Tracing Self-Translation : discursive perspectives in context
Maud Gonne, University of Leuven, Belgium
Klaartje Merrigan, University of Leuven, Belgium
Reine Meylaerts, University of Leuven, Belgium 
Katarzyna Szymanska, University of Oxford, UK

Once known as a marginal field of study, self-translation has recently attracted a considerable amount of scholarly interest. Current theories vacillate between opposing understandings of self-translation, depending on whether the focal point consists of the self-translator as a unique, 'privileged agent of transfer' (Tanqueiro 1999), or of the self-translated text as the result of an act of re-writing, and thus essentially no different from any other text that is reshaped or 'fragmented' in view of a new readership (Lefevere 1992, Bassnett 2013). The focus on the agency of the self-translator has led to passionate pleas to 'move beyond Beckett' in order to place reflections on self-translation in a broader sociological framework of a competing world system of languages (Grutman 2013). Theoretical reflections on the self-translated text have, in turn, defined the latter as a complex cultural artifact which constantly questions binary oppositions underlying key-concepts of translation studies (Cordingley 2013).

Nevertheless, current approaches tend to neglect the specificity of the self-translation process, which implies a cross-fertilization between writing, translating, reading and often re-writing between languages as well as an act of world-construction across languages. While self-translators are often exceptional 'cultural brokers', they are also the creators of complex literary scenographies, which necessarily bear the traces of the multilingual enunciative conditions out of which they emerge. By focusing on literary scenographies, this panel aims to extend current research on bilingualism within linguistic theories of discourse by reflecting on the ramifications of the 'bilingual condition' on the literary discourse of self-translating authors. The term scenography, as introduced by Maingueneau (2004) refers here to the narrative scene constructed in a fictional text, which reflects and legitimate the genre in which it partakes and in turn influences the 'image' of the author perceived as the creator of that particular scenography. In the case of literary self-translation, we believe these scenographies need to be linked to (i) the specific language(s) in which they are written and (ii) the complex author-translator status of the writer who created them.

The purpose of this panel is therefore to study self-translation as both a translational and literary activity, with highly complex modes of interaction which can be traced discursively. Concretely, we aim to (1)open up new methodological questions on how translation strategies between versions can be linked to narrative and/or discursive structures which concur across versions (2)study the continuities (and not only the dissimilarities) between versions and analyze how these deepen or problematize the relationship between a given literary scenography and its double context of reception.

Possible research questions are:

- Are there recurring topoi, stereotypes, discursive strategies within the self-translated text/discourse? What kind of discursive 'traces' (narration, voice, time, space, ...) emerge out of the conditions from which self-translators write?

- Is it possible to speak of a self-translating 'ethos', at once inscribing itself in authorial and translational discourses?

- To what extend does self-translation constitute a meta-literary or meta-translational practice? Can it be analyzed as the (self-)translator's comment on either the original or translation process?

For informal enquiries: [maudDOTgonneATartsDOTkuleuvenDOTbe]

Maud Gonne isa PhD student in Translation Studies at the University of Leuven, Belgium. Her current research interest concerns the role of intercultural mediators in the process of cultural nation building. She is preparing a doctoral dissertation on the forms and functions of intercultural and interlingual transfer activities by the writer-translator Georges Eekhoud (1854-1927) within Belgium and between Belgium and France (https://lirias.kuleuven.be/cv?u=U0058694).

 

Klaartje Merrigan is a research fellow of the Flemish Fund for Scientific Research (FWO) at the University of Leuven, Belgium. Her current research interest concerns the practice of literary self-translation in twentieth-century Canadian and French literature. She is preparing a doctoral dessertation on the literary works of Nancy Huston between 1948-2002. She is also a member of the research group 'Multilingualism, Translation, Creation', of the Institut des Textes et Manuscrits modernes (UMR CNRS/ENS) (https://lirias.kuleuven.be/cv?u=U0085898).

 

 

 

Reine Meylaerts (KU Leuven) is Professor of Comparative Literature and director of CETRA (Centre for Translation Studies; http://www.arts.kuleuven.be/cetra) at KU Leuven. Her current research interests concern the theory, methodology and historiography of intercultural relationships in multilingual societies. She is the author of numerous articles and chapters on these topics (https://lirias.kuleuven.be/items-by-author?author=Meylaerts%2C+Reinhilde%3B+U0031976). She is review editor of Target. International Journal of Translation Studies and coordinator of 2011-2014: FP7-PEOPLE-2010-ITN: TIME: Translation Research Training: An integrated and intersectoral model for Europe. She is former Secretary General (2004-2007) of the European Society for Translation Studies (EST) and Chair of the Doctoral Studies Committee of EST.

 

Katarzyna Szymańska (Universiry of Oxford) is a PhD student in Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford, UK. Funded by Rawnsley Graduate Scholarship (St Hugh's College), her project focuses on the concept of meta-translation in contemporary translations of poetry across English, German and Polish. She is also a postgraduate representative of British Comparative Literature Association (http://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/katarzyna-szymanska).

 

 

 

SESSION PLAN

Each paper is allocated with a 20 minutes time slot + 10 minutes discussion.

Discussion time at the end of each session

INTRODUCTION (20 min)

Title: Tracing Self-Translation: discursive perspectives in context

Speakers: Klaartje Merrigan, University of Leuven, Belgium and Katarzyna Szymanska, University of Oxford, UK.

PART 1: MULTIPLE BELONGINGS

PAPER 1:

Title: Israel Zangwill: translator and (self-)translator from Hebrew and Yiddish into English

Speaker: Denise Merkle, Université de Moncton, Canada

Abstract:

This paper will contribute to research on self-translation by studying the case of Israel Zangwill, the son of East End London immigrants. Zangwill earned a B.A. in English and French in the 1880s, in addition to learning the two traditional languages of the Jewish community: Yiddish and Hebrew. His mastery of Hebrew enabled him to translate competently Hebrew poetry into English; however, Zangwill was not primarily a translator. Rather, he was a successful author, well integrated into English cultural and literary circles. Yet, some of his writings were more controversial, in particular his self-translations that incorporated linguistic hybridity to varying degrees.

To understand the power dynamics that influenced Zangwill's (self-)translation decisions and strategies, the paper will refer to polysystem theory as well as to Bourdieu-inspired sociological approaches to translation that consider issues of (authorized) language and power. This theoretical framework will underpin the analysis of, in particular, Zangwill's Children of the Ghetto: A Study of a Peculiar People, as an example of self-translation. It was written as a realistic socio-linguistic portrait of the linguistic hybridity that marked the East End Jewish community, and it became the first Anglo-Jewish best-seller to present the spiritual crisis that London's assimilated Jewish community was facing. Zangwill wished that his Jewish roots be known and was keenly aware of "'asymmetric' linguistic configurations" (Grutman 2013) between English and poor immigrant languages (e.g. Polish, Russian and Yiddish), that did not enjoy the same symbolic capital English did. At the beginning of the 1890s,the Jewish Publication Society of America (JPSA) was looking for a Jewish Robert Elsmere and asked Zangwill to produce an English version based on London's East End for Jewish Americans, in addition to British Jews. However, to reproduce the linguistic diversity of the community he was forced to choose between writing a linguistically hybrid text or

(self-)translating immigrant languages, in particular Yiddish and Hebrew.

Israel Zangwill belonged to a traditional linguistic minority (Grutman 2013: 188), was multilingual and "well read in more than one literary tradition" (ibid.: 193). The paper will examine examples of (self-)translation strategies in Children of the Ghetto, and compare them to strategies retained by Zangwill in earlier works as well as to examples of self-translation between conventional British and Jewish cultures in his daily life in order to come to a clearer understanding of his status as a (self-)translator. By cultural self-translation, we refer to Zangwill's negotiations between British (dominant) and Jewish (minority) cultures in London.

Like Oscar Wilde's French original Salome, Children of the Ghetto has no source text, Zangwill self-translating between Hebrew/Yiddish and English while putting pen to paper. While Wilde, Kafka and Huston, among other translator/writers have been abundantly studied, Zangwill's works have not yet attracted the attention of Translation Studies scholars. As such, analyzing this case study will add new research to the literature on self-translation.

Bionote:

Denise Merkle teaches translation at the Université de Moncton, Canada. She publishes on the translating subject, censorship and translation, and official translation/translators. Her articles have been published in various journals (e.g. Babel, TransCanadiana , TTR) and collected volumes (e.g. Agents of Translation, ed. J. Milton and P. Bandia; Translation Effects, ed. K. Mezei, S. Simon, L. von Flotow; Traduction et censure, ed. M. Ballard). She has edited or co-edited journal issues (TTR, Alternative francophone, the latter with A. Klimkiewicz) and collected volumes (e.g. The Power of the Pen with C. O'Sullivan, L. van Doorslaer and M. Wolf).

PAPER 2:

Title: Self-translation, textual role-shiftingness and cross-fertilisation in the works by Marco Micone

Speaker: Cecilia Foglia, University of Montreal, Canada

Abstract:

In the article entitled "History and the Self-translator" (2013), Jan Hokenson maintains that a large amount of translative activity has been prompted by four main historical drives. These are the foundation of political states, post-colonialism, religious reform movements and diasporas (such as exile and migration). Such immense translative activity, as she claims, includes an important subgroup, that of self-translation and self-translators, which needs to be investigated more deeply. In line with Hokenson's call, our presentation will focus on the case study represented by Marco Micone and his peculiar activity as a migrant self-translator.

Born in Italy in 1945, he migrates to Quebec (Canada) to escape poverty. Micone is a polyvalent individual. Not only has he extensively written, translated, adapted and self-translated for the stage, he has also played a politically pivotal role within the Italian migrant community of Quebec by supporting the adoption of a multicultural and plurilingual politics. Despite being an Italian native speaker, Micone has always written his plays in French, and translated/adapted for the stage from English or Italian into French. His name has thus seldom crossed the ocean to reach his homeland. Nevertheless, the chance to be published in Italian arrives when he agrees to self-translate his theatrical trilogy for Cosmo Iannone Editore, a small publishing house interested in translating into Italian the works of Italian migrant writers living abroad.

To investigate Micone's self-translations, we have adopted the socio-graphical approach, which is a theoretical model stemming from Bourdieu's (1993) concept of "genetic sociology". This approach aims at uncovering Micone's personal writing and translatorial dispositions within a national and social system. In other words, this model does not prioritise sociological subjects over the context or vice versa. It rather investigates them as interdependent forces that mutually influence and affect the cultural product. The application of such a model to Micone's self-translations has brought about some preliminary results. While self-translating from French into Italian, and after having self-translated literally the first four scenes of his first play, Micone decides to rewrite the rest of the trilogy. Fascinated by the way the Italian language reshapes and revitalises his plays, Micone drastically decides to put the source texts of his trilogy originally written in French in the '80s aside. Thus, the self-translations into Italian become the "new source texts" of the trilogy he will then self-translate into French, too. We refer here to an exceptional textual role-shiftingness triggered by a linguistic and cultural change.

Micone's unique experience as self-translator has inspired the following research questions: since his textual role-shiftingness appears to be an attempt to blur the frontiers between original creation and translation, is self-translation not a final result but a "meta-writing-practice" capable of cross-fertilising various cultural fields, leaving a mark on them and eventually generating some features of its own? Can self-translation help us understand how multilingual migrant agents perceive interculturality? How can TS benefit from studying self-translation (and self-translators) especially in its variant of migration?

Bionote:

Cecilia Foglia received her BA in Foreign Languages, Literature and Culture, and her MA in Modern Euro-American Languages and Literature from the University of Macerata (Italy). She is currently writing a Ph.D thesis at the University of Montreal (Canada), where she also works as research assistant and teaching assistant of Italian. Her interests include the sociology of translation, cultural translation and migration literature in translation. Her doctoral research focuses on the literary production and trajectory of Marco Micone, an Italian writer, adapter, translator and self-translator who migrated to Québec after World War II.

PAPER 3:

Title: Ethnographies and Autoethnographies as Self-Translations: The Case of 19th Century Writings in Spanish and Mapudungun

Speaker: Gertrudis Payas, Universidad Católica de Temuco, Chile

Abstract:

The late 20th century saw the realization in the disciplines of anthropology and ethnography that most narratives of so-called "primitive" cultures based on oral accounts gathered by Western scholars to help understand such cultures had to be viewed as representations created by the practitioners themselves and hence reflected their biases and prejudices. This acknowledgement characterized the ensuing "crisis of representation" that affected historical and anthropological studies (Marcus and Fisher 1986). In general terms, postcolonial translation studies can be described as a consequence of this turning point (Carbonell 1997; Bassnett &Trivedi 1999).

Applying these concepts to the analysis of translated ethnographic texts, Kate Sturge (2005) observed that ethnographers are often unaware of translation as a method for understanding and representing cultures, and argues that most ethnographic narratives obtained by eliciting information from informants and textualizing it in their language can be considered as originals, created and formatted by the ethnographer himself, before subsequent translation The ethnographer can thus be regarded as both the author of the original, creating the text in the indigenous language and preparing it for translation, and of the subsequent translation, meaning that such authors can arguably be regarded as self-translators, as well as target readers.

However, on other occasions it is the native informant who textualizes oral accounts in his own language using the ethnographer's method, and translates them into the ethnographer's language. Pratt terms these texts autoethnographic (1991), and in this case it is even clearer that the process is one of self-translation.

The language of Chile's native Mapuche, Mapudungun, was first described by the Spanish Jesuit missionaries during Spanish colonial rule in the 16th and 17th centuries, although it was not until the late 19th century, after Chile had declared independence, that the first modern descriptions and systematizations of Mapudungun were undertaken. Rudolf Lenz, a German philologist residing in Chile, published a series of studies in which he presented and commented on a collection of oral narratives and lists of phrases compiled during his field trips with the help of informants who also collaborated in the translation. One of these indigenous collaborators, Manuel Manquilef, took it upon himself to publish similar material, using the same method and translation strategies as the philologist but introducing literary features that enhanced the text in Spanish. Manquilef's literary embellishments attracted severe criticism from Lenz.

This presentation will examine the relevance of parody and other literary tropes when considering the translation strategies used in these self-translations and discuss the discourse on translation and the indigenous language that is explicitly or implicitly proposed by both Lenz and Manquilef's texts, together with the role of translation at the intersection of poetics and ideology.

Bionote:

Gertrudis Payàs is lecturer in Translation and Interpreting at the Languages and Translation Department of the Universidad Católica de Temuco. She is a member of a research group on intercultural studies (Núcleo de Estudios Interétnicos e Interculturales) and of the Alfaqueque Research Group at the Universidad de Salamanca. Her research focuses on the history of translation and interpretation in Hispanic America, with an emphasis on their cultural functions. This presentation is part of the Fondecyt Research Project: "Translation and interpretation during the period 1814–1930 in the Araucanian frontier as a means of revealing the dynamics of recognition" (Chile, 2011-2014).

 

PART 2: NEGOTIATING THE SELF IN SELF-TRANSLATION

PAPER 4

Title: Traces of memory and metaphor in the self-translated text

Speaker: Frances Antoinette Vosloo, Stellenbosch University, South Africa

Abstract:

Skinned (2013), South African bilingual author and poet Antjie Krog's most recent poetry volume in English translation, includes a section entitled 'becomings'. The section comprises of eight poems originating from a poetry caravan across Senegal and Mali which Krog attended together with African poets and griots. In her narrative fictional book(s) A change of tongue (2003) and its translation into Afrikaans, 'n Ander tongval (2005), Krog recreates the landscape of poetry with which she engaged as Afrikaans mother tongue speaker during the travels to Timbuktu. Her narrative account is interspersed with translated poems of her own and of the African writers. The eight poems in Skinned represent a process of re-vision, opening up a space (through the text) where culture and language come to signify a multiplicity and diversity of creative origin.

Using Lionnet's (1989) interpretation of the term métissage, the poems in Skinned and A change of tongue are read as textual spaces characterized by stratifications of diverse language and cultural systems. These texts, specifically Skinned, represents a site or a space of métissage on more than one level: In her recollection of the words and poems of some of the African poets, Krog shapes these words into Afrikaans, her mother tongue, as part of a process of translation as comprehension (read understanding and knowledge); the comprehended poetry is represented in 'n Ander tongval, only to be translated later into English in the book A change of tongue (which was published before the Afrikaans version), and 'retranslated' as 'complete' poems in Skinned. Interweaved in these poems are Krog's own poetry – fragments of existing as well as new poems that originated during the poetry caravan. In the process of retranslation and the creation of different or differing versions, Krog adopts a rhizomatic translational identity, reflecting her socioideological horizons.

This paper explores the interlocking traces of memory, metaphor and identity by following the modes of interaction and conditions underlying the creation of these poems. Following Nouss's (2007) take on métissage within the frame of translation, Skinned is interpreted as a meaningful vector and index of the historicity of not only Krog's process of translation, but also the African origin of her texts. The poems stand as both textual and oral traces of the past – as spaces of memory constructed through the interreferential nature of the texts themselves.

Bionote:

Dr. Franci Vosloo is a postdoctoral fellow in Translation Studies at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. The title of her PhD was "Om te skryf deur te vertaal en te vertaal deur te skryf: Antjie Krog as skrywer/vertaler" (Writing through translating and translating through writing: Antjie Krog as writer/translator". With degrees in Archaeology and Translation Studies, her research interests include the sociology of translation, self-translation and translation as abjection.

PAPER 5:

Title: Self-translation and Narration in Rolando Hinojosa's Klail City Death Trip Series

Speaker: Marlene Hansen Esplin, Brigham Young University, USA

Abstract:

I examine the question of narration and how it both shapes and develops in the Spanish and English novels that constitute Mexican-American author and self-translator Rolando Hinojosa's Klail City Death Trip series. Through the course of this series of fifteen interconnected novels, Hinojosa frequently recurs to the device of an active, self-referential, and sardonic narrator who both colludes with and playfully jeers at the other narrative voices. I argue that the narrator's interpolations reflect Hinojosa's own internal negotiations as an author and translator who displays and interrogates Anglo, Mexican, and Mexican-American identities in the linguistically ambivalent space or scenography of South Texas, Hinojosa's Klail City or the larger Belken County. This recurring narrative voice enables Hinojosa to foreground or make "visible" the translation processes that are otherwise understated in his multilingual oeuvre and to lend authorial credence and coherence to the stories and many voices that make up his extensive narrative project.

I ask if the narrator's constant interpolations and humorous asides can be considered part of a larger "ethos" of self-translation and if, through the similar but disparate Spanish and English versions of a number of the novels in the series, Hinojosa creates an inter-textual reading project that is decidedly bilingual and transnational. The spaces between the versions of his novels reiterate his role as translator and self-translator and evidence ways in which Hinojosa, like his meddlesome narrator, both mediates among and causes trouble for the other characters and/or narrative voices who animate his series.

The meta-narrative of the Klail City series engages both the problems and possibilities of self-translation in the context of the borderlands between Texas and Mexico. This paper is part of a future chapter of a current book project entitled Spanish, English, and In-Between: Self-Translation in the U.S. and Latin America, in which I examine incidences of several U.S. Latino/a and/or Latin American authors who write Spanish and English versions of their texts.

Bionote:

Marlene is an Assistant Professor of Humanities at Brigham Young University with a PhD in Hispanic Cultural Studies from Michigan State University. Her research focuses mainly on how problems of translation or rewriting create intersections between U.S. and Latin American literatures. Her current book project concerns U.S. and Latin American "self-translators" who write Spanish and English versions of their texts. Other projects include a book chapter on how shifts in translating by bilingual authors such as Rosario Ferré, Margarita Cota-Cárdenas, and María Luisa Bombal reflect ambivalences surrounding a feminist identity and an article discussing heteroglossia in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah.

PAPER 6:

Title: A Poet Who Can Be Only Read in Translation...: Czesław Miłosz as self-translator in the context of his practice of cultural mediation

Speaker: Magda Heydel, Jagiellonian University, Poland

Abstract:

Czesław Miłosz is a pivotal figure in the Polish-American cultural mediation. He combined the roles of writer, anthologizer, journalist, commentator, translator and self-translator. His original writing shows traces of interaction with the literary environment he inhabited after the war. He opened channels of communication between the two cultures; what is now known as "the Polish School of Poetry" stemmed from his translations of Polish poetry; he also became a self-translator, carefully managing his bilingual output.

Although defining himself decidedly as a Polish poet, Miłosz was aware of the role the English versions of his work played in creating the image of himself as a writer and of the canon of contemporary Polish poetry. The aim of my paper is to look at Miłosz's self-translations as a case in designing the cross-cultural mediation (Pym 1998; Milton, Bandia 2009, Cordingley 2013). I want to look at Miłosz's complex status as a writer displaced from his native environment, to study the web of interconnections between his writing in Polish and the shape it took in English, as well as the inspirations he found in English-language literature. The status of his self-translated work is ambivalent in perspective of both his self definition as a writer and the practice of cultural mediation he was engaged in. The case of Miłosz as self-translator will let me answer questions regarding the relationships established in the course of the cross-cultural mediation not only on the extra-textual level but also on a deeper level of text construction and poetics. Both differences and equivalences between the bilingual versions display the construction of the inter-space which emerges through (self-)translation between the two world-views and world-images of the two languages. By problematizing the complex position of the author-translator I intend to describe dimensions of the space "in-between" (Pym 1998, Koster 2002) which is practically non-divisible into the original and the translated.

I have written on Miłosz as translator (Heydel 2013; Heydel 2007) and edited a volume of his translations into Polish (Miłosz 2005). I was also granted a fellowship at Beinecke Library (Sept-Oct2014) to study Miłosz's manuscripts there. Reading his notebooks and letters from the American years, let me look deeper into the mediation processes he initiated and to understand the causative mechanisms behind the making of his (self)translations.

Bionote:

Magda Heydel PhD hab., teaches translation and comparative literature at the Department of Polish Studies, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland. She is the head of the Postgraduate Programme in Literary Translation at the Jagiellonian and editor-in-chief of a translation studies journal Przekładaniec. Her publications include T.S. Eliot in Polish Literature (2003) and Role of Translation in Czesław Miłosz's Oeuvre (2013). She co-edited anthologies of contemporary translation studies (2009) and Polish concepts in translation studies (2012). She is an award winning translator of English language literature, e.g. Joseph Conrad, T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and Virginia Woolf.

 

PAPER 7:

Title: Self-translator as Chameleon

Speaker: Tomoko Takahashi, Soka University of America, USA

Abstract:

In this study, I examine the process of self-translation that I have experienced translating my autobiography from Japanese to English, focusing on the fundamental link between the acts of translation and narration. The main question asked here is: What is the self-translation process like when the translator is also the author, narrator, and protagonist, as in the case of my autobiographical translation, Samurai and Cotton? This study is unique in that the process of self-translation is examined by the author-translator herself (i.e., myself). Moreover, the story, being autobiographical in nature and narrated by the translingual writer and protagonist, serves as metanarrative providing clues about the author-translator's psyche as she transitions through geographical, cultural, and linguistic changes.

Translation is a communicative act, in which the translator tries to achieve purposes, one of which is to communicate across languages with the intended addressees—the target audience. Narration, too, is a communicative act, in which a narrator produces a narrative discourse or text intended for her/his target audience. In works of fiction, the narrator and the author are not necessarily coterminous, but in the case of self-translated autobiographical narratives, such as mine, the author, who is the protagonist by definition, serves as the first-person narrator as well as the translator. As in the case of Samurai and Cotton, when the roles of the author, first-person narrator, protagonist, and translator are coterminous (thus used interchangeably in this study), the translation of the narrative needs to be examined from multiple communicative perspectives, which involve, for instance, the narrator-translator's perceptions of the new target audience, the events and participants described in the story, etc. Although the narrator remains constant throughout the story, her/his role and tone may change as the story develops, events occur, stages shift, and different participants come and go, which in turn influence the narrator-translator as well.

Self-translation is a complex process, and it becomes even more so when the author-narrator serves as a historian, family biographer, autobiographer, and nostalgic storyteller. The geographical and temporal stages in Samurai and Cotton shift dramatically from the world of the samurai and the collapse of feudalism, to postwar and modern Japan, and to the US, covering the time span of more than 150 years, with two different cultures being juxtaposed. The narrator-translator's psyche surfs through different phases and events as the translation work progresses through different stages of the story told in the book. In this study, therefore, I examine the process of self-translation in light of the narrator's roles and persona—or "colors"—that change according to the time, events, and participants as well as the audience and the language, focusing on the chameleon-like style-shifting by the narrator-translator in self-translation.

Bionote:

Tomoko Takahashi is the Dean of the Graduate School and Professor of Linguistics and Education at Soka University of America in Southern California. She holds a doctorate in applied linguistics from Columbia University. Her research interests include second language acquisition, particularly lexico-semantic transfer and pragmatic transfer, cross-cultural communication, and translation theory. Takahashi's research has been widely published and cited in scholarly journals and books in the field of applied linguistics. She is also a well-respected translator of Japanese and English.

