Call for Papers: Reading the Target: Translation as Translation

Reading the Target: Translation as Translation

University of East Anglia

School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing

School of Language and Communication Studies

23^rd and 24^th March 2013

The fifth Postgraduate Translation Symposium at the University of East Anglia aims to examine translation as a form of literature in its own right: since Lawrence Venuti’s influential work on the translator’s visibility (1995), much progress has been made in the academic study of translation in this regard, but many critics and publishers remain reluctant to acknowledge the translator’s involvement in the creation of a new text or the status of these texts as anything more than a duplicate in another language.    

      

The symposium aims to explore the following questions: what are the effects of cultural contexts, literary systems and philosophical and ideological cues on the appreciation of translated literature? What are the power structures and hierarchies that translated literature must negotiate in order to achieve acceptance? What are the benefits to a culture that acknowledges the presence of translations within its literary canon?

We invite submissions for presentations by postgraduate research students and academics across a wide range of disciplines. Fields of particular interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

- Performance and adaptations

- Cross-genre translation

- The diversity of overt forms of translation

- Concepts of authorship in translation

- The translation of poetry

- The role of translation in religious texts

- Pseudo-translation

- Ethical and political considerations in translation

- The visibility of translation in modern forms of text and media (Subtitling, Films, Games)

Please send proposals of no more than 250 words (with bibliographical references and a short biographical note) for 20-minute papers to translationsymposium@uea.ac.uk by Friday 7 December 2012.

Please address all correspondence to:

Lina Fisher

translationsymposium@uea.ac.uk

University of East Anglia

School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing

Norwich

NR4 7TJ

The Organising Committee: Nozomi Abe, Moira Eagling, Lina Fisher, James Hadley

Meanwhile, up in Manchester…

I’m currently writing my dissertation on the translation of comics. In the name of research, last week (5th-8th July), I attended the Joint International Conference of Graphic Novels and Comics and The International Bande Dessinée Society, at Manchester Metropolitan University. Over 4 days, academics, students, artists, authors, and other interested parties variously presented, discussed and generally delighted in the evidently active international comics community. Over 4 days, these same academics, students, artists, authors, and other interested parties deliberated over a multitude of issues pertaining to comics on an international scale. By definition, the discussion centred on both comics in a source-language, and comics in translation (to and from English). Yet not one paper over the 4 days focussed on the translation of comics as a process. Granted, I couldn’t attend all presentations on all days, but from all the abstracts given in the conference programme, I still couldn’t find anything about translation. I was rather surprised by this and, to be honest, a bit disappointed. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been. It’s just that it highlighted once again the invisible nature of our beloved craft at what seemed to me to be a prime opportunity to make some translation noise.

Still, to view the glass half full, it was encouraging to find tangible evidence of a community who not only read translated material, but are aware that it is translated and want to discuss the translated product (even if they’re not discussing the act of translation!) And of course, I ought to remember that this was not a translation conference and that there is more than just that one important aspect of international comics.

Highlights, for me, included Frank Bramlett’s enlightening paper on ‘Conversation Analysis and the Representation of Time in Comics’, in which he discussed how the study of sequentiality in conversation may shed light on how temporal duration is shown in comics; via the linguistic content of the speaker’s turn, rather than the spatial distribution of those turns. Joan Ormrod’s paper ‘Teenage Dream Tonight: UK Girls’ Romance Comics 1957-64’ provided a fascinating investigation into the construction of pop-stardom through the medium of comics, with comics playing the dual role of fanzine and media machine in the days before Beatlemania. And Rikke Platz Cortsen’s detailed paper ‘And the Dog got its Bone – Asterix as an Example of the Chronotope in the European Album’ focussed on the nature of how formal elements of a comic can affect narrative space and time as perceived by the reader, both within one album and over an whole series.

Cortsen’s presentation was memorable for a further reason: she mentioned translation! In passing. But it was there. In album 5 of the Asterix series, the story features a trek around Gaule in order to gather items for a banquet. Cortsen said that the English translation puts emphasis on the dinner, whereas the French emphasises the gathering of goods for the dinner. Eager to pick up on this thread, I asked her in what way the English text had shown this emphasis and she answered that it was in the title. The French title is Le Tour de Gaule d’Astérix [the tour of Gaule of Asterix] which is a clear reference to the Tour de France cycle race and highlights the enormity of the task the characters are faced with in the story. The English title is Asterix and the Banquet, which does indeed focus more on the end result and loses the Tour de France reference. Cortsen is Danish and also read the Asterix comics in her native language. Interestingly, the Danish title of this album (in English) is ‘Going around Gaule’, which, although it doesn’t retain the Tour de France reference either, does emphasise the gathering rather than the banquet.

