Over the past 500 years, English has gone from a marginal language hardly spoken by anyone outside of England to a global lingua franca with speakers, native and non-native, all over the world. This has created situations of multilingualism both within countries where English is the main language and elsewhere, as many people who speak English on a regular basis are not native speakers, and the language itself has come into contact with other languages in the course of processes of colonisation, immigration, and globalisation. Beginning in the sixteenth century, these processes have broadened the contact zone of English, redefined its relations with the classical languages of humanist communication as well as with modern European languages (some of which have developed varieties outside Europe), and ultimately led to a questioning of the majority/minority-language binary. Literature and the verbal arts, be it to give a realistic description of the world or to experiment with language and form, have reflected, registered and contributed to such plurilingual practices. 

To give only a few examples, early modern playwrights such as Shakespeare and Dryden included words or pieces of dialogue in fashionable foreign languages (mostly Italian and French) in their plays, as did Sterne in Tristram Shandy with long passages in French and in Latin; George Eliot’s choice of headings for the chapters in Middlemarch testifies to her plurilingual reading skills; the translation practices of émigré writers such as Nabokov or Beckett rely on their plurilingual experiences, as do Nancy Huston’s choices of self-translation between English and French. Authors from multilingual backgrounds writing in English such as (to name but a few) Derek Walcott, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Salman Rushdie resort to forms of language mixing and switching. Multilingualism takes on new inflections for contemporary British poets such as Steve Ely, whose concept of xenoglossia incorporates foreign words, Old English and dialecticisms.

Evolutions in the status of English as a communication language in everyday lives and in artistic productions go hand in hand with evolutions in translation techniques and strategies, with the development of translation into English as a necessary means of worldwide communication as well as the acknowledgment of varied linguistic and cultural skills in target audiences. This is particularly striking in translations (dubbing or subtitling) of contemporary films and TV series which foreground multilingual (and multicultural) environments, such as Jane the Virgin, Unorthodox, Generations, and Derry Girls. Some film genres or series depict plurilingual characters, for example the protagonists in many Bollywood films, or Italian-American gangsters in The Godfather movies or Latino-American gangsters in Breaking Bad;  one could also think of westerns which stage multilingual encounters with Spanish-, French-speaking, or Native American characters. 

For contemporary artists such as Caroline Bergvall, whose installation and collected poems Meddle English bring together English, French and Middle English, multilingualism fuels a reflection on multimodality. Theatre (The Forbidden Zone by Katie Mitchell, Tous des Oiseaux by Wajdi Mouawad) also uses multilingualism as a way to experiment with contemporary modes of representation on stage.

More generally, traditional social constructs applied to analyse language use and cultural productions in translating, such as the “foreign/native” or the “source/target” opposition, are in need of redefinition. Likewise, the concept of lexical borrowing needs to be reexamined if English is considered a multilingual language from the start, with its elaboration relying on words and structures taken from Saxon, but also Latin and Romance languages – as the lexicographers (and the translators) from the Renaissance already knew.

This two-part conference welcomes both synchronic and diachronic approaches to the interplay between multilingualism and translation involving English as source or target language and at least one other language in works of literature, the performing arts and audio-visual productions, from the sixteenth century to the present. Multilingualism will be taken in the broad meaning of the co-presence of several languages within the same work, thus including neighbouring concepts such as heterolingualism, and such phenomena as code-switching and multi-ethnolects. Papers that combine methodologies from linguistics, literary/film studies and translation studies will be particularly appreciated.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to, the study of:

• Strategies of translation that deal with multilingual sources, or that turn monolingual sources into multilingual translated works
• Editions of texts with their translation(s)
• Cases in which the target language also features in the source
• Comparisons of translation strategies in various target languages for English sources
• The rendering of phonetic specificities in both text and performance
• The translation of metadiscursive comments/elements in multilingual contexts
• The specific issues raised by dubbing and subtitling/surtitling
• Multilingualism and forms of expanded / contrapuntal / prismatic translation
• The technologies developed/adapted to facilitate the translation of multilingual texts

The first part will take place at Université Paris Nanterre (30-31 March 2023), and will focus more specifically on literary works in print (and the issues related to translating and publishing multilingual texts) from the sixteenth century to the present. Keynote speaker: Dirk Delabastita (Université de Namur).

