The translation of crime fiction is all around us, from the current wave of Scandinavian and European crime novels, film and television to recent screen adaptations of classic crime fiction such as Sherlock Holmes. But it’s not only in fiction that translation meets crime. The police and the courts rely heavily on public service interpreters and translators. Translation itself is criminalised in various ways, e.g. in relation to copyright infringement, legal proceedings against translators of ‘problematic’ texts and various forms of piracy.
The 2013 Portsmouth Translation Conference aims to bring the different facets of translation and crime together in an interdisciplinary one-day conference, allowing exchange of ideas between translators, criminologists, interpreters, literary scholars and translation researchers.
We invite proposals for 20-minute papers and 60-minute practical workshops on any area connecting crime and translation or interpreting. We welcome approaches from practitioners as well as researchers.
Topics may include (but are not limited to):
- The challenges of translating crime fiction
- Subtitling and dubbing thrillers
- Crime, translation and the law
- ‘True crime’ in translation
- The role of translation and interpreting in criminal justice
- Translation by and for criminals
- Translation as a crime
- Translation and forensic linguistics
- The representation of translation and interpreting in crime fiction and film
Enquiries and/or 300-word abstracts should be sent to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. by 15 June 2013
