Calls for papers

Our contemporary world is characterised by mobility and migration. People are on the move for various reasons: to flee war and persecution in their home countries, to get reunited with their families, to work and live abroad. Movement always involves a displacement of individual people who find themselves in a new socio-cultural context and a new linguistic environment. Overcoming linguistic and cultural borders and facilitating communication often requires some form of mediation, which is often practised in institutional sites of contested discourses. Translating and interpreting narratives of migration as told by migrants entail the (re)construction and transformation of these narratives, and affect the representations of ‘self’ and ‘other’ as well as policies of social inclusion and community cohesion. The proposed issue intends to explore the role of language, translation and interpreting in constructing narratives of migration. It invites contributions from the perspective of different research fields (translation and interpreting studies, linguistics, journalism studies, sociology, political science, etc.) on topics such as the following: Which policies and practices are in place to use (or reject) translation and interpreting for engaging with narratives of migration?What factors influence the construction of narratives in interpreter-mediated events (e.g. asylum hearings)?How are narratives (re/de)constructed and transformed in processes of translation and interpreting?What types of narratives are constructed and (re/de)constructed (narratives of difference, of belonging) and how do they influence the representations of ‘self’ and ‘other’?What are the implications of rendering narratives of migration for translators and interpreters in respect of professional ethics?Which approaches and models are suitable for investigating such questions? Call for abstracts: 16 December, 2019 Notification of acceptance: 23 December 2019 Call for papers: 16 March, 2020 For more information, click here

PACTE (Process of Acquisition of Translation Competence and Evaluation) is organising the Fifth International Conference on Research into the Didactics of Translation (didTRAD), which will be held at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 8-10 July, 2020. This conference aims to provide a forum for researchers in the field of translator training. Plenary Speaker: Don Kiraly, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz Conference Topics Teaching translation: introduction to translation, legal translation, scientific translation, technical translation, literary translation, audiovisual translation, localization, inverse translation, etc. Teaching interpreting: simultaneous interpreting, consecutive interpreting, community interpreting, etc. Teaching signed languages interpreting and translation. Teaching technologies for translators and interpreters. Teaching language for translators and interpreters (L1 and L2). Teaching professional aspects. Assessment in translation and interpreting teaching. Cross-cutting aspects of curriculum design: tutorials, final-year dissertations, placements, etc. Applications of empirical research in translation and interpreting teaching. Deadline for submissions: 19th January 2020 For more information, click here

The times and epochs have passed, but meaning in translation – elusive and fascinating, precise and pragmatically relevant – remains the main focus of translation studies. The issue of accurate representation of meaning across the languages has become particularly topical in the era of digitalization, proliferation of MT and CAT tools, evolution of neural machine translation networks, and the changes in the way information is generated, stored, processed and transmitted. 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 of abstracts: 31 January 2020 For more information, click here 

In a world that seems continuously to be stretching the line of what is acceptable to the inhabitants of specific linguistic and cultural contexts, this interdisciplinary conference acknowledges the importance of investigating taboos and their reinforcement/breaking in various areas of language, culture, literature and society, and across different cultures. We propose to explore the delicate balance and subtle boundaries between the need for inclusion and respect for different ethnic, religious, sexual backgrounds – which seem to be at the basis of modern multicultural societies – and a conscious (or unconscious) push towards the breaking of existing taboos, for example for shock value, as in the case of comedy and art. In such contexts, investigation of the linguistic, cultural, social, institutional and personal implications of taboo reinforcement/breaking appears of extreme value. For its 5th edition, the Taboo Conference series will specifically address the intricacies of taboo in language, culture, literature and communication in its various occurrences from the points of view of production, performance, and perception/reception. The subject of taboo in language, culture, literature and communication seems to have become especially relevant in the last few years, in which political correctness at both the institutional and individual level has been seen, on the one hand, as a crucial tool in protecting people from verbal abuse and in preventing the reinforcement of stereotypes and, on the other, as a set of measures and a way of thinking which significantly curtail free speech in many aspects of the public sphere. The 2020 conference seeks to explore the shifting boundaries of the acceptability of taboo in their various incarnations as produced and perceived in today’s multicultural society, from cinema and television, to news, videogames, literature and different kinds of online content. The study of taboo in the past, for example through the medium of literature, is also relevant to the conference. Possible areas of inquiry include, but are not limited to, political orientations and political satire, identity and gender politics, ethnic stereotypes, different kinds of non-normative behaviour, political correctness and the discourse surrounding it, and the debate between real and perceived offense through comedy. Deadline for submissions: 10th February 2020 For more information, click here