The second part will take place at Université de Lille (February/March 2024), and will focus more specifically on the performing arts, films and TV series (and the challenges set to translators by aural effects dependent on multilingualism). Keynote speaker: Charlotte Bosseaux (The University of Edinburgh).

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Deadline for submissions: 1 June 2022

Authors are expected to submit papers discussing the use of terminology with
possible connotative or ideological implications, intentional or otherwise, in various
domains and in different communicative situations (intra‐ and interspecialist
communication, knowledge dissemination for didactic/pedagogical purposes,
popularization, etc.). Authors are invited to discuss one or more of the following
topics:
• the use of terminology with connotative or ideological implications or
intentions in different communicative situations
• the role of non‐experts (e.g., journalists) in fostering connotative and
ideological uses of terms resulting in terminology taking on connotative and
ideological undertones
• the role of collaborative work (e.g., editorial teams) in the development of
connotative and ideological terminology
• the role of metaphors in the creation of connotative and ideological
terminology
• the consequences of using connotative and ideological terminology in different
communicative situations
• the challenges posed by connotative and ideological terminology to
terminology representation and management
• terminology and political correctness in e.g., gender issues, woke culture, etc.
• the role of translation in assigning ideological significance to terminological
units

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Deadline for abstracts: 30 September 2022

We are looking for an inspiring translation researcher and lecturer to strengthen our newly established Master’s track Translation in Europe, a one-year degree programme that combines a theoretical approach with professional and academic skills (see https://www.rug.nl/(...)s/vertalen-in-europa). The position we offer combines research (40%) and teaching (60%), and will be situated within the chair group of Applied Linguistics.

We expect you to have in-depth knowledge of translation studies, working experience as a translator (preferably, English-Dutch but other languages are welcome), as well as experience in (translation) teaching at academic level. In addition, you are familiar with up-to-date translation technology.

Your primary task will be to conduct research and develop your line of investigation in the field of translation studies. In addition, you will be responsible for teaching research-driven translation seminars and to supervise internships and theses in this area as well as to become involved in PhD supervision. Depending on your specific expertise, you may also be involved in other degree programmes of the Faculty of Arts. You will also be expected to take on administrative and organisational duties.

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Deadline for applications: 18 April 2022

This collection of essays represents the first of its kind in exploring the conjunction of translation and social media communication, with a focus on how these practices intersect and transform each other against the backdrop of the cascading COVID-19 crisis. The contributions in the book offer empirical case studies as well as personal reflections on the topic, illuminating a broad range of themes such as knowledge translation, crisis communications, language policies, cyberpolitics and digital platformization. Together they demonstrate the vital role of translation in the trust-based construction of global public health discourses, while accounting for the new medialities that are reshaping the conception, experience and critique of translation in response to the cultural, political and ecological challenges in the post-pandemic world.

Written by leading scholars in translation studies, media studies and literary studies, this volume sets to open up new conversations among these fields in relation to the global pandemic and its aftermath.

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The past decade has seen a substantial rise in research publications focused more and more on the issue of translation tasks and projects having to tackle with texts that are not limited to a single language, dialect, or sociolect (Beseghi 2017, Ranzato and Zanotti 2018, Pérez and de Higes 2019, Rebane and Junkerjürgen 2019, to mention but a few). In other words, they display, and play with, the inclusion of words or phrases that do not belong to the standard language norm of the main language the text is composed in. The decade(s) before that required that such studies be introduced by a justification of the importance or relevance of language variation within texts (e.g., Sternberg 1981, Delabastita and Grutman 2005, Bleichenbacher 2008, Corrius and Zabalbeascoa 2011). This is no longer necessary nor is it accurate to claim that there is a woeful lack of studies on this topic. So, the question now is how far have we come exactly in our progress towards including this kind of sensitivity in the mainstream of translation studies, both theoretically and in the applied domain of professional practice and academic training?