 

PART 3: SELF-TRANSLATION AT THE CROSSROADS OF MULTIPLES PRACTICES

PAPER 8:

Title: A traceable hybrid process : simultaneous self-translation in a popular serial novel

Speaker: Maud Gonne, University of Leuven, Belgium

Abstract:

Literary self-translation is currently seen as a (post-)modern expression of a globalized world. Inter-lingual rewriting and intertwining between translation and writing seem to constitute a new literary phenomenon attributed to hybrid and bilingual writers "having been born across the world" : the "translated men" (Rushdie, 1991:16).

Nevertheless, bilingualism is far from being a new element in literature and the desire – or necessity – to direct a text to two readerships has been a secular practice (cfr. Hokenson & Munson) especially in heterogeneous and multilingual cultural spaces.

As such, in early twentieth century Belgium, in spite of the growing tensions between the two historical linguistic communities, self-translation into Dutch (Flemish) and French was a common activity, particularly for less literary genres (popular novels, chronicles, art critics). For example, under the pseudonym of Gabriël d'Estrange(s), the consecrated Flemish writer Georges Eekhoud (1854-1927) wrote four serial novels, existing in two linguistic versions, which circulated more or less simultaneously in weekly deliveries between 1897 and 1904.Constrained by time, by the editing house guidelines and by the necessity to write fast and in quantity, rather than in quality, the self-translator conveniently changed the directionality of the self-translation process various times, effectively blurring the borders between original and translation.

As a result, in this process of (nearly) simultaneous self-translation, interaction between writing and translating, as well as both adapting (from theater) and plagiarizing become sources of creativity. Both versions cross-fertilize each to create an hybrid scenography that reflects and negotiates a complex and conflictual enunciation context via a.o. (1) a multilingual scenography and the use of heterolingualisms (Grutman, 1997), (2) a dialogue between the writing and translating agencies (3) characters as translator or interpret who mediate within a manichean story (4) a paratopical narrator voice (Maingueneau 2004).

Taking as an illustration one of the four bilingual novels of Gabriel d'Estrange(s), i.e., The Brussels street singer [De Brusselsche straatzanger/Le chanteur de rues bruxellois] (1897-1898), the aim of this paper is (1) to analyze the discursive traces, or textual inscriptions, left in the production process of this bilingual text (2) to discuss a few features for a poetic of self-translation.

Bionote:

Maud Gonne is a Ph.D. student in Translation Studies at the University of Leuven. She is working on the relation between intercultural transfer activities, including self-translation and multilingual writing, and cultural nation building. Her research project focuses on the hybrid actors that embody those transfers and the way they simultaneously assume different (literary) roles. She is the author of various articles on that topic: https://lirias.kuleuven.be/cv?u=U0058694. Her research interests are literary (self-)translations and cultural transfers in border regions, intercultural relationships, discourse analysis, Descriptive translation studies and Actor Network Theories.

PAPER 9:

Title: Cross-fertilization between self-translation and other writing practices in interwar bilingual Belgium

Speakers: Reine Meylaerts, University of Leuven, Belgium

Tessa Lobbes, Utrecht University, Netherlands

Abstract:

In this paper, we want to study the complex cross-fertilization between self-translation, translation, multilingual writing and collaborative writing developed by two important bilingual (Flemish-French) cultural mediators in early twentieth century Belgium, Paul-Gustave Van Hecke (1887-1967) and André De Ridder (1888-1961). Van Hecke and De Ridder need to be studied together. First of all because of their joint activities as founders and editors in chief of the Flemish periodicals De Boomgaard (1909), Het Roode Zeil (1920) and of the Francophone periodical Sélection (1920), secondly because of their common writing practices and finally because of their concerted efforts in favor of Flemish art and literature in both Flemish and Francophone publications. Our corpus will consist of published novels, essays, chronicles and critiques, but also of unpublished letters and manuscripts which gives us insight into the concrete practices of self-translation.

In the context of a linguistically conflicted Belgium, it is fascinating to scrutinize how Van Hecke and De Ridder practiced and used self-translation and to examine when, why and how they switched between languages and how they connected these practices to other literary and artistic mediating activities. Since the origin of Belgium in 1830, a national culture was never self-evident. In the aftermath of World War I, Van Hecke and De Ridder witnessed a number of seemingly opposite developments within Belgium. Rising patriotism in the immediate postwar years went together with an intensification of regionalism. Especially Flemish groups were lobbying for Flemish cultural and linguistic emancipation which increased tensions between the two language groups. At the same time, a firm internationalism was politically visible in the creation of the League of Nations and culturally in the international humanism as defended by Romain Rolland in his Déclaration d'Indépendance de l'esprit [Declaration of the Independence of the Spirit] (1919), uniting some thousand writers worldwide. Both Van Hecke's and De Ridder's multilingual and collaborative writing practices had a regional, a national and an international dimension, in dialectically interacting and evolving combinations.

By examining Van Hecke and De Ridder, we aim to show how self-translation should be studied first of all in relation to other writing and mediating practices, secondly in terms of continuities between versions and finally in relation to the production and reception contexts. In other words, we aim to analyze if and how the cross-fertilization between translating, self-translating, multilingual writing and collaborative writing as well as the evolution of the relationships between them is instrumental to understand Van Hecke's and De Ridder's textual universes and their contribution to the construction of a changing (sub-)national and international culture in early twentieth century Belgium.

Bionotes:

Dr. Tessa Lobbes works as a postdoctoral researcher at Utrecht University within a HERA-project on cultural exchanges during the First World War. She is writing a book on the confrontation between 'neutral' Dutch writers and foreign cultural propaganda services. Prof. dr. Reine Meylaerts works at the Translation Studies research unit of the University of Leuven. She is an expert in the field of intercultural relationships and translation strategies in past and present multilingual societies.

PAPER 10:

Title: Tracing self-translation and bilingual writing: the case of André Brink

Speaker: Lelanie de Roubaix, Stellenbosch University, South-Africa

Abstract:

The proposed paper will focus on André Brink, acclaimed South African author who has been creating Afrikaans and English versions of his novels since he first self-translated one of his own novels in 1974. Brink's creative practice has evolved over time – starting from only writing in Afrikaans, to self-translating his Afrikaans novels into English, to creating simultaneously the Afrikaans and English versions of each work. In interviews, Brink has qualified this latter process, saying that he goes back and forth between the two versions while he writes them, letting one version influence the other and making changes to both as he continues. This process of writing two linguistic versions of his novels simultaneously is not only a unique creative practice, but a practice that results in texts that are interesting and challenging to study.

In Brink's case, simultaneously writing two versions of a novel in two languages has become part of his creative process. Whether one chooses to situate this practice within the framework of self-translation, or places it in a broader category of rewriting (cf. Bassnett 2013), the texts resulting from this creative act provide valuable insight into the phenomenon of simultaneous bilingual writing itself, as well as into the creative literary practices of their creator.

The proposed paper will trace the evolution of Brink's creative literary practices, namely from self-translation to simultaneous bilingual writing, by studying examples from texts created by these different practices. By comparing the two linguistic versions of novels that were self-translated with linguistic versions of novels that were written bilingually, I aim to trace the voice of the author in different versions of the text by focusing not only similarities and differences between two versions of a single novel, but also similarities and differences between "self-translations" and "bilingual creations". Focusing on the texts themselves and linking the discussion of examples back to the practices that were used to create them, I aim to consider not only the translational or literary activity that gave rise to the texts, but also the linguistic, cultural, ideological and political spaces from which they were created and that ultimately constitute the voice of the author.

Cordingley (2013:3) emphasises that the self-translator's stereolinguistic optics puts any one of her or his languages/cultures into relief with respect to the other. Consequently, translators share with many writers from the margins the tendency to subvert the possibility that their writing affirms a singular national culture or literature. Hybridity characterizes not only many self-translators' external and textual environments, but the internal bilingual and bicultural space out of which their creativity emerges.

In Brink's case, a multilingual author living in a multilingual environment, his use of languages and his creative literary practices are inevitably closely linked. By studying different linguistic versions of his novels and attempting to find traces of the voice of the author in the different versions, I aim to contribute to the increasing interest in and research on self-translation that Cordingley (2013:9) has symbolically termed "a renewed interest in the author".

Bionote: Lelanie de Roubaix is a PhD student at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. She holds a master's degree in Translation Studies as well as a BA degree in Language and Culture from Stellenbosch University. Her PhD project deals with well-known South African author André Brink as translator, focusing on his creative processes of self-translation and bilingual writing. Other research interests include ideology in translation and translation in the South African context.

WRAP-UP SESSION (20 min)

Title: Tracing Self-Translation: discursive perspectives in context: conclusions.

Speakers: Maud Gonne,University of Leuven, Belgium,

Klaartje Merrigan, University of Leuven, Belgium,

Reine Meylaerts, University of Leuven, Belgium,

Katarzyna Szymanska, University of Oxford, UK.

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New Trends in the Research on AVT and Accessibility
Vera Lúcia Santiago Araújo, State University of Ceara, Brazil

This panel addresses the current status of the research on Audiovisual translation and accessibility. Different methods and theories have been used since the beginning of AVT research in the nineties, ranging from the description of norms (Descriptive Translation Studies), experimental research (Reception Studies) and case studies (action research). The objective of this panel is to bring together those who are interested in, and concerned about the discussion of the contribution on how different methods and disciplines approach the access of people with sensory impairment (deaf and blind) to audiovisual products by means of subtitling for the deaf and the hard-of-hearing (SDH) and audiodescription (AD). It is composed of twelve papers dealing with the interface of SDH and AD and Corpus Linguistics, Multimodality, Social Semiotics and Text World Theory.

For informal enquiries: [verainnerlightATuolDOTcomDOTbr]

Vera Lúcia Santiago Araújo Vera Lúcia Santiago Araújo (State University of Ceara) has been working with audiovisual translation and accessibility since the year 2000, mainly with SDH and AD, having developed research, written academic papers and supervised theses and dissertations on the topic. She has organized a lot of panels, workshops and round tables in different Brazilian Conferences. The last one was on the Brazilian Translation Research Conference (ABRAPT) last year in Florianópolis, Brazil.

 

 

 

 

 

SESSION PLAN

SESSION 1: THE RESEARCH ON SUBTITLING AND ITS INTERFACES

Introduction: 5 minutes

PAPER 1:

Title: The Analysis of Multimodal Irony in Film Subtitles

Speaker: Paulina Burczynska, University of Manchester (United Kingdom)

PAPER 2:

Title: Subtitles as a Manipulated Source for Target Audience's Text-Worlds

Speaker: Zhu Zhu, University of Edinburgh (Scotland).

PAPER 3:

Title: Linguistic Segmentation in the SDH of a Brazilian Soap Opera: a corpus-based study

Speaker: Ítalo Assis, UECE (Brazil)

Discussion: 33 minutes

Wrap-up time: 10 minutes

SESSION 2: THE RESEARCH ON AUDIODESCRIPTION AND ITS INTERFACES

Introduction: 5 minutes

PAPER 4:

Title: A proposal for the audiodescription of children's books

Speaker: Soraya Ferreira Alves, UNB (Brazil)

PAPER 5:

Title: Why not? Arguments in favor of a closer and more effective partnership between sighted describers and consultants

Speaker: Manoela Silva, UFBA (Brazil)

PAPER 6:

Title: Brazilian audiodescribed television: a corpus based study of ad screenplays of films and TV series

Speakers: Renata Mascarenhas, Alexandra Seoane, Ana Tássia Silva, Ana Carla Nóbrega, Jéssica Nóbrega and Lindolfo Farias Júnior, UECE (BRAZIL)

PAPER 7:

Title: In search of parameters for the audiodescription of paintings with the support of audiovisual translation, multimodality and social semiotics

Speaker: Maria Nunes, UECE (Brazil)

PAPER 8:

Title: Overcoming the interpretation/description dichotomy in AD: an interdisciplinary approach

Speakers: Larissa Costa and Gabriela Baptista, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio De Janeiro, PUC-Rio (Brazil)

Discussion: 33 minutes

Wrap-up time: 10 minutes

 

PAPER TITLES, ABSTRACTS AND BIONOTES

PAPER 1:

Title: The Analysis of Multimodal Irony in Film Subtitles

Speaker: Paulina Burczynska, University of Manchester (United Kingdom)

Abstract:

Research on verbal irony has been attracting growing attention from audiovisual translation scholars. Nevertheless, the number of conducted studies on the combination between verbal and non-verbal components in the analysis, translation, and particularly, reception of irony transfer in audiovisual texts is still very limited. Due to the rapid technological advances, commercial requirements and differentiated viewer's preferences, it is thus crucial to understand how viewers prioritize meaning-making modes embedded in the multimodal text and conveyed via subtitles so that a film could be accessible for a broader audience. The reception analysis of the subtitled films also aims to support screen translators in decision-making processes to produce film translation. My theoretical framework comprises of the echoic theory of irony and multimodal theory. Echoic theory of irony appears to be the most capable framework to support the study of multimodal irony in audiovisual texts as the significant importance of non-verbal semiotic resources in the generation and interpretation of irony has been demonstrated. Multimodal theory, on the other hand, will enable me to examine the role that verbal and non-verbal modes play in the construction of irony on screen. The data set is interrogated using a mixed-methods approach consisting of observational tools, questionnaires and eye-tracking. The observational phase involves multimodal transcriptions of selected fragments in which irony plays a pivotal narrative role to determine what non-verbal modes contribute to the multimodal construal of irony and how irony is relayed in the subtitles translation. The experimental phase will combine the use of eye-tracking technology and questionnaires for the purposes of triangulation. The analysis proceeds in the following way: first the selected excerpts of the film are divided into individual frames in order to identify and analyze what and how non-verbal semiotic resources are intertwined to construe a meaningful whole. The frames are arranged in sequences vertically demonstrating in columns various semiotic modes which contribute to the creation of meaning. Subsequently, subtitles are transcribed and analyzed. In the experimental phase, responders' eye movements will be recorded when watching selected fragments of the films. This will follow up with a questionnaire in order to elucidate how viewers of the subtitled version of the films i.e. Sherlock Holmes (2009) and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011) are able to retrieve ironic meaning in the original films. The results yielded form the multimodal analysis are expected to indicate how irony is conveyed in the subtitled Polish version of the two films. The experimental phase is expected to report what is the contribution of non-verbal semiotic resources to irony reception and comprehension by Polish viewers and what semiotic resources do Polish viewers prioritize when watching selected film fragments featuring the use of irony. On this basis, I aim to make an assessment of how effective subtitles are in the translation and reception of irony.

Bionote:

Paulina Burczyńska is currently a PhD student in Translation and Intercultural Studies at the University of Manchester, UK. She has an MA in Applied Linguistics from Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz, Poland. As a scholarship recipient Paulina studied at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. Her research interests focus mainly on multimodality, reception, audiovisual translation, pragmatics, non-professional translation as well as SLA via different modes of translation. As a young researcher, Paulina has already presented her research at international conference in Spain, Italy, UK, Belgium, Poland and Costa Rica.

PAPER 2:

Title: A Multimodal Analysis of Chinese Subtitles in Animated Films--A Case Study of Mulan (1998)

Speaker: Yuping Chen and Wei Wang, University of Sydney (Australia).

Abstract:

There is a common call in the field of subtitle translation to improve the quality of subtitles and construct a reliable theoretical framework to direct subtitling. By referring to Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) that can equip us with a fundamental research perspective to address subtitle translation and Semiotic Translation that can provide us with a specific angle to analyse subtitle translation, this paper seeks to conduct a SFL-informed and semiotics-guided multimodal analysis of Chinese subtitles in animated films.Subtitle translation is never a pure linguistic meaning transfer process, but involves various semiotic modes. This rationalizes the adoption of multimodality to examine subtitling. Furthermore, due to the fact that audiovisual texts are dynamic-image reigned, the moving feature of these images must be considered in subtitling process. This justifies the employment of SFL-informed multimodal analysis to investigate the meaning-making process by dissecting audiovisual texts into three co-existent metafunctional levels: representational level, interactive level and compositional level. Different from the multimodal analysis of print texts, these three metafunctions are addressed at different social semiotic levels of films. Representational meaning is analysed by addressing the semiotic interplay between participants and contexts in frame/shot, i.e. uncut camera movement. Interactive meaning is examined by investigating how the intersemiotic relation functions in scenes when edited camera movement entails the interaction between viewers and the videoed physical world. Compositional meaning is dealt with by taking the sequence, generic stage, or even the whole audiovisual text into account to highlight how representational meaning and interactive meaning are integrated to realize the holistic cohesion in subtitling. However, since SFL-inspired multimodal analysis is not applicable in explicating the translation practice, Semiotic Translation is ushered in by resorting to its three basic concepts, including abduction, deduction and induction, to address subtitle translation at representational level, interactive level and compositional level respectively. By integrating SFL-based multimodality and Semiotic Translation, a theoretical framework is established. Through analysing the Chinese subtitles of one Disney animated film --- Mulan (1998), it is found that there are seven types of semiotic interplay at three metafunctional levels, shouldering various functions to facilitate the subtitling process and exerting different impacts on linguistic levels in subtitles. In one sentence, this study integrates SFL-based multimodality and Semiotic Translation to construct a theoretical framework guiding the production of high quality subtitles. This would be of great significance to both practical and academic fields of subtitle translation.

Bionote:

Ms. Yuping Chen is a PhD student at the University of Sydney, Australia. She received her M.A. from Guangxi University, China in 2003 and then worked in English Department, China Agricultural University as a lecturer. After her ten-year career as a university teacher, she went to the University of Sydney to start her PhD study in 2013. Her thesis is about the multimodal analysis of subtitle translation. She just successfully completed her probation and won a faculty scholarship to support her trip to attend an international conference held in September, 2013 in Germany.

PAPER 2:

Title: Subtitles as a Manipulated Source for Target Audience's Text-Worlds

Speaker: Zhu Zhu, University of Edinburgh (Scotland).

Abstract:

Cognitive theories generally hold that human beings understand a text by creating and processing mental representations in their minds. Text World Theory shares this belief and calls mental representations 'text-worlds'. Informed by systemic functional grammar and other cognitive, psychological and philosophical approaches, Text World Theory holds that text-worlds are situated by world-building elements (time, location, object and enactor) and propelled by function-advancing propositions (relational, material and mental processes). A film is a polysemiotic text composed of messages produced and received in aural-verbal, aural-nonverbal, visual-verbal and visual-nonverbal channels. Messages in each channel would contribute to the creation and development of the target audience's text-worlds. When a film is subtitled in a foreign language, messages originally carried in the aural-verbal channel are duplicated in the visual-verbal channel. Due to the three-fold translation constraints on subtitling (cross-medium, feedback-effect and technical constraints), it is not possible for the messages duplicated in the subtitles to be identical to those in the original dialogue exchanges in either form or content. This means that compared to the intended audience of the original film, the target audience of the subtitled version would base their text-worlds on manipulated world builders and advancers. The current study looks at what has been manipulated in the process of subtitling Chinese feature films into English and how, and also what impact such manipulation may potentially have on the creation and development of the target audience's text-worlds. Three Chinese films are selected as the case study in this paper: Farewell My Concubine (dir. CHEN Kaige, 1993), Summer Palace (dir. LO Ye, 2006) and Coming Home (dir. ZHANG Yimou, 2014). All the three films contain sections set against the background of political turmoil in modern China: either the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) or the Tiananmen Incident (1989). Detailed comparison between the English subtitles and the original dialogue exchanges is carried out at the sentence level. The entire dialogue exchanges and subtitles of the three films are examined with a focus placed on extralinguistic cultural references (ECRs)

Bionote:

Zhu holds a PhD in Translation Studies from Newcastle University and is working at Asian Studies, University of Edinburgh in the role of Chinese Language Programme Director. She carries out research in the fields of translation studies, Chinese language teaching methodology and second language acquisition. Zhu is also an active translator with extensive professional experience.

PAPER 3:

Title: Linguistic Segmentation in the SDH of a Brazilian Soap Opera: a corpus-based study

Speaker: Ítalo Assis, State University of Ceará, UECE (Brazil)

Abstract:

Since 2002, State University of Ceará has carried out researches about Subtitling for the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (SDH) in an attempt to establish parameters that fit the needs that Brazilian deaf people might have. The results of one of these previous studies have suggested that a good segmentation – subtitling feature that is related to the division of the translated speech into text along the subtitle – can guarantee a comfortable subtitle for the deaf community even when the subtitle is based on reading speeds of 160 and 180 words per minute. This work aims at describing and analyzing how ill-segmented subtitles regarding linguistic segmentation – segmentation that is based on syntax and is related to the division of the translated text into subtitles of 2 lines or more – is presented in the closed caption pop-on type of SDH aired on Brazilian TV network. More specifically, in the SDH of one episode of the Brazilian telenovela Amor Eterno Amor, part of the corpus of the CORSEL project (Corpus, Segmentation and Subtitling) and which was extracted automatically with the program CCExctractor. The methodology was based on a descriptive dimension, making use of a quali-quantitative analysis to check the problems related to the linguistic segmentation. It was done by using tools that are proper from Corpus Linguistics, such as annotation and corpus electronic analysis. The so-called segmentation problems were identified by annotation of specific tags to this kind of analysis, created from a Brazilian Portuguese grammar based on a functional aspect. After the annotation process, the corpus could be analyzed with the help of the program Wordsmith Tools 5.0. The results of the research indicated a substantial quantity of linguistic segmentation problems in the corpus, close to 26.8 % from the total amount of subtitles. The problems appeared with more frequency in verbal and noun phrases, as well as in 3-line subtitles with a high speed. I consider this substantial quantity of segmentation problems in the corpus as one of the reflexes of the lack of preoccupation TV Stations in Brazil have got with their subtitle quality. Also, subtitlers' lack of expertise on linguistic segmentation may be one of the causes of so many problems.

Bionote:

Ítalo Alves Pinto de Assis holds a Bachelor's degree in English from State University of Ceará and is currently a Master's student at the Applied Linguistics Graduation Program from the aforementioned university. His research now focuses on the cognitive effect of ill-segmented subtitles on the reception by deaf and hearing viewers. His academic background is rooted in Translations Studies, more specifically in the Audiovisual Translation (AVT) branch aimed at Media Accessibility through Subtitle for the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (SDH) and Audio Description for the blind. His areas of research interests include Corpus-based Translation Studies, Experimentation in Translation and Applied Linguistics.

PAPER 4

Title: A proposal for the audiodescription of children's books

Speaker: Soraya Ferreira Alves, University of Brasília, UNB (Brazil)

Abstract:

This paper aims at presenting the results of a research held at University of Brasília – UnB, during the period 2013/2014 and is linked to a research group on audiovisual translation and accessibility. It intended to suggest patterns for the audio description for visually impaired children of illustrated children´s books. In this case, the audio description would consist in the description of the images and their relation to the written text. The audio description is gradually being implanted in Brazil, and there are initiatives of the government in order to establish patterns of audio description of books, as the Nota Técnica Nº 21 / 2012 / MEC / SECADI /DPEE – MECDaisy, published at internet, which expects to regulate such practice with editors. Such document, however, does not include specific proposals for children´s books. Having this observation as basis, and having in mind that the semiotics organization of the book, that is, the relation between text/narration/images/audio description should make sense for the children, it was traced a methodology to verifying if the children´s books published in Brazil with audio description were following the rules of Mecdaisy and if they would fit the necessities of visually impaired children. So, a reception test was held at CEEDV – DF (Centro de Ensino Especial do Deficiente Visual), with 17 children between 5 and 8 years old. At first, all the children listened to a book published with audio description and answered comprehension questions. Then, an activity with the same book was applied at the classes, as a suggestion of the teachers involved, and other questions were made, along with the intervention of the teachers. After the results obtained and discussed with the teachers, the audio description of another book was made, following their observations and suggestions, like the insertion of sound effects. Then, other activities were proposed in order to verifying the comprehension of the children and if they liked to listen the story with audio description. After the test, the teachers answered a questionnaire about the efficacy of the audio descriptions of both books and their suggestions for a model that would satisfy the children. A final proposal of audio description was recorded and given to the school. Our final proposal for the audio description includes the insertions of music and sound effects and a major integration of narrative and audio description.

Bionote:

Dr. Soraya Ferreira Alves is graduated in Translation English/Portuguese at Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo; has received her Master and Doctorate degrees in Communication and Semiotics also by PUC-SP. Developed a post-doctorate research at Universidade Estadual do Ceará under the sponsorship of CAPES. Professor at Universidade de Brasilia – UnB, teaches at the Translation Course and at the Master in Translation Studies acting mainly with literary and audiovisual translation. Has presented papers on literature studies, literary and audiovisual translation both in national and international conferences, and written articles in refereed Brazilian journals. Conducts research on audiovisual accessibility. Is audio descriptor.

