IATIS News

Special issue of Babel Editors Frans De Laet Reiner Heard Miodrag Vukčević Übersetzen und Dolmetschen im juristischen Bereich / Traduction et interprétation juridiques / Legal Translation and Interpreting Technologie – Outsourcing – Veränderungen / Technologie – externalisation – transformations / Technology – Outsourcing – Shifts For more information, click here

Series: New Trends in Translation Studies Edited By Ali Almanna and Juan José Martínez Sierra This volume affords an opportunity to reconsider international connections and conflicts from the specific standpoint of translation as a dynamic, sociocultural activity, carried out and influenced by numerous stakeholders. The various chapters contained in this volume survey a wide range of languages and cultures, and they all pivot around the relationships that can be established between translation and ideology, re-narration, identity, cultural representation and knowledge reproduction. The ultimate aim is to shed light on the actual act of translating in which the self is well-presented and beautified and the other is deformed and made ugly. In this volume, due consideration is given to the main frames (be they characterization, interpretive or identity frames) as well as to the nonverbal factors that play a fundamental role in forming the final shape of the translated product.  For more information, click here

Providing efficient and safe healthcare services is tenuous even at the best of times. Hospital staff who must also circumnavigate language barriers are placed in problematic, perhaps disastrous, situations if they have not received the proper training. The Handbook of Research on Medical Interpreting is a compendium of essential reference material discussing the educational, ethical, pedagogical, and specialized aspects of medical interpreting. Featuring research on topics such as patient care, competent healthcare, and specialized training, this book is ideally designed for hospital staff, healthcare administrators, medical specialists, professional interpreters, industry professionals, academicians, researchers, and students seeking coverage on a new, international perspective to the medical sciences. For more information, click here

The IMLR is delighted to announce a new area on our website: Online Resources. We are pleased to able to continue promoting and facilitating research whilst our physical building remains closed. We have a number of online events lined up, with more to follow: 12-19 May          Playing with Prose: Online Theatre Workshop https://modernlanguages.sas.ac.uk/events/event/22507 18 May               Samuel Beckett et la Guerre d’Algérie https://modernlanguages.sas.ac.uk/events/event/22498 3 June                 Digital Modern Languages https://modernlanguages.sas.ac.uk/events/event/22490 16-17 June         Disrupting Digital Monolingualism https://modernlanguages.sas.ac.uk/events/event/22492 The intention is to record these events and make them available online. Also in our Podcasts section are taster sessions for events which have had to be postponed, such as the session on ‘Decolonising Modern Languages – a preview, and recordings of virtual events such as A Virtual Encounter between Andrea Grill and Tess Lewis.

Debido a la pandemia del coronavirus Covid 19, se aplaza el 9th IATIS Regional Workshop. La fecha tentativa para su realización será el mes de diciembre de 2020. Les informaremos sobre las nuevas fechas y plazos de inscripción. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the 9th IATIS Regional Workshop has been postponed. The Workshop is tentatively scheduled for December 2020. We will inform you on new dates and registration deadlines.

The event’s hosts, H.E. Ambassador María Bassols and UNDSS Director Bill Keller, delivered the opening remarks and introduced the audience to the plight of civilian translators and interpreters working in conflict and post-conflict settings. Maya Hess laid out in clear and accessible language the reasons why there is an urgent need for the world language community, Human Rights activist organisations and supranational entities like the UN to concretely support professional and non-professional translators and interpreters who get hired to work with and for an army, journalists, NGOs, diplomats, and other foreign entities during and right after war. At present, the protection mechanisms available under international humanitarian law do not adequately address the specific needs of these local translators and interpreters, as they fall through the cracks in the Geneva Conventions and, unlike journalists working in war zones, are not covered by UN resolutions. As Hess explained, the problem partly arises from discriminatory views that are commonly held about cultural mediators and language brokers. Whilst their employers, who represent powerful institutions and structures like the United States Army, tend to view them instrumentally as “tools” able to decipher an unknown code in a hostile foreign setting, the local communities these interpreters are part of often see them as traitors, an “enemy within”collaborating with “foreign invaders”. By contrast, debates like the one held at the UN seek to reimagine war zone translators and interpreters as professionals who, much like journalists, play a politicised, contested, complex and often necessary role in increasingly globalising societies.  Red T founder Maya Hess suggested a set of concrete ways to enhance linguist protection through a coordinated international response. These include the establishment of a working group on this thematic within the UN structure; the appointment of a Special Rapporteur by the UN Human Rights Council to investigate, gather data and draft a report on the scope of the issue along with possible solutions; an iteration of the Montreux document that would include a section on linguist protection; and a UN resolution or similar legal instrument that would articulate interpreter rights and establish a normative framework for future protection. Hess argued that a UN Resolution, similar to those adopted for journalists, would be a first critical step towards greater protection and increased safety and that, while such a resolution would not be binding, it would represent a political commitment by the member states.  The envisioned UN Resolution would first and foremost recognize that translators and interpreters in conflict situations face threats and violence. Furthermore, it would call on states to publicly condemn attacks targeting linguists and urge them to ensure accountability by dedicating the resources to investigate and prosecute such attacks. She concluded with an urgent appeal to member states to firmly place the protection of translators and interpreters in the “Protection of Civilians” agenda of the United Nations. Red T’s appeal was then echoed by Betsy Fisher, Esq., from the International Refugee Assistance Project, Lucio Bagnulo, the Head of Translation at Amnesty International’s Language Resource Centre, Maître Caroline Decroix from the Association des interprètes et auxiliaires afghans de l’Armée Française, and Dr. Simona Škrabec from PEN International. As a member of IATIS and as a scholar of Translation and Interpreting Studies, what struck me the most about the event was how several of the speakers understood the problem as partly originating from narratives about translation and interpreting which reduce the role of language brokers to that of tools or are enmeshed in a larger contemporary moral panic about cultural and linguistic “contagion” in increasingly post-national societies. This implicitly calls on scholars to pay particular attention to the question of how translation is viewed and imagined in globalised cultures whose post-monolingual reality may often be riven with violence and conflict. The event successfully provided an international platform for raising awareness of the urgent need for greater legal protection of local civilian translators and interpreters in conflict and post-conflict situations.    Serena Bassi, Yale Translation Initiative Postdoctoral Fellow 

