Call for Papers

Miller et al (2001, p.1) claim in Globalization and Sport that 'Sport is probably the most universal aspect of popular culture. It crosses languages and countries to captivate spectators and participants, as both a professional business and a pastime'.

In a globalised world, much sport has a vast international audience and consequently generates enormous income and extensive media coverage. In some of the most highly mediated sports many of the sportsmen and women come from a wide range of linguistic and cultural backgrounds which means that they must be able to adapt to often greatly differing occupational, linguistic and social environments during their careers. Depending on the extent of linguistic diversity of the contexts within which sportsmen and women in each sport operate, they come into contact with, or are subject to, intercultural mediation of various types and degrees.

The particularly high economic stakes in many international sports raise interesting questions for translation studies scholars as to how economic forces affect translation policy and practice in the environments in which these highly mobile, globalised workers move.

The aim of this panel is to turn the spotlight of translation studies onto a domain of considerable intercultural activity which the discipline has not yet investigated in any detail, with a view to uncovering questions which can provide ways of better understanding the issues affecting intercultural mediation for mobile workers in wider society.

Possible topics could include:

• what effect does transnational media representation of sportsmen and women have on general perceptions of foreign workers?
• do high financial stakes in the sports industry lead to translation gaps being manipulated by the media or other agents? What kinds of power relationships operate in this context?
• do these mobile workers become members of multicultural or integrated groups?
• to what extent are translators and interpreters cultural brokers in this context?

Chair

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. is a Lecturer in French Language and Translation Studies at the University of East Anglia. His research encompasses news translation with specific reference to the football industry, and stage translation with an emphasis on translation in performance. Recent and forthcoming publications include 'The journalist, the translator, the player and his agent: games of (mis)representation and (mis)translation in British media reports about non-anglophone football players', in Maher, B., and Wilson, R., (eds.) Words, Images and Performances in Translation (London and New York: Continuum) (forthc. 2011); (with Dalmasso) 'Musical realisations: a performance-based translation of rhythm in Koltès' Dans la solitude des champs de coton', in Baines R., Marinetti C. and Perteghella M. (eds) Staging Translation: Text and Theatre Practice. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan) 95-106 (2011).

Call for Papers

Portuguese occupies a position as a language of colonization which is very different from that of English, Spanish and French. Portuguese became the only language of Brazil, now a superpower of over 180 million. But in Portugal's other colonies: Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe, Guinea-Bissau, Equatorial Guinea, East Timor, and Macau, it remained a colonial governing language, usually just being learnt by the local elites, and seldom studied by the masses.

Each of the Portuguese colonies has its own history of translation to and from local vernaculars in missionary writings, legal documents, government decrees, military manuals, educational material, oral interpreting, and works of fiction.

Against this backdrop, a number of questions can be raised. For example, to what extent did the Portuguese colonizers work with and translate into local languages? Did local writers translate their own works into Portuguese, or did they themselves write in Portuguese, itself a form of translation in colonial and postcolonial societies (see Paul Bandia, Translation as Reparation. St Jerome 2008).

And what is the contemporary situation of translation in the former colonies of Portugal? In East Timor, for example, Portuguese is the official government and legal language, but is spoken well by a very small proportion of the population, and in Macau, where very few people know Portuguese, but government documents must be translated into Portuguese.

And as, through immigration, Portuguese becomes a widespread language in metropolises such as Boston, Montreal, Toronto, London, and Paris, what new patterns of translation can we find here?

This panel welcomes papers which deal with translation and interpretation to and from Portuguese in its colonial and postcolonial setting. The emphasis may be on the role of Portuguese translation policy in its colonies, translations between Portuguese and vernacular languages, language policy related to translation, and the effect of recent military, political and economic events on translation and translation policy.

Chair

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. is Associate Professor of English Literature and Translation Studies at the Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil His recent publications include Agents of Translation (John Benjamins 2010), edited together with Paul Bandia.

