Administrative secretariat: Rachael Wilkinson, Eventus – This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

For information and special rates on a range of accommodation options click here.

This service is offered by the Belfast Visitor & Convention Bureau.

Queen’s University Belfast (www.qub.ac.uk) has a proud academic tradition that stretches back over 160 years from its establishment by Queen Victoria in 1845 as one of three Queen’s Colleges in Ireland. It received its Royal Charter from King Edward VII in 1908, becoming an independent university in its own right. Today its beautiful campus attracts visitors from far and wide.

Getting to Queen's University

The University is situated on University Road, about one mile from Belfast city centre, and is easily accessible by bus, train or on foot. For information on getting to Belfast, see Travel Information.

Belfast is the capital city of Northern Ireland, a place with an amazing variety of landscapes, cultural attractions and leisure opportunities as well as an intriguing - and famously complex - history. Within a few hours of Belfast, one can visit pre-Christian burial sites, coastlines of legend and famous cathedrals.

Belfast boasts an impressive architectural heritage: from the proud City Hall in the heart of the city, to the beautifully restored carved stone and ironwork of St. George's Market near the waterfront, and the elegant Linen Hall Library with its priceless collection of books. It is also home to the world's oldest aircraft production company, the Titanic was built here,  and it’s where the tractor and the tyre were created.

The city has undergone a metamorphosis in recent years: the mighty £100 million Odyssey complex, the Waterfront Hall, new galleries, new public and private developments are all part of the transformation.  But the people are as warm and witty as ever, and city pubs like the Crown Liquor Saloon in Great Victoria Street still buzz with the friendliness and humour of the city's residents.

And did you know that Belfast is said (by The British Council) to have the lowest cost of living in the UK ? It has been voted one of the top 10 cities on the rise (Lonely Planet Blue List) and is considered the second safest city in the world behind Tokyo (United Nations). In 2009 leading travel guide publisher Frommer's named Belfast as one of its top 12 world travel destinations.

Conference Registration for IATIS 2012 will open on Tuesday 20th March 2012.

There are different conference registration fees for:

• IATIS members and non-members
• students and non-students
• early-bird (up to 5pm on 25th May 2012) and late registrations

Please make sure you register for the conference using the correct category.

You can join IATIS or renew your IATIS membership here.

To register for the conference click here.

Call for Papers

In Latin America, translation has had a crucial importance in shaping identities, in contesting or supporting nationalist discourse, in establishing contact between different –and often asymmetric– linguistic communities. An already considerable body of research documents the role of translators and interpreters in the Colonial context, in the constitution of nation-States, in the renovation of literary repertoires. In those processes, Latin American letrados in the nineteenth century and intellectuals in the twentieth century were active agents of cultural and literary exchanges. In addition, travel narratives can be read as cultural translations in colonial and postcolonial contexts. In present-day Latin America, translation is a field in which the strains between source and target languages/cultures: Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese, these and English and other foreign languages, Spanish and native languages, are at stake.

Focusing especially in the thematic areas suggested in the Call for Panel Proposals, this panel proposal aims at exploring the practice of translation in Latin America, its politics, its poetics and its history.

Possible topics:

• Historiography of translation in Latin America
• Translation and interpretation during Colonial rule
• Translation and the trials of the foreign in Latin America
• Translated  literature in Latin America: ideological and aesthetic issues
• The translator as a fictional hero in Latin American fiction
• Literary translation as cultural memory in Latin America
• Translation and book industry in Latin America
• Translation in the context of Mercosur (Southern Common Market)
• Translation in the context of NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement)
• Translating science in Latin America

Chairs

Dr. Andrea Pagni is Professor of Latin American Studies at the Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg  in Germany. She specializes in Latin American literary translation and travel literature  and in Argentine literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She has published Post/Koloniale Reisen (1997) and has edited El exilio republicano español en México y Argentina (2011) and América Latina, espacio de traducciones (2004). She is also co-editor of Argentinien Heute (2010), Memorias de la nación en América Latina (2008), Blicke auf Afrika nach 1900 (2002), Crossing the Atlantic. Travel Literature and the Percep­tion of the Other (1992) and Literatura Argentina Hoy - De la Dictadura a la Democra­cia (1989). She has also published articles on literary translations by Latin American writers in nineteenth century, Latin American travel literature, and Argentine literature in various anthologies and academic journals.