Gender and Transnational Reception. Mapping the Translation, Circulation and Recognition of Women's Writings in the 20th and 21st Centuries. Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU Organisers: Dr Alberica Bazzoni (University of Warwick) and Dr Caterina Paoli (University of Warwick) Abstract Proposal Deadline: 20 December 2019 Conference: 25-26 September 2020 Organised in collaboration with the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing (CCWW) and partially funded by the British Academy, this two-day conference aims at exploring the transnational reception of 20th- and 21st-century literary texts by women (where “woman” is understood beyond cis-normative categories). How are processes of literary reception and consecration gendered and transnationalised? How do transnational networks support the circulation of texts by women? What are the processes that intervene in the recognition or misrecognition of their artistic value, in their own country and abroad? Gender still plays a crucial role in the ways in which a work of art circulates and is received, as the construction and recognition of artistic value is deeply influenced by social structures and the hierarchies that permeates them. On the other hand, the transnational dimension of feminist struggles and thought fosters the circulation of works by women beyond their country of origin, so that they often meet popular success in other countries – the cases of Nicaraguan Gioconda Belli, Nigerian Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Italian Elena Ferrante, for example, are paradigmatic in this sense. Furthermore, since the second half of the 19th century, feminist networks of translators, publishers and intellectuals have worked tirelessly to promote and enable the circulation of works by women. This conference aims at investigating the gendered promotion and reception of works by women on a transnational level. For more information, click here

Potential topics include but are not restricted to: - rethinking basic concepts of Translation Studies through the lens of indirect translation (e.g., source text and target text, author and translator, original and translation, center and periphery, equivalence, direct translation) - core features or patterns of indirect translation verifiable across different translation domains (e.g., audiovisual, machine, specialized translation; community interpreting, audio-description, localization, transcreation, transediting) - indirect translation in other fields and disciplines (e.g., adaptation studies, forensic linguistics, gender studies, development studies, multilingual studies, international business studies, etc.) - indirect translation and hot topics in Translation Studies (e.g., social media, big data, multilingual crisis communication, etc.). Deadline for submissions: 30 Nov 2019 For more information, click here