Call for Papers

When the British first established trading posts in China in 18th Century, they faced insurmountable problems in communicating with the Chinese. Translation and interpretation were undertaken by the so-called linguists, who were linguistically incompetent and ethically unworthy. Moreover, these linguists were in fact part of the so-called Canton System set up by the Qing authorities to put the Westerners, who were in their eyes uncivilized barbarians, under control. They were held responsible for the conduct, and in particular the misconduct of the barbarians. To them, the interests of the British were of the lowest priority. But this does not mean that they were valued by the Chinese authorities. On the contrary, Chinese linguists were viewed with great scepticism for their link with the foreigners. During the Opium War, some of them were even taken as traitors.

On the other hand, the British gradually built up their team of translators, under Robert Morrison, the first Protestant missionary in China, who set up classes to teach Chinese to the officers of the East India Company. Many of them ultimately worked under the British Superintendent of Trade, when the trade monopoly of the Company ceased. During the Opium War, they served in the British armies and upheld national interests to the most.

Another aspect of these translators of the British camp should not be neglected, that many of them were originally missionaries with a wish to preach the greatest population on Earth. The interests of the church should always be taken care of.

The panel aims to study the different roles played by translators in the early stage of contacts between China and Britain in 18-19th century. Serving different interests with various agenda, the translators were by no means innocent mediators.

Possible topics:

• Analysis of the cultural and socio-political background against which the translators worked
• Analysis of different translator groups serving different interests
• Case study of individual translators

Chair

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. is Professor of Humanities at the Department of Translation, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is also the director of Research Centre of Translation and director of Hong Kong Cultural Studies Centre. He is Executive Editor of the Chinese-English translation journal Renditions, and Chief Editor of Journal of Translation History. He has single-authored ten books and about 100 articles on modern Chinese literature, Chinese translation history and Hong Kong literature and history.

Call for Papers

In recent years the study of media in/and translation has grown significantly since both enable communication across languages and cultures, promote people's mutual understanding and dialogue, document human civilization and culture, and record the progress and development of human society. As many research scholars have demonstrated so far, translation means more than just a linguistic exercise. Rather, it is a critical keyword that speaks in diverse ways to media cultures as it stands out as a conceptual lens and metaphor for the interlaced and often contradictory set of transformative processes at work when media objects, policies, and economies traffic across geographic borders, cultural institutions, and technological platforms. This synergy between media and translation occur in a wide range of contexts (e.g. the press, advertising, television, cinema, and the world wide web or other information channels) where both disciplines seek for new translative possibilities in their creative processes.

In order to provide a common theoretical platform on these challenging issues, we invite participants to figure out the implications of the interrelationship between media in the widest sense and translation and to discuss the following key-questions:

• How do mass media enable communication across language and cultures?
• How are language and translation issues manifesting in media today?
• What is the role played by translation in international news reporting?
• Can multilingual bloggers act as ambassadors for reaching multilingual audiences?
• What is the relationship of regional news to multilingual sources, and what efforts can be made to bridge that divide?
• How can we undertake the analysis of ideology as reflected in the media and translated across languages and cultures?
• What exactly happens in the complex processes of reformulation across linguistic, cultural and ideological boundaries?
• Which transformations occur from the original source text to its (mis)representation, for example, in another language and culture or through other communication media?
• What effects do these transformations have on readers and their perception of information and knowledge?
• How do choices made at the various levels in the process of producing texts (i.e. choices concerning which information to include or exclude, what to make explicit or leave implicit etc.) result in different interpretations of the 'same' event by readers in different countries and even in political conflict?
• How do socio-cultural and historical conditions, primarily in the recipient socio-culture, influence information transfer and translation behaviour?

