Items filtered by date: November 2018

Drafts are welcome until 1 February  2019 for the general section, and until 31 December for the guest-edited thematic section.

Jacob Blakesley

This volume provides an in-depth comparative study of translation practices and the role of the poet-translator across different countries and in so doing, demonstrates the need for poetry translation to be extended beyond close reading and situated in context. Drawing on a corpus composed of data from national library catalogues and Worldcat, the book examines translation practices of English-language, French-language, and Italian-language poet-translators through the lens of a broad sociological approach. Chapters 2 through 5 look at national poetic movements, literary markets, and the historical and socio-political contexts of translations, with Chapter 6 offering case studies of prominent and representative poet-translators from each tradition. A comprehensive set of appendices offers readers an opportunity to explore this data in greater detail. Taken together, the volume advocates for the need to study translation data against broader aesthetic, historical, and political trends and will be of particular interest to students and scholars in translation studies and comparative literature.

https://www.routledge.com/A-Sociological-Approach-to-Poetry-Translation-Modern-European-Poet-Translators/Blakesley/p/book/9781138616035 

Paper submission is now open for volume 24 of the journal Tradução em Revista (july/decembre 2019).

This issue calls for papers focusing on the various aspects of the relationship between Translation & Music. The following topics can be considered for submissions: versionism (in oral languages or not), plagiarism (melodic, written, rhythmic), dubbing, subtitling and voice-over of songs (for movies, operas, plays, musicals, TV, radio, etc.). This issue aims, thus, to gather papers about these themes for the first time in a Brazilian journal, giving a greater impulse to their academic researches.

The papers may be written in Portuguese, English, French or Spanish.

GUEST EDITORS: Dennys Silva-Reis (UnB/POSLIT) e Daniel P.P. da Costa (UFU)

Deadline submission (3,000–6,000 words): May 31, 2019.

Please send the articles in .doc, .docx or .rtf format to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 

For more information, contact Daniel da Costa <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.> or Dennys Silva-Reis <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>

Detailed call for papers: https://www.academia.edu/37252830/_TRADUÇÃO_and_MÚSICA_TRANSLATION_and_MUSIC_CHAMADA_PARA_ARTIGOS_call_for_papers_-_Tradução_em_Revista_27_2019_

Site of Jornal Tradução em Revista: https://www.maxwell.vrac.puc-rio.br/rev_trad.php?strSecao=proximos&fas=&menufas=5

In this entry to our blog series, we caught up with IATIS Secretary / Treasurer Rebecca Tipton to find out what she's currently reading.

University of British Columbia

June 2-4, 2019

Translation Spaces is currently accepting and reviewing articles for Vol. 8(2) with publication planned for December 2019. The deadline for submission of all articles to be considered in Vol. 8(2) is March 15, 2019.

Translation Spaces is an international peer-reviewed, indexed journal published biannually by John Benjamins Publishing Company (https://benjamins.com/catalog/ts). It envisions translation as multi-dimensional phenomena productively studied (from) within complex spaces of encounter between knowledge, values, beliefs, and practices. These translation spaces -virtual and physical- are multidisciplinary, multimedia, and multilingual. They are the frontiers being explored by scholars investigating where and how translation practice and theory interact most dramatically with the evolving landscape of contemporary globalization.

The journal recognizes the global impact of translation and actively encourages researchers from diverse domains such as communication studies, technology, economics, commerce, law, politics, news, entertainment and the sciences to engage in translation scholarship. It explicitly aims to stimulate an ongoing interdisciplinary and inter-professional dialogue among diverse communities of research and practice.

Translation Spaces publishes two issues per year. The first issue (1) is open for thematic proposals from potential guest editors. The second issue (2) welcomes submissions that consider translation in terms of global dynamics impacted by the technologies used in diverse social, cultural, political, and legal settings, and by which they are transformed.

