Recent discussions in Translation Studies on the practice of intervention have tended to focus on the target text, examining issues such as how the translator might criticise or challenge the politics of the source text in her or his translation (in feminist or post-colonial translation, for example), how the translator might express her or his translating self through translation (as in Clive Scott’s ‘Translating Baudelaire’), and how the translator might intervene in the target text to create a ‘foreign’ reading experience, representative, if not in fact mimetic, of the foreign text that lies behind the translation (as in Lawrence Venuti’s advocacy of ‘foreignisation’).

These welcome developments in translation thought indicate the increased political and creative agency of the translator and the translator’s growing empowerment in relation to the longstanding authority of the source text.  This panel aims to complement Translation Studies’ recent focus on intervention in the target text by examining intervention in the source text, looking at the nature and effects of linguistic innovation in literary texts and the implications of such innovation for the translator.  Linguistic innovation can be said to be interventional when, for example, it challenges voiced or unvoiced claims to ownership of language by particular social or national groups, when it expresses a postcolonial, postnational, hybrid or other complex identity, when it upsets established concepts of “the literary”, and when it blurs the boundaries between the incorrect and the creative.  The translator must identify the poetic effects of linguistic innovation in the source text and decide if, how and to what extent intervention in the source text – in the form of linguistic innovation – implies intervention in the target text.

Papers are invited on topics related to the concept of linguistic innovation as intervention and to the translation of linguistic innovation.  These topics might include: linguistic innovation and its translation in, for example, women’s writing, postcolonial and hybrid literature, surrealist and experimental texts; the application of existing translation theory to linguistic innovation; innovative translational responses to linguistic innovation; the translator/publisher interface.

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