Call for Papers: Special Issue of Translation Studies: Orality and Translation

guest edited by Paul F. Bandia, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

For details see www.tandf.co.uk/journals/rtrs

There is a growing interest in orality as a concept underpinning research in many disciplines, including translation studies. Orality has featured prominently in studies related to pre-modernist traditions, modernist representations of the past, and postmodernist expressions of artistry such as in audiovisual media. Its conceptualization may vary according to the research objectives or preoccupations of particular disciplines. Anthropologists and historians conceptualize orality as the medium of expression and discourse of non-literate cultures, while colonialists and Christian missionaries explored orality as a means to understanding so-called primitive or heathen societies for purposes of proselytism and civilization. Modernists have shown an anaphoric interest in orality mainly as a sounding board for calibrating the privileges of modernity. In more recent times, postmodernist preoccupations with orality have explored issues related to the representation of otherness, the assertion of marginalized identities through a variety of art forms such as literature, cinema, music, painting and the spoken word. In these various disciplines or approaches translation or interpretation is indispensable as the conduit for the recording, textualization, representation or appraisal of orality. Thanks to the influential work of scholars like Albert Lord (The Singer of Tales, 1960), Jack Goody (The Domestication of the Savage Mind , 1977) and Walter Ong (Orality and Literacy: the Technologizing of the Word, 1982), orality has shed its negative image as primitive, unwritten, non-literate and exotic, and has grown into a major field of scientific interest and the focus of interdisciplinary research including translation studies.