General Conference

extended deadline for receipt of abstracts:

November 30th, 2005

latest date for notification of acceptance of abstracts:

January 15th, 2006

Special Panels

extended deadline for proposals for panels:

October 31st 2005

deadline for receipt of abstracts for panels:

November 30th 2005

Click here for information on panels already accepted, including:

< The intercultural workplace

< Beyond the post-conundrum: Intercultural communication in an asymmetrical

world

< The Global Initiative for Local Computing

< Translating/interpreting for/in grassroots movements and NGOs

< Training for the market or educating for society?

< Investigating translation competence from an empirical-experimental perspective

< Material practices of translation

< Translating attitudes and feelings: degrees of intervention

< Translating Children’s Literature: intervention or imposition?

< The Bible and its translations: colonial encounters with the indigenous

< Cultural mediation in the Japanese Context

< Intervention in Audiovisual/Multimedia Translation

The conference will also feature a New Voices workshop on writing successful academic papers.

Translators, interpreters, and other intercultural communicators and commentators are indispensable mediators in processes involving the movement of people, ideas, technologies, and literatures between different places, cultures, languages, and even times. Their role can, however, also be described as one of intervention, which stresses a more-or-less self-conscious commitment to effecting change and determining outcomes in societal, cultural, economic and other encounters. This, the 2nd Conference of the International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies (IATIS), aims to address issues of intervention in interlingual and intercultural encounters, asking, for example, how such intervention can be conceptualised and enacted? And if, following Hermans (2001), such encounters require the speaking subject to position itself in relation to, and at a critical distance from, a source text, does intervention grow as we take up positions that are in direct opposition to source texts? Or does maintaining the status quo not itself sometimes imply complicity with a position that may change the future for others?

Following the success of its inaugural conference in Seoul in 2004, the International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies now invites proposals for papers and panels addressing the theme of Intervention in Translation, Interpreting and Intercultural Encounters. The Conference will welcome contributions in areas where the ethical and ideological dimensions of translation, interpreting and other intercultural practices have traditionally been a focus, as well as in areas where these dimensions have been addressed less explicitly, although they are always present. Contributions in the following areas are thus particularly encouraged:

• Interpreting cultural interfaces

• Translator and interpreter training

• Language survival and nation-building/nationalism/transformation

• Post-colonial acculturation and hybridity

• The translation of literature (adult and children's) as intervention

• Oral literary traditions and folklore as intervention

• Globalisation and localisation in the developed/ing world

• Interpreting and the authentic voice

• Interpreting silences

• Corpus translation/interpreting studies

• Forensic linguistics

• Translation technology

• The crisis of representation in Western theory

Contributions may be approached from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds including, but not restricted to: anthropology, corpus-based studies, cultural studies, gender studies, intercultural studies, interpreting studies, linguistics, literary theory, localisation, media studies, pedagogy, postcolonial studies, pragmatics, sociology, translation technology.

The conference will be held at the University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa and will be truly international in its outlook, while at the same time drawing on South Africa's recent and rich experience of cultural and political transformation.

please note: Abstracts can be sent either to:
< the general conference (at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.)
< or to individual panels through their Chairs. Click here for more details.

A book exhibition will be organised to run concurrently with the conference.  For exhibition space please contact Ilse Feinauer: e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.;  tel. +27218082162; fax + 27218083815.

Basil HATIM (United Arab Emirates)

Basil Hatim is a translation theorist and a prolific translator both into and out of Arabic. He has lectured widely on issues of discourse and translation at international conferences and universities around the world. He has also published widely on Translation and Text Linguistics. Among the books he has authored are Discourse and the translator (Longman 1990), The Translator as Communicator (Routledge 1997) (both with Ian Mason), Communication Across Cultures (Exeter University Press 1997), Teaching & Researching Translation (Longman 2002) and, with Jeremy Munday, Translation: An Advanced Resource Book (Routlege 2004). At present, he is Professor of English and Translation at the American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates (on leave from his original post as Professor of Translation & Linguistics at Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh).

Rita KOTHARI (India)

Rita Kothari teaches at St.Xavier's College, Ahmedabad (India), where she also runs a translation research centre. She is an accomplished translator from Gujarati, having published six books in English translation. Her translation of the ground-breaking Dalit novel Angaliyat (The Stepchild, Oxford University Press, 2003), met with much critical acclaim, and was nominated for the Crossword Translation Prize in 2005. Her anthology of modern Gujarati poetry in translation (Modern Gujarati Poetry, Sahitya Akademi, 1998) put the State’s poetry on the national map in India, and her translated collection of Gujarati short stories by women writers is soon to be published by India’s first feminist press, Kali for Women. Kothari also writes extensively on translation studies, social history and communalism in Gujarat. She is the author of one major study of English translation in India (Translating India, St. Jerome, 2003), and her recent work (under consideration with Sage) is a study of the Sindhi community in Gujarat and how their post-partition adjustment has led to their shedding of a pluralistic and sufi identity.

