International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies

Name and Legal Status

The International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies (IATIS) is a non-profit making organization. It provides an intellectual forum where scholars from different regional and disciplinary backgrounds can debate issues relating to translation and other forms of cross-cultural communication.

Address for Correspondence

The IATIS address for correspondence is that of the Secretary/Treasurer serving in that role at any given time. The secretariat will change when a new Secretary/Treasurer is appointed.

Official Language

The official language of IATIS is English.

Aims

IATIS aims to:

• Establish an organizational structure that will facilitate the exchange of knowledge, expertise and resources among scholars in various parts of the world;

• Stimulate interaction among scholars in different geographical regions;

• Encourage scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds to explore areas of mutual concern.

Activities

IATIS undertakes the following kinds of activities to fulfill its aims:

• Convening triennial conferences;

• Organizing other meetings and workshops;

• Promoting the publications of scholarly works;

• Encouraging and coordinating research;

• Exchanging information with other bodies and institutions;

• Raising funds to further its aims.

Organisational Structure

Executive Council

The governing body of IATIS is an Executive Council comprising:

• The President;

• The Two Vice-Presidents;

• The Secretary/Treasurer;

• The Chair of Executive Council;

• The Committee Chairs and Website Manager(s);

• Twelve to fifteen additional members.

Duties of Executive Council

The President:

• To represent IATIS in external contacts;
• To sign official documents on behalf of IATIS;
• To chair general meetings of IATIS.

The Vice-Presidents:

• To deputize for and assist the President.

The Chair of Executive Council:

• To chair Executive Council meetings and coordinate the work of the Executive Council.

The Secretary/Treasurer

• To collect income and make payments on behalf of IATIS;

• To arrange appropriate public liability insurance to limit the liability of Executive Council members in the country where the Secretary/Treasurer is based;

• To provide a budget for the upcoming year within three months of appointment, and on the anniversary of his/her appointment;

• To provide budgets and statements of income and expenditure to the Executive Council on a regular basis.

• To transfer surplus funds and financial records to the new Secretary/Treasurer within three months of the election of a new Executive Council.

Twelve to fifteen members:

• To represent the views of the membership of IATIS;
• To propose, discuss and introduce activities commensurate with the aims of the Association.

Further Duties of the Executive Council

• To convene a general meeting during the triennial conference;

• To oversee the elections of the Association’s officers;

• To present the budget to the IATIS membership;

• To promote the aims and activities of the Association;

• To set up committees as appropriate.

Appointment of members of the Executive Council

The Executive Council will be elected for a four-year term by a ballot of individual members. In the case of the resignation of a member before the end of his/her term, the Executive Council may appoint a replacement member for the remainder of the term. Members of Executive Council cannot serve in the same function for more than two consecutive terms.

Membership

• Any person or institution may become a member by payment of dues. In exceptional cases, the Executive Council reserves the right to refuse or annul membership.

• The categories of membership are individual and institutional. The categories of individual membership are: Full, Student/Retired, and Group;

• Membership is renewable annually;

• Honorary membership is offered by the Executive Council on a case by case basis;

• Membership fees are determined by the Assocation’s General Meeting.

Amendments to the Constitution

Amendments to the Constitution may be made by the Executive Council and approved by two thirds of the votes returned in a ballot of individual members.

Accounting

The Association’s accounts are audited on a regular basis.

To register as an IATIS member using the online form, click here:

December 2009: IATIS is pleased to announce the publication of the fifth issue of New Voices in Translation Studies.

August 2010: IATIS announces that the 15th issue of the IATIS Bulletin (May-August2010) is now available. [Access the Bulletin here]

August 2010: IATIS announces election to Executive Council. Nominations are now being sought for election candidates for the IATIS Executive Council. The deadline for nominations is 30th September 2010.

• Read the procedure for nominations and elections here.

• The nomination form can be downloaded here.

The International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies (IATIS) is a world-wide forum designed to enable scholars from different regional and disciplinary backgrounds to debate issues pertinent to translation and other forms of intercultural communication.

