Calls for papers

The second edition of the UMAQ conference seeks to explore the ways in which the different stakeholders involved in the MA/AVT value chain (such as researchers, industry, policy-makers and organisations of end-users) tackle the pressing and complex issue of quality. The conference will be followed by a free multiplier event of the EASIT project on 18 September afternoon. Information about the multiplier event will be provided at a later stage. Possible topics of interestWithin the context of Media Accessibility and Audiovisual Translation, possible topics of interest include, but are not limited to: Theoretical issues and the theoretical foundation of quality Quality issues in specific modalities: dubbing, respeaking, subtitling, audio description, etc. Quality in standards, guidelines and regulations The human factor in the definition and assessment of quality Quality in/and technology: machine translation, automatic subtitles, automatic audio description, clean audio, technologies for access services, etc. The role of MA/AVT stakeholders (industry, end-users, regulators, etc.) in the definition and evaluation of quality Quality issues in live events, museums, videogames, immersive environments, etc. Quality and reception studies Metrics for measuring quality One-size-fits-all approaches versus context-dependent approaches to quality Interdisciplinary approaches to quality Intersectionality in the definition and assessment of quality Pedagogical issues: quality in education and training, the role of education and training in current and future accounts of quality, the need for and role of new professional profiles and their potential impact on quality issues in AVT/MA Quality issues in relation to different end users’ groups: children, younger adults, the elderly, migrants, persons with disabilities, etc. Deadline for submissions: 15 April 2020 For more information, click here

Language and law are two intertwined areas of study whose connections are still opening new windows across disciplines. With the objective of enhancing an interdisciplinary reflection among researchers and practitioners in these domains, Jurilinguistics III: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Language and Law will foreground the applications of jurilinguistic approaches to the analysis of law and language. This conference will gather professionals in both fields who are interested in discovering the linguistic nature of legal (including political and sociolegal) challenges, and the legal implications of (new) multilingualism(s). We will promote a closer understanding among professionals and researchers in legal disciplines of the work done by linguists and translators, against the background of the increased interest for their tools and insights into the scientific study of languages among lawyers. On the grounds of increasing collaborations between of language and law professionals and researchers, bilingual and multilingual programmes in international law are being implemented, linguists and translators increase their demands for specialized legal training, corpus linguistic tools are being used in the legal interpretation of jurisprudence, growing cooperation among societies triggers the creation of supranational structures, legal relationships become globalized… New fields for both language and law are emerging as societies develop new ties and needs across the globe, demanding cross-disciplinary research designs, new tenets and increasingly complex methods. The symposium Jurilinguistics III: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Language and Law aims to provide a meeting point for professionals and researchers interested in the intersection of language and law from different disciplines, including translation and interpreting studies, sociology, anthropology, criminology and, indeed, law and linguistics. The purpose is not only to identify progress and key insights into this hybrid field, but also to explore new areas of study and/or research.  Deadline for submissions: 1 March 2020 For more information, click here

We invite proposals for papers on the topic of the conference from the field of education and translation and representing a variety of contexts i.e. multilingual, first, second and foreign language contexts, library environments, professional settings or NGO contexts. We hope to attract proposals that contribute to our understanding of the following: ProposalsContributions to the conference are welcome in the form of:A) Oral presentations (20 min + 10 min discussion). Proposals should be prepared in a word document and should include:• Full name(s) of presenter(s) and affiliation(s)• A 250-word abstract with a maximum of three references. • Bio sketch of 100 words B) Panels for three or four presentations (60 min + 30 min discussion)• Full name and affiliation of the panel coordinator • Full names and affiliations of presenters• A 200-word introduction to the panel, together with the 250-word abstracts and a 100-word bio sketch from each presenter (see above). Please send submissions to the conference email: multimodalmediations@gmail.com Deadline for submissions: 28 February 2020Notification of acceptance: 31 March 2020  

We would like to invite you to the 8th international scientific conference for PhD students and young researches. This year’s title is Tradition and Innovation in Translation Studies Research VIII: Translation in Motion. The conference will be held on 13th February 2020 at the Faculty of Arts, Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra. The aim of the conference is, just as every year, to provide an opportunity for the participants to present their research from various fields of their scientific interests within translation studies. As this year’s main topic, Translation in Motion, reflects the unceasing developments in translation studies, we will focus on new, as yet unresearched areas from across the entire range of translation studies - from didactics of translation (and interpretation), through history and translation criticism, non-literary translation and terminology, to (as is now tradition in Nitra) audiovisual translation. Deadline for submission of abstracts: 13 January For more information, click here