These are questions to which we cannot yet provide a definite answer, since they have not yet been investigated in sufficient depth and breath and are just beginning to attract more attention from Linguistics and Translation Studies scholars. This panel is thus intended to bring this recent and multi-layered interdisciplinary interest to the investigation of the language of the media. To this end we invite submissions for 20-minute papers and/or 20-minute creative project presentations that consider the stakes of translating media from diverse methodological, disciplinary and creative approaches (e.g.: Discourse Studies, Cultural Studies, Translation Studies, Psycholinguistics, Marketing Studies, Mass Communications, Visual and Performance Studies, etc.) with the aim to reach an important crossroads in the understanding of information transfer across languages and cultures, as well as of the impact the media have on individuals and societies, their tastes, aspirations, attitudes to other languages and cultures and their responses to socio-cultural and political developments.

Chairs

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. is a researcher and lecturer in English Language and Translation at the University of Bari. Her main research interests are in Applied Linguistics, Specialized Discourse and Corpus-based Translation Studies. She has published an article which provides a brief summary of ESP (English for Special/Specialized Purposes) from a historical perspective. Her PhD dissertation together with her other articles focus on the use of domain-specific parallel and comparable corpora specially collected in order to investigate English and Italian Medical Purposes and how medical discourse enters the realm of fiction. Her new research area includes fashion theory, in general and language transfer and cultural communication in fashion advertising, in particular a topic on which she has published a paper entitled "Moving across languages and cultures in Vogue fashion advertising" (2009). Her recent publications are Understanding The Language of Medicine (2009) Aracne, and English4Fashion (2010) Wip Edizioni.

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. is Assistant Professor in English and Translation Studies at the Faculty of Education, University of Bari (Italy). Her areas of research include women's and gender studies, translation theory and practice, contrastive linguistics, comparative cultural studies (Chicana literature; Afroamerican language and literature). She has translated Pilar Godayol's works (Spazi di frontiera. Genere e traduzione, 2002; Voci Chicane. Mericans e altri racconti. 2005). She has published several articles and authored The Languages of the ghetto. Rap, break-dance e graffiti art come pratiche di ®esistenza (Aracne, Roma, 2005) and Pratiche traduttive e Gender Studies (Aracne, Roma, 2006). She has edited Translationscapes. Comunità, lingue e traduzioni interculturali (Progedit, Bari, 2009), a collection of academic essays on interculturality and/in translation by some of the most influential scholars as Mona Baker, Moira Inghilleri, Paul Bandia, Chris Larkosh-Lenotti, Paola Zaccaria, Pilar Godayol.

Call for Papers

Audiovisual translation has unprecedented currency as a mode of intercultural exchange in the global context, and a huge potential to build bridges across languages and cultures, and to celebrate difference. This potential is still largely unexplored in theory, and perhaps untapped in practice. We know little about the linguistic and cultural representations conveyed and their impact on the public, in particular from a cross-cultural pragmatics perspective, where cultural a-synchrony is a key variable. Target texts are inescapably tied to source text contexts. The intersection of modalities and frames of (linguistic and cultural) reference thus inevitably involved in responding to translated AV text challenges us to broaden our approaches to representation, and to shift our perspectives, not least on the specificities of the medium. As constraints on translation choices, they have fuelled legitimate concerns about 'loss'. There are signs that debates are shifting, however, and making room for views paying heed to the potential of AV modes of translation to transcend their limitations: to produce their own systems of linguistic and pragmatic multi-modal representation and to activate their own modes of textual interpretation, for example.

The panel will take its cue from Gambier and aim to bring together researchers with an interest in AVT, 'not as a constellation of problems, but as a valuable asset addressing the need for multilingual and multicultural communication in the international arena' (Gambier 2008:12), specifically in its capacities to promote, or hinder, intercultural understanding. Possible topics include:

• representation of particular language practices (e.g. modes of address, the negotiation of conflict or other types of interpersonal relations), and the opportunity they offer to examine more closely cross-cultural but also intercultural issues in different languages or language pairs;
• linguistic/cultural stereotypes and how they can be created, reinforced or contrasted by AVT;
• multilingualism and code-switching in films, as a source of insight into representation;
• comparison of different forms of AVT and the forms of representation they may promote;
• AVT representations and their implications from a learning/teaching perspective, and for FL learners as learners and ambassadors of other cultures;
• audience responses to representations.