Ongoing internationalization and networking, increasing population mobility, mass migration and rapidly developing communication technologies involve cross-cultural representation of one kind or another. Mediation is provided by translators and interpreters in some cases. In others, this mediation is assisted by means and processes which are less explicit and thus remain largely untheorized and under-researched.

Institutions and individual researchers across the world have been placing issues of globalization and multiculturalism at the centre of their scholarly agenda, while others explore more traditional avenues of translation and cultural transmission. Translation Studies is now an established discipline in many academic and educational contexts on an international level. Intercultural Studies is rapidly emerging as a vibrant area of study in its own right.

To date, the interests of academics and researchers in these rapidly growing fields have been largely misrepresented. Existing organizations tend to be restricted in their aims and scope, closely focusing on either the professional development of translators and interpreters, on specific geographical areas, or on a narrowly-defined field of translation. At the same time, issues of translation and intercultural communication feature only occasionally in the conferences and publications of scholarly associations in areas such as anthropology, comparative literature, or pragmatics. This explains the need for a world-wide association which encompasses both Translation and Intercultural Studies; to this end, IATIS can be posited as the association which caters for various aspects of intercultural communication, providing an internationally-based platform for scholars and institutions to exchange information and insights on various topical translation and interpreting issues.

Remit

The main tasks of the Publications Committee are:

• defining and implementing a publications policy that enables IATIS to provide a forum for debate and to stimulate scholarly interaction and the exchange of knowledge
• supervising the publication of the IATIS yearbook, a full-length, refereed volume containing a thematically coherent collection of essays and overseen by an expert editor
• defining themes for individual volumes, appointing editors for these volumes and creating mechanisms to ensure overall quality control
• liaising with publishers and obtaining estimates of publishing costs
• exploring other publication possibilities and initiatives
• securing discounts from publishers for IATIS members.

The Committee reports to the IATIS Treasurer and to the Executive Council.

Composition

DUNCAN POUPARD, Publications Committee Chair

Chinese University of Hong Kong, SAR Hong Kong

duncan[at]cuhk[dot]edu[dot]hk  

Duncan Poupard is Assistant Professor in the Department of Translation at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on the translation of Chinese ethnic minority literature, specifically of the Naxi minority in southwest China. His primary interest is in furthering the recognition and revitalization of minority and endangered forms of writing, and he has worked with museums and libraries around the world, including the British Library and the Barcelona Museum of World Cultures, on the cataloguing and translation of Naxi manuscripts.    

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ROSARIO MARTÍN, Secretary of the IATIS Publications Committee

Universidad de Salamanca Spain

mrmr[at]usal[dot]es

M. Rosario Martín Ruano teaches translation at the University of Salamanca, where she achieved her PhD. Her research interests include legal translation, translation theory, gender studies and post-colonial critique. She has published several books, anthologies and essays on these issues, including El (des)orden de los discursos: la traducción de lo políticamente correcto (Granada, Comares, 2003) and Últimas corrientes teóricas en los estudios de traducción y sus aplicaciones (coedited with Anne Barr and Jesús Torres, Salamanca, Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2001). She is a practising translator.

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ROMÁN ÁLVAREZ, Member of the IATIS Publications Committee

Universidad de Salamanca, Spain

roman[at]ual[dot]es

Román Álvarez Rodríguez is Professor of English Philology at the University of Salamanca, Spain, and currently Dean of the Faculty of Philology. He has published widely in the field of literary criticism and translation studies. Worthy of mention in this latter field are the anthologies Translation/Power/Subversion (coedited with África Vidal, Clevedon, Multilingual Matters, 1996) and Cartografías de la traducción: del post-estructuralismo al multiculturalismo (Salamanca, Ediciones Almar, 2001). He is a practising translator.

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DIRK DELABASTITA, Member of the IATIS Publications Committee

University of Namur Belgium

dirk[dot]delabastita[at]fundp[dot]ac[dot]be

Dirk Delabastita (1960) is professor of English literature and literary theory at the Facultés Universitaires Notre-Dame de la Paix, Namur (Belgium). He wrote his PhD (1990) on Shakespeare’s wordplay in Hamlet and the problems of translating it (There’s a Double Tongue, published in 1993). He edited two further volumes on the translation of wordplay: Wordplay and Translation (1996, a special issue of The Translator) and Traductio. Essays on Punning and Translation (1997). Dirk Delabastita also co-authored a Dutch-language dictionary of literary terms (Lexicon van Literaire Termen, with Hendrik van Gorp and Rita Ghesquiere, 1998), which has been translated into French (Dictionnaire des termes littéraires, 2001). His other books include European Shakespeares (with Lieven D’hulst, 1993). He serves on the editorial board of The Translator, is one of the series editors of Approaches to Translation Studies (Rodopi) and belongs to the team of supervisors of CETRA.