PAPER 5:

Title: Why not? Arguments in favor of a closer and more effective partnership between sighted describers and consultants

Speaker: Manoela Silva, Federal University Of Bahia, UFBA (Brazil)

Abstract:

Audio description (AD), a translation mode that aims at making visual information accessible to those who are blind, have low vision or who otherwise have difficulty to grasp visual information, was introduced to the Brazilian public more than a decade ago. Over the past years, the activity has left the shadows and has gained the status of an official occupation, being included in the Brazilian Classification of Professions (Classificação Brasileira de Ocupações - CBO). As a result, the quality of the descriptions being offered and their adequacy to the target audience became even a bigger issue, which led to the emergence of a new professional: the consultant. However, the role of that professional in the AD process might differ a lot depending on the company or team of audio describers. Most of the time, since the consultants are members of the target audience, they act as revisers checking if scripts created by sighted describers are understandable and would suit the needs of visually impaired people. Sometimes, however, they work side by side with their sighted peers and are involved in the writing of the scripts as well. Personally, we favor the second model. The objective of this study, therefore, is to present arguments in favor of a closer and more effective partnership between sighted describers and consultants. The research derives from two other studies. The first one, whose objective was to outline the competencies needed by visually impaired people to act as consultants, was presented in the city of Florianópolis in 2013 at ABRAPT's XI International Congress and the V International Congress of Translators. The second one, whose objective was to describe which elements in a training course were necessary to foster a more collaborative work between prospective describers and future consultants, was presented in the city of Salvador in 2014 as part of UFBA's XII Seminar on Applied Linguistics and VIII Seminar on Translation. After those studies, we offered training courses aligned to the principles outlined in those works to both sighted and non-sighted people. The data collected was then complemented by some practical exercises we undertook in writing scripts together with visually impaired people as well as by interviews we carried out with professional describers and consultants. All those experiences led us to believe in the advantages of a stronger partnership between sighted and non-sighted professionals. We want to make clear, however, that our goal is not to dictate rules, but to demystify "the less travelled road" and help describers make reasoned decisions about the role of the consultant in the AD process.

Bionote:

Manoela Cristina Correia Carvalho da Silva holds a Master in Letters and Linguistics from the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA). She works at the same institution where she teaches English and Translation to undergraduate students, besides working with teacher training as one of the coordinators of the institutional program for proficiency in foreign languages (PROFICI). Author of the first master's degree thesis on audio description (AD) written in Brazil, she is currently the coordinator of TRAMAD (Translation, Media and Audio description), a pioneer Brazilian research group on AD.

PAPER 6:

Title: Brazilian audiodescribed television: a corpus based study of ad screenplays of films and TV series

Speakers: Renata Mascarenhas, Alexandra Seoane, Ana Tássia Silva, Ana Carla Nóbrega, Jéssica Nóbrega and Lindolfo Farias Júnior, UECE (BRAZIL)

Abstract:

In compliance with the Ordinance No. 188/ 2010, the TV stations that transmit with a digital signal, since July 2011, must broadcast some of its programs with audiodescription (AD), an audiovisual translation modality that aims to translate images into words for the visually impaired audience. Four years after the implementation of AD in the Brazilian television, it is worth investigating how this translation practice is being applied to this media. In this context, the research project CAD_TV (PosLA/ UECE/ BFP-FUNCAP) was created. The purpose of this paper is to present this project that has the objective to build a corpus of audiodescription screenplays of films and TV series broadcast on different Brazilian TV stations in order to map and to describe its translation strategies, while taking into consideration the differences between each program and narrative genre. To this aim, the research is carrying out the following steps: (1) recording the TV programs; (2) transcribing the audiodescriptions, using the software Subtitle Workshop 2.51; (3) manual tagging of the AD screenplays of each program; (4) reviewing the tags, according to narratological parameters and the creation of new tags fulfilling the standard demands by the corpus built in this research; (5) identification of the most frequent translation strategies of the screenplays, using the software WordSmith Tools; and (6) the description and analysis of the most meaningful and frequent strategies. This research is therefore descriptive in nature and corpus based because it proposes a systematic study (based on narratological and discursive patterns) of the AD of films and series broadcast on Brazilian television by way of an electronic analysis of an annotated corpus. In general, the preliminary results demonstrate that the theme of each program and its narrative structure influence the discursive strategy of its AD screenplay. It is also observed that the translation strategies vary according to the TV station and to the narrative genre. We believe this research seems effective in the investigation of the most frequent translation strategies of the screenplays and can be used to identify possible linguistics and narratological problems that can afterwards be evaluated with visually impaired audience and audiodescribers.

Bionotes:

Renata Mascarenhas completed her Masters in Applied Linguistics at the State University of Ceara (Brazil). In 2012, she defended her doctoral thesis on the audiodescription of a Brazilian detective TV mini-series. She has participated in the audiodescription of a dance and a theatre performance and has written and revised screenplays for the audiodescription of several films. She recently taught AVT for a post graduation course at the State University of Ceara and is currently involved in the research of audiodescription carried out at this institution.

PAPER 7:

Title: In search of parameters for the audiodescription of paintings with the support of audiovisual translation, multimodality and social semiotics

Speaker: Maria Nunes, UECE (Brazil)

Abstract:

This article takes into consideration the assumption that the audiodescription (AD) of works of art is still a field that is only beginning to be explored and researched, allowing new studies to be carried out in the attempt to expand its domains. Thus, it is part of a piece of research which is aimed at finding systematic ways of audiodescribing bidimensional works of art so that they may effectively provide the visually impaired with access to aesthetic experiences through the audiodescription, in this case, of paintings. In this process, alternatives for the ressignification of meanings from a visual code to a verbal one are of Paramount importance, in order to really convey the so much sought and expected aesthetic experience that a work of art might provide. The aim is, therefore, to present an audiodescription of a painting by Dutch painter Pieter Brueghel (c.1525-1569), entitled Hunters in the Snow, preceded by an analysis of the painting, using as support elements of audiovisual translation, multimodality and social semiotics studies. More specifically, the analysis is carried out using as a reference mainly O'Toole (2011), whose model of analysis of works of art provides an insightful way of viewing a work of art, thus allowing the audiodescriber to make informed choices when translating the visual aspects verbally. Theoretically, it is also anchored on Holland (2009), and De Coster e Mühleis (2007), works which provide access to considerations on the process of AD of Works of art founded on previous practical experiences of audiodescription in museums. Following the presentation of the audiodescription, a brief discussion and assessment of how the theoretical works and research so far carried out help to outline some parameters for the audiodescription of bidimensional works of art. Although still in an early stage, the research points to some aspects that may be converted into parameters, as more audiodescriptions are developed.

Bionote:

Maria da Salete Nunes teaches Literature and Translation at the State University of Ceará. Currently, she is working on her doctoral dissertation, which is affilliated to a research group coordinated by Vera Lúcia Santiago Araújo, who is also her supervisor.

PAPER 8:

Title: Overcoming the interpretation/description dichotomy in AD: an interdisciplinary approach

Speakers: Larissa Costa and Gabriela Baptista, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio De Janeiro, PUC-Rio (Brazil)

Abstract:

The aim of this paper is to produce a theoretical investigation about the relationship between the description and interpretation of visual images in audiovisual translation (AVT) focusing on audio description (AD). AD is defined as the translation of images into words, intended to make visual media accessible for the blind and the visually impaired. Therefore, the main particularity of AD is that the source texts are visual images, in all forms: still or moving, seen live or mediated by a screen etc. The issue of how words and visual images are interpreted is central to the elaboration of guidelines for AD, since "describe what you see" is the field's main general rule. Frequently, both lay people and specialists still conceive describing and interpreting as a dichotomy, and prioritize description, seen as objective, over interpretation, considered as subjective and valuational. In order to examine this issue, we draw on the field of literary criticism, based on the premise that there are interpretative strategies authorised by institutions and shared by groups of individuals, for whom some interpretations are more acceptable than others. Our methodology is based on social semiotics and multimodal research, which emphasise the communicative practices of individuals interacting in social contexts by articulating and interpreting discourses produced through the organisation of semiotic resources called 'modes' (i.e. image, writing, lay out, visual image, speech, gesture, posture, music, moving image, 3D object, soundtrack). All modes and the relations between them offer a potential to produce meanings, which are socially constructed. In other words, the meaning making potential of verbal language (writing and speech) and images (moving and still) and cultural conventions guide their production and interpretation. The main point of our analysis is to deconstruct the interpretation/description dichotomy in AD, since interpretation is always part of all communicative practices. The result we aim at is to develop a theoretical basis by providing analysis tools that can inform the decision making process of audio describers and audiovisual translators

Bionote:

Gabriela Baptista has a degree in Film from UFF and is currently a master's student in Translation Studies at PUC-Rio, researching the theoretical and conceptual approach of visual images in AVT. She is a translator, mostly for voice over and dubbing of TV programs. Larissa Costa has a degree in History from UERJ, a master's degree in Compared History (UFRJ) and a doctorate degree in Translation Studies from PUC-Rio. She is currently an audio describer, mainly for film, working in the following issues: audio description, audiovisual translation and accessibility.

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Changing the World: Translating Soft and Revolutionary Power
Kathryn Batchelor, University of Nottingham, UK
Sue-Ann Harding, Hamad bin Khalifa University, Doha, Qatar

The writings of revolutionary figures are such that, by definition, they exert significant impact and influence across the globe. Summaries of those effects are often widely cited and reproduced, but are rarely substantiated, and almost invariably ignore the ramifications of the fact that such texts achieve their impact through translation. Similarly, while nations and global organizations seek to increase their leverage and acceptability through the exertion of soft power, academic analyses of soft power are usually situated within the social sciences, and issues of language and translation remain peripheral, or are passed over in silence. Over and over again, however, research carried out within Translation Studies has revealed the inextricable links between translation and power. Translation, both in the narrower sense of inter-lingual transfer and in the broader metaphorical sense of image-building and representation, has been shown to represent not only a means of establishing and maintaining dominance, but also of resisting it and of revealing the power dynamics that hold between states, multinationals, peoples, cultures and languages. While the bulk of TS research that focuses on connections between power and translation has centred on the West, usually taking formerly colonized cultures as the other pole of study, in this panel we seek to foreground studies of translation and intercultural exchange that do not sit comfortably within these existing paradigms, be that because they focus on 'South-South' interactions, because they involve multiple languages and situations, or because they are concerned with voices from dominated cultures but use languages associated with hegemony. In many cases, such studies are likely to be carried out through collaboration, since expertise in multiple non-global languages is rarely the preserve of a single researcher. Our second focus in this panel is therefore the exploration of innovative and collaborative research methodologies, both within and between TS and neighbouring disciplines.

The panel is divided into four sessions. In the first two sessions, Revolutionary power: Frantz Fanon and Revolutionary power continued: Marx and Engels, three members of the team of scholars collaborating on a multi-authored international project exploring the links between the translations of works by Frantz Fanon and their connections to revolutionary movements around the world will present the findings of their research. A further two papers will be presented by scholars working collaboratively to investigate the translation of radical texts, with a focus on the translations of works by Marx and Engels into the English and Greek languages. Both teams will also reflect on the benefits and challenges of working collaboratively across international borders and linguistic limitations in order to move beyond the presentation of isolated case studies and to benefit from a range of methodological approaches and specific expertise. Three other members of the Fanon team will be presenting papers in later sessions of the panel, and will be able to complement the breadth and detail of the first session by contributing to the discussions that follow on from these papers where appropriate. In the third session, Soft power and soft war, two of the papers will explore China's current efforts to develop its soft power programme through translation, the first in general and theoretical terms, the second in relation to the specificities of the 21st century Sino-African relationship. The third paper in this group will present a study of the USA's efforts to exert soft power through its Swahili translation project, Maisha Amerika, Uislamu Amerika (Life in America, Islam in America), in a post 9/11 context, while the final paper will examine the related concept of 'soft war', exploring the Iranian state's efforts to control the translation of children's literature in order to counter the perceived erosion of Islamic values by the West. In the final session, Conveying and (re)defining political ideas and ideologies, the focus will be on translation's role in the communication and interpretation of political ideas and ideologies, exposing the power dynamics that are at stake in the way translations are carried out or reviewed, or enlisted for a range of political and historiographical ends. The papers draw on case studies from a range of understudied linguistic and cultural contexts, the first focussing on historiographical studies in Latin America, the second on collaborative activist online translation in Canada and Brazil, and the third on the construction of solidarity with postcolonial countries in Poland.

For informal enquiries: [KathrynDOTBatchelorATnottinghamDOTacDOTuk]

Kathryn Batchelor Associate Professor of Translation and Francophone Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK. Her publications include Decolonizing Translation: Francophone African Novels in English Translation (2009); Translating Thought/Traduire la pensée (2010), co-edited with Yves Gilonne; and Intimate Enemies: 'Translation in Francophone Contexts (2013), co-edited with Claire Bisdorff. She is currently leading two major collaborative research projects, Building Images: Exploring 21st Century Sino-African Dynamics Through Cultural Exchange and Translation and Frantz Fanon in and through Translation. She is also Chair of the ARTIS Steering Board (Advancing Research in Translation and Interpreting Studies).

 

 Sue-Ann Harding is Assistant Professor at the Translation and Interpreting Institute under the auspices of Qatar Foundation. Her research interests are in translation and social-narrative theory, media representations and configurations of violent conflict, and explorations of intralingual and intersemiotic translation with regards to collective memory and issues of state, (national) identity, civil society and social justice. She is the author of Beslan: Six Stories of the Siege (2012) and several articles in leading translation studies journals. She is also a co-editor of Translation Studies Abstracts Online, the Review Editor for The Translator and interim Chair of the IATIS Executive Council.

 

 

 

SESSION PLAN

INTRODUCTION TO WHOLE PANEL (10 minutes): Kathryn Batchelor

PART 1: SOFT POWER AND "SOFT WAR"

PAPER 1

Title: Translation and Soft Power in a Globalizing World: A Chinese Perspective

Speaker: You Wu, Shanghai University, China

PAPER 2:

Title: Translation, soft power and intercultural power dynamics in the context of 21st century Sino-African power relations

Speaker: Kathryn Batchelor, University of Nottingham, UK

PAPER 3:

Title: Translators: reinforcing or challenging hegemony? A strucurationist approach to the translation of children's literature in Iran

Speaker: Shabnam Saadat Arkan Najd, University of Manchester, UK

PART 2: TRANSLATION, HEGEMONY AND ENGAGED PRACTICES

PAPER 4:

Title: Translation and Solidarity: Postcolonial-Polish Relationships at the end of the 20th Century

Speaker: Dorota Goluch, University of Cardiff, UK

PAPER 5

Title: The International Labour Movement Refracted: The Communist Manifesto in English

Speaker: Stefan Baumgarten, Bangor University, Wales

PAPER 6

Title: Against Ventriloquism: Notes on the Uses and Misuses of the translation of subaltern knowledge in Latin America

Speaker: Daniel Inclan, National University of Mexico

PAPER 7:

Title: Collaborative Activist Translation 2.0 and 'slow politics' in the 21st Century: Changing the World one Semi-Colon at a Time

Speaker: Raúl Ernesto Colón Rodríguez, University of Ottawa, Canada

DISCUSSION (30 minutes)

CONCLUSION TO WHOLE PANEL (10 MINUTES): Sue-Ann Harding

 

PAPER TITLES, ABSTRACTS AND BIONOTES

PAPER 1

Title: Translation and Soft Power in a Globalizing World: A Chinese Perspective

Speaker: You Wu, Shanghai University, China

Abstract:

Globalization, characterized as multiculturalism and universalism, brings about an increasingly interconnected world and intensifies linguistic interchange among people living in the "global village". "Hybridity", the conceptual linchpin to interpret this process in the context of global mélange, has gained visibility across many spheres of cultural research, including translation studies, being addressed as the output of dynamic cross-cultural communication. Along with the cultural turn in Translation Studies, the cross-cultural dimension has been highlighted, the function of translation has shifted from mere language transfer to dynamic cultural representation, and translating cultural differences becomes a central issue. Thus, as a bridging means of cross-cultural communication, translation with no doubt plays an important role in resituating and readapting local culture in the global context, which becomes a significant source of a country's defensive and soft power. Translation as revolutionary/defensive power requires translation studies to retain certain problematic political principles to defend cultural alterity and diversity. From the perspective of manipulation and power, translation is a possible vehicle of political engagement and revolutionary agendas. Globalization presents new risks, therefore one of the key issues concerning the connections between culture and globalization relates to cultural security. To ease the tensions triggered by the conflicts of different identities and the cultures behind, translation as both cross-linguistic and cross-cultural practices could play an important role as defensive power. Globalization provides the grounds for the development of soft power, and translation can function as attractive power to promote an understanding of China's ideals, support its economic goals and enhance national security in subtle, wide-ranging, and sustainable ways. The concept of "soft power" derives from a simple dichotomy of defining coercive power as hard power while attractive power as soft power with three parameters, namely, culture, political values and foreign policy. In contrast to its remarkable performance in economy, the cultural influence of China has long been marginalized, which counteracts its international role achieved in the context of global economic integration. In this respect, the soft power strategy, with its emphasis on (re)construction of traditional culture and (re)assertion of cultural identity, becomes crucial in expanding China's international influence, in which translation plays a considerable part. In reviewing existing literatures and analyzing statistical data, this paper argues that globalization presents both opportunities and challenges for translation as soft power. The role of translation has been strengthened in the age of globalization, which in turn leads to its even greater prominence in political arena. Translation is ideology-loaded and political-minded, instead of being an innocent act of disinterested mediation, translation is an important means of constructing identities and configuring the shape of intercultural encounters, which makes it possible as the defensive/revolutionary power vis-à-vis the arising fears regarding a crisis of identities intensified by globalization. Under the guidance of soft-power-oriented policies, translation not only serves as a "charm" tool for public diplomacy and nation branding, but also contributes to export Chinese cultural values. In this respect, promoting translation activities and ensuring sustainable development of translation industry is an essential issue in the long run.

Bionote: WU You is assistant Professor in the School of Foreign Studies, Shanghai University, China, where she is also a research fellow at the Center for Global Studies. She received a Ph. D. in European Civilisation and Society from Université Paris Diderot-Paris VII, France, in 2011. Before joining Shanghai University in 2012, she was international coordinator in Gras Savoye and translator/interpreter in AMARE, France (2010-2011). She is the author of Un siècle de révolution (2013) and a dozen papers in Chinese. Her research interest focuses on translation and intercultural communication, cultural policies and EU-China relations.

PAPER 2:

Title: Translation, soft power and intercultural power dynamics in the context of 21st century Sino-African power relations

Speaker: Kathryn Batchelor, University of Nottingham, UK

Abstract:

In the context of China's ever-increasing involvement with Africa and of the competing and conflicting discourses that surround that involvement, this paper presents two sets of findings from an AHRC project exploring contemporary Sino-African dynamics through the prism of cultural exchange and translation. Firstly, using frameworks that outline connections between translation import/export patterns and power relations, such as those developed by Itamar Even-Zohar, Richard Jacquemond), José Lambert and Lawrence Venuti, the paper summarizes literary translation imports and exports between China and Africa between the years 2000 and 2014 and assesses the extent to which the patterns that emerge are characteristic of north-south or south-south exchange patterns, and thus how far they support or counter the official discourse put forward by Chinese and African governments, which casts the relationship as one of south-south co-operation. At the same time, the paper interrogates the usefulness of existing paradigms of translation dynamics in the context of situations with complex linguistic and cultural pasts, or where writers are likely to belong to a dominated culture but at the same time write and read works in languages normally associated with hegemony. Secondly, drawing on two examples of literary translations into Chinese that do not conform to the usual patterns governing translation selection, the paper suggests that translation can represent an important, if often overlooked, soft power tool, offering significant media opportunities for conveying a positive intercultural relations image, even if the translations themselves do not enjoy huge success in the target culture. By exploring the processes through which these translations came to be published in Chinese and contextualizing them within patterns of agency in translation selection more generally, the paper argues that these instances of soft power translation point to imbalances in the Sino-African relationship, in contrast with official discourses that stress equality and mutual benefit.

Bionote: Kathryn Batchelor is Associate Professor of Translation and Francophone Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK. Her publications include Decolonizing Translation: Francophone African Novels in English Translation (2009); Translating Thought/Traduire la pensée (2010), co-edited with Yves Gilonne; and Intimate Enemies: 'Translation in Francophone Contexts (2013), co-edited with Claire Bisdorff. She is currently leading two major collaborative research projects, Building Images: Exploring 21st Century Sino-African Dynamics Through Cultural Exchange and Translation and Frantz Fanon in and through Translation. She is also Chair of the ARTIS Steering Board (Advancing Research in Translation and Interpreting Studies).

PAPER 3:

Title: Translators: reinforcing or challenging hegemony? A strucurationist approach to the translation of children's literature in Iran

Speaker: Shabnam Saadat Arkan Najd, University of Manchester, UK

Abstract:

The increasing acknowledgement of translation as an influential factor in socio-political changes highlights its role as a locale for power within which agent-structure interaction occurs. This irrefutable power container and its potential to shape perceptions has been controlled, banned or exploited by hegemonic groups throughout history, for which there is no shortage of evidence. This study explores children's literature domain since it is ideologically, morally and didactically surrounded and it is where dominant institutions often start the inculcation of their values to build up the prospective supporting ideologues, to maintain hegemony and to preserve order. Adopting a sociological approach, this paper draws on Giddens's structuration theory to address the dynamic nexus of structure-agency and rationalise translators' role in constructing and perpetuating the contexts within which they face constraints. The very structures which impose themselves as constraints to translators are enablers for the agents invested with power. Although the rudiment of change lies in the actions, it is the asymmetrical access of agents to resources that maintains the hierarchy of power and directs their actions and decisions. In an attempt to expand the use of structuration theory in the domain of translation, this study focuses on Iran to investigate how translation can be instrumentalised to promote certain values and to instil intended norms. Iran has an elaborate monitoring apparatus which is a barricade at the frontline of the soft war, the term frequently used in the state mass media referring to the cultural and ideological effort of the West to erode Islamic values and to influence Iranian society's worldview. In a developmental design, the data was gathered from quantitative and qualitative sources. The bibliographical catalogues of all children and adolescents' books published in Iran during the years 1978-1993 and 2009-2012 were consulted to have a broad picture of children's literature publication in Iran during the times of crises and post-crises. The quantitative analysis revealed that there is an overall tendency to proliferate domestic literature, and the rate of the translation for adolescents has been remarkably lower than translation for younger group. This gave impetus for further investigation in a smaller frame, from translators' point of view, since they are the first-hand source to impart their rationalisations of decisions. Fifteen semi-structured interviews were conducted to explore the factors which permeate translators' decisions and their reflexively deployed strategies to cope with or potentially flout structurally imposed constraints. As per the qualitative analysis, translators' decisions are structurally informed, and this might account for the significantly smaller proportion of translated literature for adolescents as well as the emergence of non-professional volunteer translations circulated on the internet, as an instance of resistance and counteract against structures of power. This study shows that structuration theory presents an inclusive framework to analyse how structures of signification, domination and legitimation are instantiated in translation activity in the form of communication of meaning, exercise of power, and evaluation of conduct, how translation contributes to their reproduction and thus their reinforcement, and how it can flout structures and bring about change.

Bionote: Shabnam Saadat is a final year PhD student in Translation Studies at the University of Manchester, where she was a member of the organising committee of IPCITI 2014. Her research focuses on translation of children's literature in Iran, and aims to expand the use of Giddens's structuration theory in the field of translation studies. She attained a BA in English/Persian Translation and an MA in Translation Studies from Kharazmi University in Tehran, Iran. She is also a translator, and has published seven books so far.

PAPER 4:

Title: Translation and Solidarity: Postcolonial-Polish Relationships at the end of the 20th Century

Speaker: Dorota Goluch, University of Cardiff, UK

Abstract:

Indebted to the 1990s reflection on postcolonial translation and inspired by the recent shifts towards broader paradigms of translation and power or translation and activism, this research contributes to theorizing links between translation and solidarity, a term which punctuates for example Spivak's 1993 Classic essay 'The Politics of Translation', but also features strongly in very recent debates about power, activism and revolution (see for instance the conference call for papers for 'Translation and the Many Languages of Resistance', Cairo, 2015). 'Solidarity' is also relevant for my case study – reception of translated postcolonial literature in Poland – because it lets me think about Polish, or Eastern European, and 'postcolonial' relationships beyond the colonizer/colonized divide and because the term surfaces in Polish discourses around postcolonial literature.

The paper examines the idea that translated postcolonial literature may have led Polish readers to see similarities between 'postcolonial' and Polish historical experiences, which in turn might enable the forging of Polish-'postcolonial' solidarity. It is based on a reading of almost one thousand Polish reviews of translated postcolonial prose – including Nigerian, Algerian and other African works, as well as Indian, Middle Eastern and Caribbean texts – from the period 1970–2010. Using elements of discourse analysis, the reading reveals that postcolonial narratives featuring political and cultural subjugation, revolutionary struggle and postcolonial turbulences resonate for the reviewers with Poland's history: the Partitions (1795–1918), German occupation (1939–1945), Soviet domination (1945–1989) and, to an extent, post-1989 globalization and U.S. American influences. Selected examples are presented in the paper.