Gambier Yves (2008). Recent developments and challenges in audiovisual translation research. In Chiaro, D, Heiss C and Bucaria C Between Text and Image: Updating Research in Screen Translation, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 11-33.

Chairs

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. is a Senior Lecturer in French, Linguistics and Translation Studies at the University of East Anglia. Her research encompasses translation studies - specifically audiovisual translation -, and cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics. Forthcoming and recent publications reflect this dual interest and include: 'Film subtitles and the conundrum of linguistic and cultural representation: a methodological blind spot'. In S. Hauser and M. Luginbuehl (eds) Contrastive Media Analysis, Amsterdam: John Benjamins (forthc. 2011); 'Issues of L2 Pragmatic Discrimination from an Interactional Perspective: The Case of mais as a Turn-Initial Device in L2 French". In M. Auger, C. Béal et F. Demougin (eds) Interactions et interculturalité : Variétés des corpus et des approches, Montpellier: Maison des Sciences de l'Homme de Montpellier (forthc. 2011) ; 'Film subtitles from a cross-cultural pragmatics perspective: issues of linguistic and cultural representations' in The Translator (16.1) (2010); 'Interruption in advanced learner French: issues of pragmatic discrimination'. Languages in Contrast 9.1, 98-123 (2009). She was also the guest editor for the Journal of French Language Studies 20.1 Special Issue on Cross-cultural Pragmatics (2010).

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. is Professor of English language and linguistics at the University of Pavia. Her research has addressed several topics in English applied linguistics and has focussed on second language acquisition, the English of science, corpus linguistics and audiovisual translation. In these fields she has published widely both nationally and internationally. For the past few years she has been working on features of spoken language in film dubbing. In this area, she has published a book, La traduzione filmica. Aspetti del parlato doppiato dall'inglese all'italiano [Film translation: Aspects of spoken language dubbed from English into Italian], Rome, 2005, and co-edited the volume Analysing audiovisual dialogue. Linguistic and translational insights, Bologna 2009. In the field of audiovisual translation, she has also authored articles on subtitling and second language acquisition and address shifts in film dubbing. Maria Pavesi is currently the coordinator of the international project "English and Italian audiovisual language: translation and language learning" founded by the Fondazione Alma Mater Ticinensis and comprising the Universities of Pavia, Loughborough and Malta.

Call for Papers

This panel addresses the role and status of the translator in the current panorama of the ‘technological turn’ of Translation Studies. Especially in the domains of technical translation and localisation, translators can find themselves in low-paying, low-status employment, where their expertise is under-appreciated. Developments in translation technology over the past 15 years (including the optimisation of web-based CAT tools and Machine Translation Systems) point to a possible shift in the professional practice of translation towards a ‘post-editing’ environment where translators act as proofreaders of output from automated systems, no longer involved in ‘translation proper’. The focus may shift from computer-aided human translation to human-aided computer translation. Coupled with this, the translation community also faces the questions raised by emerging phenomena on the Web like ‘crowdsourcing’ that might also pose a silent threat for the recognition and the visibility of the role of the translator as the ‘expert’ and ‘mediator’ in intercultural communication. On the other hand, the promotion of user interaction in Web 2.0 and the recent developments towards ubiquitous access to multilingual digital content in Web 3.0 and 4.0 require (human) translators to be engaged in the design of the multilingual web, which potentially raises their status as multilingual mediators.

The objective of this panel is to bring together those who are interested in, and concerned about, the impact of technology on the status and role of the translator, the reaction of the community to questions of status, the threat or opportunity posed by technology, and new trends such as crowd-sourcing and volunteering, in order to discuss, debate and deliberate on the role of the translator now and in the future. Papers on (but not limited to) the following topics are most welcome:

• The positive or negative impact of technology on the status of the translator and the value placed on translation
• The impact of crowdsourcing and user-generated translation (including wiki-translation, fansubbings, scanlations or Rom-hacking)
• The role of the translator in localization and internationalization, and multimedia translation e-inclusion and accessibility
• Other issues concerning the relation between human translation and new technologies
• Translator pedagogy and technology: what does the future hold for translators trained at third-level?; How/Should translation curricula change given recent trends? What ethical questions present themselves?
• Submissions from commercial players are also welcomed.