Needless to say, this got me thinking…!

Samantha Christie is a translator from French and Spanish into English and is currently pursuing the MA in Literary Translation at UEA. Special interests include translation in the areas of detective fiction and music, and the relationship between author and translator.
Contact: info@samanthachristie.co.uk

Cultural Translations Symposium 2011

*Venue*:

Valletta Campus,
Old University Building,
St Paul Street,
V A L L E T T A
Malta

*Dates*:
15-16th April

*Subject*: *Cultural Translations Symposium 2011*

The first definition of the word ‘translation’ offered by the OED is ‘Transference; removal or conveyance from one person, place, or condition to another’. Understood in this way, it is apparent that translation’s relationship with literary and cultural texts is not simply that of a process whereby a particular text is rendered in another language. Translation is not only something done to a text.
Understood in the broader sense, it is something that has occupied and exercised the literary and cultural imagination from its beginnings. This strange coextensivity takes us from Homer’s tale of the ‘translations’ of Ulysses, right the way up to Rushdie’s declaration that diasporic writers are ‘translated men’. Literary and visual culture has always told of journeys, loss, changes in condition or circumstance; even its very modes – metaphor, symbolism, irony, figuration itself – are arguably inherently translational. So although any mention of translation immediately and inevitably calls to mind what might be called ‘linguistic’ translation, on further consideration literature and visual culture seem to have always been preoccupied with what might be called ‘cultural’ translation. The distinction, however, is not an easy one. The border between the two is far from impenetrable and the linguistic is as prone to being carried over into the cultural as the cultural is to the linguistic.
However one looks at it, then, translation is rife and arguably always cultural. This conference invites papers that respond to and explore cultural translations and translations of culture in literature, art, culture and theory.

Papers may discuss, but need not be limited to, issues like the following;

• Loss and gain: the economy of cultural translation
• Literature and the exilic consciousness
• Cultural translation as an agent of literary/cultural/ historical
change
• The relationship between cultural translation and cultural memory
• Human translation and questions concerning technology
• The cultural turn in translation studies
• The place and state of language(s) in cultural translation
• Ethnicity, hybridity and multiculturalism
• Diaspora and migration
• Borders, margins and the in-between in art and culture
• ‘Foreignising’ cultural translations
• Cultural adaptation and transmediation
• Cultural untranslatability
• Surviving translation
• Origins, originality and authenticity
• Cultural translation and the future of comparative literature and
transnational literatures
• Aesthetics, politics and ideology in cultural translation
• Literary geographies

Proposals to be sent to: culturaltranslations2011@um.edu.mt

Call for Papers

Call for Papers
A Dangerous Liaison? The Effects of Translation and Interpreting Theory on Practice
UWM Graduate Conference in Translation and Interpreting Studies
Friday 30 September and Saturday 1 October, 2011
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Keynote speakers: Gertrud Champe and Madeleine Velguth

“A theory of translation is potentially more dangerous to translation practice than a theory of meaning, of literature, of the text, or of the reader.”
Jean Boase-Beier, 'Who Needs Theory?'

Translation and interpreting theory can be tremendously liberating for the practitioner but, as Boase-Beier argues, this liberating potential can be undermined by “naive application”. Translation and Interpreting Studies have been consolidating their status as independent academic disciplines since the 1980s and as a result today's translators and interpreters increasingly receive rigorous formal training in their field. Translation and interpreting theory is a well-established component of translation and interpreting programs, but the precise use that theoretically-aware translators and interpreters make of this knowledge in their practice is in need of further exploration. How does theory influence the trained translator/interpreter? Are 'outside' theories such as theories of cognition more useful to the translator/interpreter than theories generated within Translation and Interpreting Studies? Is the over-schooled practitioner a dangerous creature?

MA and PhD students are invited to submit proposals for twenty-minute papers on any aspect of the relationship between translation theory and practice. Potential topics might include, but are not limited to:

• Theory at the “wordface” (Wagner)
• Translation and interpreting practice and 'outside' theories
• Cognitive theories of translation and interpreting
• 'Failed' translations
• The dangers of translation and interpreting theory
• Translation pedagogy
• New directions in translation and interpreting theory

Expressions of interest are also solicited from graduate students who would like to participate in a round table on graduate programs in translation and interpreting and/or in a language-specific workshop in literary translation.

Please e-mail 250 word proposals for papers and expressions of interest in the round table and/or workshops to wrightcm@uwm.edu by April 30, 2011.