Then, it is suggested that the awareness of historical similarities may imply a shared postcolonial sensitivity and, possibly, solidarity. To support the supposition, the paper employs Richard Rorty's view that a localized and historically-bound sense of similarity – as opposed to similarity predicated solely on the universalist notion of common humanity – can pave a way for solidarity. Yet, it also problematizes the finding, signalling that the potential expressions of solidarity are channelled and modelled through existing Polish discourses on postcolonial countries, including the colonialist discourse of European superiority, the Cold War politics of 'solidarity and aid' towards the Third World, the democratic rhetoric of the anti-Communist 'Solidarity' movement and the Western idiom of charity for developing countries.

Bionote: Dorota Gołuch is a lecturer in translation at Cardiff University. In 2013 she completed a PhD on the Polish translation and reception of postcolonial literature at University College London; she also holds a magister degree from the Jagiellonian University and an MA in Postcolonial Studies from the University of Kent. Dorota has written book chapters on the ethics and methods of translating postcolonial literature (focusing on Chinua Achebe and Amos Tutuola). Currently she is writing about translation and solidarity, while also beginning to work on memory, multilingualism and translation in the Auschwitz Museum.

PAPER 5:

Title: The International Labour Movement Refracted: The Communist Manifesto in English

Speaker: Stefan Baumgarten, Bangor University, Wales

Abstract:

This paper attempts to sketch the conceptual representation of the international labour movement, a movement that was spearheaded by the Communist Manifesto. Co-authored by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, this revolutionary text was originally published as a short German-language pamphlet in London in 1848. Designed as an incendiary polemic and aiming to spark a nascent international labour movement, just as most canonical works, the Communist Manifesto went, over the last 150 years or so, through innumerable translational refractions, as well as intra- and intersemiotic interpretations and modifications. By broadly contextualising the English-language versions within their respective historical and socio-economic conditions of production and reception, I will first argue for a more prominent space accorded to economic and associated socio-psychological factors in translation research, factors which are too often ignored or sidelined in mainstream descriptivist, positivist-cognitive, and even culture-oriented translation theories. Especially when English is involved as a language in the translational encounter, it is arguably even more significant to not overlook the critical centrality of the economic factor prior to the need to position the translational objects of investigation in their respective target-literary, psycho-dynamic and ideological environments. Secondly, by considering the Communist Manifesto's immense popularity and continuing centrality for international class struggle, and against the background of a research project in which I investigate the repercussions of both soft and revolutionary power on the translation of radical scholarly texts, this paper aims to sketch the power dynamics pertaining to the English interlingual refractions of this internationally received and extensively refracted work. And finally, by comparing the results of an extensive case study of the text's Greek translations with my own preliminary analysis of some English translations within their respective contextual surroundings, I will attempt to draw some preliminary conclusions about the fate of the international labour movement in the Anglophone hemisphere – a hegemonic sociocultural landscape that remains to be violently enthralled to the reified principles of free market liberalism.

Bionote: Stefan Baumgarten is Lecturer in German and Translation Studies at Bangor University, Wales. His research concentrates on the interrelation of translation, power and ideology. Apart from a theoretical focus on the sociology of translation and on ideology research, he is interested in the role of translation in globalisation processes and specifically in its impact on political and critical philosophical discourse. Additional research interests concern questions of translation historiography and the role of translation in maintaining 'epistemological' diversity.

PAPER 6 (in Spanish):

Title: Against Ventriloquism: Notes on the Uses and Misuses of the translation of subaltern knowledge in Latin America

Speaker: Daniel Inclan, National University of Mexico

This paper will contrast two forms of translation of subaltern knowledge in Latin America, using the frames of the conceptual history and the sociology of knowledge. On the one hand, in the last two decades, decolonial studies scholars have attempted to propose an alternative way of thinking Latin America by focusing on the knowledge of local communities. The ways of knowing of these subaltern groups have played a key role in these theoretical endeavours. The translation strategies used by decolonial studies' scholars aim at putting the knowledge of indigenous populations at the centre of a decolonizing intellectual project. While the importance of the decolonial studies' work is undeniable, it should be noted that their translations tend to resemble a ventriloquist performance. That is, there is a tendency to speak on behalf of subaltern groups, rather than to translate their discourse. Moreover, the translations carried out by decolonial studies' scholars still need to overcome: 1) the victimization of the local discourses, 2) an essentialist vision of identities, and 3) a lack of empirical work within the communities. By failing to go beyond these colonial remainders, decolonial translations also fail to show the internal contradictions of subaltern groups, their complex historicity, and their conflictual relationship with hegemonic dynamics. On the other hand, long before the raise of decolonial studies, Bolivia became a stage of an extremely interesting translation project involving indigenous knowledge. In the 1980s, the Taller de Historia Oral Andina (THOA, Workshop of Andean Oral History) developed an epistemic process, whose main goal was recovering indigenous experiences for building new analytical frames. A historiographical project, which was focused on local communities was then undertaken with the objective of setting the grounds for a critique of the marginalizing life conditions of indigenous communities. Translation was one of the guiding principles of this historiographical project. The THOA reinterpreted the history of the Bolivian Altiplano through the oral histories of Aymara and Quechua communities. Within THOA, translation had a clear political goal, which could not be reduced to rhetorical intentions. It was not a matter of uncovering a hidden history, but of criticizing a particular social organization. Translation was used as a tool in the struggle of these communities for articulating their histories in their own terms. Because THOA is practically unknown in other Latin American countries, its multiple contributions to rearticulate subaltern discourses through translation have been understudied. By contrasting these two translation projects, this paper will shed light on the uses and misuses of the translation of subaltern knowledge in the Latin American context at the end of the 20th century, and will argue for studying translation processes such as the one undertaken by THOA.

Bionote: Daniel Inclan is Professor of the Postgraduate Program of Latin American studies at the National University of Mexico. His research interests focus on the theory and philosophy of history in Latin America after dictatorships process in Bolivia, Argentina and Chile and on economic process in the indigenous communities in Bolivia. His recent publications include: 'De la política a la historia. Historiografías y estéticas en posdictadura', Acta sociológica no 61. , 2013; 'El sujeto político en el pensamiento boliviano', Revista de Estudios Latinoamericanos, no. 30, 2012. He is also the autor of El problema del sujeto de la historia (forthcoming).

PAPER 7 (in Spanish):

Title: Collaborative Activist Translation 2.0 and 'slow politics' in the 21st Century: Changing the World one Semi-Colon at a Time

Speaker: Raúl Ernesto Colón Rodríguez, University of Ottawa, Canada

Abstract:

As a consequence of truthiness' pervasive character that bombards citizens from everywhere and on almost every topic, agents from civil society mobilize in order to demand sanity, and to promote an agenda of rational and complex reflection and analysis. This phenomenon gives rise to a new sociopolitical ethics named 'slow politics'. Translation figures in the change that civil society conveys through different activism projects, with both collaborative and non-professional forms of translation gaining ground. New formats for the dissemination of translations have been developed (web sites), translators are organizing and functioning in new horizontal forms, and these are partially replacing traditional vertical activist forms of organisation (spontaneous non-professional translators' groups), and new tactics and strategies are developing, giving pre-eminence to pluralistic ideological engagements. As a result, translation is engaged today in a new wave of the never-ending confrontation and dialogue between the dialectics of metaphor and the dialogics of metonymy in political discourse. The former are closely related to exclusivist binaries, the latter allowing, through adjacencies, dialogue and confrontation at the same time. This is the main reason why Complexity theory is pertinent to this study, its dialogic principle being a fundamental theoretical tool for the analysis of these new realities.

In this presentation, the author will compare two corpora of 15 originals and their translations of two recent experiences of collaborative activist translation online, from two countries of the Americas: Canada and Brazil. Levels of usage of metaphor and metonymy will be measured between original and translation, with the help of the bilingual term extracting software SynchroTerm 2013.Qualitative analysis will follow, through the study of commented published translations, in order to determine the impact, acceptance and reactions to this new textual forms.

In Canada, the site Translating the printemps érable, linked to the student movement in Quebec of 2012, constitutes a paradigmatic example of what we call here collaborative activist translation 2.0. In Brazil, the web site Outras Palavras presents articles translated into Portuguese, penned by leading authors of the international left and reflects a preliminary stage of development in collaborative activist translation, but one already far from 1.0 activism. Both cases allow us to grasp the social context and projection in which those translational practices are introduced and the way in which translators of these projects become representatives of a neorational message, with different, but interlinked ideological nuances, maybe in the new spirit of 'slow politics'.

Bionote: Raúl Ernesto Colón Rodríguez is a PhD candidate in Translation Studies at the University of Ottawa. Raúl has worked on editorial and cinematographic translations in Canada (2007-2009), completed a Masters degree in Translation Studies in 2011 (also at University of Ottawa) and since then has been working on his PhD thesis on the subject of collaborative activist translation in Canada and Brazil. He has published articles, translations and book reviews in Canadian, Spanish, Colombian, Polish and Brazilian publications.

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Innovation in Bible Translation: History, Theory, Practice
Jacobus Naude and Cynthia Miller-Naude
University of the Free State (Bloemfontein, South Africa)

 

Although Bible translation is rightly considered a variety of religious translation, in many respects Bible translators have operated outside of the field of translation studies in general. This panel seeks to bring Bible translation into conversation with translation studies by highlighting recent developments in Bible translation with respect to the implementation of the sociological turn in translation studies.

There are three main areas to be examined: (1) The writing of histories of Bible translation with special attention to their social and cultural impact. Included in this area are the ways in which Bible translation has impacted language groups socially and culturally with respect, for example, to language development and social and economic development. (2) The theory of Bible translation, especially concerning direct and indirect translation, translation as interpretation, and intersemiotic translation. Included in this area are the ways in which Bible translation has approached the issues of foreignisation and indigenisation and the question of respect for the cultural and religious values of the target culture. (3) The practice of Bible translation, especially with respect to orality and non-print media, performance criticism, and technological developments.

For informal enquiries: [millerclATufsDOTacDOTza]

Jacobus A. Naudé (University of the Free State) is a member of the Afrikaans Bible translation project and serves on the advisory board of the Handbook of Translation Studies. He edited Contemporary Translation Studies and Bible Translations (2002), Language Practice: One Profession; Many Applications (2007), Socio-constructive Language Practice: Training in the South African Context (2008), Bible Translation and the Indigenous (2009).

Cynthia L. Miller-Naudé (University of the Free State) has been a consultant for Bible translators in Africa since 1992. She has published on the translation of biblical proverbs in African languages (2005), religious translation in Africa (2011), Lamentations in the King James Version (2012), ideology and translation strategy in Bible translation (2013), alterity, orality and performance in Bible translation.

SESSION PLAN

Each paper is allocated with a 20 minutes time slot + 10 minutes discussion.

Discussion time at the end of each paper

PAPER TITLES, ABSTRACTS AND BIONOTES

Introduction to the panel

Title: Innovation in Bible Translation

Speaker: Cynthia L. Miller-Naudé, University of the Free State

Bionote:

Cynthia Miller-Naudé (University of the Free State) has been a consultant for Bible translators in Africa since 1992. She has published on the translation of biblical proverbs in African languages (2005), religious translation in Africa (2011), Lamentations in the King James Version (2012), ideology and translation strategy in Bible translation (2013), alterity, orality and performance in Bible translation.

 

PAPER 1:

Title: PARATEXT: SOFTWARE FOR BIBLE TRANSLATORS - Staying Close to the Cutting Edge

Speaker: Reinier de Blois

Abstract: Since 1997 thousands of Bible translators worldwide have been working with Paratext, a suite of programs, created by the United Bible Societies (UBS) for Bible Translation staff. In 2011 UBS and the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) decided to merge Paratext with SIL's Translation Editor (TE) and continue developing the resulting tool together under the name ParaTExt. Other tools of the suite are Publishing Assistant, Concordance Builder, Names Index Builder, the Digital Bible Library, and the Global Bible Catalogue. Together these programs offer Bible translators, publishers, and archivists a set of tools that cover almost all phases of the Bible Translation lifecycle. As a result, ParaTExt has become the de-facto standard in the Bible Translation world.

This paper will give a brief history of the development of this tool, followed by a description of the entire suite and the place of each individual tool within the Bible Translation lifecycle. The main focus will be on ParaTExt and the special functionality that it offers to Bible translators that are not usually included in other Bible software packages. We will see how Project MARBLE offers access to high quality resources to serve Bible translators all over the globe, including those that do not know Hebrew and Greek. We will also pay attention to ParaTExt's powerful Scripture editing and text checking functionality. In addition, there will be a section that demonstrates how ParaTExt can help ensure the consistency of a translation with the help of the Biblical Terms and Parallel Passage tools. We will also pay attention to a number of advanced features of the software, such as ParaTExt's statistical glossing technology. The paper will conclude with a brief description of several other tools that are part of the ParaTExt suite.

Bionote: Reinier de Blois has an MA in African Linguistics (University of Leiden) and a PhD in Biblical Hebrew Linguistics (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam). His area of specialization is Hebrew Lexicography. He is the editor of the Semantic Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew (SDBH, www.sdbh.org). He has worked with the United Bible Societies as Translation Consultant in Africa from 1990 until 2011. Since 2011 he is the Global Coordinator for the Institute of Computer Assisted Publishing

PAPER 2:

Title: From Orality to Orality: A Sensual Story of Bible Translation

Speaker: James Maxey

Abstract: The histories of the Christian Bible offer a fertile space for the consideration of translation and media. Beyond the sheer number of cultures, languages, and translated material, the sociological dimensions of Bible translation demonstrate the multilateral interactions of commissioners, translators and host communities in highly charged ideological situations. This is particularly evident during the missionary era of the 18-20th centuries, in which Bible translation is implicated in the colonial projects of Europe and North America carried out in the global south. Of the many facets of these colonial projects, the printed book as the preferred medium of translation reflects the bias of those involved in the Bible Translation (BT) industry. In the late 20th century, research in several disciplines – from the classics to ethnopoetics to religious studies to translation studies – highlighted the questions of media and translation. These studies have slowly begun to inform BT. While many in BT have simply substituted oral for the print media while maintaining their ideological agendas, others have understood the epistemological implications in a shift of media and the ideological, theoretical, and methodological ramifications of such a shift. This is evidenced in the emerging theory of Biblical Performance Criticism (BPC). An assertion of BPC is that oral performance was the primary means of communication in antiquity and that this informed how the early biblical material was composed and disseminated. That is to say, that the biblical material was composed to be heard and experienced in performance rather than to be read silently and in isolation from community. This assertion has tremendous implications for the interpretation and translation of the Bible today. The set of questions and the methods for translation change dramatically if one understands the Bible as a result of the interface of media and its portrayal as oral performance. This current study develops themes from previous research in the translation and performance of biblical material in one project in central Cameroon as well as personal experiences of performance and translation. One of the main assertions made in this regard is that this activity is more than translation for performance, but understands performance as translation. Translation studies' view of translation as a creative act and rewriting rather than as an act of recuperation with the results constantly being measured by equivalence encourages BT to be prospective rather than retrospective in its views. This perspective invites BPC to promote the creative production of biblical material that contributes to a sociological understanding of BT beyond linguistics to cultural issues of identity and power along with audience interaction.

Bionote: James Maxey is Associate Dean of the Nida Institute and Dean of Faculty for the Nida School of Translation Studies. He has been involved in translation work in Africa for more than twenty years. His research interests include performance and translation, as well as cultural studies. In addition to numerous journal articles, he is author of From Orality to Orality: A New Paradigm for Contextual Translation of the Bible (Wipf & Stock, 2009) and co-editor of Translating Scripture for Sound and Performance: New Directions in Biblical Studies (Wipf & Stock, 2012).

PAPER 3:

Title: Bible Translation as Intercultural Encounter: Translation as an Interrogative Paradigm

Speaker: Deborah Shadd

Abstract: Recent decades have seen a significant expansion in the theorization of translation and increased complexification of our very understanding of the concept, due in large part to the ongoing elaboration of postcolonial thought and of other theoretical perspectives which have developed in its wake. Moving beyond the notion of translation as a strictly textual process, a number of scholars have begun to recognize translation as a valuable paradigm for interrogating certain other disjunctive cultural and social experiences that increasingly mark our existence in a globalized world and that contribute fundamentally to the formation of identities. In the introduction to their book Post-Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice, for example, Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi suggest that colonies could usefully be considered translations of their European originals. Building on this historical example, others have employed a similar paradigm in writing about experiences from migration to education to the construction of multicultural societies as processes of translation. Each of these studies, as well as others like them, presents a concept of translation that is far from prototypical; instead, what emerges is a metaphorical, or better, paradigmatic view of translation that allows us to apply what has been learned from centuries of dialogue about the social and cultural negotiations demanded by textual translation to other non-textual transformative processes. Bible translation is a clear example of a practice positioned at the very juncture of these two broad conceptions of translation – the prototypical and the paradigmatic – being initially concerned with a textual transformation, but inevitably carrying with it much broader implications for a whole series of other potential transformations of identity and community. Having first surveyed the ways this translational paradigm has been employed by scholars to date, this paper will go on to explore how such a paradigm might be usefully applied to the theorization of Bible translation, positioning the textual act of Bible translation as but one element of a broader socially transformative process and providing a single framework within which to address not only linguistic, but also contextual, cultural and social disruptures. Drawing on examples of several Bible translation projects carried out within the Canadian context, this paper will ask whether and to what extent the notion of a translational paradigm may be a useful tool both for deepening our understanding of past conflicts which have emerged in relation to sacred text translation and for helping us envision new and generative possibilities for better situating such projects in the future. In other words, how might expanding the breadth of our translational thinking inform our theorizing of Bible translation, as well as our practice of engaging with the cultural and social aspects of this cross-cultural undertaking?

Bionote:

Deborah Shadd holds the position of Translation Training and Scholarship Associate at the Nida Institute and is Dean of Associates for the Nida School of Translation Studies. Her research focuses on the role of language and education policy in the formation of cultural identities, postcolonial translation theory, and the maintenance and management of Canadian multiculturalism. She has worked as a freelance translator and published a number of articles, including "The Other Side of the Coin: A New Perspective on Translation and Metaphor" (In Other Words, 2009) and "Chasing Ricoeur: In Pursuit of the Translational Paradigm" (New Voices in Translation Studies, 2012).

PAPER 4:

Title: Bible Translation and Alterity from an Orthodox Perspective

Speaker: Simon Crisp

Abstract: Much recent discussion in Bible translation has turned on questions of alterity. The wish to reflect in translation the essential otherness of the biblical text has come more clearly into focus as readers have increasingly become dissatisfied with the so-called functionally equivalent Bible translations which predominated in the second half of the twentieth century, largely as a result of the work of Eugene Nida. The sharp distinction made by Nida between equivalence of form and equivalence of meaning, together with a strong emphasis on idiomatic communication of meaning at the expense of the form of the source text, has over time been found unsatisfactory by readers looking for translations which reflect more clearly the status of the Bible as sacred text. In part these concerns have been driven by an increasing engagement of Bible translators with the wider world of Translation Studies. Functionalist theory of translation (Vermeer, Nord) in particular has become influential, and Relevance theory (Sperber, Wilson) has been systematically applied to Bible translation by some scholars (Gutt, Pattemore). Most recently attempts have been made to explore ways in which concepts of alterity, developed primarily in literary theory (Kristeva) and social psychology (Levinas), can usefully be applied to Bible translation (Beal, Towner). Nonetheless there remains a significant gap between this more theoretical level of reflection and the actual practice of making Bible translations. Most attempts to preserve in translation the otherness of the biblical text come down to more or less extremely literal renderings which essentially reflect very closely the form of the source text. This paper will suggest that the Orthodox Christian tradition of the understanding of Scripture, with its emphasis upon mystery on the one hand and continuity with Tradition on the other, can provide the basis for an approach to Bible translation which respects alterity without simply turning it into extreme literalness. Illustrative examples from a range of Orthodox-sponsored Bible translation projects will be presented and analysed in support of this claim, and some conclusions will be drawn about Orthodox Bible translation in English in the light of discussions about translation and alterity.

Bionote: Simon Crisp holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford and an MA from the University of Birmingham. He has worked in the field of Bible translation for more than thirty years, and currently serves as Coordinator for Scholarly Editions and Translation Standards with the United Bible Societies. He is partially seconded to the Nida Institute for Biblical Scholarship at the American Bible Society, where he has particular responsibility for program development in the Orthodox world. He has published widely in the areas of Bible translation, hermeneutics and biblical text criticism, and holds an honorary fellowship at the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing at the University of Birmingham.

PAPER 5

Title: A Case Study of the Chinese Union Version of the Holy Bible from the feminist perspective

Speaker: Debbie Sou

Abstract: The translation practice of the Holy Bible has been of the most challenging intercultural and interracial activity for the bible translators at all times because of the rapid and constant growth of a wide readership around the world. The myriads of retranslated and revised versions of this Holy Scripture indicate that there has always been a need for greater accuracy and the consideration of readers' response. Most versions of the Holy Bible in use nowadays are the products of patriarchy, and thus inevitably carry some gender-biased elements, which can appear to be perplexing or even unacceptable in an era when 'Feminist influences have penetrated every denomination' of Christianity. The vernacular Bible in the patriarchal language may create negative perceptions of women in the target culture. Although there are already many revised versions of the Holy Bible paying special attention to the use of gender-neutral or gender-inclusive terms, did the translators of the latest version of the Chinese Union Version (CUV) pay attention to the issue of gender? Have some of the gender issues that exist in various English versions of the Holy Bible been 'automatically' resolved as the text is rendered into contemporary Chinese? And if they did, how is the translator's gender consciousness reflected in the use of third-person pronouns in the two Chinese Union Versions? Citing translation theorists W. Benjamin (1968), S. Simon (1996) and some feminist discourse on Bible translation, this thesis examines the Chinese Union Version Bible (1919) and its updated version, the (RCUV) Revised Chinese Union Version (2010) to see if the RCUV is more gender-conscious than its predecessor. For the purpose of the investigation, the biblical 'fault lines' and the gender-biased language challenged and revised by the feminists are selected and studied together with their corresponding Chinese verses in the CUV and the RCUV. The study has found that the gender-biased lexes in the Chinese Union Version have been updated in the Revised Chinese Union Version; moreover, it is also perceived that an increasing number of Chinese biblical theologians and Chinese readers of the Bible are holding an open attitude towards reading the Bible from the feminist perspective. Therefore, the findings in the paper will provide reference for checking the gender-biased elements in the existing and future revisions of the Chinese Bible.

Bionote: Debbie Sou completed her Master's Degree in Translation Studies two years ago with her Master's thesis in Bible translation from the University of Macau. She also received her Bachelor's Degree in English Studies and Post-graduate Education diploma in the same university. She is now working as an English teacher in a secondary school in Macau. For translation practice, Debbie has been involved constantly in some church simultaneous interpretation services both in English and Chinese since 2009 in her own church in Macau. Her interest is to study any Bible translation work and interpretation practice rendered in today's Chinese Christian denominations.

PAPER 6:

Title: Oral-Written Style and Bible Translation

Speaker: Cynthia L. Miller-Naudé and Jacobus A. Naudé

Abstract: Recent research has shown that the Bible, in general, and the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible), in particular, were composed both by way of oral tradition and scribal activity and that, furthermore, these two aspects cannot be absolutely separated, either chronologically or in terms of importance (Carr 2005, 2011; de Vries 2012; Walton and Sandy 2013). This oral-written interface means that, on the one hand, there are oral features of the biblical tradition, some of which we have access to as "fossilized" remnants within the written text (Rhoads 2012). On the other hand, there are written features that relate both to the literary style of the author(s) and to the influence of scribal redaction and transmission (Polak 1998, 2012). The new field of Biblical Performance Criticism has highlighted the oral background of the biblical text and has suggested that translation must attend to translation of performance, translation for performance and translation as performance (Maxey 2009, 2012; Makutoane, Miller-Naudé and Naudé forthcoming)

In this paper, we examine various aspects of the oral and written styles within the Hebrew source text of the Old Testament as they relate to the ways in which speech and the perception of speech are represented. When speech is retold or represented within a story, the storyteller has the option to provide a metapragmatic analysis of the "original" speech event. Most commonly, these metapragmatic comments take the shape of quotative frames, which introduce the represented speech and specify various pragmatic features of it, such as the original speaker, the original addressee, the nature of the speech event, or the reason for the speech event. The metapragmatic variety encountered within the Hebrew Bible is usually described as the work of authors/redactors and attributed to written literary style. In this paper we first examine evidence which suggests that at least some of the metapragmatic variety relates instead to strategies employed by the storytellers/performers of oral texts. We then explore the ways in which various kinds of oral and written style may be encountered in translations of the biblical text.

Bionote: Cynthia Miller-Naudé (University of the Free State) has been a consultant for Bible translators in Africa since 1992. She has published on the translation of biblical proverbs in African languages (2005), religious translation in Africa (2011), Lamentations in the King James Version (2012), ideology and translation strategy in Bible translation (2013), alterity, orality and performance in Bible translation.

