Mona Baker
Activist Translator Communities in the 21st Century: Challenging or Reinforcing Structures of Power?
Language: English. Interpreting: Spanish.
Wednesday 17 April, 9.30 am. Auditorium
Abstract
Translation has the potential to play a transformative role in reconfiguring social and political relations by articulating new forms of knowledge through the responsible confrontation of diverse epistemologies and cultural experiences. The work of activist groups such as Guerrilla Translators and Respond Crisis Translation attests to the power of translation in this respect. At the same time, translational encounters, even when well intentioned, can be exploitative, manipulative, and can reinforce rather than challenge structures of power. This is evident in the work of a growing number of ‘activist’ groups that claim to offer volunteer translation to spread purportedly progressive ideas and support marginalized communities. Some of these groups adopt discourses of globalization, development, human rights, diversity and mutual understanding that mask aggressive processes of homogenization, exclusion and co-optation.
Building on earlier studies of activist communities of translation and interpreting, by myself and others, this presentation will offer a critical analysis of the political positioning and language policies of a number of recently founded groups of volunteer translators and interpreters. With some exceptions, much of the work of these (often well intentioned) groups will be shown to perpetuate epistemic injustice and reinforce existing social and political inequalities.
Bio note
Mona Baker is Affiliate Professor at the Centre for Sustainable Health Education (SHE), University of Oslo, where she is responsible for developing the Oslo Medical Corpus, co-coordinator of the Genealogies of Knowledge Research Network, and Director of the Baker Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies at Shanghai International Studies University. She is author of In Other Words: A Coursebook on Translation and Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account; co-author (with Eivind Engebretsen) of Rethinking Evidence in the Time of Pandemics; editor of Translating Dissent: Voices from and with the Egyptian Revolution (winner of the 2016 Intranews Linguist of the Year Award); and co-editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies and the Routledge Encyclopedia of Citizen Media. Her articles have appeared in a wide range of international journals, including Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, Social Movement Studies, Critical Studies on Terrorism, Social Semiotics, Translation Studies and The Translator. She posts on translation, citizen media and Palestine on her personal website and tweets at @MonaBaker11.
Francisco Moreno Fernández
Language norms and practices
Language: Spanish. Interpreting: English.
Wednesday 17 April, 3.45 pm. Auditorium
Abstract
The “norm” refers to a cross-disciplinary concept which requires one to reflect and continually decide on its scope in both theory and practice. The complexity of the concept demands an analysis of the implications that the concept of “norm” has on the training, activity and evaluation of professionals who work with language as a prime ingredient. The norm is analysed from different disciplines of social science, offering a conceptual typology which aims to clarify some of the most frequent aporia and contradictions.
Bio note
Francisco Moreno Fernández holds a PhD in Hispanic Linguistics from the Complutense University in Madrid. He has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science and Sociology. Alexander von Humboldt Professor at the University of Heidelberg and Director of the Heidelberg Center for Ibero-American Studies. He is a specialist in dialectology, sociolinguistics, sociology of language and linguistic methodology. His most recent publications include Tras Babel. De la naturaleza social del lenguaje (2018), La lengua española en su geografía (5th ed. 2020), Variedades de la lengua española (2020), La lengua y el sueño de la identidad (2020), La lengua de los hispanos unidos de América. Crónica de resistencia (2022) and, with Rocío Caravedo, The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Dialectology (2022).
Honorary Professor at the University of Alcalá. He is a Full Member of the Academia Europaea and of the North American Academy of the Spanish Language, and a Corresponding Member of the Cuban, Mexican and Chilean Academies of Language, as well as of the Spanish Royal Academy. He directed the Instituto Cervantes centres in São Paulo and Chicago. Former Academic Director of the Instituto Cervantes in Madrid and the former Director of the Observatory of the Spanish Language and Hispanic Cultures in the United States of the Instituto Cervantes at Harvard University.
Founding Editor of the journal Lengua y migración / Language & Migration, Executive Editor of the journal Spanish in Context and Co-editor of the Journal of Linguistic Geography. Member of the Editorial and Scientific Boards of various specialised journals, including: Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana, Journal of World Languages, Boletín de Filología de la Universidad de Chile, Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada and Oralia.
