Translating Disability Across Cultures: The Translation and Representation of Disability in the Modern Indian Short Story

14 to 16 September 2016

Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

Modern Indian languages present us with a rich and variegated body of short stories that capture in fiction the phenomena of disability in its manifold aspects. These stories, by both disabled and non-disabled authors, frame the experience of disability within specific cultural registers, but since they remain for the most part untranslated, their reach and influence is limited to the source-language communities. This three-day regional workshop aims a) to provide an opportunity for translation scholars and practitioners as well as postgraduate students interested in the field of translation and disability studies to come together to identify short stories from a range of modern Indian languages that primarily address the issue of disability and then translate these into English. b) to critically examine and compare the translations of disability texts from a variety of Modern Indian languages and identify if there are any common translation challenges that these texts pose and c) to develop appropriate and useful translation strategies to translate disability texts.

 This workshop was partly sponsored by Routledge and IATIS gratefully acknowledges their support of our aim to stimulate interaction among scholars in different geographical regions, particularly in regions where Translation Studies is still developing and gaining recognition.