Chairs

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. is a lecturer at the University of Oviedo (Spain) where he lectures in languages, translation and applied linguistics. Currently, he is a visiting researcher at Imperial College London where he is conducting research on collaborative translation. His main research lines focus on localisation and internationalisation of multimedia products (websites, videogames, etc.), social and fan translation (with a special emphasis on crowdsourcing and fansubbing), and translation technology. He is also a member of the European Thematic Network “Multilingual Web” and works as a freelance translator and interpreter. In addition, he is a member of the scientific committee of the Hermeneus Project, listed in the main international indexes and databanks. He has authored several peer-reviewed articles on translation and presented papers in international conferences.

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. is a lecturer in translation and language technology in SALIS, Dublin City University. Her teaching centres around practical translation (French/German to English), Research Methods, Translation Theory and Localisation. Her research interests include the measurement of cognitive effort in translation and post-editing of machine translation output via eye tracking and keyboard logging, translator interaction with technology, process-related research and research methods, controlled authoring of content etc. She is affiliated with the Centre for Translation and Textual Studies and the Centre for Next Generation Localisation.

Call for Papers

In The Conference of the Tongues, Theo Hermans addresses the question of how a translation ‘stands for’, ‘represents’ or ‘mediates’ its original (2007:87). The various possible relations between source and target text (as in the case of ‘declared equivalence’), Hermans argues, cannot be extrapolated on the basis of textual comparison. Rather, these features are ‘imposed on them through an external intervention in a particular context’ (2007:6). Defining and evaluating the relation between source and target text are therefore performative speech acts, which can include a written declaration or other official stamps of legitimacy.

The notions of ‘speech act’ and ‘external intervention’ pertain to the general theme of the conference, “The Politics of Recognition”, in that they consider the role of extra-textual authorities in the recognition of a translated text, as well as the pragmatic purpose of such a recognition. Such authorities and pragmatic purposes may be legal, religious, literary or institutional, amongst others.

The panel builds upon this claim and invites contributions that explore a variety of “translation-defining speech acts”, with the aim to assess, in the light of current research, the circumstances that make it necessary to recognise a translation as standing for, representing or mediating its original. Topics may include, but are not limited to:  

• the historical / social perception of one or more specific translations
• the cultural value of different kinds of translation (e.g. religious, legal, literary, scientific translation)
• translation pragmatics
• meta-translations
• translator’s voice and the role of the paratext in defining a translation
• specific discussion of scholars addressing translation in terms of speech acts

Chair

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. wrote her PhD dissertation on Translating Nonsense, Nonsensing Translation under the joint supervision of Theo Hermans (University College London) and Daniel Abondolo (SSEES) and expects to complete her doctoral degree in May 2011. She holds a Licence ès Lettres in Russian and Comparative Literature from the University of Geneva, and a Master of Studies in European Literature from Oxford University, where she specialized in Soviet children’s literatureShe has translated fiction, plays and articles and has worked as a freelance subtitler for the Swiss Broadcasting company SSR.

Panels are groups of papers organised around a particular sub-theme. Each panel has its own call for papers and a designated chair. Calls for papers for panels are available below.

To submit an abstract to a panel, please use the link provided.