Gertrudis Payàs (Ph. D. Translation Studies, University of Ottawa, 2005) teaches at the Universidad Católica de Temuco, in Chile, and has been visiting professor for History of Translation at El Colegio de México. She is a member of research groups Alfaqueque (Universidad de Salamanca) and Frontera de Lenguas (U. C. de Temuco), specializing in history of translation and interpretation in Hispanic contexts. Recent publications are the reedition of J.T. Medina’s Biblioteca Chilena de Traductores (1821-1924) (2007) and El revés del tapiz. Traducción y discurso de identidad en la Nueva España (1521-1821) (2010). She is currently directing a 3-year research interdisciplinary project on the impact of translation and interpretation in the Araucanian Frontier during 17^th-19^th centuries (Fondecyt-regular 1090459, Chile) and is also responsible for the Chilean section of a projected biographical dictionary oh Hispano-American translation (FFI2009-13326, Spain).

Dr. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. is a translator; her translations of Roland Barthes, Paul Ricoeur, Jean-Paul Sartre, Gustave Flaubert, Richard Rorty, H.P. Lovecraft, Mark Twain, Mary Shelley, among other authors, have been published in Argentina and Spain. She has published La Constelación del Sur. Traducciones y traducciones en la literatura argentina del siglo XX (Siglo XXI Editores, 2004), and received in Madrid the Panhispanic Prize for Specialized Translation (2005). She was Gerhard-Mercator Visiting Professor at Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (2008). She chaired in Buenos Aires the Seminario Permanente de Estudios de Traducción (SPET, 2004-2010). She is currently professor of TS at El Colegio de México.

Call for Papers

The invisible and neutral interpreter profile that emerged out of the drive towards professionalization of conference interpreting prevailed in early work in interpreting studies. The discipline experienced a volte-face at the turn of the present century however, with the growing scholarship on community interpreting, civil society interpreting and interpreting in conflicts. The recognition of interpreting as a situated practice has shifted the focus of research from interpreters’ detachment to allegiances, from deontology to ethics, from training skilled practitioners to educating socially aware professionals. In an invitation to take stock of these developments and to further the analysis of the embeddedness of interpreters in the social fabric, this panel aims to bring together critical reflections and research work on the relationships between interpreting and society, with a particular emphasis on issues of ethics and social responsibility.

It welcomes contributions on conference interpreting, community interpreting, court interpreting, sign language interpreting, interpreting in conflict, or other ad hoc interpreting practices that may arise to respond to societal needs.

Contributions that address the following topics are particularly welcome:

• the role of interpreting and its agents in our societies
• the socio-political conditions under which interpreting takes place
• vacuums in interpreting practice and their social consequences
• models to account for the social transcendence of interpreting
• initiatives to enhance responsible practice, the professional status of interpreters, research, or training

Chairs

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. is currently working as a visiting teacher-researcher in interpreting at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona). She is also a member of the Research Group CEDIT, of the same University. She holds a PhD from the University of Manchester and a B.A. and Masters degree in translation and interpreting from the University of Granada. Her freelance activities in a variety of contexts – ranging from film festivals and the media, to conferences, seminars and workshops – and (organising) interpreting in civil society contexts (ECOS, Babels, Social Forums, etc.) have aroused her interest in the complex and contentious role that interpreters play in society. Her work, which has been published in Eurotopia (Transnational Institute), The Translator, The Interpreter and Translator Trainer, and Puentes as well by Peter Lang Publishing, focuses on the ethics, the sociology and the politics of interpreting as a profession, a scholarly discipline and a field of education.

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. is a PhD fellow at the Government and Public Policies Institute (Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona). Her dissertation is concerned with intercultural communication as a collective problem, and hence with interpreting as a collective and ethical solution, in public institutions of multicultural societies. She holds a B.A. in Translation and Interpreting Studies from the triple qualification program L.A.E. (Universities of Granada, Aix-Marseille and Northumbria) and an M.A. in Social and Political Science (Universitat Pompeu Fabra). She is presently a visiting fellow at the Center for Ethics of the University of Toronto. Sofía has worked as a freelance conference interpreter and she has gathered hands-on experience and found inspiration for her research during her collaboration with entities that operate in the field of healthcare intercultural communication. Sofía is also an active member of the research group MIRAS Mediació i Interpretació: Recerca en l’Àmbit Social (Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona).

Sofía García-Beyaert and Julie Boéri are co-founders of This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., an initiative that seeks to develop research and reflection on issues of ethics and social responsibility in the field of interpreting studies

Call for Papers

Since the foundation of the academic discipline of Translation Studies after World War II, the asymmetries and anisomorphisms of cultures and languages have been recognized and well articulated as a central theoretical issue for Translation Studies and as fundamental challenges for practicing translators and interpreters.  The translation of categories and concepts brings these issues to the fore.  Categories and concepts sit at the intersection of cultural and linguistic asymmetries and anisomorphisms:  they are the foundation of cultural dispositions and practices, as well as cultural structures.  At the same time categories and concepts are normally expressed in language:  they are signaled, recognized, and taught in significant ways through linguistic means, and their contrastive boundaries are delimited by linguistic contrasts, semantic fields, and usages.