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ROY DILLEY, Member of the IATIS Publications Committee

University of St Andrews Scotland, UK

rmd[at]st-and[dot]ac[dot]uk

Roy Dilley teaches in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews, and specialises in the study of the social organisation and culture of the Haalpulaaren (Tukulor) in Senegal, West Africa. He has published widely in journals and edited collections on this topic over the last 20 years, and has recently completed a historical ethnography entitled Islamic and Caste Knowledge Practices among Haalpulaaren, Senegal: Between Mosque and Termite Mound, in the International African Institute Library Series, London 2004. His earlier work includes Senegal in the Clio Press World Bibliographical Series, Oxford, 1994 (with J. S. Eades). He also has research interests in anthropological theory and cultural economics, and has edited two thematic collections of essays, entitled Contesting Markets: Analyses of Ideology, Discourse and Practice (Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 1992), and The Problem of Context (Berghahn Press, Oxford 1999). This 1999 publication deals with how interpretative anthropologists have approached the problem of context in their analyses, and attempts to uncover the assumptions that lie behind the use of this key concept in anthropology, linguistics and other related disciplines.

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JULIANE HOUSE, Member of the IATIS Publications Committee

University of Hamburg Germany

j[dot]house[at]uni-hamburg[dot]de

Juliane House was born in Berlin, Germany. She studied English, Spanish and International Law at Heidelberg university , where she graduated with a degree in translation (English, Spanish, German) and international law in 1966. She taught German as a second language to international students at Heidelberg university, worked as a translator, interpreter and market researcher for an multinational firm in Frankfurt before emigrating to Canada in 1968. After working in a Law Library at York University in Toronto, she continued her studies in General and Applied Linguistics at the University of Toronto. In her M.A. thesis (1971) she discussed "Theoretical Aspects of Translation", and in her Ph.D. (1976) she set up a "Model for Translation Quality Assessment". Following her remigration to Germany, she worked at the University of Bochum writing a pedagogical and an interactional grammar of English, as well as conducting a number of contrastive English-German pragmatic analyses. Since 1980 she holds the position of professor of applied linguistics at the University of Hamburg .She has published numerous articles and books in the fields of contrastive pragmatics, translation theory, intercultural communication, discourse analysis, interlanguage studies and, most recently, English as a lingua franca. She is a member of the editorial board of The Translator and Applied Linguistics, of the advisory board of Target, and a founding member of the German Society of Translation Studies and its Yearbooks of Translation and Interpreting. She is also a member of the German Science Foundation's research centre on multilingualism, where she directs a project on "Covert Translation" which investigates the influence of English as a lingua franca on discourse norms in other languages via processes of multilingual text production. In 1998 she was awarded an honorary doctorate from the university of Jyväskylä, Finland in recognition of her work in translation theory and cross-cultural discourse analysis.

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Séverine Hubscher-Davidson, IATIS Executive Council Member

Aston University, Birmingham UK

s[dot]hubscher-davidson[at]aston[dot]ac[dot]uk

Séverine Hubscher-Davidson is a lecturer in Translation Studies at Aston University, England, where she teaches translation and interpreting theory and practice. She received her PhD from the University of Bath. Her research interests include translators’ personalities, the translation process and translation pedagogy. She has organized short courses for professional translators and interpreters, including UK government linguists. Recent publications include 'A Reflection on Action Research Processes in Translator Training', in The Interpreter and Translator Trainer (2008), ‘Personal Diversity and Diverse Personalities in Translation: A Study of Individual Differences’, in Perspectives (2009) and ‘A Discussion of Ethnographic Research Methods and Their Relevance for Translation Process Research', in Across Languages and Cultures (2011). Séverine is co-editor (with John Kearns) of the IATIS Bulletin and a practising translator.