Sherry Simon
Speaking Memory: Translation Sites and their Conflicting Stories
Language: English. Interpreting: Spanish.
Thursday 18 April, 9.00 am. Auditorium
Abstract
A hotel in Sarajevo, a memorial in Lviv, a bridge in Mostar, a museum in Ottawa, a garden in Ireland, a market in Hong Kong and a church in Toledo, these are all sites shaped by conversations across languages. Here words and histories meet – in modes of coexistence, rivalry or conquest.
Translation sites are places of overlapping and conflicting stories. To visit them is to experience competing versions of history and the uneven fit between present and past.
This presentation will focus on the city of Prague between 1900 and 1935, and the opera houses that crystallized its competing cultural worlds. During a period of great effervescence, musicians and mediators played important roles, among others, Max Brod, Leos Janacek, Milena Jesenska, Alexander Zemlinsky, making Prague an emblematic translational city.
Bio note
Sherry Simon is Distinguished Professor Emerita, Concordia University. She has published widely in the areas of intercultural and translation studies, most recently exploring the cultural history of linguistically divided cities, multilingual cities in situations of post-conflict and the cities of the former Habsburg empire. Among her recent publications are Translation Sites. A Field Guide and Cities in Translation: Intersections of Language and Memory, both of which have appeared in French translation. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a member of the Académie des lettres du Québec.
Kobus Marais
Complexity Thinking in Translation Studies: A Critical Reflection
Language: English. Interpreting: Spanish.
Thursday 18 April, 3.30 pm. Auditorium
Abstract
Complexity thinking has now been around in translation studies for quite a while. On the one hand, scholars engaged the topic positively in search of concepts and methods that would add value in translation studies. On the other hand, as is to be expected, scholars have engaged critically with a complexity approach to translation studies while not dismissing the endeavour in its totality (Pym, 2023; Robinson, 2022; 2022).
It is perhaps time, for someone like me who has been invested in this approach over the past 15 years, to stand back and take a reflective view on the emergence of complexity thinking in translation studies. Taking stock of the emergence of a scholarly trajectory is required every so often in order to orientate oneself to the developments, the problems and the unfinished tasks that remain ahead.
This presentation therefore invites a critical engagement about a complexity approach to translation by engaging with some of the criticism. The main task, however, will be to map an agenda for further research, based on the critical reflection, to continue the development of the approach. I engage the latest literature on complexity thinking generally and the complexity of constraints and absentials (Deacon, 2013; Juarrero, 2023) in particular to work out a nuanced conceptual framework with which to study the emergence of any semiotic trajectory (Byrne & Callaghan, 2023) through a process of translation. In addition, I consider a soft causality for social-cultural studies that is able to reflect the complexity of causality in these domains by further exploring the notion of ‘propensity’ (Williams, 2021).
References
- Byrne, D., & Callaghan, G. (2023). Complexity theory and the social sciences: The state of the art. London: Routledge.
- Deacon, T. W. (2013). Incomplete nature: How mind emerged from matter. New York: WW Norman & Company.
- Juarrero, A. (2023). Context changes everything: How constraints create coherence. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
- Pym, A. (2023, May 23). Retrieved May 25, 2023, from Why complexity can be too simple in translation research: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiFnrMh_3Ys
- Robinson, D. (2022). The strange loops of translation. London: Bloomsbury.
- Robinson, D. (2022). Translation as icosis as negentropy at the edge of chaos. Stridon, 2(1), 97-128.
- Williams, M. (2021). Realism and complexity in social science. London: Routledge.
Bio note
Kobus Marais is Professor of Translation Studies at the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein. He has published three monographs, namely Translation Theory and Development Studies: A Complexity Theory Approach (2014), A (Bio)Semiotic Theory of Translation: The Emergence of Social-Cultural Reality (2018) and Trajectories of Translation: The Thermodynamics of Semiosis (June 2023and an edited volume Translation Beyond Translation Studies (2022). He has also published edited volumes with Ilse Feinauer, Translation Studies Beyond the Postcolony (2017), and Reine Meylaerts, namely Complexity Thinking in Translation Studies: Methodological Considerations (2018), Exploring the Implications of Complexity Thinking for Translation Studies (2021) and The Routledge Handbook of Translation Theory and Concepts (2023).