We are pleased to invite translation scholars and researchers worldwide to contribute research papers to an edited volume, titled Translation and Interpreting as a Set of Frames: Ideology, Power, Discourse, Identity & Representation The proposed volume, which has been accepted by Routledge, will be considered for publication as an edited book in 'Routledge Studies in Language and Identity'. Interested contributors are requested to submit to the volume editors Ali Almanna: alialmanna9@gmail.com Chonglong Gu: chonglong.gu@liverpool.ac.uk The initial abstract submission should include the article title, abstract and brief bio sketch of the author(s) (31st December 2019 the latest). Once the abstract is accepted by the editors, the first draft of the chapter (approx. 7000 words) should be due by 1st April 2020. These chapters will be then peer reviewed before submitting to the publisher. Aim: Translation and interpreting can be conceptualised as a set of frames, where different versions of fact, truth and reality are reflected, enacted, mediated, (re)constructed, (re)framed, (re)narrated and even manipulated and contested in the process. Notably, as major agents in the interlingual and intercultural communication process, translators and interpreters are often not ideologically neutral but might mediate in the process and effect change possibly on a greater scale regionally and globally (given the increasingly interconnected and mediatised world we are living in in the 21st century). This points to the great relevance and imperative to conceptualise the translation and interpreting product as essentially a kind of discourse and look at translation and interpreting as a mediated activity that is closely related with issues of ideology, power, agency, identity and representation, beyond the traditional source text-oriented lenses that for example focus on ‘equivalence’ or ‘accuracy’ merely on a linguistic level. This eclectic volume aims to address the topic relating to ideology, power, discourse, identity and representation and welcomes submissions involving different language combinations and from a wide range of sociopolitical, cultural and institutional contexts. Potential submissions can be from various theoretical perspectives and draw on different methodological approaches. Some of the relevant topics might include but are not limited to the following (theoretical insights and methodologies): · Translation/interpreting and (critical) discourse analysis · Translation/interpreting and narrative theory · Translation/interpreting and Systemic Functional Linguistics · Translation/interpreting and corpus linguistics · Corpus-based critical discourse analysis · Translation, interpreting and Bourdieu's theory   More specific topics might include but are not limited to the following: · The (re)presentation of various sociopolitical actors in translation and interpreting · Interpreter and translator's agency and ideology mediation · The (re)narration of (different) versions of fact, truth and reality (e.g. news and social media) · The discursive (re)construction of Self versus Other and Us versus Them in translation and interpreting · The discursive enactment of identity (e.g. national identity and group identities) in translation and interpreting · Translation and interpreting as means of subjugation and/or resistance · Translation/interpreting, power, international relations and global order · ‘Critical points’ in translation and interpreting · Diplomatic and political translation and interpreting · Translation and social media (e.g. twitter, Facebook and Instagram) · Translation and interpreting in war zones and conflict areas · Translation as (re)writing · Image (re)construction · Issues of power, ideology and mediation in various historical periods and diachronically

7th International Conference on Public Services Interpreting and Translation: The Human Factor in PSIT, 26 - 27 March 2020, University of Alcalá. Proposals are encouraged to focus on PSIT and to specially apply to any of the following areas of study: • PSIT and its relationship with the socio-political and economic environment • Intercultural and interlinguistic mediation • Multiculturalism and multilingualism • Linguistic resources and migrant population in the European Union • Technological advances in PSIT • Curriculum design and training in PSIT in humanitarian settings • T & I in/with indigenous language/lesser used languages • Language policies in African communities • PSIT as a tool/strategy/way to favor inclusion in society   Deadline for proposals: 17 December 2019   For more information, click here  

The video game industry has become a worldwide phenomenon, generating millions in revenue every year. Video games are increasingly becoming more elaborate and sophisticated, with advanced graphics and intricate story lines, and developers and publishers need to reach the widest possible audience in order to maximise their return on investment. Translating games into other languages and designing games that can be played for a wide spectrum of players, regardless of their (dis)ability, are two obvious ways to contribute to increasing the audience for the game industry. In addition, games are increasingly being used for “serious” purposes beyond entertainment, such as education, and such games should also be designed inclusively, to facilitate access to them by all types of players. Research on game translation and localization and accessibility has been gaining momentum in recent years. In particular, and the number of studies analysing game translation and localisation from different perspectives has increased dramatically, while game accessibility remains a relatively unexplored topic. The Fun for All: 6th International Conference on Game Translation and Accessibility aims to bring together professionals, scholars, practitioners and other interested parties to explore game localisation and accessibility in theory and practice, to discuss the linguistic and cultural dimensions of game localisation, to investigate the relevance and application of translation theory for this very specific and rapidly expanding translational genre, and to analyse the challenges game accessibility poses to the industry and how to overcome them. The successful previous editions of the Fun for All: International Conference on Translation and Accessibility in Video Games, held at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016 and 2018 have become a meeting point for academic and professionals working in the game industry and the game localisation industry, as well as students and translators interested in this field The sixth edition of the Fun for All Conference, in collaboration with the Researching Audio Description project, financed by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (PGC2018-096566-B-I00, MCIU/AEI/FEDER, UE), aims to continue fostering the interdisciplinary debate in these fields, to consolidate them as academic areas of research and to contribute to the development of best practices. Deadline for submissions: 31 December 2019 For more information, click here