This panel explores productive ways to think about, approach, and model cross-cultural categories and concepts (such as the concepts literature, language, game, and translation itself) when such concepts themselves move across cultural and linguistic boundaries in translation, interpreting, and other cross-cultural forms of interface. Among other things, the panel will further explore the question of whether prototype theory can be utilized or whether in cross-linguistic situations (assuming independent linguistic and cultural traditions) one must turn to a cluster-concept approach.

Presentations are invited that discuss both the macrolevels and microlevels of such questions pertaining to concepts and categories, drawing from cognitive science, neuroscience, and just plain common sense.

Chair

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. is author of Translation in a Postcolonial Context:  Early Irish Literature in English Translation (1999) and Enlarging Translation, Empowering Translators (2007); with Edwin Gentzler, she is editor of Translation and Power (2002).  Her most recent publication is the edited collection Translation, Resistance, Activism (2010) and Neuroscience and Translation is currently in progress. Professor Tymoczko has published widely on translation theory and on translation as an engaged social practice; her articles have appeared in major collections of essays about translation and in many translation studies journals.  She is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Call for Papers

‘Large’ and ‘small’ nations within official national boundaries co-live and preserve cultural identities in various forms. In some geographical areas, the recognition and protection of cultural heritage, including language, have entailed tensions between local, regional and national governments and users of the so-called minority languages. These tensions have been mirrored in educational curricula, in the media and in the social and political groups aiming at the promotion of these languages.

Within this panorama, translation activities contribute to the debate about the political recognition of language rights and to the processes of standardisation and normalisation of minority languages. In the last few decades, global-local economic forces, the use of far-reaching media such as the Internet and the promotion of domestic interests and commodities have increasingly affected the translation market, as there has been a growing demand for translation into and from the minority languages. Thus new tensions have been steadily arising, resulting in domesticated and foreignised cultural and language elements, and leading to the consolidation and of some texts and identities, and the fading of others.

Thus, this panel invites contributions that may offer different angles on the social, ideological and cultural implications of translating from and into a minority language. Possible topics that could be addressed include

• the role of translated material in minority language promotion and education
• the presence of translation activities into and from minority languages in the media
• the promotion of local identities in global settings through translation
• the translation of literary production as a challenge to domestication and foreignising actions.

Chair

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. is a lecturer in the University of Oviedo, where she teaches British Culture, Translation and English Language. She has completed a PhD on advertising translation and has developed her research towards website translation and communication and audiovisual advertising translation. Now she coordinates the research group ILTO (Internationalization, Localization, Translation, Oviedo) in the University of Oviedo. She has experience in international programmes and EU-funded projects such as one on the Multilingual Web, which is currently active.

Call for Papers

Arabic literature, declared Edward Said in 1990, "remains relatively unknown and unread in the West, for reasons that are unique, even remarkable." Twenty years later, there has certainly been an increase in the availability of Arabic literary and non-literary works in several European languages, and more attention is being given to current publications in Arabic. Yet, considering the great interest in the West in Arab and Muslim societies, translating and publishing Arabic works in several Western languages is still often seen as nothing less than a gamble.

Whether it is their illustrative social value, their exotic appeal, their connection to current trends, Arabic works often have to give justifications for their existence in Western languages, other than their own intrinsic merit. One very effective pass to translation has been the "controversial" or "subversive" status of a work in Arabic. Writings viewed as subverting political, social, and religious establishments or defying moral codes (especially when accompanied by public outcries or bans of any kind) have usually been given priority by translators and publishers in the West.

This panel seeks to explore, from various angles, the translation of works considered controversial or subversive in Arabic. Our aim is to examine the factors influencing the selection of works for translation, the choices and dilemmas facing translators and publishers in the process of transferring the work from Arabic, and the recent developments and current state of the field.

We welcome contributions that benefit from recent research in translation studies, especially those engaging critically with traditional paradigms in translation theory or scholarship on Arabic literature, society, and politics.

Some of the questions that the panel addresses are:

• How significant is the work's controversial status to its selection for translation from Arabic?
• Has there been any change in recent years toward more attention to the "intrinsic artistic value" of Arabic literature, rather than its social or political relevance?
• How valid are the traditional paradigms of Orientalism and exoticism in understanding current translator choices and audience reactions in Western languages?

Chair

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. is an assistant professor at the Translation Studies Department, United Arab Emirates University. He has published in major academic journals on translation and intercultural relations, including the book Translation and the Manipulation of Difference: Arabic Literature in Nineteenth-Century England, published by St. Jerome in 2009.