Gisèle Sapiro
Translating the Humanities and Social Sciences: issues and challenges
French. Interpreting: Spanish and English.
Friday, 19 April, 9.00 am. Auditorium.
Abstract
[Original title: Traduire les sciences humaines et sociales : enjeux et défis]
Translation in Humanities and Social Sciences is facing new challenges. On the one hand, the reluctance of general publishers relegates translation to scholarly publishing, which is increasingly controlled by the large Anglophone and German-speaking scientific publishing groups. At the same time, however, they demand disproportionately high contributions to publish in gold open access and do not fund translations. On the other hand, machine translation programs call into question the investment of financial resources in translators’ work. The paper will focus on a quantitative study of translations into French of books in the Humanities and Social Sciences, originally written in English, German and Italian, between 2003 and 2013; interviews and discussions to take stock of the current situation and propose ideas for reflection.
Bio note
Gisèle Sapiro is Professor of Sociology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and Research director at the CNRS (Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique), member of Academia Europæa, silver Medal of the CNRS 2021. Her areas of interest are the sociology of culture, of literature, of intellectuals, of translation, of law, and the epistemology and history of the social and human sciences. She is the author of La Guerre des écrivains, 1940-1953 (1999; Transl. English Writers’ War, 2014), La Responsabilité de l’écrivain (2011), La Sociologie de la littérature (2014; forth. English; Transl. Spanish La sociología de la literatura, 2018), Les Ecrivains et la politique en France (2018), Peut-on dissocier l’œuvre de l’auteur ?(2020; Transl. Spanish ¿Se puede separar la obra del autor?, 2021), Des mots qui tuent. La responsabilité de l’intellectuel en temps de crise, 1944-1953 (2020).
Among the books she (co)edited: Pierre Bourdieu, sociologue (2004; Transl Spanish Pierre Bourdieu, sociólogo, 2007), Translatio. Le marché de la traduction en France à l’heure de la mondialisation (2008), Les Contradictions de la globalisation éditoriale (2009), L’Espace intellectuel en Europe (2009), Traduire la littérature et les sciences humaines (2012), Sciences humaines en traduction (2014, online), Ideas on the move in the Social Sciences and Humanities: The International Circulation of Paradigms and Theorists (2020), and Dictionnaire international Bourdieu (2020).
Najat El Hachmi
Between Languages
Language: Spanish. Interpreting: English.
Friday 19 April, 1.25 pm. Auditorium.
Abstract
Growing up in a multilingual environment always requires metalinguistic reflection and translation. I was born into a family whose only language was the Riffian variant of Amazigh, and as a young child I moved to a city in inland Catalonia with an unusual linguistic situation: Catalan was already the language used in education, though some teachers and many classmates spoke Spanish amongst themselves. This context has given rise to many elements that have marked my writing, which is inseparable from my condition as the daughter of immigrants, a child interpreter, then an adult confronted with the frictions of the complex situation of 21st-century Catalonia. I would like to share my impressions and the conclusions I have drawn from my experience to date.
Bio note
Najat El Hachmi was born in Beni Sidel, Morocco in 1979. At the age of eight, she moved to Vic, in the province of Barcelona, where she grew up. She studied Arabic Philology at the University of Barcelona, was a cultural mediator and migrant reception expert before becoming a full-time writer. She is the author of such well-known novels as El último patriarca (Ramon Llull Award, Ulysse Award, and finalist for the Mediterranée étranger Award), which has been translated into ten languages (Transl. English The Last Patriarch, 2010), La cazadora de cuerpos (Transl. English The Body Hunter, 2013), La hija extranjera (Sant Joan Award) and Madre de leche y miel, the last two published by Ediciones Destino. In 2019, she published the manifesto Siempre han hablado por nosotras, which had a considerable impact both in the media and among readers. She is currently a contributor for the Spanish newspaper El País and the radio network Cadena Ser. El lunes nos querrán (Nadal Award 2021) is her latest novel.