As Lydia Liu asks, “Can the achieved or contested reciprocity of languages be plotted as the outcome of a given economy of historical exchange?” Attention to these economies of exchange with their “struggles over the commensurability or reciprocity of meanings as values” may generate crisper insights into problems of intellectual and cultural translatability.

This panel seeks to understand these processes by directing attention to the material practices of translation (including interpreting). A more detailed understanding of how translation is or was pursued, under what circumstances and using what kind of personnel, will provide greater purchase on the broader questions set out above. Particularly in colonial/postcolonial situations (for example the mission domain), where little is known of how translation was pursued in practice, tracing out the material practices of translation and their implications will throw light on themes of translation and intercultural exchange.

The panel thus invites papers on all aspects of the material practices of translation and interpreting, including, but not restricted to: translators' working conditions at particular historical moments, the translation practices of missionaries, translator profiles, relations between authors and translators (in each case 'translator' is taken to include 'interpreter').

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