How is (yet another) dichotomy—of foreign vs. non-foreign—called into question by multilingual phenomena, such as creoles and code-switching, which are not necessarily based on the same factors as national borders, especially if we take into account multilingual communities and co-official languages within a given country? 

This Special Issue aims to address this question by accepting submissions that deal with it from different angles such as the ones suggested here but not limited to them:

• Are translators proficient in all the languages of a multilingual fictional text (e.g., a novel or television series), and do they need to be?
• How is multilingualism in fiction an element of an author’s style and how is multilingualism dealt with accordingly?
• What strategies are used by translators in rendering scripted multilingualism and how they are affected by the habitual strategies involved in translation practices?
• How have stereotypes (of character portrayal, conversational patterns or topics, or situations or events) developed and changed regarding the strategic use of foreign languages, dialects and non-native use of languages?
• What are the practices and trends of using and rendering invented languages (e.g., as spoken by aliens from other planets or fantasy worlds)?
• Are translations becoming more multilingual or linguistically diverse and, if so, by what means?
• What genres and text-types are more affected by multilingualism, more problematic or innovative in translation?
• In what aspects can / must we revise traditional theoretical approaches in the light of discoveries made in the area of multilingual translation? What about less traditional approaches, such as taking LGBTiQ+ studies/factors into account, or racial discourse, etc.?
• To what extent is lingua franca a factor, and directionality, as in the distinction between from English vs. into English, for instance, or between languages that are not widespread on a global level?
• Are there significant differences depending on whether the texts are written or audiovisual, i.e., mode and multimodality?
• What are the relations between translation, multilingualism, pseudotranslations, creoles, code-switching, slang, non-native speech and other manifestations of sociolinguistic variation?
• What historical periods can be meaningfully sketched both in the use of multilingualism in film, television, and video on demand, and the way they were and have been translated? What are the key characteristics of each period and the key factors of change from one period to another?
• How have the researchers’ interests in the field of translation studies been sparked, what is the focus of their research and how has it evolved? What other aspects of translation has multilingualism been related to?
• How is multilingualism tackled in machine translation, artificial intelligence, templates for translators, and post-editing practices?

Deadline for submission of abstracts: 12 October 2022

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With the rapid growth of corpus-based translations studies (CBTS) over recent years, this book offers a timely overview of the field today. It features cutting-edge studies from leading experts in the area, focused on both professional and student translations, and covers the latest theoretical developments such as the constrained communication framework, with a strong focus on methodology, particularly mixed-method approaches, multivariate research designs and translation error annotation. The volume highlights the emerging interdisciplinary bridges between CBTS and other areas in linguistics and demonstrates the applications of these theories and methods to translator training. It also offers a forward-looking perspective by presenting some of the challenges CBTS currently faces and possible pathways for future research.

Thanks to its combined theoretical, methodological and applied perspective and innovative approaches, Extending the Scope of Corpus-Based Translation Studies will appeal to both seasoned specialists and newcomers to the field.

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The University of Cordoba (Spain) and University College London (UK) are proud to announce the 6th E-Expert Seminar in Translation and Language Teaching about Feminism and Gender Awareness in Modern Foreign Languages and Translation.

This sixth virtual expert seminar aims to create a shared space for reflection on topics related to translation and language teaching. The conference will be held in English and Spanish using a real-time video conferencing tool that lets you add files, share applications, and use a virtual whiteboard to interact.

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JRHE, the Journal of Research in Higher Education published by Babeș-Bolyai University, the QUALITAS Centre, invites submissions for the forthcoming special issue on the research, pedagogy and practice of translation and interpretation, due out in September 2022. JRHE is a peer-reviewed, open access journal http://jrehe.reviste.ubbcluj.ro/, that seeks to address and factor in the major challenges educators, researchers, trainers and trainers of trainers in the field  are faced with in these accelerated global times.