Recomposed: Anglophone Presences of Classical Literature

Special Issue Editor: Paschalis Nikolaou

(Synthesis 12.2019)

While works like Agamemnon or the Metamorphoses are part of a different (moral) universe, they are also considered as a global inheritance and their restatement or appropriation across languages occurs either through established paths of interlinguistic transfer or through varied modes of reference and increasingly intersemiotic retellings. These works have enabled us to enunciate constants of human behavior, selves and societies, and to establish connections across time.

In an Anglophone context, the (re)uses of drama and poetry from Greek and Roman antiquity have been insistent, not least in the ways Anglo-Saxon cultures and political actors, as early as Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Age, often (mis)read themselves as successors to the philosophies embedded in texts such as the Iliad. Editors’ and publishers’ strategies have also informed the reception of the classics: from the serialized appearance of Chapman’s and Logue’s Homer to Ted Hughes’s classical translations as the first section in the posthumously published Selected Translations, such practices suggest interesting shifts in how this material is p(r)ossesed.

In the twentieth century, literary movements and groups have deployed classical texts as catalysts for change; from Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius to Ted Hughes’s The Oresteia, the limits and possibilities of translation are integral to the poetic process and to a poet’s body of work. Others return to the classics also in response to recent geopolitical events (for instance, Slavoj Zizek’s Antigone in 2015; Seamus Heaney’s translation of Sophocles’s tragedy as The Burial at Thebes in the middle of the War in Iraq in 2004). Poets like Alice Oswald offer radical versions of classical works (her Memorial of 2011), and often feature treatments of ancient myth in their collections (for instance, Orpheus or Tithonus within Falling Awake, 2016). Experiment with hybrid textualities in the work of someone like Josephine Balmer enunciates a modern consciousness in classical surroundings, or situates classical thought in the present. Moreover, in the present day, cover design and font selection (for instance, the use of photography and covers suggestive of modern warfare in Stanley Lombardo’s translations of Homer and Virgil), as well as instances of intersemiotic or transmedial approaches, for instance Anne Carson’s forays into graphic novel territory with Antigo Nick (2012) or web-based, digital configurations of ancient texts, significantly affect the reception of the classics.

In multiple ways then, classical writing inflects contemporary discourse at the same time as new forms and an increasingly visual culture re-encounter and propose, through these familiar texts and classical scenes, new relationships between image and text. Given the wealth of such (re)transmissions of literary expression, the special issue Recomposed: Anglophone Presences of Classical Literature invites contributions that address (inter)textual and sociocultural relations, as well as developments before and after figures such as Pound; the current status of both the classics and classical translation within Anglophone literary systems, also in terms of themes and characters; publication or performance contexts; case studies of textual permutation.

Other possible topics include, but are not restricted to, the following:

Fragments of classical texts within modernist poetry (The Waste Land, The Cantos etc)Changing practices in translating, and in presenting the translations of classical textsRetranslation as a means of adjusting to cultural currents, global events, ideological and political shiftsEmbeddings and refractions of classical literature in Shakespeare’s playsShifts in the content, scale and significance of paratextual material, and connections to ways of viewing and/or theorizing translation, from John Dryden to Josephine BalmerThe role of (series) editors, and publishers in the dissemination of classical texts (Loeb Classics, Penguin)Visual components and their role–for instance in intensifying anachronisms–across (re)imaginings of classical literature for the screen or the stageContemporary meeting points of classical translation, theatrical translation and adaptation (e.g. Simon Armitage’s The Story of the Iliad)Classical literature in the subcontinent, Canada and across former British colonies

Abstracts of 300 words should be submitted to Paschalis Nikolaou at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. by 20 January 2019.

Notification of acceptance will be delivered by 15 February 2019.
Accepted articles should be submitted by 15 July 2019.

Articles should be 6,000-7,000 words long and include a short biography of no more than 300 words.

All inquiries regarding this issue should be sent to the guest editor, Paschalis Nikolaou, at the above email address.

The ‘symbolic capital’ provided by modern Nicosia as a space of division and prospect, forms the source of inspiration for the theme of the conference: Effecting change through and in translation.