Bernard Shaw was perhaps the first playwright who truly became an international figure. His plays have been performed in every country imaginable; his works, translated to dozens of languages. In addition, his ideas have influenced the most disparate authors on a global scale. To this attests his correspondence with some of the leading luminaries of the continent as well as the media attention he received from Amsterdam to Zagreb. Bernard Shaw, the man and the persona, knew no borders, and nowhere is this more so than in Europe. Some of his plays premiered in German translation years before they could be staged in the West End. At the peak of his career, Saint Joan, to cite but one example, was translated and produced in every major European capital within a year of its publication. The International Shaw Conference—“Shaw in Europe” is intended as a forum for scholars who study Shaw’s reception in Europe and the ramifications of his works and ideas on the continent. The Organizing Committee welcomes papers on any of the following topics: • Shaw productions in European countries • Translations of Shaw plays and other works into European languages • The reception of Shaw’s works and ideas in Europe • Shaw’s influence on European authors • Shaw and his views on European history and politics • Shaw plays that have specific European connections: Bulgaria and Arms and the Man; France and Saint Joan; Spain and Man and Superman; Russia and Great Catherine / Annajanska; Ireland and John Bull’s Other Island, etc. Proposals for themed panels and roundtables are also welcome, especially those covering Shaw in specific countries and/or languages (in the case of translation). Deadline for proposals: 17 February 2020 For more information, click here

It is widely accepted that translators and interpreters do not work in isolation but “in a wider social context, interacting with other agents and with information technology” (Shih 2017: 50; See also Wang & Wang 2019). As in any effective social interaction, three components underpin translators and interpreters’ daily activities. They are: affect, behaviour and cognition (Spooner 1989). Cognition is defined as ‘the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses’ (Oxford Dictionary 2019). In translation and interpreting, this often refers to the mental procedure of how translators and interpreters acquire and store information, and consequently plan and execute translation and interpreting activities, often under the constraints of limited resources and situational contexts. With an accumulation of these ongoing mental processing throughout translators and interpreters’ experience and career, perception, schemata and understanding are gradually developed, which consequently guide their behaviours. Whist often overlooked, affect, which refers to translators’ and interpreters’ emotion and feeling, is tightly interwoven into the fabrics of translation and interpreters’ cognition and behaviour. To understand the entirety and complexity of translation and interpreting as social interaction, it is important to explore the interplay between translators’ and interpreters’ affect, behaviour and cognition, be it from the theoretical, empirical or methodological perspectives.This symposium welcomes contributions related to the following themes (although not limited to): Themes: - Interdisciplinary studies in translation and interpreting- Eye tracking in translation and interpreting studies- Human and computer interaction for translators and interpreters- Translation and the Web- Emotions in Translation and interpreting- Ideologies in translation and interpreting- Technology in translation and interpreting- Ecological approach to translation and interpreting- Ergonomical approach to translation and interpreting- Neurological approach to translation and interpreting- Pedagogy for translation and interpreting- Professional issues in translation and interpreting- Innovation in research methodologies Deadline for submissions: 31 March 2020 For more information, see here

The forthcoming International Conference ‘New Trends in Translation and Technology’ (NeTTT’2020) will take place on the island of Rhodes, Greece, 28-30 September 2020. The objective of the conference is to bring together academics in linguistics, translation studies, machine translation and natural language processing, as well as developers, practitioners, language service providers and vendors who work on or are interested in different aspects of technology for translation. The conference will be a distinctive and interdisciplinary event for discussing the latest developments and practices in translation technology. NeTTT’2020 invites all professionals who would like to learn about recent trends, present their latest work, and/or share their experiences in the field. The conference will also be an ideal place to establish business and research contacts, collaborations and new ventures. The conference will take the form of presentations (peer-reviewed research and user presentations, keynote speeches), demos (demos from sponsors) and posters; it will also feature panel discussions and tutorials/workshops. The presentations will be published as open-access conference e-proceedings. Deadline for submissions: 30 April 2020 For more information, click here