Panel 1
Speech Acts Defining Translation
Chair: Daniela Almansi

Panel 2
Translation, Technology, Status
Chairs: Sharon O’Brien and Alberto Fernández Costales

Panel 3

Can Loss be More? Audiovisual translation and its potentials for linguistic and cultural representation
Chairs: Marie-Noëlle Guillot and Maria Pavesi 

Panel 4
Media and/in Translation: exploring synergies and representations across language and culture boundaries
Chairs: Rosita Maglie and Annarita Taronna

Panel 5
Serving Different Interests: Translators in Sino-British conflicts in the 18th & 19^th century
Chair: Lawrence Wong

Panel 6
Translation to and from Portuguese in areas of military conflict, political upheaval, and economic change
Chair: John Milton

Panel 7
Translation and Sport in a Globalised World
Chair: Roger Baines

Panel 8
Translating “Controversial” Arabic Works
Chair: Tarek Shamma

Panel 9
Minority languages and the tensions of translation
Chair: Cristina Valdés

Panel 10
Cross-Cultural Concepts and Translation Theory
Chair: Maria Tymoczko

Panel 11
Interpreting and the Social Fabric
Chairs: Julie Boéri and Sofía García-Beyaert

 Panel 12
Translations and Translators in Latin America
Chairs: Andrea Pagni, Gertrudis Pavàs and Patricia Willson

Panel 13 
Innovation in Translation and Interpreting Pedagogy CALL CLOSED -- abstracts are no longer being accepted for this panel 

Chairs: Don Kiraly and Silvia Hansen-Schirra

Panel 14
Epistemicide: Translation and the Globalization of Knowledge
Chair: Karen Bennett

Panel 15
Teaching and Capacity Expansion in a Modern Translation/Interpreting Classroom
Chair: Yong Zhong 

The theme of the IATIS 2012 conference is: ‘Translation and the Politics of Recognition’. This may be interpreted in a broad manner, embracing such topics as globalisation, cultural encounter, intercultural relations and conflict.

Related thematic areas include, but are not limited to, the following:

• the crisis in models of multiculturalism and integrationism;
• the role of translation in terms of conflict resolution, mediation and reporting;
• covert censorship - mediated manipulations and the role of the translator / interpreter;
• cultural translation between ethnic groups, particularly majoritarian and minoritarian;
• translation, minorities, and language rights;
• translation, public memory and memorialisation;
• the translator / interpreter as cultural broker in a transnational world;
• intercultural relations and their political impact;
• interaction between the cultures of 'large' and 'small' nations;
• the role of literary translation in challenging or reinforcing cultural difference;
• transnational media and their role in facilitating, or discouraging, intercultural understanding;
• translation/interpreting and its politics;
• translation/interpreting and its ethics;
• translation and the contesting of nationalist narratives;
• recognition of the translator in technologised workflows;
• the identity of the translator/the translator’s multiple identities.

Conference Organising Committee

Piotr Blumczynski (Queen's University Belfast, Northern Ireland)

David Johnston (Queen's University Belfast, Northern Ireland)

Stephen Kelly (Queen's University Belfast, Northern Ireland)

Dorothy Kenny (Dublin City University, Ireland)

John Milton (University of São Paulo, Brazil)

Local Organising Committee

Mayella Almazán (Queen's University Belfast)

Piotr Blumczynski (Queen's University Belfast)

David Johnston (Queen's University Belfast)

Stephen Kelly (Queen's University Belfast)

Dorothy Kenny (Dublin City University)

Conference Advisory Panel

Mona Baker, UK

Paul F. Bandia, Canada

Sanjib Bhattacharya, India

Piotr Blumczynski, Northern Ireland

Lynne Bowker, Canada

Martha P.Y. Cheung, Hong Kong

Hiroko Cockerill, Australia

Michael Cronin, Ireland

Farzaneh Farahzad, Iran

Theo Hermans, UK

Juliane House, Germany

David Johnston, Northern Ireland

Stephen Kelly, Northern Ireland

Dorothy Kenny, Ireland

Youngmin Kim, Korea

Rita Kothari, India

Lorraine Leeson, Ireland

Brigid Maher, Australia

John Milton, Brazil

Jeremy Munday, UK

Maeve Olohan, UK

Hala Sharkas, United Arab Emirates

Sebnem Susam-Sarajeva, UK

Şehnaz Tahir-Gürçağlar, Turkey

Charles Tiayon, Cameroon

Rebecca Tipton, UK

Marija Todorova, Macedonia

Rita Wilson, Australia

Jenny Williams, Ireland