The question of whether translation may effect change may seem redundant at a first glance. Nevertheless, the focus here is placed not so much on change as passing from one state of things to another, which is inevitably and automatically brought about by every human action, but on change as deliberate, targeted, and transformative action, as well as on the realization of its motives and accomplishments. Change is understood as improvement, transformation, and necessity.

The source of inspiration for the theme unavoidably alludes to political conflict, political issues and political change in the broader sense. However, these are not but some of the possible issues and questions that might fall under the concepts of change and effecting change. The political dimension is understood as a point of departure to investigate change and ways to effect it both within the area of Translation Studies and outside, in many other areas of social and cultural life, even in the theoretical and methodological realm of other disciplines. In other words, if Translation Studies, Interpreting Studies, and Intercultural Studies have by now become disciplines in their own right, this conference is intended to investigate their potential for extrovert action, the potential to effect change in other neighboring or more distant disciplines, in various expressions of culture, in various manifestations of social life and in various social processes and practices, in the ways citizens, ‘ordinary’ as well as ‘organized’ ones, deal with other ‘citizens’ and the world around them, and in helping societies cope with our digital era of overwhelming data. Moreover, it aims to investigate possibilities for introvert action, i.e. change and ways to effect it within the above disciplines themselves, reaffirming established approaches or introducing new ones.

Related topics/questions include, but are not limited to, the following:

Broader social and political questions

• Translation peripheries: Effecting change in local communities
• Translation of/in social movement and translation as activism: ‘Mild’ and ‘extreme’ forms of effecting change in society and conflict situations
• Translation and Interpreting for social institutions: Communities, migrants, refugees
• Translation in identity construction and negotiation of identity: Translation processes in political theory
• Eco-TranslationPostcolonial ideology and censorship
• Crowdsourcing, volunteering and funsubbing

Theoretical and methodological questions

• The consequentialist approach to translation, interpreting, and mediation: Imagining the ‘effect’ as strategy. Is a certain kind of translation ethics required in order to effect change?
• Agency, cause, and effect in Translation and Interpreting Studies
• Complexity theory and model simplification: Effecting change(s) through predictability and constraints
• Translation Studies: Humanities or Social Sciences?
• Aesthetics and politics of/in literary translationIntersemiotic translation, translation as adaptation
• Gender studies in translation: A necessity for whom?
• Translator and interpreter training: Traditional and innovative approaches
• Translation history

Questions relating to the interaction with other disciplines

• Translation vis-à-vis language and other disciplines: Are there possibilities and ways to inform them and effect change in them?
• From the multilingual to the ‘mediating’ professional: Training professionals from other disciplines to respond to tasks
• Advances in corpora, machine translation, and translation in large data-processing
• Legal systems and Comparative Law through Translation Studies
• News agencies and translation/interpreting: A ‘submissive’ or collaborative endeavor?
• Localization and transcreation, audiovisual translation, audio-description and sign language: Legal and humanistic issues
• Translation and theatre/film studies: How do we go beyond facilitating the performance?

The department of translation at the Chinese University of Hong Kong is seeking to recruit a new full-time assistant or associate professor. The post is initially by contract, renewable and potentially leading to substantiation (tenure).

Closing date: January 7, 2019

Applicants should (i) possess a relevant PhD degree in translation or other related fields; (ii) specialize in one or more of the following areas: practical translation (including translation project supervision), interpreting, translation studies, literary translation and computer translation; and preferably (iii) have relevant teaching experience and professional qualification(s). Priority consideration will be given to those with publications both of a scholarly nature and of actual translation.

The appointees will (a) teach undergraduate and/or postgraduate courses in the area(s) named above; (b) supervise research postgraduate students; (c) develop and participate in independent and/or collaborative research projects; and (d) undertake administrative duties.

Appointments will normally be made on contract basis for up to three years initially commencing August 2019, which, subject to mutual agreement, may lead to longer-term appointment or substantiation later.

For further details, please see:

https://cuhk.taleo.net/careersection/cu_career_teach/jobdetail.ftl?job=1800029V&tz=GMT%2B08%3A00