Yameng LIU (China)

Yameng Liu, formerly an associate professor of rhetoric and English at Carnegie Mellon University in the U.S., is Professor of English at Fujian Normal University in China. He has published articles addressing issues in rhetorical theory and cross-cultural communication, in journals such as Philosophy and Rhetoric, Philosophy East and West, and Argumentation. Among his more recent publications are In Pursuit of Symbolic Power, a major study in Chinese of Western rhetoric, and “Academic Culture of the West and Scholarly Translation in China.” A long-time translator himself, he has been serving as a guest English editor for the Chinese Translators Journal.

Carol MAIER (USA)

Carol Maier is professor of Spanish at Kent State University, where  she is affiliated with the Institute for Applied Linguistics and serves as graduate coordinator for the Department of Modern and Classical Language Studies. Her research interests include translation theory, practice, and pedagogy, and her publications include Between Languages and Cultures: Translation and Cross-Cultural Texts (1995), which she co-edited with Anuradha Dingwaney and a special issue about evaluation that she guest-edited for The Translator (2000). She has published translations of work by Octavio Armand, Rosa Chacel, Severo Sarduy, and María Zambrano, among others. Her current translation projects include work by Margo Glantz and further work with Armand, Chacel, and Sarduy. She is also editing a homage volume to the late Helen R. Lane.

Rosemary MOEKETSI (South Africa)

Rosemary M. H. Moeketsi has been employed by the University of South Africa since April 1985. She is the Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, chairs the Faculty Tuition Committee and is also Director of the School of Languages and Literature. The School consists of six departments with 176 personnel and offers tuition from undergraduate to doctorate level in twenty-one languages. Before moving to this management position, Rosemary was Associate Professor in the Department of African Languages where she taught aspects of Linguistics (Sociolinguistics, Discourse Analysis) and Literature.

As part of her Doctoral studies between 1993 and 1997 she investigated the use of (especially African) languages and the role of the court interpreter in the multilingual and multicultural courts of South Africa. From this research came, inter alia a BA in Court Interpreting, an academic programme which has received positive reviews as it serves to address the proper teaching of court interpreters in the country (cf. Diana Eades, 2003: "Participation of second language and second dialect speakers in the legal system" in Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (2003) 23, 113-133). A book, a number of articles and chapters in books, as well as a short story have been published in the fields of Forensic Linguistics and Court Interpreting. She has also participated in conference presentations at home and abroad.

Jef VERSCHUEREN (Belgium)

Jef Verschueren received a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of California at Berkeley. After a long career as a researcher for the Flemish Fund for Scientific Research, he is now Professor of Linguistics at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, where he is currently also Dean of the Faculty of Arts. He is the founder and Secretary General of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA), and he directs the IPrA Research Center. His main interests are theory formation in linguistic pragmatics (conceived broadly as a cognitive, social, and cultural perspective on language and language use), intercultural and international communication, and language and ideology. In all these areas he has published extensively. Some recent publications include the annually updated Handbook of Pragmatics (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins; first published in 1995, now also available online), Debating Diversity: Analysing the Discourse of Tolerance (London: Routledge, 1998; co-authored with Jan Blommaert), and Understanding Pragmatics (London: Edward Arnold/New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

Intending participants should send a 300-word abstract of their proposed paper (30 minutes including 10 minutes for questions)

• either by e-mail to [This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.].

• or by fax to ++353 1 700 5527 (marked for the attention of Dorothy Kenny)

Extended deadline

for receipt of abstracts: 30 November 2005.

Panels are groups of papers organised around a particular theme. Proposals for panels should take the form of one or two paragraphs establishing the rationale for a panel, a succinct statement of the aims of the panel, and a list of specific issues that intending contributors might address. Proposals for panels should be sent

• either by e-mail to [This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.].

• or by fax to ++353 1 700 5527 (marked for the attention of Dorothy Kenny)

Extended deadline deadline for receipt of panel proposals: 31st October 2005.

please note: Papers of participants who have not submitted a registration form and payment by 20^th June 2006 will not be included in the final programme.