Sixth IATIS Regional Workshop: Report

Workshop on Translating Disability: A Brief Report

Writing the Margins: Negotiating the Politics of Translating Dalit Literature

India, 22-24th November 2017

West Bengal State University, Calcutta

UPDATE: The Fifth IATIS Regional Workshop, Translating Disability across Cultures: The Translation and Representation of Disability in the Modern Indian Short Story, was held at Jawaharlal Nehru University Campus in New Delhi, India in September 2016. Workshop organiser Someshwar Sati and his colleagues have brought out two volumes based on this workshop, one with Routledge and one with Bloomsbury. They are Disability in Translation: The Indian Experience and Reclaiming the Disabled Subject: Representing Disability in Short Fiction. Both these publications stem from work presented and undertaken at the workshop.

New political and cultural margins have emerged as contested terrain in translation studies and one such margin that has witnessed much activity is the area of Dalit Literature. With Dalits and ‘Dalit issues’ gaining electoral mileage on the Indian subcontinent, the political scenario in India has seen the emergence of a space that is fraught with anxieties, apprehensions and misunderstandings. This has led to an increasing demand for intellectual interactions and exchanges between the erstwhile ‘elite’ centers and the margins that are now making rapid strides towards the political centres. Translation has been a key word here, and speeches, essays, manifestoes have needed translations into the common Indian languages, Hindi or English.

This workshop was partly sponsored by Routledge and IATIS gratefully acknowledges their support of our aim to stimulate interaction among scholars in different geographical regions, particularly in regions where Translation Studies is still developing and gaining recognition. 

The workshop on Translation and Disability had an enthusiastic response from the South Asian region and the programme is available to download.

Translating Disability Across Cultures: The Translation and Representation of Disability in the Modern Indian Short Story

14 to 16 September 2016

Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

Modern Indian languages present us with a rich and variegated body of short stories that capture in fiction the phenomena of disability in its manifold aspects. These stories, by both disabled and non-disabled authors, frame the experience of disability within specific cultural registers, but since they remain for the most part untranslated, their reach and influence is limited to the source-language communities. This three-day regional workshop aims a) to provide an opportunity for translation scholars and practitioners as well as postgraduate students interested in the field of translation and disability studies to come together to identify short stories from a range of modern Indian languages that primarily address the issue of disability and then translate these into English. b) to critically examine and compare the translations of disability texts from a variety of Modern Indian languages and identify if there are any common translation challenges that these texts pose and c) to develop appropriate and useful translation strategies to translate disability texts.

Translating Disability Across Cultures: The Translation and Representation of Disability in the Modern Indian Short Story

14 to 16 September 2016

Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

Modern Indian languages present us with a rich and variegated body of short stories that capture in fiction the phenomena of disability in its manifold aspects. These stories, by both disabled and non-disabled authors, frame the experience of disability within specific cultural registers, but since they remain for the most part untranslated, their reach and influence is limited to the source-language communities. This three-day regional workshop aims a) to provide an opportunity for translation scholars and practitioners as well as postgraduate students interested in the field of translation and disability studies to come together to identify short stories from a range of modern Indian languages that primarily address the issue of disability and then translate these into English. b) to critically examine and compare the translations of disability texts from a variety of Modern Indian languages and identify if there are any common translation challenges that these texts pose and c) to develop appropriate and useful translation strategies to translate disability texts.

 This workshop was partly sponsored by Routledge and IATIS gratefully acknowledges their support of our aim to stimulate interaction among scholars in different geographical regions, particularly in regions where Translation Studies is still developing and gaining recognition.

IATIS is committed to stimulating interaction among scholars in different geographical regions, particularly in regions where Translation Studies is still developing and gaining recognition. The Regional Workshops Committee of IATIS is pleased to invite proposals to host a Regional Workshop in 2025 or 2026. A small amount of funding is available (up to £750 for each workshop). Workshop organizers are expected to source further funding from local funding bodies and organizations to meet the total cost of the workshop if required.