Translation and Multimodality: Beyond Words is one of the first books to explore how translation needs to be redefined and reconfigured in contexts where multiple modes of communication, such as writing, images, gesture, and music, occur simultaneously. Bringing together world-leading experts in translation theory and multimodality, each chapter explores important interconnections among these related, yet distinct, disciplines. As communication becomes ever more multimodal, the need to consider translation in multimodal contexts is increasingly vital. The various forms of meaning-making that have become prominent in the twenty-first century are already destabilising certain time-honoured translation-theoretic paradigms, causing old definitions and assumptions to appear inadequate. This ground-breaking volume explores these important issues in relation to multimodal translation with examples from literature, dance, music, TV, film, and the visual arts. Encouraging a greater convergence between these two significant disciplines, this text is essential for advanced students and researchers in Translation Studies, Linguistics, and Communication Studies. For more information, click here

This interdisciplinary edited collection establishes a new dialogue between translation, conflict and memory studies focusing on fictional texts, reports from war zones and audiovisual representations of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco Dictatorship. It explores the significant role of translation in transmitting a recent past that continues to resonate within current debates on how to memorialize this inconclusive historical episode. The volume combines a detailed analysis of well-known authors such as Langston Hughes and John Dos Passos, with an investigation into the challenges found in translating novels such as The Group by Mary McCarthy (considered a threat to the policies established by the dictatorial regime), and includes more recent works such as El tiempo entre costuras by María Dueñas. Further, it examines the reception of the translations and whether the narratives cross over effectively in various contexts. In doing so it provides an analysis of the landscape of the Spanish conflict and dictatorship in translation that allows for an intergenerational and transcultural dialogue. It will appeal to students and scholars of translation, history, literature and cultural studies. Lucía Pintado Gutiérrez is Assistant Professor at the School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies at Dublin City University, Ireland. Alicia Castillo Villanueva is Assistant Professor of Spanish at the School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies at Dublin City University, Ireland. For more information, click here

This book presents and comments on four short works of Japanese literature by prominent writers of the early twentieth century, including Natsume Sōseki and Miyazawa Kenji. These are their first-ever published English translations.The book is designed to be used as a textbook for the translation of modern Japanese literature—another first. Each chapter introduces the writer and his work, presents the original Japanese text in its entirety, and encourages students with advanced Japanese to make their own translation of it, before reading the author’s translation that follows. The detailed commentary section in each chapter focuses on two stylistic issues that characterise the source text, and how the target text—the translation—has dealt with them, before the chapter concludes with questions for further discussion and analysis. For more information, click here

Summer School on Cognitive Translation & Interpreting Studies dates: 15-26 June 2020 Pre-registration will open when website is online, January 20, 2020 Two weeks in Italy to attend courses on the empirical research of cognitive aspects of translation and interpreting from different angles: (1) Cognitive Translation Studies (2) Cognitive Linguistics (3) Cognitive Psychology & Psycholinguistics (4) Neuroscience (5) Research Methods (6) Corpus Studies (7) Statistics and (8) Scholarly & scientific dissemination The school will welcome up to 25 students More information at https://www.academia.edu/41219391/MC2_Lab_s_CTIS_Summer_School https://www.researchgate.net/project/Summer-School-on-Cognitive-Translation-Interpreting-Studies-June-2020

Adaptation Special Issue: Intersemiotic Translation as Adaptation, Edited by Vasso Giannakopoulou and Deborah Cartmell Volume 12, Issue 3, December 2019 For more information, click here