Jacobus Naudé (University of the Free State) is a member of the Afrikaans Bible translation project and serves on the advisory board of the Handbook of Translation Studies. He edited Contemporary Translation Studies and Bible Translations (2002), Language Practice: One Profession; Many Applications (2007), Socio-constructive Language Practice: Training in the South African Context (2008), Bible Translation and the Indigenous (2009).

PAPER 7

Title: Power and Progress: a look at the Baoule Bible Translation Project

Speaker: Lynell Marchese Zogbo

Abstract:

Missionary-based and missionary-directed Bible translations in Africa were the norm rather than the exception during the major part of the twentieth century. However, due to a number of factors impacting the continent(the end of colonialism and the subsequent waves of anti-colonialism, the 'predicted' expansion of Christianity and rise in church growth, along with the emergence of high level training institutions and a well educated Christian leadership), new attitudes, procedures and structures have emerged. There has been a very noticeable power shift as expatriate-dominated translation projects have given way to African-directed ones. Not surprisingly, such radical change presents tremendous challenges and cannot occur without some degree of conflict.

This paper focuses on a specific translation project in Côte d'Ivoire, the Baoule Bible, begun by American missionaries in the 30's (giving rise to a succession of New Testament versions), a project which continued on from 1960's, in collaboration with UBS and the Alliance biblique de Côte d'Ivoire, culminating in the 1998 publication of a very popular and widely used Baoule Bible. Today a revision of that Bible is almost completed, along with a mother tongue study Bible, the first of its kind in the country. In this paper, we will examine shifts which have occurred as indigenous translators' profiles, training and status have changed, as well as the impact of such shifts on the translation itself.

The translation has obligatorily moved from a rather strict evangelical perspective to a wide inter-confessional one. As the translation becomes more community-oriented, translation style has radically changed, moving away from a free dynamic style to renderings closer to the source. At times, team knowledge of literary stylisics has led to an improved translation. Metaphors which were not permitted in the first Bible (God is 'rock'), due to the potential of cultural mismatch, are now judged admissible. Issues of foreignization and domestication are carefully weighed. How do translation agents (translators, exegetes, consultants, sponsoring organizations) "live" these numerous changes? What tensions arise between the community's desires and vision and the publisher's need for international quality standards?

A history of this project is traced, concentrating on the impact of social change on the inner workings of the translation team and the impact of these shifts on the translation itself.

Bionote: Lynell Marchese Zogbo has a PhD in Linguistics from UCLA (1979). She taught linguistics at the University of Ilorin and San Jose State University. She served as Bible Translation Consultant 1986-2013 with the United Bible Societies and as professor in the Department of Translation, FATEAC, Cote d'Ivoire. She is presently a research associate and visiting lecturer at the University of the Free State (South Africa)

Concluding comments and discussion

Title: Future Innovation in Bible Translation

Speaker: Jacobus A. Naudé

Bionote: Jacobus Naudé (University of the Free State) is a member of the Afrikaans Bible translation project and serves on the advisory board of the Handbook of Translation Studies. He edited Contemporary Translation Studies and Bible Translations (2002), Language Practice: One Profession; Many Applications (2007), Socio-constructive Language Practice: Training in the South African Context (2008), Bible Translation and the Indigenous (2009).

 

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Literary Translation from the Cultural Margins: Fields of Political Intervention
Guillermo Badenes, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina:

This panel aims at studying the translation problems presented by literary texts belonging to the cultural margins in order to assess the strategies used by the translators of those texts regarding the preservation of their inherent cultural values, evaluating the effect of these translations as vehicles of cultural expression.

The panel has been divided into five sessions to organize the ideas underlying the panel. Thus, Session One takes the example of translation policies into Russian in different contemporary historical periods to pose key questions such as what are the reasons for literary works by certain authors to be translated and how these criteria may change, thus setting the tone and posing many of the questions that will cross the different presentations. Session Two presents ideas regarding translation done when national and racial identity come into play studying the translator as a visible, subjective individual, subverting years of so-called invisibility. Later, Session Three and Session Four present similar perspectives as regards sex and gender and exploring strategies used by different translators in the creation of sexual minorities. Session Five will observe how literary translation from the cultural margins may spill out into other social areas where marginal identity comes into conflict with hegemonic ideas.

In this way, the preoccupation for the recuperation of silenced voices belonging to the cultural margins or the denouncement of agents for silencing these voices spring as the main concerns throughout the presentations. Thus, the first four sections, Choices, Nation and Race, Sex and Gender, offer a survey of the status quo in different parts of the world, while Outbound, the last section, revises the manner in which ideas born in literary translation may spill out into other realms of society.

 

For informal enquiries: [guillermobadenesATflDOTuncDOTeduDOTar]

 

Prof. Guillermo Badenes (Universidad Nacional de Córdoba) is an instructor and researcher in Córdoba, where he teaches Literary Translation and Translation of the Humanities at undergraduate and graduate levels. As a researcher, he directs the research project "Literary Translation from the Cultural Margins: Fields of Political Intervention". He has published translation theory (Traducción periodística y literaria) and translated anthologies such as El viejo sofá azul, Voces del norte and Qué onda Canadá. His numerous academic studies have been published in Argentina and abroad. Prof. Badenes is an active advocate for the recuperation of silenced voices in literature.

 

 

 

PART 1: Choices

INTRODUCTION (10 minutes)

Title: Literary Translation in the 21st Century: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants or Dwarfs?

Convenor: Guillermo Badenes

PART 2: Nation and Race

PAPER 1:

Title: Rafael Barrett about the mate tea plantations: Speak for the other in my language?

Speaker: Eleonora Barretto, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina

PAPER 2:

Title: Aiming (For) Translation

Speaker: Nicole Nolette, University of Ottawa

PART 3: Sex

PAPER 3:

Title: Translation at the Crossroads of a National Literature: The Case of Woolf, Borges and Ocampo

Speaker: Josefina Coisson, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba

PAPER 4:

Title: Translating sexual violence at wartime in the Middle East and North African (MENA) region: a minority within the minority Poets

Speaker: Anissa Daoudi, University of Birmingham

PART 4: Gender

PAPER 5 :

Title: As Queer as Queer Can Be? William Burroughs' Novella through Rose-Tinted Glasses

Speaker: Guillermo Badenes, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba

WRAP-UP SECTION (10 minutes)

Title: Literary Translation as Political Activism: The End of Invisibility?

Convenor: Guillermo Badenes

 

 Translation and development

Panel Convenors: Kobus Marais, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa:

Recent decades have seen criticism levelled against the reductionist project in Western scholarship. In the search for a solution to the perceived impasse, semiosis, complexity and emergence have been introduced as possible avenues by which to deal with the perceived limitations of reductionism. At the same time, it has become common place to talk about the sociological turn in translation studies. This development, which started with sociolinguistic approaches to translation in the 1960s and which included pragmatic, cultural, and ideological approaches to translation studies, is aimed at liberating translation studies from the confines of a narrow linguistic perspective to include the whole of social reality in its purview. In the current sociological debate in translation studies, the focus is on the agency of translators, i.e. the way in which translators contribute towards the creation of the various domains of society.

Recent advances in translation studies have focussed on geopolitical factors that influence translation practices. This will open the door to study third-world or developing contexts and the relationship between translation and development, i.e. both the developmental role played by translation as well as developmental contexts as a factor in translation. If it is true that societies emerge from the linguistic interactions of individuals, it means that issues of development have a semiosic substratum that links to translation in multilingual situations.

In light of the above, the overarching question is the following:

How is one to conceptualise the relationship between translation and society and, in particular, developing society?

Related questions entail the following:

· How does the notion of development relate to translation, i.e. is a development context a factor in translation? If so, how is this relationship to be conceptualised, and what are the implications for translation theory and for the education of translators in such contexts?

· How does the notion of translation relate to notions of development, i.e. what role does, can, or should translation and translation studies play in development as a social ideal?

· Can the same claims about the construction of culture through literary translation by, for example, Gentzler and Bandia be made for the construction of social reality through communicative texts in developing contexts?

· What new vistas does the notion of development open for translation and translation studies? For one, how would translation practices in the informal sector of the economy differ from those in formal sectors of the economy?

Far from being parochial, these questions feed into pressing global debates such as the power differentials between developed and developing parts of the world, the negotiation of ideas when they travel and when they interact with contexts in which they did not originate, cultural translation and the representation of the Other, notions of post- and neo-colonialism, and the foundational role of human interaction and semiosis in all of the above.

 

For informal enquiries: [jmaraisATufsDOTacDOTza]

 

 Kobus Marais is an associate professor in translation studies at the University of the Free State in South Africa. He holds qualifications in various fields of study, including an MA in translation studies and a PhD in Biblical Hebrew Literature. His research focuses on theorising the African context of translation from the perspective of complex semiosic systems. He explores the relationship between development and translation by constructing a theory of complex semiosic responses. He has just published a book with Routledge called Translation theory and development studies: A complexity theory approach.

 

 

 

 SESSION PLAN

Each paper is allocated with a 20 minutes time slot + 10 minutes discussion.
Discussion time:
- at the end of each paper

PAPER TITLES, ABSTRACTS AND BIONOTES

INTRODUCTION
Title: Translation and development: Setting the scene
Speaker: Kobus Marais, University of the Free State

Abstract: 10 minutes introduction

Bionote: Kobus Marais is an associate professor of translation studies at the University of the Free State in South Africa. He holds qualifications in various fields of study, including an MA in translation studies and a PhD in Biblical Hebrew Literature.
His research focuses on theorising the African context of translation from the perspective of complex semiosic systems. He explores the relationship between development and translation by constructing a theory of complex semiosic responses.
He has just published a book with Routledge called Translation theory and development studies: A complexity theory approach.

PAPER 1:
Title: Translation, translation studies and development: Widening our worlds
Speaker: José Lambert (CETRA, KULeuven; PGET/UFSC, Brazil), This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Abstract: Academic disciplines as well as universities have a certain autonomy in the definition of their goals and priorities, which explains their shifts in terms of time and space as well as their lack of homogeneity. Hence translation scholars have their responsibilities, in terms of globalization. Our question in this panel might indeed be what kind of models for development will be adopted. This sounds like a scary issue for a field of expertise where literature and language, in European environments, tended to provide the dominant background until the 1980s.

In a few decades, various particular traditions have developed, from translation training to linguistic, literary and cultural models, etc. According to Pym, the well-known Holmes model, later worked out by Toury, was the only explicit attempt to meet the standards of academia. This makes us assume that the academic dynamic was weaker than the external dynamic. Indeed, external forces such as internationalization (after World War II) and then globalization (at the end of the 20th century) seem to have been decisive. The diplomatic selection of a name in the new lingua franca has certainly favored the illusion of consistency. Illusion? Even within the bibliography in English, one and the same name does not guarantee one and the same nature of Translation Studies (TS). Translation training has joined various options for academic research. So far the institutional power remains mainly located within the language departments, notwithstanding the many "turns" experienced over, say, twenty years. The late discovery of sociological turns, amongst others, is surprising given the idea, since the 1970's, that research on translation ought to be research about norms.

TS seems to share with many other disciplines its search for stability: in terms of internal dynamics, first of all, since turning around is no symptom of continuity and certainly in terms of relations with several neighbour (?) departments (linguistics, communication, literary and cultural studies, psychology, sociology, technology, philosophy, etc.). Bibliographical and conceptual interaction does not really circulate, not even between several departments where languages, communication and translation are at stake. In terms of mobility, the sudden and spectacular participation of new continents and new people involve the establishment of new centers and networks. While universities in general tend to be absorbed by "global" ranking, communication and other marketing currents, TS can hardly function as an autonomous resource. Whether it will be enrolled as a service by and for stronger neighbours or as an active partner in organization and decision issues will obviously not be a matter for academia only. The main obstacle seems to be that so far TS has cut off itself from obvious and strong partnerships both within academia and within the real everyday world: in the 1950s, TS has started in business and in organizations, but nowadays the discipline still belongs to ancient worlds. This paper seeks to address these issues conceptually in order to link translation studies (again) to current reality.

Bionote: José Lambert is professor emeritus at KULeuven in romance philology, comparative literature and theoretical studies. Long before functioning as ICLA's European secretary, he played a role in the development of translation studies, first with James Holmes and Gideon Toury, particularly as the organizer of the influential Leuven conference on Literature and Translation and then when creating in the same year CETRA (first called CERA Chair, a research training center and Target. Beyond particular initiatives in the institutionalization of the discipline, he struggled for interdisciplinarity and for a real globalization. Since 2011, he has been a professor at Florianópolis, Brazil (PGET at UFSC).

PAPER 2:
Title: Translation and development: A multinational company (MNC) in a BRICS country
Speaker: Jean-François Brunelière (PGET/UFSC/BRAZIL), This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Abstract: The relevance of companies and of their communication as a strategic component of "real" (social, economic, cultural) life is nothing new for Translation Studies (TS). This was one of the axioms of translation theories and training after World War II, but some translation scholars from the age of globalization seem to have forgotten their origins. For a new branch of the discipline focusing on the relationship between translation and development, the specific case of MNCs entering emergent markets (e.g. the BRICS countries) offers clear indications of how translation, local economic development and the knowledge economy are linked. In Brazil, the government made a considerable effort to encourage foreign automotive manufacturers to invest in innovation and, ultimately, to produce locally.

Inevitably, technology transfer between foreign countries and Brazil involve the use of different languages – hence, the advent of translation. This interactive channel has an overt impact on local economic development – in terms of employment, formation and language/cultural contact. PSA Peugeot Citroën, the MNC we have chosen to observe, relies on more than 5,000 employees in Brazil and operates two local plants and one research and design unit. Even though PSA claims to use "one" corporate language at management level worldwide, it sounds rather unlikely that all employees involved in the industrial production process communicate through this lingua franca in all situations. One can say that, for companies of such magnitude, translation is among the cornerstones of both production and communication.

Owing to techniques developed within Toury's Descriptive Translation Studies – such as macro/micro level and synchronic/diachronic analysis – and using the company's discourse designed for different audiences (investors, press, clients) – largely available on the Internet – it is possible to approach the polysystems at work and identify some basic trends in the translations circulating in Brazil – e.g. in terms of directionality, norms and dominant positions (centers/peripheries). As both diversity and recurrent schemes come to the forefront, one realizes that the complexity of external and internal factors – just as the variety of agents participating in the translation process – must be taken into consideration. Depending on where a specific vehicle is produced and how the international communication campaign is designed, Brazilian members of the local marketing team might instigate their headquarter colleagues to privilege the local consumers' taste, for example, allowing new translation patterns to emerge. MNCs, driven by their rather besetting preoccupation with market and economic performance, often reshape the existing interrelationship between state, economy and society; such dynamics illustrate principles stressed by Walter Ong and in many books on the mobility of communication, but never applied to translation, and still less to business translation should no longer be overlooked in Development and Translation Studies.

Bionote: Jean-François Brunelière is a graduate of the Ecole Nationale des Travaux Publics de l'Etat ("National Civil Engineering School of Lyon"), France, where he also worked for eight years as an engineer. He is currently living in Brazil and is taking a PhD in Translation Studies at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC) in Florianópolis. His project is on language management and translation in multinational companies. He is currently focusing on French car manufacturers in Brazil. His academic adviser is Translation Studies specialist José Lambert.

PAPER 3:
Title: Theoretical background for studying innovation issues in translation-service activities
Speaker: KUŹNIK, Anna, PhD, Uniwersytet Wrocławski, Poland, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Abstract: The aim of my communication is to present a theoretical background and the pilot-study findings of my current post-doctoral research that I am carrying out in the Institute of Romance Philology, Unity of Translation Studies, University of Wrocław. The theoretical stage will be completed at the beginning of 2015, and the first empirical data (pilot study) will be collected in May and June 2015.
In this study, I touch upon the issue of translation approached from the translation studies, social and economic angles. What is in the centre of my interests is translation and, in particular, the questions about its essence, variety of forms, limits and surrounding in modern understanding, reception and service practice in the Republic of Poland. I focus on the translation service providers, irrespective of language combinations. The object of my research is the following three aspects: the conceptualisation of translation, the configuration of translation service activities and its innovative potential. My main research hypothesis is that there is a cause-and-effect relationship between all the three aspects of the translation service activities within a single translation service provider. This means that it is possible to observe that a broad understanding of translation determines a broad configuration of services and has an impact on the level of the innovative potential. A narrow understanding of translation determines the restricted configuration of services and has an impact on the level of the innovative potential, resulting in a tendency towards a low innovative potential. In my approach, I understand the concept of development as a specific process of evolution of the translation service activities, from its current form to a future, more efficient and competitive one.
Firstly, in my communication, I focus on the theoretical background of my research, approached from the fields of management, organisational studies and translation studies. I will try to answer the following three questions:
1. Are the general definitions of innovation, well known in the field of management and organisational studies, are applicable to translation service activities?
2. To what extend are the main typologies of innovation, namely the OECD typology (product innovation, process innovation, organizational innovation and marketing innovation) and the "4Ps" model (product innovation, process innovation, position innovation and paradigm innovation) developed by Bessant and Tidd (2007) useful for studying translation service activities?
3. Are all the traditional (object-based) and new forms of measuring innovation (subject-based approaches) possible and efficient in the case of the translation service activities?

Secondly, I present the results of my pilot study carried out with two translation service providers based in the city of Wroclaw (Poland). In the pilot stage, I take into account two respondents' profiles: (1) translation companies with Polish capital and (2) translation companies which are the representatives of foreign mother companies (in their cases, the indicators of innovation can be shaped differently).

Bionote: Anna Kuźnik is a graduate of Romance philology from the Jagiellonian University in Cracow (Poland), a Master degree in Ibero-American Linguistics and Literature from the Caro and Cuervo Institute in Bogota (Colombia), she was awarded a PhD in Translation and Intercultural Studies by the Autonomous University of Barcelona (Spain) in 2010. She is now working as a senior lecturer at the Institute of Romance Philology, University of Wrocław (Poland). Her research interests are focused on the following topics: work organization in translation services; knowledge transfer from universities into translation services; and work content of translators' jobs.

PAPER 4:

Title: Exploring the genesis of Arabic fiction translation into English: A sociological account

Speaker: Abdel Wahab Khalifa, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Abstract: English translations of texts associated with Arabic fiction remain largely unexplored from a sociological perspective. Research on the translations of Arabic fiction into English has mainly focused on the linguistics of translation. However, the network of sociocultural factors conditioning the production, consumption, and circulation of these translations appears to have been largely overlooked within scholarly discourse. Hence, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's sociology, this paper sets out to examine the genesis of translating Arabic fiction into English as a socially situated activity.

Works of Arabic fiction emerged in English translation in the early twentieth century. In his chronological bibliography of Arabic fiction in English translation, Altoma argues that there are three identifiable thresholds or "phases" within the history of translating Arabic fiction into English (i.e., the initial phase, the expanding phase and the post-Nobel phase). This paper challenges and reconstructs this argument, putting forward alternative dates for the processes of development identified by Altoma and a Bourdieusian analysis of the dynamics of translation in the phases he suggested. The paper culminates by arguing for the recognition of a fourth phase, which could be referred to as the post 9/11 phase, and will also investigate its agents and dynamics.

Since the field of Arabic fiction translation into English is subject to both internal and external factors – including geopolitical and sociocultural events – which (trans)form and condition its structure and dynamics, this paper attempts to provide insights on overlooked aspects of the four distinct, though overlapping, phases identified above. This is done insofar as they have affected the field's structure, capital at stake, agents involved, modes of production used and the amount of activity within the field. Thus, in contrast to the linear understanding of the history of Arabic fiction translation and informed by a bibliography of translated Arabic fiction into English which I have compiled, this paper makes use of Bourdieu's concepts of field and capital as analytical tools to both describe and interpret the complexity of the translation activity taking place in this field of cultural production.

Bionote: Abdel Wahab Khalifa is a double major doctoral candidate at the Centre for Translation Studies (CTS) and the Centre for Arabic, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies (AIMES) at the University of Leeds. He has a BA and a PGDip in English Language and Literature from Tanta University, and an MPhil in Translation and Intercultural Studies from the University of Salford. Among other publications, he is the editor of Translators have their say? Translation and the power of agency (2014). His research interests include the sociology of translation; translation historiography; translation motivation as well as literary criticism and Arabic, Islamic and Middle Eastern cultural and literary histories.

PAPER 5:
Title: Translation as an agent for development communication in sub-Saharan Africa
Speaker: Mwamba Chibamba, PhD candidate, University of Ottawa, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Abstract: The notion of development has been a rather polemical as the evolution of the discipline through the years has shown. Scholars such as Dwivedi and Nef, among others, have argued that most of the theories that inform development administration as a discipline are largely Western, and as such, do not adequately explain nor provide solutions to developmental issues for peripheral regions of the world with very different contexts. Despite their differences, earlier theories of development such as modernization, dependency and neo-liberalism have been criticized for focusing on economic growth as the major indicator of development as opposed to more current indicators such as those encompassed in the United Nations Development Programme's Human Development Reports and Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum's capability approach, which are centered more on the individual.

Development has been one of the top priorities of African governments since independence. Achieving it sometimes hinges on the extent to which development communication is successful. Development communication is thus an important tool in facilitating development, and it equally requires a context-specific approach. Suffice it to say that translation and communication could play an important role in the implementation and successful delivery of development programs.

It is against this backdrop that this paper seeks to highlight the role of translation in development communication in some countries of sub-Saharan Africa (e.g. Zambia and Kenya). Given Africa's diversity, it is imperative that development communication on issues such as child nutrition and immunization and the prevention of diseases ranging from malaria to HIV and AIDS, which, for the most part, is produced either in the West or in European languages, is localized. The study aims to explore some of the translation practices and innovative ways in which developmental messages have been delivered, such as through the use of drama and mass media. It will also explore some of the ways in which translators have dealt with the question of specialized terminology (for example medical terms) that have no equivalent in local languages or are considered as taboo subjects. The paper will analyse some of the context-specific dynamics that could affect communication such as multilingualism, orality and the disparate literacy levels and diverse cultures. In discussing translation as a mediating force between cultures, Bernacka points out that "Translations can therefore have a distinct effect on how global and human rights issues can be conveyed and communicated".

It is expected that this paper will give an insight into how translation facilitates communication in development. It is also expected that the paper will demonstrate that context matters when it comes to the delivery of any kind of information.

Bionote: Mwamba Chibamba is currently pursuing a doctorate in translation studies at the University of Ottawa. Her research interests include translation in Africa, postcolonialism, African affairs as well as global affairs.

PAPER 6:
Title: We have never been un(der)developed: Translation and the biosemiotic foundation of being in the global south
Speaker: Kobus Marais, Department of Linguistics and Language Practice, University of the Free State, South Africa, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Abstract: Development studies in general and development theory in particular face serious problems. Not only is the development project itself problematic for ideological and practical reasons, but scholarly thinking about development also faces serious problems. The most prominent current theories of development are trying to find the foundation of development theory in theories of justice and human rights. Though these theories are making an important contribution towards the debate on development theory, they seriously lack in one regard. None of them regard language in general and multilingualism in particular as relevant factors in development. What is more, none of them consider semiosis, i.e. the ability of living organisms to create meaning, as a factor of development.

In this paper, I intend to go deeper than merely considering the linguistic and translational (proper) foundation of development. By building on theories of biosemiotics and intersemiosic translation, I shall consider the biosemiotic foundation of what is these days called 'development'. In its link to Lotman's theory of semiotic universe, the argument pertains to the ability of living organisms to respond to an environment by creating meaningful responses to that environment (semiosis). The argument also considers translation as focussing on the process nature of semiosis, thus explaining the continuous creative ways in which living organisms and groups of organisms respond to the challenges of their environment and in which they construct these response to create what we call culture and/or society.

The aim of the paper is to argue that translation studies have been too narrowly 'cultural' and 'linguistic' in its view of translation. If translation is expanded, through a biosemiotic conceptualisation of translation, to include the material conditions of semiosis, it will allow translation scholars to contribute at a much wider scale to the debate on 'development'. Also, it could lead to a more solid theoretical foundation of development itself. The paper thus entails a conceptualisation, relating its thesis to a debate with current literature in translation studies, semiotics and development studies.

Bionote: Kobus Marais is an associate professor in translation studies at the University of the Free State in South Africa. He holds qualifications in various fields of study, including an MA in translation studies and a PhD in Biblical Hebrew Literature.
His research focuses on theorising the African context of translation from the perspective of complex semiosic systems. He explores the relationship between development and translation by constructing a theory of complex semiosic responses.
He has just published a book with Routledge called Translation theory and development studies: A complexity theory approach.

CONCLUSION:
Title: Translation and development: Rounding up
Speaker: All participants and audience
Abstract: 30 minutes concluding discussion

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Performativity and Translation Studies:
Dennitza Gabrakova, City University of Hong Kong,
Douglas Robinson, Hong Kong Baptist University,
John Milton, University of São Paulo, Brazil,

As Cristina Marinetti argues, "The concept of performativity itself has yet to be fully articulated in relation to translation"; indeed, performativity has only recently begun to cross paths with Translation Studies, particularly with a focus on the translator's agency or identity and on translation as embodied epistemologies and aesthetics.