FACING THE FUTURE – TRANSLATION AND TECHNOLOGY Glendon College, York University (Toronto) – March 14, 2020  Keynote speaker: Sharon O’Brien, Dublin City University Into the second decade of the 21st century, technology continues to play an increasing role in translation processes and translator environments. What is translatable or not translatable through the mediation of machines is a central question as we head into the era of neural translation and AI. At the same time other questions emerge: are the existing models of collaborative translation, crowdsourcing, machine translated corpora, and cloud-based CAT tools leading us towards a new era of multi-modal plurality or to a fragmented dystopia where quality becomes a casualty? Is the interaction of human and machine in present and future translation ecologies a harbinger of an enlightened posthumanism or a problematic process that favours disembodied networks, algorithmic decision-making, and unsustainable growth in a time of runaway climate change and environmental degradation? This year’s graduate student conference will address what Minako O’Hagan (2019) describes as a kind of quantum entanglement, the link between human and machine, a crucial issue for our century. Deadline for submissions: 15 January 2020 For more information, click here

The European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT) invites everyone interested in machine translation, and translation-related tools and resources ― developers, researchers, users, translation and localization professionals and managers ― to participate in this conference. If you envisage an information world in which language barriers become less visible to the information consumer, submit a paper on the topic that drives you and your work. Driven by the state of the art, the research community will demonstrate their cutting-edge research and results, and professional MT users in the language industry will provide insight into successful MT implementation in business scenarios. Translation studies scholars and translation practitioners are also invited to share their first-hand MT experience, which will be addressed during a special track. Deadline for submissions: 6 March 2020 For more information, click here

Decolonising university curricula has made international headlines in recent years. From the Rhodes Must Fall movement, to campaigns within universities to diversify reading lists, university departments have integrated new teaching practices that seek to both acknowledge and challenge the legacies of colonialism. Some UK universities have begun to recognise how they profited from the slave trade and have made (not uncontroversial) plans for restorative justice. Given its intrinsic relationship with the history of colonialism and its aftermath, Modern Languages – and the multilingualism upon which it relies – has been at the centre of debates about reforming research practices across universities. Scholars such as Alison Phipps, and research funded by the AHRC ‘Translating Cultures’ theme, have led the way in deploying creative and self-reflexive methods to acknowledge the uneven power relations that are implicit in the way we teach and learn languages.  While research agendas in the field have begun to embrace change, it is far less clear how the Modern Languages teaching landscape has been transformed in recent years. If scholars have questioned how imperial and colonial forms of knowledge-making impact upon their research, what opportunities and challenges have arisen when integrating de-colonial research into materials and methodologies for teaching?  The aim of this conference is to explore, examine and disseminate practices from within university language departments, sharing ideas about existing knowledge and practices of attempts to decolonize Modern Languages curricula in the UK and beyond.  Deadline for submissions: 31 January Please submit a title, 200-word abstract and short bio to joseph.ford@sas.ac.uk 

This year, the main focus of the conference is “Translation Studies in the Era of Digital Humanities”. We hope that the conference will bring together researchers and translators, academia and students, practitioners in language services and technologies and language policy makers and will become a forum for promoting dynamic and constructive debate, networking and research cooperation. The fourth international scientific conference “Meaning in Translation: Illusion of Precision” is aimed at exploring themes from the theoretical and practical perspectives covering a wide scope of topics: Terminology standardization and harmonization; Pragmatic, semantic and grammatical aspects of meaning in translation; Translation of sacred, legal, poetic, promotional and scientific and technical texts. Deadline for submissions: 31 January 2020 For more information, click here

Terminology as a research discipline has yet to achieve a well-grounded position among other disciplines. Nonetheless, the number of specialists dealing with it is constantly rising. Among them, besides terminologists sensu stricto, are theorists and educators of translation, researchers interested in language, translators etc. Moreover, tools used in terminological research are very diverse. We would like to open a multidisciplinary and a multilingual discussion on whether we can – and we should – talk about boundaries of and in terminology. Deadline for abstracts: 31 Jan 2020 For more information, click here

