Atlantic and on the Asian continent will be particularly useful. In addition to broadening our perspectives regarding the complex linguistic dynamics of contemporary globalisation and the processes of identity construction that take place in intercultural exchanges between the Chinese and Hispanic cultural spheres, the volume will also aim to fine-tune, enrich and diversify the theoretical-methodological basis of Translation Studies. Indeed, as more and more critical voices have been raised against certain research biases, including Eurocentrism, which may limit the development of our discipline (Tymozcko 2009; van Doorslaer and Flynn 2013), the calls to broaden the understanding of the phenomenon of translation through a greater integration of the plurality of visions, conceptions and translatological traditions that coexist around the globe have also recently gained strength.

Deadline for submissions: 1 March 2020

Expected date of publication: June 2020

For more information, click here

The School of Language, Literature, Music & Visual Culture seeks to appoint a Lecturer in Interpreting and Language Acquisition, with a specialism in Mandarin Chinese, from 1 July 2020.

The successful candidate will undertake research and teaching in an area of Interpreting or Language Acquisition relevant to the requirements of the School. The successful candidate should be able to teach Interpreting into Mandarin. She or he will teach on the undergraduate and taught postgraduate programmes offered by the departments of Language and Linguistics and Translation and Interpreting Studies, including introductory courses and research-informed specialist options; will undertake supervision of postgraduate research students; will contribute to the work of the School’s research centres; and will pursue external funding opportunities. Responsibilities will also include administrative roles as agreed with Undergraduate Programme Co-ordinators and the Head of School in Language, Literature, Music & Visual Culture.

Application deadline: 4 December 2019

For more information, click here

Potential topics include but are not restricted to:

- rethinking basic concepts of Translation Studies through the lens of indirect translation (e.g., source text and target text, author and translator, original and translation, center and periphery, equivalence, direct translation)

- core features or patterns of indirect translation verifiable across different translation domains (e.g., audiovisual, machine, specialized translation; community interpreting, audio-description, localization, transcreation, transediting)

- indirect translation in other fields and disciplines (e.g., adaptation studies, forensic linguistics, gender studies, development studies, multilingual studies, international business studies, etc.)

- indirect translation and hot topics in Translation Studies (e.g., social media, big data, multilingual crisis communication, etc.).

Deadline for submissions: 30 Nov 2019

For more information, click here

Gender and Transnational Reception. Mapping the Translation, Circulation and Recognition of Women's Writings in the 20th and 21st Centuries.

Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU

Organisers: Dr Alberica Bazzoni (University of Warwick) and Dr Caterina Paoli (University of Warwick)

Abstract Proposal Deadline: 20 December 2019

Conference: 25-26 September 2020

Organised in collaboration with the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing (CCWW) and partially funded by the British Academy, this two-day conference aims at exploring the transnational reception of 20th- and 21st-century literary texts by women (where “woman” is understood beyond cis-normative categories). How are processes of literary reception and consecration gendered and transnationalised? How do transnational networks support the circulation of texts by women? What are the processes that intervene in the recognition or misrecognition of their artistic value, in their own country and abroad? Gender still plays a crucial role in the ways in which a work of art circulates and is received, as the construction and recognition of artistic value is deeply influenced by social structures and the hierarchies that permeates them. On the other hand, the transnational dimension of feminist struggles and thought fosters the circulation of works by women beyond their country of origin, so that they often meet popular success in other countries – the cases of Nicaraguan Gioconda Belli, Nigerian Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Italian Elena Ferrante, for example, are paradigmatic in this sense. Furthermore, since the second half of the 19th century, feminist networks of translators, publishers and intellectuals have worked tirelessly to promote and enable the circulation of works by women. This conference aims at investigating the gendered promotion and reception of works by women on a transnational level.

For more information, click here

The Faculty of Translation and Interpreting (FTI) of the University of Geneva invites applications for the position of Full or Associate or Assistant Professor in the English Unit of the Department of Translation.
This full-time position involves teaching various courses in the FTI’s translation and multilingual communication programmes at the bachelor’s, master’s and postgraduate levels.
Duties include directing master’s theses and doctoral dissertations, developing research at a national and international level in translation studies (relevant to the Department’s areas of research) and securing external funding.
The successful candidate will also be responsible for managerial and organizational tasks related to his or her position in the Faculty’s Department of Translation.

Application deadline: 15 January 2020

For more information, click here

Newcastle University's School of Modern Languages is currently advertising for a permanent, full time lectureship in Spanish & Translation Studies.

This is a great opportunity to join a school with a vibrant research culture, which is enhanced by our relationships with wide research networks in the Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.

Applicants must hold a PhD in a subject area relevant to the post (Spanish, Iberian Studies, and Translation Studies) and have research expertise in Translation Studies. They will be expected to contribute to the delivery of Spanish language modules on our undergraduate programmes and to deliver research-led teaching on our undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in both Spanish and Translation Studies.

Deadline for applications: 29 November 2019

For more information, click here