Performativity intersects with Translation in various ways: Sherry Simon (1998) and Edwin Gentzler (2008) discuss adopting a performative perspective "especially in relation to unpacking notions of identity". Douglas Robinson discusses the "performative linguistics of translation", that is, "translating as 'doing', doing something to the target reader". He also mentions "Translating as colonizing, or as fighting the lingering effects of colonialism; translating as resisting global capitalism, translating as fighting patriarchy, as liberating women (and men) from patriarchal gender roles (...) the translator as a doer, an actor on variously conceived cultural, professional, and cognitive stages" (Robinson 2003).

A recent special issue of Target (25:3) was dedicated to the role of translation and performativity in the theatre, and a colloquium organized by the proposers of the present panel in Hong Kong in January 2014 discussed "Performativity and Translation". Most of the papers examined aspects of performativity in theatre translation, a starting point for evaluating the innovative potential of Performativity as a productive rather than a merely reproductive force in other areas of Translation Studies. The Hong Kong colloquium attracted interest from scholars who demonstrated genuine enthusiasm and creativity in approaching this new topic and generating cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural dialogues. The present panel will be a natural continuation of this on-going discussion.

Possible research areas are: Dubbing and Subtitling, where the on-screen words or those the actors mouth reperform, closely or not so closely, those of the original; the Translator's Preface and other paratexts, which introduce a second performance to the original, supporting, contradicting, directing, or diverting the reader from the original text; Natural Translation, where, within the immigrant family, the language performance skills of the child may give them enormous power; translation for a specialized audience such as children or the deaf, where the translation must perform a role to construct a specific relationship; Interpreting Studies, where the neutrality of the interpreter comes into question.

Such intersections of performativity with Translation and Interpretation Studies will open up new perspectives on the role and practice of translation as an integral part of the performativity of culture on multiple levels: ethnicity, race, marginalization, generation, and gender, as well as the performativity of cross-cultural dynamics.

 

 

For informal enquiries: [jmiltonATuspDOTbr]

 

Dennitza Gabrakovais Assistant Professor in Japanese Studies at City University of Hong Kong. She is interested in the rhetoric of translation in connection to Postcolonial Studies and cultural identity. Currently Dennitza is working on a project related to the translation of (Postcolonial) theory into Japanese as a social and cultural intervention.

 

Douglas Robinson is Chair Professor of English and Dean of Arts at Hong Kong Baptist University and author of The Translator's Turn, Translation and Taboo, Translation and Empire, Becoming a Translator, What Is Translation?, Who Translates?, Performative Linguistics (the relevant predecessor for his talk here), Translation and the Problem of Sway, and Schleiermacher's Icoses, and editor of Western Translation Theory from Herodotus to Nietzsche. His forthcoming books include Semiotranslating Peirce and The Dao of Translation. He is currently at work on a translation of Finland's greatest novel, Aleksis Kivi's Seven Brothers (1870).

 

 

John Milton is Titular Professor, University of São Paulo, Brazil, teaching English Literature at undergraduate level and Translation Studies at M.A. and Ph. D. He is also the Coordinator of the M.A. and Ph.D. programmes in Translation Studies. His main academic interest is in the theory, history, sociology and politics of translation and has published several books in Brazil and edited Agents of Translation, John Benjamins, 2009. He has also published many articles in Brazil, and in Target and The Translator, and translated poetry from Portuguese into English, and, together with Alberto Marsicano, Keats, Wordsworth and Shelley into Portuguese. 

 

 

Introduction: Dennitza Gabrakova

PART 1: THEATRICAL TRANSCULTURATIONS

PAPER 1 – 20 minutes for presentation + 10 minutes for discussion

Performativity and Translation ethics in multicultural theatre
Cristina Marinetti

As a profoundly hermeneutic practice, involving interpretation alongside choice and representation, translation brings to the fore the ethical dimension of cross-cultural encounters. Although rich in a variety of positions – from relativity (Pym, 2002) to intervention and resistance (Venuti, 2007) – debates over the ethics of translation have traditionally been based on discussions of translation as a primarily textual and subsequently social phenomenon (Buzelin, 2006), where cultural representations are negotiated, preserved and changed through a series of interventions mappable onto texts and paratexts and more recently onto enquiries into the translator's unconscious (Venuti, 2012). In this paper, I intend to explore the question of translation ethics not from a textual or social but from a performative perspective, looking at instances where translation occurs not in the written text or in the negotiations around a written text, but in the process of devising and enacting a performance. My research on the performance aesthetics of Italian multicultural company Teatro delle Albe and suggests that a different set of variables are at play when translation occurs not 'on the page' but 'on the stage' and in this paper I intend to articulate, with the help of insights from research on ethics in intercultural performance (Ridout 2009, Barucha 2004), how they relate to and possibly even challenge existing models of translation ethics.

Barucha, 2004 Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture. London: Routledge. Buzelin, 2006 'Translation Ethnography and the Production of Knowledge'. St Piere ed. In Translation: Reflections, Refractions andTransformations. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Ridout, 2009 Theatre and Ethics. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Venuti, 2007 'Translation, Simulacra and Resistance' Translation Studies 1 (1). Venuti, 2012 Translation Changes Everything. London: Routledge.

Cristina Marinetti is Lecturer in Translation Studies at Cardiff University and director of the Translation Programme. Her primary area of research is translation studies but I also have a strong interest in theatre history and theatre practice. She has published on translation theory in relation to identity and performance, on drama and multimedia translation and on the interface between translation theory and practice. Her research is comparative in nature and combines historical/cultural analysis with reflections on her own translation practice.

PAPER 2 – 20 minutes for presentation + 10 minutes for discussion
Issues in the Performative Turn
Scott Williams 

The performative turn in Translation Studies builds on the many other developments in the field over the last decades. The notions of performance and performativity are key in examining translations across genres, from drama to the oral tradition and localization. Working mainly with translations to and from German, we will consider several issues. The performative turn demands that we correlate theatre translation with other types of rewriting. Connecting theatre and the oral tradition of the epic, for instance, also highlights the influence of physicality; for instance, in terms of sound ("speakability" is a recurrent issue in theatre translation). A fairly recent translation of Homer's epics (by Raoul Schrott) illustrates the cross-over of genres that can constitute the totality of rewriting. Thus the translation was commissioned for a radio performance and also appeared as written publication in conjunction with yet another book by the translator proposing a new theory of the Iliad's origins. The entire production taken collectively represents the multiplicity of rewriting as action. The necessity of negotiation is important in any stage production (e.g., of German drama) but also in website creation. Thus the collective input into English productions of the Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt parallels the various players in, for instance, website productions. Indeed, the internet provides a different stage upon which even Homer can be enacted. Thus a format that emphasizes textuality above orality can still perform a text, as Walter Grond attempted with Homer's Odyssey. Grond (Absolut Homer) challenged twenty-two authors to rewrite parts of the Odyssey. Although now in book form, it was originally a piece of concept art in which the various texts were online with key phrases hyperlinked to passages by the other authors. Thus each reading depended on the reader physically manipulating the mouse to click on whichever linked phrase was most appealing. Since each reader each time may link to different texts, every reading experience became a different 'odyssey.' Different authors wrote the text, but someone also had to decide which phrases to link, just as someone had to write the code and maintain the site. Some might restrict the association with performance to only theatre translation; but by sketching out the parallels between theatre translation and other rewritings one can better appreciate the scope of the performative turn.

Scott G. Williams (Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin) has published translations of over 20 contemporary German-language authors. He has written articles on, for instance, computer assisted language learning, the modern reception of Greco-Roman antiquity, and the application of translation theory to the study of modern literature. He is currently working on issues of translation and performance.

PAPER 3 – 20 minutes for presentation + 10 minutes for discussion

From Performance Studies to Translation Studies: Translations Performed in Brazil: Anchieta, the Minas Conspiracy, and Monteiro Lobato
John Milton

In the Introduction to The Performance Studies Reader Richard Schechner stresses the need to broaden Performing Arts curricula to examine "how performance is used in politics, medicine, religion, popular entertainments, and ordinary face-to-face interactions" (p.8), analysing the relationships between authors, performers, directors, and spectators. This panel adds Translation and Interpretation to Schechner's list, seeing translators and interpreters as performers of a text authored in a different language, and whose audience, in the case of most translations, or broadcasted Interpreting, is largely unknown, though Interpreting includes a large number of situations, including the very theatrical and performative Consecutive Interpreting.

In the same volume, Marvin Carlson complements Schechner: "With performance as a kind of critical wedge, the metaphor of theatricality has moved out of the arts into almost every aspect of modern attempts to understand our condition and activities, into almost every branch of the human sciences – sociology, anthropology, ethnography, psychology, linguistics" (p.74).

In this presentation I follow Schechner and Carlson and take performativity and theatricality into the realm of Translation Studies, more specifically three studies I have made, and re-examine them from the perspective of Performativity. Firstly, the translations, or rather, adaptations of the plays of the Portuguese dramatist, Gil Vicente, into the indigenous Brazilian language, Tupi, by the Jesuit missionary José de Anchieta (1534-1597) in Brazil in the 16th century, with the intention of catechising the Brazilian Indians into Catholicism. In which ways did Anchieta translate and perform these translations, and how were they presented to the Tupi Indians? And how can Performativity Studies help us to understand these works?

Secondly, I examine the performative elements of translation in the Minas Conspiracy [Inconfidência Mineira], the thwarted revolution in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais in 1789. The role of the main figures, the Ensign, or Second Lieutenant, Tiradentes [Tooth-Puller], and the poets, Clãudio Manuel da Costa, and Tomás Gonzaga, have been performed in different ways, according to historical and ideological interpretations of the Conspiracy. And the iconic copy of Claude Ambroise Régnier's Recueil des Lois Constitutives, which enabled the rebels to become familiar with the constitution of the United States and the laws of the 13 states, is now on show in Ouro Preto as a central property of the Conspiracy.

Last, but not least, I analyse the retelling of Peter Pan (1930), by the Brazilian writer and translator José Bento de Monteiro Lobato (1889-1945), especially well-known for his children's fiction: Grandmother Dona Benta retells the story to the children and dolls of the Yellow Woodpecker Farm, and through her insertions and the questions and the comments of the children and dolls, Lobato is able to include critiques of the contemporary Brazilian economic situation and the dictatorship of the populist president, Getúlio Vargas. Copies of Lobato's Peter Pan were even confiscated and destroyed in the state of São Paulo. Thus Lobato's translation is reperforming Barrie's original, and changing the place of enunciation from Barrie to Lobato.

John Milton is Titular Professor, University of São Paulo, Brazil, teaching English Literature at undergraduate level and Translation Studies at M.A. and Ph. D. He is also the Coordinator of the M.A. and Ph.D. programmes in Translation Studies. His main academic interest is in the theory, history, sociology and politics of translation and has published several books in Brazil and edited Agents of Translation, John Benjamins, 2009. He has also published many articles in Brazil, and in Target and The Translator, and translated poetry from Portuguese into English, and, together with Alberto Marsicano, Keats, Wordsworth and Shelley into Portuguese.

PART 2 : ETHICAL INTERVENTIONS

PAPER 4 – 20 minutes for presentation + 10 minutes for discussion
Pragmatic texts and notions of performativity
Candace Séguinot 

The concept of performativity has been related both to the linguistic notion of performatives (Robinson, 2006), and translational discussions of agency and (in)visibility (Simeoni: 1998 , and Venuti: 2008). The introduction of the former as a property of utterances came to be extended to linguistic interaction and the assumptions about communicating that underlie them. The latter have recently shifted from a consideration of the rights and obligations of the translator to an original author or to an internalized professional and social role to the intervention of translators as social actors and activists both inside of and outside of what has traditionally been called translation. This traditional or as it has been called narrow view of translation in the call for papers for the 2015 conference Translation and the Many Languages of Resistance (http://globalizingdissent.wordpress.com) has a complement called broad characterized by mediation in which there may not be more than one language involved, or indeed any language at all.

In just such a way the evolution of the notion of performativity can help us revisit certain aspects of pragmatic translation. This paper will discuss three areas in particular. The first is the reduced agency in the value-added aspects of the translator's role in the language industries compared to knowledge mobilization. Knowledge translation in particular has been defined as "... a dynamic and iterative process that includes synthesis, dissemination, exchange and ethically-sound [ emphasis mine] application of knowledge..." in the health fields (Canadian Institutes of Health Research, 2000, Cihr-irsc.gc.ca). The transforming of information to make it available to the public used to be based on rhetorical principles, ie the form of argumentation, the use of the second person, etc. Today the recognition of the importance of emotions in decision-making means that audiences are no longer seen as homogeneous, and translators are not constrained by texts to produce texts. Further, even the production of texts in traditional professional translation is being rethought to improve performability as content managers look for ways to analyse and organize language-independent content.

This leads to the question of what cognitively-based observational research can show us about degrees of performativity in the translations themselves and in the agency of the translator.

Candace Séguinot is a Full Professor at the School of Translation at Glendon College, York University, in Toronto, Canada, where she also directs the Program in Technical and Professional Communication. Her research and publications are in the areas of cross-cultural communication, global marketing, theoretical models of the translation process and the nature of professional expertise.

PAPER 5 – 20 minutes for presentation + 10 minutes for discussion

Translation Acts: Discourse, Performativeness and "Emic" Entities
Lenita Esteves (Submission #117)

Common sense holds that the best translations are those that render the source text faithfully, without any loss in meaning, form or tone. It is also well agreed that the task of producing such a translation, despite being an ideal pursued by many, is impossible. In line with Douglas Robinson's ideas as proposed in "Performative Linguistics" (2003) this paper considers translation performatively, that is, as action. This implies an agent, motives and consequences. The most important corollary of this proposal is an alternative way of seeing the role of translators in society — they start being considered as real mediators, leaving behind their function as mere carriers of ideas and meanings. The Speech Act theory, as proposed by J. L. Austin, will serve as a guideline in the exploration of the concept of translation as action, an act performed in the real world. This performative approach of translation is, in Robinson's words, "interested in actual language use in real-world contexts, in the relationships between actual speakers and writers and actual interpreters, specifically in how humans perform verbal actions and respond to the verbal actions performed by others" (p. 4). This work focuses specifically on the way Austin builds his theorization. In his very peculiar way of making theory, Austin does not advance in a straight line, but in a rather sinuous movement, with many reformulations and new developments. Moreover, Austin's insistence on basing his reflections on "ordinary language", taking into account the circumstances under which utterances are made, will be emphasized, along with his reiterated opinion that philosophy should neither oversimplify its issues nor work based on ideal situations that do not correspond with real life. This paper argues that Austin's theoretical attitude, with its uncertainties and open-ends, is an adequate attitude for translation scholars, who should also work with language in use and delve deeply into issues, avoiding oversimplifications. Kanavillil Rajagopalan (1992) has argued that illocutionary acts are "emic" entities, that is, irreducibly cultural units of analysis. Translation acts will also be analyzed here as "emic" entities that resist strict generalizations. On the other hand, "families" of translation acts will be presented – "families" in the Wittgensteinian sense (1953) — of groups whose elements do not have an essential feature, but rather several overlapping similarities. These families are: Translation as diffusion of knowledge; Translation as immersion in textuality; Translation as enrichment; Translation as political engagement.

Lenita Esteves is Associate Professor of Translation Theory and Practice at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. Her main research interests are Translation and Ethics, Historiography of Translation; Translation and Psychoanalysis, and the Reception of Brazilian Literature in the English speaking world.

PAPER 6 – 20 minutes for presentation + 10 minutes for discussion

Translating theory and the Japanese Postcolonial Refraction
Dennitza Gabrakova

This paper focuses on the significance of translation of theory as an site of intersection of the 1) self-fashioning of a type of performative ethical identity of the Japanese intellectual activist and 2) generation of intellectual perspectives with close affinity to postcolonial critique. After briefly outlining the significance of translation for Japanese modernity, the work of several translators of theory will be discussed against the background of the unilateral flow of ideas and Enlightenment. The study of the creative transformations accompanying the translations of T. Eagleton (Literary Theory), Ed. Said, G. Spivak and J. Derrida provide a unique perspective to the Japanese intellectual as "translator", a complex identity negotiating issues of originality and commitment. The translation of Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory by Ohashi Yoichi in 1985 not only attracted the attention of creative writers critical of the Japanese academic establishment, but resulted in a self-critical parody authored precisely by the translator: Ohashi's New Introduction to Literary Theory: Reading Eagleton's Literary Theory (1995). Another important site of the formation of the Japanese intellectual persona as a figure of responsibility is the work of Motohashi Tetsuya, a prolific translator of literary theory and postcolonial critique. The performativity of Motohashi's translational agenda will be analysed through his attempt at popularizing postcolonial perspectives in combination with a critique of Japanese history in his Postcolonialism (2005). The case of Ukai Satoshi, a translator of Derrida and a scholar with a strong penchant for postcolonial critique is particularly illuminating in the way it flows into Ukai's essentially postcolonial ethics and philosophy of translation. Two additional examples will be Komori Yoichi's ground-breaking work Postcolonial as an epistemological case of translation as reception of theory and Nishiyama Yuji's translation of Derrida combined with his documentary film touring.

Dennitza Gabrakova is Assistant Professor in Japanese Studies at City University of Hong Kong. She is interested in the rhetoric of translation in connection to Postcolonial Studies and cultural identity. Currently Dennitza is working on a project related to the translation of (Postcolonial) theory into Japanese as a social and cultural intervention.

PART 3: THEORETICAL STAGINGS

PAPER 7

Literary Translation and/as Performance
Sandra Bermann

"Literary Translation and/as Performance"

This paper builds its argument at least in part on my recent article, "Performing Translation," published in 2014 in the Wiley Blackwell Companion to Translation Studies, edited by Catherine Porter and me. In this article, I looked at literary translation from the viewpoint of J.L.Austin's "performative," Jacques Derrida's notions of iterability, and Judith Butler's discussions of gender performativity. Douglas Robinson's work on linguistic performatives and the long and fruitful history of gender studies and translation were also important references. Though I used some literary examples in the course of the essay, it was largely theoretical, meaning to draw in some of the main terms and ideas associated with "performance," "performative" and "performativity" in translation studies. In the paper I propose for this conference, I begin more pragmatically. Here, I examine closely a few examples of literary translation and re-translation in the light of the theoretical concepts analyzed before, but underscoring in a somewhat different way the value of considering translation as a performative act rather than as a reproductive inscription. Reading several translations of Rene Char's Feuillets d'Hypnos, texts dense with allusion as well as with specific historical and political reference, I discuss the ways that different translational "performances" have opened up different interlocutory spaces for engaging audiences and producing new insights. In the process of my analyses, I bring performance and the performative into dialogue with ideas of translatability, untranslatability and ethics raised by Gayatri Spivak in a number of essays and by Emily Apter in her recent Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. Indeed, viewing translation as performance heightens our awareness of specific choices that the translator makes (consciously and unconsciously) while grappling with different cultural systems, regimes of power, and political, economic and social constraints, and while negotiating daunting linguistic divides. It also reminds us of the powerful role that translation can play within the field of comparative literature, by opening it to the details of difference and the often illuminating difficulties these pose.

Sandra Bermann is Cotsen Professor of the Humanities and Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton, where she also serves as Master of Whitman College. Her research and teaching interests include lyric poetry, translation, gender and sexuality, and comparative literature. She is author of The Sonnet Over Time: Studies in the Sonnets of Petrarch, Shakespeare, and Baudelaire; translator of Manzoni's On the Historical Novel; and editor of Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation with Michael Wood, and of A Companion to Translation Studies with Catherine Porter.

PAPER 8

Pushing-Hands and Periperformativity
Douglas Robinson

This talk explores the performativity of translation in the context of Martha Cheung's theory of translation as tuishou or "pushing-hands"—the martial arts form of Tai Chi. Specifically, the paper will explore three areas in which Prof. Cheung's formulation of the pushing-hands theory of translation falls into essentializing habits, and offer a performative rereading of those three areas that will seek not to refute her approach but to perfect it: (1) pushing-hands and gender (her focus on yin-gentleness as an essentializingly female foundation for the pushing-hands of translation); (2) pushing-hands and dialogue (her tendency to focus on the translator's unidirectional response to the "incoming force" of the source text, rather than looking at the ongoingness of dialogue); and (3) pushing-hands as (peri)performativity (her tendency to present translation as like pushing-hands as a stable thing, rather than both translation and pushing-hands as a performance—and specifically a way of performing the audience into dialogical participation in the performance).

The talk makes the following claims:

(1) Pushing-hands can be thought of as a gentle, cooperative analogue for a dialogical engagement with an "incoming force," such as a single author or point of view. The implication is that all knowledge is mediated, constructed, and situated.

(2) Pushing-hands can be thought of as a gentle, cooperative analogue for a dialogical engagement with a whole parlor full of internally and externally dialogized viewpoints. The implication is that all knowledge is even more complexly mediated, constructed, and situated than in (1), featuring incoming and outgoing and interactive forces of which we may never become aware.

(3a) The pushing-hands analogue can also be extended to the translator's engagement first with the source author, then with the target reader. The fact that the translator pushes hands with the source author and the target reader in "stealth" mode—pushing hands with the target reader "as" or "through" the "I" of the source author—complicates the pushing-hands model in interesting ways.

(3b) The pushing-hands analogue can be further extended to the scholar's rhetorical engagement with the audience s/he is trying to persuade, making persuasion a pushing-hands encounter in which speaker and listener both participate, reciprocally.

Douglas Robinson is Chair Professor of English and Dean of Arts at Hong Kong Baptist University and author of The Translator's Turn, Translation and Taboo, Translation and Empire, Becoming a Translator, What Is Translation?, Who Translates?, Performative Linguistics (the relevant predecessor for his talk here), Translation and the Problem of Sway, and Schleiermacher's Icoses, and editor of Western Translation Theory from Herodotus to Nietzsche. His forthcoming books include Semiotranslating Peirce and The Dao of Translation. He is currently at work on a translation of Finland's greatest novel, Aleksis Kivi's Seven Brothers (1870).

PAPER 9 – 20 minutes for presentation + 10 minutes for discussion

A Performative Theory of Translator Style
Gabriela Saldanha (Submission #320)

Drawing on Butler's (1990) performative theory of gender, Harvey (2003: 4) suggests, rather tentatively, the possibilities opened by a performative theory of the translated text as a way of moving beyond an understanding of 'translated texts as caused objects' and towards an understanding of 'translated texts as interfaces' where the problematics of the intercultural crossing is inscribed within their very nature. This understanding of performance and translation resonates with Bhabha's (2007) argument that cultural communication is performative in the sense that it enacts and creates identities, is constructivist rather than essentialist. Underlying these arguments is an understanding of translation as the staging of difference. This paper further develops Harvey's tentative proposal for a performative theory of translation by applying an anthropological understanding of performance, Richard Schechner's (1985) characterisation of performance as restored behaviour, which has also been used to explain theatrical performance, to explain translator's agency, more specifically, what I call 'translator style'. The concept of restored behaviour refers to "the process of framing, editing, and rehearsing; the making and manipulating of strips of behaviour" (Schechenr 1985: 33). Understanding the translator's agency as restored behaviour enables us to conceptualise translator style in a way that is not only reflective, or even interpretative, but constructive. I argue here that in framing, editing and rehearsing the source text, translators are staging differences and creating identities for themselves, the world of the source text and their audiences. This, in turn, enables us to discuss a translator's oeuvre as a coherent body of work which has its own artistic motivating principle. In order to illustrate and support my argument I provide examples of patterns of translation strategies, following the model proposed in Saldanha 2011 for identifying stylistic features in translated texts and then analyse discursive representations of translators' agency. This analysis relies on peritexts produced by translators themselves as well as by professional and non-professional readers, mainly in the form of reviews published on broadsheet newspapers and online. References Bhabha, Homi K. (2007) The location of culture. London: Routledge. Butler, Judith (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and London, Routledge. Harvey, Keith (2003) Intercultural Movements: American Gaby in French Translation, Manchester, UK & Northampton, MA: St Jerome. Saldanha, Gabriela (2010) 'Translator style: methodological considerations', The Translator 17(1) 25-50. Schechner, Richard (1985) Between Theatre & Anthropology, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Gabriela Saldanha is a Lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Birmingham (UK). She has published extensively on translation stylistics and is the author of Research Methodologies in Translation (Routledge, 2013) together with Sharon O'Brien. She co-edited the Routledge Encyclopaedia of Translation Studies (Routledge, 2009), together with Mona Baker; and a special issue on 'Global Landscapes of Translation' (Translation Studies, 2013) together with Angela Kershaw. She is also co-editor of New Voices in Translation Studies, InTRAlinea and Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts.