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ALET KRUGER, Member of the IATIS Publications Committee

University of South Africa, Pretoria South Africa

krugea[at]unisa[dot]ac[dot]za

As Senior Lecturer in the Dept of Linguistics at the University of South Africa (Unisa), Alet Kruger has taught translation students in the postgraduate Diploma in Translation and the Honours in Translation Studies for 20 odd years and has recently become involved in the BA in Court Interpreting at undergraduate level as well. She also supervises masters and doctoral students in Translation Studies at Unisa. Her doctoral studies on lexical cohesion and register variation in translation paved the way for her current interest in corpus-based translation research. She is currently editing the proceedings of the Corpus-based Translation Studies (Research and Applications) conference jointly hosted by Unisa and UMIST in Pretoria in July 2003, to be published in a special issue of Language Matters, Vol. 34 (2004), as well as in a book in 2005. She serves on the editorial boards of Babel (FIT’s journal), Hermeneus, the South African Journal of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics and the John Benjamins Translation Library series. She is responsible for updating the SA Bibliography on Translation, Interpreting, Lexicography and Terminology for the SA Translators’ Institute, which contains more than 1500 entries. She was appointed in 2003 as consultant to the South African Bible Society which is involved in a new translation of the Bible into Afrikaans. She is also a practising translator and is currently working on the translation of a selection of Zakes Mda’s plays into Afrikaans.

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ASHLEY RIGGS, Member of the IATIS Publications Committee

Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy

ashleymerrill[dot]riggs[at]unive[dot]it

Ashley Riggs is Assistant Professor of English and Translation at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Italy). Prior to moving to Venice, Ashley worked for many years at the Faculty of Translation and Interpreting of the University of Geneva, where she also completed her PhD. Ashley’s research focuses on the language of the news, intercultural mediation and cultural (mis)representation in the news, constructive news in translation, and feminist/queer rewritings of fairy tales and their translations. Three of her recent publications in these areas are Stylistic Deceptions in Online News (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), ‘How online news headlines and accompanying images “translate” a violent event: A cross-cultural case study’ (Language and Intercultural Communication, 2021), and ‘Of Tales, tragic opera, transformation and “tongues”: Tristan und Isolde in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber’ (in Angela Carter’s Pyrotechnics: A Union of Contraries, C. Crofts and M. Mulvey-Roberts (eds), Bloomsbury Academic, 2022).

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ÁFRICA VIDAL, Member of the IATIS Publications Committee

Universidad de Salamanca, Spain

africa[at]usal[dot]es

África Vidal Claramonte is Professor of Translation at the University of Salamanca, Spain. Her research interests include translation theory, post-structuralism, post-modernism and gender studies. She has published a number of books, anthologies and essays on these issues, including Traducción, manipulación, desconstrucción (Salamanca, Ediciones Colegio de España, 1995), El futuro de la traducción (València, Alfons el Magnànim, 1998) Translation/Power/Subversion (coedited with Román Álvarez, Clevedon, Multilingual Matters, 1996). She is a practising translator specialized in the field of contemporary art.

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In his message to the delegates at the Seoul Conference marking the launch of IATIS, Director-General  Koïchiro MATSUURA wished us a long and fruitful existence working in collaboration with UNESCO and said that UNESCO  looks to our association "for active support and cooperation in terms of thought, the exchange of ideas and research".

IATIS is delighted to announce the publication of Translation: Theory and Practice in Dialogue, the fourth volume in the IATIS-Continuum Series on Translation Studies (IATIS Yearbook 2009). This collection edited by Antoinette Fawcett, Karla L. Guadarrama García and Rebecca Hyde Parker includes contributions by Jean BOASE-BEIER, Elizabeth THORNTON, Lina FISHER, Christine CALFOGLOU, Clive SCOTT, Agnieszka PANTUCHOWICZ, Paulina Gąsior, Szu-Wen CINDY KUNG, Hiroko FURUKAWA, Kirsten MALMKJÆR.

IATIS Yearbooks are available to members free of charge. An electronic version is also available at the IATIS Intranet.

[Click here for more information on this new publication]