As well as the changing professional communication patterns and policies manifesting themselves at this juncture in pandemic times, the volume sets out to engage the transformative forces impacting these academic subjects and the global language industry in the age of digital literacies and remote teaching. Fostering transdisciplinarity and multilingualism at the highest professional level in the language industry par excellence, the Department of Applied Modern Languages at BBU – a pioneering department in the country, marking its 30^th anniversary in Higher Education in Romania–  commissions state-of-the art contributions that cover the terrain of translation and interpretation studies.

Submission topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Advanced technology applications in the pedagogies of CI and TS;
• Multimodality in T & I (audiovisuality, video-gaming, subtitling et al);
• Remote interpreting, I&T teaching and re-speaking;
• The cultural and ‘geo’ turn in translation studies;
• Posthumanities and translation and interpretation practice;
• Translation and interpretation and their territorial politics/policies

Deadline for abstracts: 30 June 2022

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Editors:
Kobus Marais
Reine Meylaerts
Maud Gonne

1. Conceptualization
Since the emergence of complexity thinking, scholars from the natural and social sciences as well as the
humanities are renewing efforts to construct a unified framework that would unite all scholarly activity.
The work of Terrence Deacon (2013), at the interface of (at least) physics, chemistry, biology, neurology,
cognitive science, semiotics, anthropology and philosophy, is a great, though not the only, example of this
kind of work. It is becoming clear that this paradigm of complex relational and process thinking means,
among others, that the relationships between fields of study are more important than the differences between
them. Deacon’s contribution, for instance, lies not (only) in original findings in any of the fields in which
he works but (also) in the ways in which he relates bodies of knowledge to one another. An example would
be his links between a theory of work (physics) and a theory of information (cybernetics) by means of a
theory of meaning (semiotics).
This line of thinking indeed situates semiotics and biosemiotics in the centre of the abovementioned debate
(also see Hoffmeyer, 2008; Kauffman, 2012).
In semiotics, Susan Petrilli’s (2003) thought-provoking collection covers a wide variety of chapters focused
on translation, which she conceptualizes as semiotic process. Her work made it possible to link biosemiotics
and semiotics through the notion of “translation”, which is what we aim to explore further in this book.
Michael Cronin’s work in translation studies links up with the above through his use of the notion of
“ecology”. To apprehend interconnectedness and vulnerability in the age of the Anthropocene, his work
challenges text-oriented and linear approaches while engaging in eco-translational thinking. He calls
tradosphere all translation systems on the planet, all the ways in which information circulates between
living and non-living organisms and is translated into a language or a code that can be processed or
understood by the receiving entity (Cronin, 2017, p. 71). The aptness of Cronin’s work on ecology finds a
partner in that of Bruno Latour, whose development of a sociology of translation (2005) responds to the
need to reconnect the social and natural worlds and to account for the multiple connections that make what
he calls the ‘social’.
In an effort further to work out the implications of this new way of thinking, Marais (2019, p. 120)
conceptualized translation in terms of “negentropic semiotic work performed by the application of
constraints on the semiotic process” (see also Kress 2013). Building on Peirce, namely that the meaning of
a sign is its translation into another sign, translation is defined as a process that entails semiotic work done
by constraining semiotic possibilities. This conceptualization allows for the study of all forms of meaningmaking, i.e. translation, under a single conceptual framework, but it also allows for a unified ecological
view for both the sciences and the humanities. “The long standing distinction between the human and social
sciences and the natural and physical sciences is no longer tenable in a world where we cannot remain
indifferent to the more than human” (Cronin, 2017, p. 3).
These kind of approaches open ample possibilities for a dialogue between Translation Studies, Semiotics
and Biosemiotics, exploring translation not only in linguistic and anthropocentric terms, but as a semiotic
process that can take place in and between all (living) organisms – human and non-human organic and
inorganic, material and immaterial alike. Not only the translation of Hamlet into French, or of oral speech
into subtitles, but also communication between dolphins or between a dog and its master, or moving a statue
from one place to another, or rewatching a film are translation processes. However, many of the
implications of this line of thinking still need to be explored, and if the references to Deacon, Petrilli and
Cronin holds, this should be done in an interdisciplinary way that tests, transgresses and transforms
scholarly boundaries.
Based on the conference that took place in August 2021, we call for papers for an edited volume in which
we hope to draw together biosemioticians, semioticians and translation studies scholars to discuss the
interdisciplinary relations between these fields and the implications of these relations for the study of social
and cultural reality as emerging from both matter and mind. We invite colleagues who presented at the
conference as well as those who did not to submit either theoretical or data-driven or mixed proposals,
reflecting on the complexity of social-cultural emergence as a translation process. Some of the topics that
colleagues could consider would be the following:

• Is translation, as semiotic work and process, indeed able to link all of the biological world,
including humans, with the non-living world in one ecology, and if so how?
• What conceptual constructs in each of the three fields are relevant for the other fields, and how?
• Could the fields learn methodological and epistemological lessons from one another? If so, what
would these entail?
• Could collaborative scholarship enhance an understanding of social-cultural emergence, and if so,
what would this scholarship entail?
• How, if at all, does entropy and negentropy play out differently in social-cultural systems
compared to biological and/or physical systems?
• How does social-cultural emergence differ from biological and even physical emergence? Systems
thinking tends to ignore differences like the intentionality of biological agents in contrast to
physical agents. Thus, if one were to consider the possibility that intention has causal effect, how
does one factor intention into thinking about complex adaptive systems?

Please send abstracts of between 300 and 500 words to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Deadline for submission of abstracts: 1 April 2022

The impact of AI on literary translation: assessing changes in translation theory, practice and creativity

In early 2020, we discussed the possibility of organizing a TRACT seminar series on machine translation (MT) of literary texts. Since then, this topic has been the subject of an ever-increasing number of conferences, articles and monographs. It is probably the spectacular “progress” of MT tools now available to the general public — in particular DeepL and Google Translate, taking advantage of recent advances in neural machine translation (NMT) — that has made it inevitable for the literary translation community to take this phenomenon into account.

            Indeed, these tools, especially because of their ability to process an impressive quantity of texts almost instantaneously, reinforce the idea that translation, i.e. going from one language to another, is quite a straightforward operation, the manifestation of a one-to-one relationship between two languages. This reflects a simplistic conception of language, seen as a code, which translators would simply have to decode and then re-encode, following transformation rules or algorithms.

            And this is precisely how the first translation machines were imagined and designed, before being supplanted by statistical translation, and then by so-called “neural” machine translation. However, the blatant failure of the first attempts at machine translation led to the total and brutal suppression of the budget allocated to this research in 1966 in the United States following the conclusions of the ALPAC report. On the other hand, the still perceptible imperfections of MT, based only on the statistical processing of huge parallel corpora, never seemed likely to call into question the role of human translators (otherwise called “bio-translators”). Until recently, only specialized or pragmatic translators often resorted to computer-assisted translation or CAT. However, with the rapid advent of CAT, even literary translators fear that their autonomy, their authorial status, their agency might be threatened. The creative dimension of their work, which translators have been claiming for so many years, is at risk of being forgotten and replaced by the ancillary activity of post-editing. Man at the service of the machine, so to speak.

            It is easy to see what advantages unscrupulous publishers could gain from this new situation. This is particularly true for so-called “genre literature” (fantasy, romance, sci-fi, etc.) that tends to follow repetitive and set patterns. The neural machine translation of fantasy or romance books, for example, would save a lot of time and therefore money, which would certainly change the practices of the publishing world.