Wrap-up: Douglas Robinson

 

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Shakespeare's 'Great Feast of Languages': Contemporary Issues in Shakespeare Translation
Daniel Gallimore, Kwansei Gakuin University, Japan
Nely Keinanen, University of Helsinki, Finland

Shakespeare remains the preeminent translated playwright around the world, whose apparently unstoppable globalization and localization in traditional and non-traditional formats seem essential to the processes of intercultural communication that underscore translation. This panel will discuss the typical range of problems and opportunities arising from both the original texts and the target languages and cultures which combine to make Shakespeare translation the rich field that it is today. In particular, we will attempt to look beyond traditional notions of equivalence and fidelity by applying contemporary approaches such as post-colonialism and recognizing the flexibility of the translator's role in relation to the theatre. The languages covered are French, Japanese, Finnish, Spanish, Chinese, Brazilian, Dutch and Bengali.

For informal enquiries: [gallimoreATkwanseiDOTacDOTjp]

Daniel Gallimore has been professor of English at Kwansei Gakuin University, near Osaka, since 2011. At Kwansei Gakuin, he teaches a postgraduate course on Shakespeare translation, and previously taught at Japan Women's University, Tokyo, between 2003 and 2011. He was awarded his doctorate from the University of Oxford in 2002 for a thesis on Japanese translations of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and has published widely in the field of Shakespeare translation and reception.

Nely Keinänen teaches English Literature and Translation at the University of Helsinki, Finland. She has recently been studying translations of Shakespeare into Finnish, and also translates modern Finnish drama into English.

 

 

 

 

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PLAN

INTRODUCTION: Daniel Gallimore, 'Overview of Current State of Shakespeare Translation in Theoretical Context'

DISCUSSION TIME AT THE END OF EACH PAPER.

 

PART ONE: Literary and linguistic nexus

 

PAPER 1

Title: Matsuoka's Four-Letter Words: Expressing the Inexpressible in Contemporary Japanese Shakespeare Translation

Speaker: Daniel Gallimore, Kwansei Gakuin University, Japan

Abstract: Japan has a long history of Shakespeare translation stretching back to the 1880s. Shakespeare translation played a central role in the development of modern Japanese drama in the early 20th century, and since all the dominant translators have been academics (and in some cases directors as well), this role has been defined as authoritative; Shakespeare production in Japan still depends on the translator-teacher's ability to understand Shakespeare's language, but as production standards have risen and Shakespeare's cultural capital grown, there have of course been numerous moments when the focus of authority has shifted perceptibly to the other elements of performance in the semiotic, holistic and socio-cultural paradigms of stage translation. Of course, all Shakespeare translation is by its nature theatrical, but what is meant by this shift is a change from a style of performance that seems to depend on the translated text to one in which the translation looks quite overtly to performance for answers to the questions it itself poses. Perhaps more than any other field of translation, drama translators negotiate a hazardous path between their textual facility and their ignorance of external conditions (in other words, stage performance). Although in fact highly knowledgeable of the theatre, it is this acceptance of the translator's limitations that strikes me first about the work of Matsuoka Kazuko, the leading Shakespeare translator in Japan today and the first woman to have attempted to translate Shakespeare's works into Japanese (having completed thirty to date); Matsuoka has consistently regarded her translations as 'discoveries' that have been subject to considerable change in rehearsal and production, and through which her appreciation of Shakespeare has evolved. My paper will draw on Matsuoka's translations in an attempt to substantiate the paradigmatic shift from both the textual and performative viewpoints. My first task will be to conduct an analysis of Matsuoka's use of yoji jukugo (four-character idiomatic phrases) in her published translation of Hamlet (Chikuma Shobō, 2011), and my second to make a detailed analysis of how these idioms are interpreted in a recent production of Matsuoka's translation directed by Ninagawa Yukio (Hori Pro, 2012). The interest of these idioms as points of reference is that they seldom serve as literal renditions of the source, instead conveying a range of cultural associations that may – depending on context – respond creatively to the rhetoric of Shakespeare's texts. Of course, they are sometimes merely semantic in function, and should be considered alongside the numerous affective expressions (e.g. onomatopoeia) characteristic of modern Japanese. One conclusion may well be is that it is the language itself that forces the translator to breach the gap between text and performance. I will also survey a group of native informants for their responses to Matsuoka's use of yoji jukugo, and so build on my extant research into Matsuoka Kazuko and her theatre as a means of understanding the linguistic and stylistic potential of Shakespeare translation in contemporary Japan.

Bionote: Daniel Gallimore has been professor of English at Kwansei Gakuin University, near Osaka, since 2011. At Kwansei Gakuin, he teaches a postgraduate course on Shakespeare translation, and previously taught at Japan Women's University, Tokyo, between 2003 and 2011. He was awarded his doctorate from the University of Oxford in 2002 for a thesis on Japanese translations of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and has published widely in the field of Shakespeare translation and reception.

PAPER 2

Title: Translating Shakespeare's Great Feast of Language: A Case Study of Two Finnish Hamlets

Speaker: Nely Keinänen, University of Helsinki, Finland

Abstract: This paper develops my previous study of translations of Hamlet into Finnish. In a previous essay I examined the political, cultural and literary significance of the first translation, done by Paavo Cajander in 1879. At the time, Finnish as a literary language was very young, and Cajander needed to invent words and expressions, and chose to develop a verse form approximating iambic pentameter. His efforts were highly appreciated in his time, with reviewers rejoicing that Finland was now finally joining European civilization as represented by Shakespeare.

In this paper, I shift focus to more aesthetic and literary concerns, examining two recent Hamlet translations, both considered to be exceptionally poetic, by Eeva-Liisa Manner (1981) and Matti Rossi (2013). Manner's translation was initially commissioned by the Tampere Theater, and was later published, while Rossi's was commissioned by WSOY, a leading Finnish publishing company as the final play in its complete works series. Both Rossi and Manner are considered preeminent translators for the stage, and especially Rossi is known as a translator of Shakespeare.

Both Manner and Rossi are also accomplished poets, and their Hamlet translations are dynamic and eminently speakable, displaying superb command of rhythm and verse, effective use of sound devices, and creative solutions to translating Shakespeare's imagery. In other respects, however, the two translations are different: Manner's text is lean and vigorous, full of verbs, and somehow angrier, while Rossi's text is fuller, more lyrical, luxuriating in the abundance of Shakespeare's feast of language.

In bringing these two texts together, I seek not to claim that one is better than the other, but rather to use them to examine the subjective criteria by which 'Shakespeare' translations are assessed in modern Finland, what qualities are claimed to be valued, and what qualities seem actually to be valued if these differ. As material, I will use the reception of these two texts in the Finnish press, as well as surveys of native informants (both theater professionals and not). In addition, I am curious whether there are differences in the features deemed vital for texts written to be read or performed. While these results will not be immediately applicable to translators and theater practitioners in other languages and cultures, I hope that they will nevertheless shed light on ways that aesthetic and stylistic criteria are discussed and evaluated.

Bionote: Nely Keinänen teaches English Literature and Translation at the University of Helsinki, Finland. She has recently been studying translations of Shakespeare into Finnish, and also translates modern Finnish drama into English.

PART TWO: Cultural considerations

PAPER 3

Title: Old Debts and New Ways – Or Not: The Forking Paths of Shakespeare Translation into Spanish Today

Speaker: Alfredo Michel Modenessi, National Autonomous University of Mexico

Abstract: Ten years ago, making a case against the pointless habit of using (mock) Iberian Spanish to translate Shakespeare in Latin America, I wrote that 'translations of Shakespeare are rarely commissioned, and publishers or directors seldom seek academic advice. Due to budget constraints, honest ignorance or blind trust, most productions rely on translations made in Spain, adapted by directors, actors, or, rarely, playwrights'. Have things changed? Consider:

1. In 1999, the collection 'Shakespeare by Writers' started to commission what would become the first 'Complete Works' printed in Latin America. In 2010, Losada of Argentina completed its own series, combining previous versions with work made to order.

2. Shortly after 2004, I started to steadily receive commissions for stage-productions of Early Modern drama; among them: Arden of Faversham (2005), Marlowe's Edward II (2006), and Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors (2007), Othello (2008), The Tempest (2011), Henry IV, Part 1 (2012, for the 'Globe to Globe, 37/37' festival), Julius Caesar (2013), and Richard III (2014). All involved close collaboration with directors, casts and crews. More importantly, all were made with Mexican norms, and all were successful.

3. By 2008, after twenty-five published texts, the head and heretofore sole translator of the only Spanish complete collection in over fifty years required contributions, first by a Catalonian translator, and then, in 2010, by me, a Mexican. With the release of its third volume ('Histories') in March 2015, the 1920s canon that stemmed from Spain and was traditionally used everywhere in the Spanish-speaking world will be fully replaced. Very importantly, all three translators employed Iberian norms.

4. Of my four translations for this collection, two, The Comedy of Errors and Love's Labour's Lost, I had already translated for the Mexican stages in radically different ways. I have, thus, rendered Shakespeare for both page and stage, into both the Mexican and the Iberian varieties of Spanish, and some plays even twice, in deeply contrasting ways.

Yet, have things changed?

This paper seeks to provide fundamental, first-hand, materials leading to possible answers. Using specific examples to compare and contrast cases from the aforementioned collections, I will discuss and illustrate how, and maybe why, Shakespeare has been more than ever translated into Spanish in recent times, and consequently assess whether the historic scenario of vertically-biased relations between Spain and its former colonies has substantially changed – for better or worse. In the end, the basic questions are if, where, and how, today, the practice of Shakespeare translation into Spanish features creative approaches and solutions effectively contributing to making Shakespeare significant in and for a contemporary context – especially a Latin American one.

Bionote: Alfredo Michel Modenessi is Professor of English and Translation Studies at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and is a stage translator and dramaturge. He has translated and adapted over forty plays, including Othello, Love's Labour's Lost, Julius Caesar, and Henry IV, Part 1 (for the 'Globe to Globe' festival in 2012). He is on the board of The Shakespearean International Yearbook, MIT's 'Global Shakespeares' website, and the University of Barcelona's 1611: A Journal of Translation Studies. He is currently preparing a book on the presence of Shakespeare in Mexican cinema after a sabbatical year at the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon.

PAPER 4

Title: Translatability of the Religious Dimension in Chinese Translations of The Merchant of Venice

Speaker: Jenny Wong, Hang Seng Management College, Hong Kong

Abstract: Political and religious issues within a drama are often the subject of manipulation and re-writing in order to conform to the predominant ideology and socio-cultural conditions. In China, from the late Qing period through to the contemporary Communist era, Christian references in Shakespearean works are often marginalized, if not lost, at the receiving end. In this paper I will attempt to demonstrate that, while translation theorists under the current 'sociological turn' view social factors as principal in determining translation activities and strategies, case studies of theatre translations of The Merchant of Venice in the Greater China reveal a critical interaction between the translator's or dramatist's theology and religious values and the socio-cultural milieu to create unique theatrical productions. Often, as one can see from my case studies, it is the religious values of the translating agents that become central to determining the translation product, rather than social factors. This paper further argues that the translatability of religious discourse should be understood in a broader sense according to the seven dimensions of religion proposed by Ninian Smart, rather than merely focusing on untranslatability as a result of semantic and linguistic differences.

Methodologically, I will first give an historical overview of the translation of religious discourse in The Merchant since the first introduction of Shakespeare in China in the early 20th century. This analysis will be followed by case studies of The Merchant using discourse analysis and a causal model of translation studies proposed by Andrew Chesterman. Following this model, sociological, behavioural and cognitive conditions that give rise to the translation agents' interpretation and translation of religious discourse will be examined. Since this sociological-oriented model assumes the overarching role of social factors in determining translatability, a phenomenological approach will be used to illustrate the interaction between the social factors and individual theology in arriving at a theatre translation. This is achieved by investigating the life world, i.e. the world behind the text of the translating agents. Interviews are conducted with directors and translators of each play to flesh out the situational translation process as well as their hermeneutic process and theological position. In the final analysis, the problems of the translatability of Shakespeare's religious language will be studied based on the expanded notion of religious language drawing on Ninian Smart's model of seven dimensions of religion. Questions of translatability across different time periods and cultures will be discussed. Thus it has been argued that the translatability of religious discourse should be understood in a broader sense according to the seven dimensions proposed by Ninian Smart, rather than merely focusing on untranslatability as a result of semantic and linguistic differences.

Bionote: Jenny Wong was Assistant Professor at BNU-HKBU United International College between 2008 and 2012 prior to which she was teaching media translation and advanced commercial translation at other universities. Her research interests lie in the study of Bible and English literature which grew out of her MA degree in Translating and Interpreting (Newcastle) and PhD in Literature and Theology (Glasgow). She is the founder of SELBL www.selbl.org, a non-profit organisation based in Hong Kong that promotes the cultural significance of the Bible among international students. She has recently been appointed Lecturer at Hang Seng Management College, Hong Kong.

PART THREE: Performance issues

PAPER 5

Title: Cultural Mediation in the House of Molière

Speaker: Stephanie Mercier, University of Poitiers, France

Abstract: The Shakespearian plays performed in France's Comédie Française 2013-2014 season featured Hamlet, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Othello. This is an opportune corpus of study in an attempt to conceptualize the translation/adaptation phenomenon as an act of cultural mediation and question the viability of such a concept when placed within the highly institutional framework of 'The House of Molière', in which historical connotations, conventions for language representation, translation and textual norms are commonly held by both stagers and spectators. The powers and pressures of such a venue, which inevitably surround both the translator and adaptor when making language and scenic choices, are thus to be taken into account in this empirical study of texts and contexts. It will be seen that the resulting stagings most often make the most of, but also sometimes misuse, Shakespeare's 'Great Feast of Languages', to the extent that the feast at times morphs into a textual and theatrical fast. In other words, translation and interpretation, when translation becomes an act of reclaiming and recentering of identity, can at times result in linguistic and cultural alienation – especially when potential multilingualism is subjugated for homebred purposes, complex ideas given little time for gestation so that poetry, in the sense of 're-creation', is doomed to become only a vain and distant hope. Despite the unfortunate occasional nationalistic stereotyping however, the unique challenges that staging Shakespeare for a still often neo-classically minded, politically sensitive, French auditorium imply can also bring out the best in translators and directors – if they are willing to cast doubt on the seemingly unswayable dramatic doxa of le français and integrate the ever-malleable prerequisites of fluidity and inventiveness inherent to Shakespearian theatre into their productions. When this happens, the linguistic characteristics of the informing text and its translation can be combined with, not cut off from its dramatic rendering so that the impulse to adapt, derived from a desire to contrast and superimpose, cuts across time, space and cultures to communicate the significance of specific canonical materials, such as those of Shakespeare, from the source to the target. In this respect, and even if the translation/ adaptation process entails experimental performance and re-writing, it still indicates a basic relationship with an informing source text, albeit one achieved in a difference temporal and generic framework. Hence, my analysis will address, and question, the current body of state-funded Shakespeare stagings in France with regards to the specificities – imitational, improvisational and intercultural – of these three productions recently staged at the Comédie Française and their at once divergent, and yet at times equivalent, approach to the concepts of translation and adaptation of Shakespearian drama.

Bionote: Stephanie Mercier is a French/English bi-national agrégée who teaches at the University of Poitiers. She gave papers about Shakespeare translation, adaptation and performance in France, the U.K. and the U.S.A. in 2014 and she also reviews regularly for L'Oeil du Spectateur, on the Poitiers University website, the Cahiers Élisabéthains (Manchester University Press) and on the University of Warwick/Shakespeare Institute's Reviewing Shakespeare. She has published articles about Shakespeare in the Presses Universitaires de Rennes, in the autumn 2014 Oxford University Press online journal English and she is currently conducting research on the commodification of the body in Shakespeare's theatre.

PAPER 6

Title: A Mid-Summer African-Brazilian Night's Dream

Speaker: Elizabeth Ramos, Federal University of Bahia, Brazil

Abstract: Shakespeare's comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream was staged in a prize-winning adaption by the Brazilian group Bando de Teatro Olodum in 2006. The Band was set as a theatre group in 1990 in Salvador, a Brazilian city where people of African ancestry amount to 80% of the population. The group's mission is to fight discrimination and racism in Brazil, maintaining a contemporary stage language and committed to an articulated drama, which incisively addresses ethnic identity issues in its various possibilities as they emerge from a joyful and entertaining stage atmosphere. The cast is today made up of twenty African-Brazilian actors and actresses under the direction of Márcio Meirelles, a well-known name in the Brazilian theatrical scene. In 2006, the Olodum Theatre Band celebrated sixteen years of popular black theatre by staging A Midsummer Night's Dream in a spicy adaptation, which privileges Bahian cultural references such as dance and music, in their different genres and styles, including African rhythms and percussion, but without losing its bond with the original Shakespearean text. The audience were confronted with an amusing story of matches and mismatches between young African-Athenian lovers, who find adventure in the woods controlled and manipulated by fairies. One of the fairies ends up falling in love with a human on the eve of the marriage of the black skinned couple Theseus and Hippolyta, when Bottom and Flute, along with Peter Quince, Starveling, Snout and Snug, who of course acquire typical local names, will perform 'Pyramus and Thisbe'. Powerful body movements agitate light and colorful pieces of cloth, which dangle and stir on stage under light effects to the sound of lively African percussion, giving the audience the impression of characters floating in the air like 'a midsummer night's dream'. Golden ornaments decorate characters' heads, beads, glass pearls adorn necks and breasts, and powerful arms and legs facilitate the vigorous movements of the forest fairies. For, in African performances, music, acting and dancing movements cannot be dissociated from one another. Music implies movement. Meirelles then invites us to expand our Western perspective in order to observe the mix of music with other stage systems. He sets his play on an African-Brazilian stage in a unique adaptation of Shakespeare's comedy that typifies what Barthes called 'a weaving of echoes, citation, references: previous or contemporary cultural languages, which cross the text in a vast stereophony.' Through such a dual process of appropriation and salvage, of interpreting and creating something new, Meirelles shows himself to be a contemporary dramatist, if (as Agemben argues) 'contemporaneity is a singular relationship with present time, to which one adheres, and from which one simultaneously withdraws.'

Bionote: Elizabeth Ramos has a Post-Doctorate degree from the Universidade de São Paulo (USP) and a Master's and Doctorate in Literary and Linguistic Studies from the Universidade Federal da Bahia, where she is Professor in the Department of Germanic Letters. She does research in the field of Shakespearean and Translation Studies (both literary and intersemiotic), mainly concerned with the relationships between literature and cinema. In those fields, she advises Master's and Doctoral students.

PAPER 7

Title: Toneelgroep's Roman Tragedies in London: The Intermediality and Interlinearity of Surtitling Shakespeare in English

Speaker: Geraldine Brodie, University College, London

Abstract: In November 2009, Toneelgroep Amsterdam visited the Barbican Theatre, London, with its critically and internationally acclaimed production, Roman Tragedies. A consecutive staging of Shakespeare's three plays, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra, the production lasted six hours and was performed in Dutch with English surtitles. In an interview published in the Barbican Theatre programme, the director, Ivo van Hove, insisted, 'we have simply made a new translation'. However, the amalgamation of three plays, the contemporary setting, the male roles played by women and the stage-audience interactivity combined to create a strikingly overt reinterpretation and condensation of Shakespeare's work. In London, the potential controversy of this approach was further reinforced by the English surtitles, negotiating between the Shakespearean text and a back-translation of the performed Dutch script. This paper considers the innovative role played by surtitles in the collaborative act of performing a translated play. The Toneelgroep production, which includes a variety of intermedial modalities such as the simultaneous filmed projection of performance aspects and pre-recorded segments in a televised format, also explores the potential of theatrical intermediality by incorporating surtitles into its digital presentation. Translation is thus situated within the central mise en scène of the production rather than banished to the wings or proscenium arch as is more frequently the case in surtitled plays in the theatre. My paper investigates the effect of this integration of surtitles. Firstly, from the point of view of translation as dramaturgy: how does this positioning of surtitles contribute to the interpretive act of theatrical communication? I will consider the motivations for this exploratory treatment, taking into account technological advances and the increasing internationalisation of productions developed for touring, and argue that, whether intentional or incidental, the intermedial positioning and display of surtitles serves to focus unprecedented attention on the contribution of translation to theatre performance. Secondly, in addition to the positioning of the Toneelgroep surtitles, their textual content, signifying the movement from Shakespeare's language through modern Dutch and back to English, provided a reminder to the London audience, familiar with the original, that translation creates its own trajectories. I will analyse the negotiation of the cultural sensitivities of translation within the text and the performance, examining the function of these surtitles. Walter Benjamin envisaged the construction of translation as an integral element within the creation of a text, insisting in his essay The Task of the Translator that 'all great writings contain their virtual translation between the lines'. My paper asks whether the innovative techniques adopted by Toneelgroep Amsterdam in this Shakespearean production present an opportunity for the consideration of surtitles as interlinear translation, overtly displayed to the audience.

Bionote: Dr Geraldine Brodie convenes the MA in Translation Theory and Practice at University College London. She is the founder and co-convenor of the UCL Translation in History Lecture Series, and a co-editor of the IATIS online journal New Voices in Translation Studies. Her research centres on the collaborative role of the theatre translator in English-language performance, including the intermediality and dramaturgy of surtitles. In addition to speaking and publishing on these topics, she has devised the UCL Theatre Translation Forum, bringing together academics and theatre practitioners in a series of interdisciplinary examinations of dramatic genres.

PART THREE: Translation and adaptation

PAPER 8

Title: Bombarding the Headquarters: Academic Tradaptations of Shakespeare in Twenty-First Century Bengal

Speaker: Sarbani Chaudhury, University of Kalyani, India

Abstract: For the metropolitan English students and academics of India, Shakespeare has long been a curious blend of the venerable and the malleable but the Bard still means serious business in the suburbia with only occasional exceptions to the rule. One such exception has been in place since 2008 during Radix, the annual reunion of the Department of English, University of Kalyani, where the insidious seepage of high voltage Indi-pop, Bollywood and Hollywood dance numbers into the 'culturally admissible' recitals of classical dance, music, and Tagore songs and poems is reflected in the highpoint of the day's festivities – the performance of a raunchy, risqué and impudently abridged version of a Shakespearean play under the able tutelage of a young faculty, Sandip Mandal. This paper proposes to investigate the developing tenor and direction of these translations of A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Tempest, Twelfth Night and Macbeth, between 2008 and 2012, which cannibalize, digest and regurgitate a diametrically split Shakespeare for local, one-time consumption. Through the complete collectivization of the page-to-stage process – from script writing to the final performance – the Bard's authorial hegemony is severely undermined and the end product becomes the collective property of the Department through collaborative enterprise at every level. The consistent deployment of confrontational bilingualism and theatricality fragments the act of 'seamless transmission,' challenging Pratt's 'contact zone' proposition by upholding rather than dissolving the binary between the source and the target text. Supposedly 'high brow' Shakespearean scenes remain unaltered while the populous 'low' scenes celebrate the 21st century Bengali suburban milieu, language and setting with a profusion of 'Hinglish' and 'Benglish' slang, innuendos and puns, and allusions to popular Bollywood and Hollywood films. The proportional relation between the 'original' and the 'indigenised' is increasingly skewed in favour of the latter till, in Macbeth: A Comedy, the Shakespearean passages (e.g., soliloquies) take on the parenthetical function of 'annotating' the translation. The politics of polarity also informs the masculinist project of forcibly occupying the 'original' where aggressive translation combined with adaptation (hence, tradaptation) effectively feminises Shakespeare by producing a new text with vestiges of both parents but dominant patrilineal traits. The discontinuous tradaptation effected through such bilingual and theatrical juxtaposition of original scenes and passages with indigenised counterparts is further assisted by definitive periodization, which entails invoking the Elizabethan-Jacobean era as closely as possible in the 'original' scenes' while locating the 'indigenised' portions in a contemporary Bengali setting. Assisted by video clips and stills, my presentation proposes to establish that together, the attributes mentioned above, move beyond the postcolonial desire to re-write/right the 'asymmetrical relations of power' (Tejaswini Niranjana) endemic to much of colonial/ postcolonial translations by rejecting the in-betweenness of Homi Bhabha's 'Third Space' in favour of bombarding the headquarter and reclaiming the centre by reconfiguring Shakespeare as a supplementary component of a hybrid, thoroughly indigenised product.

Bionote: M.Phil. on 'Shakespeare's Masterless Men'. Ph.D. on 'Subversive Voices in Tudor Literature'. Awards-Grants: All-Round Best Graduate Award, Jadavpur University, 1977; British Council Grant for Ph. D. research; Folger Shakespeare Library Fellowship. Publications: Shakespeare and the Discourse of Protest (1994); Ed. Re-presenting Shakespeare: Interpretations and Translations, Vols. 1 & 2 (2002); Ed. Undergraduate Syllabus: Perspectives and Possibilities (2002); Ed. Pearson Longman The Tempest (2009). Refereed publications: 34. Contributor, World Shakespeare Bibliography Online published by Shakespeare Quarterly and Johns Hopkins University Press; Book review editor, Multicultural Shakespeare. Current Project: Shakespeare Criticism in Bengal. Areas of interest: Theatre, Women's issues, Shakespeare in Bengal.