Following the 1st International Conference on Intersemiotic Translation, held in November 2017 at the University of Cyprus, this conference aims to address the theoretical and practical challenges that the shift away from the logocentric to increasingly intersemiotic, intermedial and transmedial culture poses for the relevant fields, which are consequently forced to reexamine their concepts, methods as well as objects of study. Concurrently with the developments that have led many disciplines (translation studies, adaptation studies, intermediality studies, semiotics, among others) to look at processes and products that cross media borders, we have also witnessed the appearance of a plethora of concepts describing such phenomena: from rewritings and refractions to intermedial translations, adaptations and appropriations to remediations, transmediations, transformations, transcreations, and (medial) transgressions, to name but a few. All these terms acknowledge the radical transformations that can occur when texts produce offshoots that transgress the borders of the language, genre, medium or platform of the original text. Recognizing that all terms have their different backgrounds and sometimes conflicting usages, this conference has chosen as one of its key terms the notion of ‘transmedia’ – not necessarily in any one of its specialised senses as used, for instance, by Henry Jenkins in the context of transmedia storytelling or by Peeter Torop and Maarja Ojamaa, who regard transmediality as the complex interrelations between texts in the mental space of culture – but rather as an umbrella term. We foreground ‘transmedia’– with its prefix trans- meaning ‘across’, ‘beyond’, ‘through’ – as a marker to highlight the ubiquitous processes and phenomena of media crossovers that share some common features (such as fictional world, character, plot). It is our understanding that with such high concentration of transmedial practices and concepts currently underway in culture and in academia, the time is ripe to see this as a general ‘turn’ not to be ignored. Although related to the ‘technological turn’ of the 2000s in translation studies as described by Michael Cronin, the ‘transmedial turn’ goes beyond the technological one: while the latter is defined by the changes in technology, the term ‘transmediality’ foregrounds a major operational logic of culture that has become especially explicit in this era of new media developments. At the same time, the notion of transmediality can shed light and contribute to the study of the respective practices of the past prior to the more recent technological changes. The aim of this conference is to look at the various transmedial practices historically and in comparison with the changes that have taken place during the last decades as a result of an explosive surge in intermedial and transmedial practices. The discussion will seek to investigate potential ways to account for these changes theoretically and map the implications they might have on the level of practice. The conference intends to bring together scholars from various disciplines, which over the recent years have moved extensively beyond their traditional borders in terms of both their study objects and their approaches. We hope that such a joint effort will offer valuable insights to the conceptualisations of transmedial practices across different cultural contexts at different points in time and bridge theoretical as well as methodological gaps. We would like to open up the discussion on the following: - The movement of texts across different times and different media: from intertextuality to intermediality, from intermediality to transmediality;  - The analysis and mapping of transmedial processes and products; - Transmedial practices in translation and adaptation history; - Theoretical models and methods to account for transmedial phenomena across disciplines; - The potential to find common ground on terminology in media-centred discourses across disciplines; - The concepts of ‘translation’ and ‘adaptation’ revisited in the framework of transmediality; - Translators, adaptors, refractors: the network of agents involved in the production of transmedia; - Transmedial entanglements of literature, theatre, film etc. and their influence on the conceptualisation and practice of translation and adaptation; - Changes in the distinction between professional/non-professional and individual/ collective in transmedial practices; - Power relations and ethics in transmedial practices.   1 March 2020: Deadline for presentation proposals For more information, click here

Editors: Evangelos Kourdis and Susan Petrilli It is our belief that the broadening of the notion of text has largely come about thanks to contributions from semiotic studies, according to a movement that has brought translation studies closer to semiotics. The relevancy of general sign studies to translation theory and practice has helped translation studies to move away from the verbo-centric dogmatism of the sixties and seventies when only systems ruled by double articulation were recognized the dignity of language (Eco, 1976). As Torop (2014) argues, “text is what we understand in culture and it is through the text that we understand something of culture”. Thanks to our primary modelling system or language (“language as modelling” which conditions communication and translation through the great multiplicity of different verbal and nonverbal “languages” with which human beings enter into contact with each other, signify, interpret, and respond to each other), understanding in culture occurs through texts of the semiotic order, verbal and nonverbal texts, multimodal texts, in the unending chain of responses among texts, engendered in the relation among speakers and listeners, readers and writers. Texts are created, interpreted and re-created in dialogic relations among participants in communication. Their sense and meaning is modeled, developed and amplified through the processes of transmutation ensuing from and at once promoting the cultural spaces of encounter. Torop (2014) argues that the text is located in a wide intersemiotic space, and that the analysis of a text demands investigation of its creation, construction, and reception: the text is a process in intersemiotic space. If we accept Marais’ (2018) argument that all socio-cultural phenomena have a translation dimension, it is difficult to disagree with Gentzler’s (2001) observation that translation theory can quickly enmesh the researcher in the entire intersemiotic network of language and culture, one touching on all disciplines and discourses. Nor could it be otherwise if we consider that the material of language and culture is sign material and that the sign as such is in translation. This means to say that to be this sign here the sign must be other, to be this text here the text must be other. The signifying specificity of a text develops in translational processes among signs and interpretants, utterers and listeners, writers and readers, across semiosic spheres and disciplines, across intersemiotic, or transemiotic spaces in the signifying universe, verbal and nonverbal. The notion of text has evolved significantly thanks to contributions not only from the Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics but also from the French School, with important implications for the question of translatability, a fundamental property and specific characteristic of all semiotic systems – as stated, the “sign is in translation”. It ensues that translatability subtends the semantic process (Greimas & Courtés 1993), and with Charles Morris (1938) interpreted by Ferruccio Rossi-Landi (1954, 1975, 1992), we know that meaning not only concerns the semantic dimension of semiosis, but also the syntactical and the pragmatic dimensions. With reference to interlingual translation, as Petrilli (2003) claims, translatability indicates an open relation between a text in the original and its translation. In this volume of Punctum, we will investigate this open relation. Deadline for abstracts: 15 December 2019 For more information, click here

Dongguk University Translation Studies Research Institute is launching peer-reviewed journal TransLinguaTech which focuses on translation, language and relevant technologies.The rapid development of machine translation and other language technologies presents fundamental challenges to researchers and practitioners in translation, calling for reconsideration of various aspects of translation such as its definition, agent, object and method. However, there are few platforms dedicated to the issues brought about by the challenge. TransLinguaTech aims at providing a venue dedicated to such discussion, welcoming manuscripts on translation, language and relevant technologies. Deadline for submissions: 15 Jan 2020 For more information, click here