            Faced with this situation, it seems that literary translation practitioners and theorists can no longer remain on the sidelines. “L’observatoire de la traduction automatique” [The Machine Translation Study Centre] set up in 2019 by ATLAS, the Association for the Promotion of Literary Translation, is a concrete example of this in France. It is not a question of adopting a defensive position, but of taking full account of the paradigm shift in translation that the emergence of NMT implies. In any case, it will not disappear and is even likely, according to some A.I. specialists, to make progress that could, in the long run, supplant bio-translators.

            That is why, beyond the fears aroused by NMT among translation professionals, and beyond the criticism of the quality of the translations it produces, we wish to question the shifts that NMT induces in our ways of considering translation. In other words, what NMT does to the concept of translation and, consequently, to translation theory — how our experience of translation, modified by the presence of the machine, necessarily affects the way we think about translation. Is the machine capable of capturing the singularity of an author's style, of what the author does with and to language? Can NMT find a strategy capable of restoring the complexity of the translation process, in one way or another? This leads us to a renewed questioning of what it means to “understand” a text, and more generally to “read” a text, especially if we consider with G. Steiner that “to understand is to translate”. Can we say that the machine reads the text in order to translate it the way the bio-translator does? Translating implies the implementation of an extremely refined form of thought. And this brings us back to the question posed by Alan Turing, one of the fathers of artificial intelligence (AI), back in 1950: "Can machines think?”

           How does the human translator understand the source text? Is reading the text to be translated different from reading for pleasure? How does the translator arrive at the target text, through hesitations, backtracking, dictionary consultations, etc.? Can research on the cognitive processes at work in human translators shed useful light on these questions?

Our seminar proposes to investigate the topic in three directions (which necessarily intersect at certain points):

• We would like to introduce literary translators, Translation Studies specialists, researchers, students to the new tools coming from AI, CAT, NMT, enlightening them on how they work, the role of computational linguistics, cognitive science, neurosciences, their history, the perspectives of progress, their limits etc.
• How does NMT measure up to literary texts; what challenges does literature — especially poetry — with its equivocation, ambiguities, enigmatic meanings, points of untranslatability pose to NMT? Conversely, what part can NMT, CAT tools, play in the renewal of literary creativity?
• Does NMT effect a paradigm shift for translation? To what extent do omnipresent machines allow us to gain awareness of the fact that certain processes that used to be performed by expert translations only have now become automatic? What is the place of bio-translators? Do they become liberated or alienated by the machine (which cannot function without human-produced data)? In what way can the translators' lived experience of these changes help to map out a new paradigm, which includes but also exceeds the pragmatic dimension of this work?

As part of the above, the following questions might be addressed:

• Could the new MT tools really replace human translators in the long run?
• Consequences of and new directions in teaching translation at universities in the age of NLP
• Can corpus translatology or CAT improve the quality of literary translations or retranslations?
• To what extent are the practices of pragmatic translators transferable to literary translators?
• Does the machine make the bio-translator an augmented or a diminished translator? What role for the machine, what role for the human?
• How do NNT and CAT change the translator's relationship to the literary text, his or her reading of the text, and thus his or her engagement with the text?
• Human/machine interaction in literary translation: is collaboration possible, desirable, or harmful?
• Aren't literary translators in danger of being strongly encouraged by publishers to become specialized editors (development of post-editing)? Won't the machine reduce them to an ancillary function that they have been trying to free themselves from for decades?
• Can't the machine become the ally of literary creativity, through the randomness it introduces into the translation, or through the formal constraints that can be instilled in it (rhymes and feet in the translation of poetry, for example)?
• Isn't genre literature, which often responds to fairly formatted forms of writing (fantasy, romance, etc.) an ideal target for the development of NMT in the literary field?
• What happens to the “translation project" — dear to Antoine Berman — if we entrust the text to a machine?
• Does corpus stylistics allow us better to study and compare the translation strategies implemented by human translators? Is it relevant for comparing machine translation and bio-translation?
• Does readers’ reception of literary texts differ depending on the modalities of their translation?

Deadline for abstracts: 6 June 2022

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