WRAP-UP SECTION: led by Nely Keinänen

 

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Repackaging books for a new audience: innovative approaches to research on cross-cultural literary flows

Panel Convenors: Gabriela Saldanha, University of Birmingham (UK)
, Célia Maria Magalhães, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brasil

Theme of the panel: The circulation of literature is affected by marketing practices, understood as "the decisions publishers make in terms of the presentation of books to the marketplace, in terms formats, cover designs and blurb, and imprint" (Squires 2009: 2) but also "the multiplicity of ways in which books are presented and represented in the marketplace: via their reception in the media; their gaining of literary awards; and their placement on bestseller lists” (ibid. 3). Translations have on impact on the landscape of reception as well as on the perceptions of the landscape of production. These perceptions are affected by the literature marketing process and have a role in shaping images of a nation's cultural landscape and the projection of such images in foreign cultural landscapes, as well as in the making of world literature. The circulation of translated literature in a globalised world passes through many filters; books are 'packaged', distributed and displayed with a particular audience in mind. Once in print, they often go through a filter of literary critics and media exposure, which contribute to the mediascape (Appadurai 1996) created around a nation's cultural tradition. These mediascapes are changing dramatically due to the impact of new technologies, which allow for the circulation of images and representations which are not under the control of the literary elite. Social approaches to translation studies need to develop innovative frameworks and methodologies that are specifically adapted to explore how the contexts of production, circulation and reception of translated literature are changing. The panel will discuss images of national/cultural identity in translation as represented in translation metatexts such as paratexts (such as, prefaces, translator's notes, glossaries, blurbs and covers) and peritexts (such as, reviews and interviews). The use of the World Wide Web by publishers, readers and other agents involved in the marketing process has open new channels for the circulation of opinions that were previously filtered by media and professional reviewers. Papers will discuss stereotypical and other kinds of (un)marked representation through and around translated literature with a focus on marginalised literary cultures as a result of the trade imbalance in translated literature. Contributions will be innovative either in terms of the theoretical framework proposed to study this area, the methodologies (a focus on multimodal analysis will be encouraged, as well as mixed methods combining corpus/text analysis and socio/cultural methodologies), or the specific contexts and translation directions addressed.

For informal enquiries: [gDOTsaldanhaATbhamDOTacDOTuk]

Gabriela Saldanha is a Lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Birmingham (UK). She has published extensively on translation stylistics and is the author of Research Methodologies in Translation (Routledge, 2013) together with Sharon O’Brien. She co-edited the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (Routledge, 2009), together with Mona Baker; and a special issue on ‘Global Landscapes of Translation’ (Translation Studies, 2013) together with Angela Kershaw. She is also co-editor of New Voices in Translation Studies, InTRAlinea and Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts.

Célia M. Magalhães is a Full Professor in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brasil. Her research interests lie on the style of translations/translators, and to innovative ways of using multimodal social semiotics analysis to translation which includes representations of translated texts on book covers and other metatextual material. She has published papers in Brazilian journals as well as books and chapters in (inter)national books on these topics.

 

 

 

SESSION PLAN

10 minutes – Introduction: Cultural translation in a changing book market

SESSION 1: Re-imaging nations and translation

PAPER 1: 20 minutes + 10 minutes discussion

Title: China as Dystopia: Cultural Imaginings Through Translation

Speaker: Tong King Lee, University of Hong-Kong

(Submission #168)

PAPER 2: 20 minutes + 10 minutes discussion

Title: 'Translation' but not as we know it: new circuits of reading and writing

Speaker: Fiona Doloughan

(Submission #216)

PAPER 3: 20 minutes + 10 minutes discussion

Title: Images of the Western Balkans in English Translation for Children

Speaker: Marija Todorova

(Submission #159)

PAPER 4: Marketing, Reading and Problematizing Turkish Literature in English Translation: From Production and Consumption to Critical Analysis

Speaker: Sehnaz Tahir Gurcaglar, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul

(Submission #294)

10 minutes – Wrap-up

SESSION 2: Cross-cultural flows in a globalized literary market.

PAPER 5: 20 minutes + 10 minutes discussion

Title: Modern European poet-translators: a statistical analysis

Speaker: Jacob Blakesley

(Submission #181)

PAPER 6: 20 minutes + 10 minutes discussion

Title: Anthologizing Italy: forms and functions of Scandinavian collections of Italian prose and poetry

Speaker: Cecilia Schwartz, Stockholm University, Sweden

(Submission #309)

PAPER 7: 20 minutes + 10 minutes discussion

Title: Representing Brazilian literary translation and translators in verbal and visual metatexts

Speaker: Célia M. Magalhães, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brasil

(Submission #158)

20 minutes – Wrap-up

PAPER TITLES, ABSTRACTS AND BIONOTES

PAPER 1: China as Dystopia: Cultural Imaginings Through Translation

Speaker: Tong King Lee, University of Hong-Kong

Abstract: This paper explores how China is represented in English translations of contemporary Chinese literature. It commences with the case of Yan Lianke (b.1958), a controversial novelist some of whose novels have been banned in China due to their politically sensitive content. Specifically, I look at the paratexts surrounding the English translation of Yan’s novel SERVE THE PEOPLE! (banned in China upon publication), and examine the image of China as projected through the translated version of the novel. The following questions guide my analysis: Given that British and American publishers have a comparatively low propensity to import translated works (as Lawrence Venuti as shown), what is it, then, that makes a novel such as SERVE THE PEOPLE! particularly attractive to Anglo-American publishers? Is it its “subversive critique of the hypocrisy and madness of the Cultural Revolution”, as the book’s introduction and blurb repeatedly tell readers, coupled with the fact that Yan was subject to state punishment for writing politically incorrect novels? Or is it the “intolerable humiliation”, allegedly endured by the masses in China, and “the desperate situations of their existences” that are depicted in novels by Yan and his contemporaries? What discourses are at work in framing these translated works for reception by an English-speaking readership, such that political subversiveness turns into a tactical motif in marketing translated literature? And how do such discourses dovetail into broader meta-narratives on China and Chineseness in the West? These questions pertain to the construction of images of alterity through translation, and to how market forces in the publishing industry collaborate with political ideologies in forging particular narratives on the culture of Other. Tapping into ideas from postcolonial criticism, the paper argues that China is systematically imagined as the dystopic Other by the Anglophone world through translation, specifically via the selection of specific texts for translation and the strategic deployment of paratexts in these translation products. It makes the case that in translated literature, the tendency to construct a tyrannical China – through the selection of censored/sensational titles and the evocation of landmark historical events in paratexts – falls in line with broad trends of Western perceptions of China. Within the geopolitical context of China’s global ascendance as a world power and its perceived hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond, the significance of the phenomenon discussed goes well beyond literature and translation. Literary translation is but part of a wider, institutionalized programme of Anglophone textual practices that positions China as a subject of gaze. These textual practices tend to triangulate around a self-fulfilling idea of what China is or will become, as if the latter were an object that can be exhaustively signified using a unified set of conceptual terminology.

Bionote: Tong King Lee is an assistant professor of translation at the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of Translating the Multilingual City: Crosslingual Practices and Language Ideology and Experimental Chinese Literature: Translation, Technology, Poetics (forthcoming).

PAPER 2: 'Translation' but not as we know it: new circuits of reading and writing

Speaker: Fiona Doloughan

Abstract: In a recent article on “Translation studies at a cross-roads”, in the context of a personal view of how far Translation Studies has come since the 1970s, Bassnett (2012) points to the challenges facing Translation Studies today in an age of increasingly intercultural writing and suggests that it needs to think more broadly and engage in dialogue with those from other related disciplines. She goes on to identify a number of scholars in Comparative Literature, Post-colonial Studies and World Literature whose work is engaging with translation and translational writing in interesting and provocative ways. Taking Bassnett’s own provocation as my starting point, I wish to suggest that understanding cross-cultural literary flows is as dependent on new conceptualizations of translation and what translated literature may look like across the globe today as it is on innovative approaches to the reception and production of writing in translation. This is not to suggest that the packaging and marketing of works in translation and their reception across cultures does not continue to be worthy of investigation. It is simply to acknowledge that the translational project has broadened at a time when it is no longer possible to make simple adequations between and among language, culture and nationhood in literary or other cultural representations; and that translation as a mode of writing and reading has become ever more complex in a world where English has become a lingua franca. To Bassnett’s contention that “so much thinking about translation seems to be coming from scholars working outside it” (Bassnett 2012: 21), I would add that contemporary writers themselves are increasingly aware of, and thematising in their work, issues of translation both literal and metaphoric. In order to explore both sides of the translational coin, I shall discuss two examples: Diego Marani’s novel New Finnish Grammar originally written in Italian in 2000 and published by Dedalus Books in English translation by Judith Landry in 2011 and by all accounts more popular in Finland in English translation than in the 2003 Finnish translation; and Xiaolu Guo’s recent novel I am China (Guo 2014), a work that cleverly draws on the process of translation (from Chinese to English) to withhold and reveal information, in line with what the translator knows, and advance the plot. In discussing these two examples, I shall draw on a range of sources both textual and extra-textual, including author interviews, publishers’ blurbs, reviews, both popular and academic in addition to reflections on the changing nature of translation today at a point when writers may be drawing on more than one language and culture in their literary representations and be conscious of the myths of nationhood, “the whole question of identity as a politics rather than an inheritance” (Clifford, 1997: 46) and the widening scope and significance of translation today.

Bionote: Fiona Douloughan is a Lecturer in English (Literature and Creative Writing) with an ongoing interest in translation and translational writing, having previously taught Creative Writing within a Translation Studies context. She is currently writing a monograph for Bloomsbury entitled English as a Literature in Translation to be submitted in December 2014 and has been involved in Panel Discussions with writers and translators as part of the activities organized in connection with European Literature Night at the British Library, London. She has a PhD in Comparative Literature from the US and a Masters in Applied Linguistics from the UK.

PAPER 3: Images of the Western Balkans in English Translation for Children

Speaker: Marija Todorova, Hong Kong Baptist University

Since the late 1990s there has been an increasing interest in the representation of Balkan culture in the literary works of authors writing in English. Scholars (Bakic-Hayden 1995, Todorova 1997, Goldsworthy 1998, Norris 1999, Hammond 2010) have shown how literary representations of the Balkans have reflected and reinforced its stereotypical construction as Europe’s “dark and untamed Other”. However, the contribution of translated literature in the construction of these images has rarely been considered. Thus, this study of representations of the Western Balkans in translated literature, published since 1990, addresses a gap in the study Balkanist discourses and helps shed a new and more complete light on the literary representations of the Balkans, and the Western Balkans more precisely. Children’s literature has been selected for this study due to its potential to transform and change deeply rooted stereotypes (Sutherland, 1997). The paper looks at the use of paratexts, and especially the cover (front and back), in the translated books as framing and representation sites that contest or promote stereotypes in the global literary market. English has been selected as a target language due to its global position as а mediating language for the promotion of international literature. However, translations in other languages, where they exist, are also examined for comparative purposes. The study adopts Kress and van Leeuven’s (1996) model of multimodal analysis and focuses on five books, each from a different country (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia, and Montenegro) and representing a range of genres and formats (non-fiction, anthology, novel, picturebook, and an ebook). The discussion considers how covers changed over time, in different editions of the translated book. It also examines adaptations accompanying the introduction of the translated book into the target society, such as documentaries, music scores and theatre performances.

Bakić-Hayden, Milica. 1995. Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia. Slavic Review, 54.4:917-31.

Goldsworthy, Vesna. 1998. Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination. London: Yale University Press

Hammond, Andrew. 2010. British Literature and the Balkans: Themes and Contexts. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Kress, Gunter and Theo van Leeuwen. 2006. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. Second edition. New York: Routledge.

Norris, David A.. 1999. In the Wake of the Balkan Myth. London: Macmillan Press.

Sutherland, Zena. 1997. Children and Books. New York: Longman.

Todorova, Maria N. 1997/2009. Imagining the Balkans. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bionotes: Marija Todorova holds a dual BA in English Language and Literature and Macedonian Language, and MA in Peace and Development Studies. She has more than 10 years of experience as interpreter for various international organisations. For one of her literary translations she received the 2007 National Best Translation Award. In 2008 she has established and taught at the University American College Skopje, Translation Programme. Currently, she is a Research Fellow in Translation Studies at the Hong Kong Baptist University. Todorova is an Executive Council member of IATIS and Kontakt. Her research interests include intercultural education, children’s and young adults literature and visual representation.

PAPER 4: Marketing, Reading and Problematizing Turkish Literature in English Translation: From Production and Consumption to Critical Analysis

Speaker: Sehnaz Tahir Gurcaglar, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul

Abstract: The paper will concentrate on the course followed by Turkish literature in English translation within the last decade and the way these translations have been tackled by researchers, working both in and out of Turkey. It will adopt a discourse-critical approach to the subject and focus on three different levels of representation and analysis. The critical moment taken as a milestone in the promotion and marketing of Turkish literature in the English-language context is the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s only Nobel laureate. The paper will focus on developments following this milestone and will also explore the ways in which a major prize such as the Nobel Prize for Literature --features in the marketing, consumption and analysis of translated literature. The study will first of all focus on the immediate paratextual aspects of a select group of works of fiction translated from Turkish into English and explore the covers, blurbs and prefaces of the works, i.e. the peritexts of the novels. The second level of analysis will engage in a critical discussion of epitextual material published about the works in question in the form of reviews and interviews with authors or translators. This level will also include an analysis of on-line reviews and comments posted in book forums and on-line bookstores by non-professionals with the expectation of building better proximity to literary reception by ordinary readers. The third level of analysis will deal with the way researchers have approached patterns of marketing and reception of Turkish literature in the Anglophone context in the light of a recent proliferation of books, essays, reports and theses written on the topic (A selection includes Seyhan 2008, Göknar 2013, Tekgül and Akbatur 2013, Eker Roditakis forthcoming, Akbatur forthcoming). This level will probe into how researchers problematize (or fail to problematize) issues of national/cultural identity and cross-cultural literary representation as they tackle translations and their reception.

Bionote: Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar is professor of Translation Studies at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul and a visiting scholar at the School of Translation, Glendon College, York University in 2014-2015. She studied Translation Studies at Boğaziçi University and Media Studies at Oslo University. She holds a PhD degree in Translation Studies and teaches courses on translation theory, translation history, translation criticism and interpreting. She is the author of The Politics and Poetics of Translation in Turkey, 1923-1960 (Rodopi, 2008) and various papers published in international journals and edited volumes. Her research interests include translation history, retranslation, periodical studies and reception studies.

PAPER 5: Modern European poet-translators: a statistical analysis

Speaker: Jacob Blakesley, University of Leeds, England

Abstract: With the rise in nation states and the development of a world economy, poets have increasingly turned to translation as a fundamental creative act. It is through translation that modern poets often begin their careers, develop their poetics, and make a living. It is through such activity that poet-translators have helped shape and form the dynamics of modern European literary fields, a fact long overlooked by scholars. My project, Poets of Europe, Translators of the World, investigates modern European poet-translators, based on new and original research undertaken in national library catalogues in England, France, Italy, and Spain. My work reveals that poets often produce more translated volumes than original books: their translations form an invisible as well as visible network stretching across Europe and beyond. My paper reveals translation has been a prime motor for modern European literary systems. Despite widespread translation work by a large number of canonical 20th-century European poets – from Federico García Lorca, and René Char to Rainer Maria Rilke, Eugenio Montale, and Ted Hughes –, no one has specifically addressed poet-translators in a transnational context. Moreover, there is no comparable project that uses a sociological approach to show translation trends across modern literary Europe. My methodology is based on two pillars of modern literary sociology, Franco Moretti and Pierre Bourdieu. I draw on Moretti’s notion of “distant reading,” where individual texts (in this case, translations) are not analysed on the level of close reading, but are examined as part of a larger group. Instead of dealing with only a few books through close reading, we can now analyse the other 99.5% of texts, “the great unread,” in Moretti’s words. I likewise make use of Bourdieu’s theorisation of the literary field, and his related concepts of cultural and symbolic capital. In this paper, I will show how the number of 20th century poets who translate (and what they translate) depends on several key factors: the importance of translation for a particular linguistic tradition, the role of poetry in society, the prestige of various languages and literary cultures nationally and internationally, the political and historical situation at large (peacetime vs. wartime), and the economic opportunities available to poets. In short, my project strives to demonstrate how translation is a vital, creative practice for poets of all nations, and allows crucial literary exchange across cultures far and wide. This research project is being continued through a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Leeds, which I will begin in September. I am co-editing a special journal issue of Translation & Literature with Jeremy Munday (2015), dedicated to the sociology of poetry translation, which will contain an article of mine about this very topic.

Bionote: Jacob Blakesley received his PhD in Italian literature in 2011 from the University of Chicago. He has taught translation studies and Italian literature at the University of Manchester and Durham University. He is taking up a 3-year Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Leeds Centre for Translation Studies in September. His monograph Modern Italian Poets: Translators of the Impossible was published this year by the University of Toronto Press.

PAPER 6: Anthologizing Italy: forms and functions of Scandinavian collections of Italian prose and poetry

Speaker: Cecilia Schwartz, Stockholm University, Sweden

Abstract: So far little attention has been given to literary anthologies as a genre, and especially in the field of translation studies (Seruya et. al 2013). This paper starts out from the idea that translational anthologies based on geographical criteria, are revealing documents of ideas concerning both source and target culture in the intercultural exchange of literary texts. These ideas are reflected in the selection of texts and in paratextual features such as titles, book covers, blurbs, prefaces etc. Just as Bourdieu (1990) points out, a literary text often gets decontextualized when leaving its original national field, which may lead to misinterpretations as well as new and different readings. In the case of translational national anthologies, we are actually dealing with a form of double decontextualization. Firstly the text loses its original cultural context, secondly it loses its original textual context. Literary texts included in translation anthologies, have all been picked out of their original textual surroundings in a rather unsentimental and sometimes careless manner, and then put together in order to create a collection of representative texts from the same geographical background. Having undergone this double decontexualization, the “national” feature of texts included in translational national anthologies might be even more emphasized as a result of paratextual strategies. Focusing on the translation flow from Italy to Sweden, with a glance given to the other Scandinavian countries, during the second half of the 20th century, this paper seeks to find out whether there is consistency to the idea that publishers tend to highlight the “italianity” when selecting and repackaging Italian texts for a Scandinavian audience. For this purpose, a paratextual corpus – consisting of titles, covers, blurbs, notes and prefaces – will be analyzed with prominence given to the selection operations and promotion strategies that are visible in paratextual features of translational national prose and poetry anthologies. Methodologically, the analysis aims to combine well known strategies deriving from sociology of translation with an imagological perspective on the construction of national stereotypes in literature (Pageaux 1994, Beller & Leerssen 2007). More precisely, this paper seeks to respond to the following questions: 1. In what way can paratextual features help us to visualize the selection criteria and, more generally, the main purpose of translational national anthologies? 2. How does the paratext in Scandinavian anthologies of Italian literature relate to stereotypical ideas of “italianity”?

Bionote: Cecilia Schwartz is Associate Professor of Italian at Stockholm University. Her present research deals with the intercultural exchanges between Sweden and Italy, with a special attention given to the circulation on the book market and the impact of literary mediators. Her recent publication on the field is the volume, coedited with Laura Di Nicola, Libri in viaggio. Classici italiani in Svezia (2013). She has also published various articles on the idea of the North in contemporary Italian novels and travel writing. She is responsible for the cultural agreement between the University of Stockholm and Sapienza-University of Rome. She is also a translator and literary critic.

PAPER 7: Representing Brazilian literary translation and translators in verbal and visual metatexts.

Speaker: Célia Maria Magalhães, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brasil

Abstract: The paper offers an analysis of the role of translation and translators in disseminating work from a different cultural context. The aim of the study is to explore which conceptualisations of translations and translators are construed and promoted by the Brazilian literary market and whether they reinforce common sense images of translations and translators or represent and help consolidate new, more positive, perspectives on translations and translators (Magalhães, 1998; St Andre, 2010; Kershaw & Saldanha, 2013). Another relevant aim is to further refine/develop analytical procedures already used in the context of the Corpus of Style of Translations – ESTRA – project, by including textual and multimodal analysis of translation metatexts. ESTRA is a parallel corpus with 72 texts, about 2 million tokens, mainly designed for the study of style of translations/translators and the analysis of

retranslations. It is composed of novels, short stories and children’s literature. The language pairs are English/Portuguese, English/Spanish and Spanish/Portuguese. It includes a corpus of metatexts such as book covers, flaps, prefaces, introductions, translators’ notes, afterwords, and blurbs. The paper will report on preliminary results of a study of both the verbal metatexts of ESTRA and the visual metatexts (covers) of a sample of Brazilian (re)translations of Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad. Two different methodologies are used. The first is analysis of verbal metatexts. The focus of the analysis will be on keywords and their collocates as representing as well as construing discourses on translation and/or translators through metaphors in metatexts (Deignan, 2005; Cameron, 2008; Berber-Sardinha, 2009). The second involves multimodal analysis (Kress & van Leewen, 2006) of the sample of book covers with the aim to decode representational, interactive and compositional

meanings as ways of (re)presenting the translated text to a new audience. Issues to be

discussed as part of the study include the comparison of the visibility of translator/author in the visual and verbal language of the metatexts as well as the inter and intradiscursive relationships established by them.

Bionote: Célia M. Magalhães is a Full Professor in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brasil. Her research interests lie on the style of translations/translators, and to innovative ways of using multimodal social semiotics analysis to translation which includes representations of translated texts on book covers and other metatextual material. She has published papers in Brazilian journals as well as books and chapters in (inter)national books on these topics.

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Organizing Committee                                                      

Fabio Alves, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG)

Celia Magalhães,Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG)

Adriana Pagano, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG)

Sandra Almeida, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG)

Tereza Virginia Barbosa, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG)

Giacomo Figueiredo, Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto (UFOP)

José Luiz Gonçalves, Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto (UFOP)

 

Scientific Committee

Fabio Alves, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG)

Julie Boéri, Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF)

Adriana Pagano, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG)

Jorge Díaz-Cintas, University College London (UCL)

Lincoln Fernandes, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC)

Myriam Salama-Carr, UK, University of Salford

 

Conference Advisory Board

Adriana Pagano, Brazil, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais

Alexandra Assis Rosa, Portugal, Universidade de Lisboa

Amparo Hurtado, Spain, Universidad Autònoma de Barcelona

Annalisa Sandrelli, Italy, Università degli Studi Internazionali di Roma

Anthony Cordingley, France, Université de Paris VIII

Arnaud Regnauld, France, Université de Paris VIII

Arnt Jakobsen, Denmark, Copenhagen Business School

Celia Magalhães, Brazil, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais

Claire Larsonneur, France, Université de Paris VIII

Dorothy Kenny, Ireland, Dublin City University

Emily Apter, USA, New York University

Erich Steiner, Germany, Universität des Saarlandes

Fabio Alves, Brazil, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais

Guillaume Wisniewski, France, Université Paris Sud

Haidee Kruger, South Africa, North-West University

Hanna Pięta, Portugal, Universidade de Lisboa

Hannu Kemppanen, Finland, University of Eastern Finland (Itä-Suomen yliopisto)

Holly Mikkelson, USA, Monterey Institute of International Studies

John Milton, Brazil, Universidade de São Paulo

Jorge Diaz-Cintas, UK, University College London

José Luiz Gonçalves, Brazil, Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto

Judith A. Inggs, South Africa, University of the Witwatersrand

Julie Boéri, Spain, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Kristian Hvelplund, Denmark, University of Copenhagen

Lincoln Fernandes, Brazil, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina

Luise von Flotow, Canada, University of Ottawa

Maeve O'lohan, UK, University of Manchester

Marc Charron, Canada, University of Ottawa

Maria Lucia Vasconcellos, Brazil, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina

Maureen Ehrensberger-Dow, Switzerland, Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften (Zurick University of Applied Sciences)

Meng Ji, Australia, University of Western Australia

Michael Carl, Denmark, Copenhagen Business School

Morven Beaton-Thome, UK, University of Manchester

Myriam Salama-Carr, UK, University of Salford

Patricia Rodriguez Inés, Spain, Universidad Autònoma de Barcelona

Patrick Zabalbeascoa, Spain, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Paul Bandia, Canada, Concordia University, Montréal

Ronaldo Teixeira Martins, Brazil, Universidade do Vale do Sapucai

Sandra Almeida, Brazil, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais

Sharon O'Brien, Ireland, Dublin City University

Silvia Hansen-Schirra, Germany, University of Mainz

Sneja Gunew, Canada, University of British Columbia

Stella Neumann, Germany, Aachen University

Stella Tagnin, Brazil, Universidade de São Paulo

Sue-Ann Harding, Qatar, Hamad bin Khalifa University

Susan Bassnett, UK, University of Warwick

Vera Santiago, Brazil, Universidade Estadual do Ceará