IATIS News

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

Clear and accessible, this textbook provides a step-by-step guide to textual analysis for beginning translators and translation students. Covering a variety of text types, including business letters, recipes, and museum guides in six languages (Chinese, English, French, German, Russian, and Spanish), this book presents authentic, research-based materials to support translation among any of these languages. Translating Texts will provide beginning translators with greater text awareness, a critical skill for professional translators. Including discussions of the key theoretical texts underlying this text-centred approach to translation and sample rubrics for (self) assessment, this coursebook also provides easy instructions for creating additional corpora for other text types and in other languages. Ideal for both language-neutral and language-specific classroom settings, this is an essential text for undergraduate and graduate-level programs in modern languages and translation. For more information, click here

The Midwest, to many Americans, is either “fly-over country” where not much of interest happens, or “the heartland,” nostalgically framed as an ideal, homogenous America. A group of U-M scholars has secured a $225,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to explore the Midwest instead as a multicultural, multilingual region shaped by successive waves of both international and domestic migrations. Focusing on the question of translation — broadly understood as complex mediations and negotiations between languages and cultures — the group of humanities scholars will organize a series of events under the Mellon Foundation’s Sawyer Seminar program. “We’ll be exploring diverse cultures of translation in various Midwestern sites,” said Yopie Prins, Irene H. Butter Collegiate Professor of English and Comparative Literature and chair of the Department of Comparative Literature in LSA. “Who translates what for which purpose and in whose interest? How has the region been defined by the interaction of multilingual communities?” Translation, the scholars stress, is not merely a process between national languages, but an everyday web of encounters among citizens who bring different backgrounds, expectations, fears and dreams to the table. The multidisciplinary U-M team of scholars is led by Prins, who also is a professor of comparative literature, and English language and literature; Marlon James Sales, postdoctoral fellow in critical translation studies; and Silke-Maria Weineck, professor of Germanic languages and literatures, and comparative literature. Collaborators include Kristin Dickinson, assistant professor of Germanic languages and literatures; Maya Barzilai, associate professor of Middle East studies and Judaic studies; Benjamin Paloff, associate professor of comparative literature, and Slavic languages and literatures; and Christi Merrill, associate professor of Asian languages and cultures, and comparative literature. Titled “Sites of Translation in the Multilingual Midwest,” the project will run for two academic years, starting in fall 2020 and culminating with a conference in spring 2022. It will bring together community organizations, as well as researchers and scholars from U-M and other Midwestern universities and colleges for a series of public events and seminars. They will explore topics as diverse as translation initiatives for local communities; U-M archives that preserve histories of translation in the Philippines and Filipino diaspora in Michigan; photojournalism that visualizes interaction among multiple languages in the industrial cities of Detroit and Dortmund; the place of Eastern European literature in Midwestern cultural networks; Yiddish translations of urban experience; the promise of translation networks enabled by Hathi Trust; and the challenges and promises of Hamtramck, Michigan’s most linguistically diverse city. Additional meetings are planned on Native American languages and the role of Arabic communities in the Midwest.   Sawyer Seminars are, in effect, temporary research centers that connect faculty, visiting scholars, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students — mainly in the arts, humanities and social sciences — for intensive study of subjects chosen by the participants. “The recognition of the Mellon Foundation and the intent of this seminar series exemplify the incredible work of U-M faculty members taking an interdisciplinary approach to analyzing multiple histories and practices of translation in the Midwest,” said Martin Philbert, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs. “These events and the conversations that come during them will spark important dialogues about the pivotal role translation plays in today’s multicultural and multilingual society.” It has been a decade since U-M last received the prestigious Sawyer Seminar grant from the foundation’s invitation-only award process. “We are thrilled to be supported by The Mellon Foundation and excited to be given this opportunity to make possible more collaboration with scholars working around issues of translation within and beyond our university,” Prins said. “We see translation not as an academia-led practice of language, but as a community-centered encounter with its own multilingual realities.”

Contra Instrumentalism questions the long-accepted notion that translation reproduces or transfers an invariant contained in or caused by the source text. This “instrumental” model of translation has dominated translation theory and commentary for more than two millennia, and its influence can be seen today in elite and popular cultures, in academic institutions and in publishing, in scholarly monographs and in literary journalism, in the most rarefied theoretical discourses and in the most commonly used clichés. Contra Instrumentalism aims to end the dominance of instrumentalism by showing how it grossly oversimplifies translation practice and fosters an illusion of immediate access to source texts. Lawrence Venuti asserts that all translation is an interpretive act that necessarily entails ethical responsibilities and political commitments. Venuti argues that a hermeneutic model offers a more comprehensive and incisive understanding of translation that enables an appreciation of not only the creative and scholarly aspects of what a translator does but also the crucial role translation plays in the cultural and social institutions that shape human life. For more information, click here

Special Issue on Intersemiotic Translation and Multimodality, edited by Karen Bennett - just out! Translation Matters Vol. 1 No. 2. Available at: https://ojs.letras.up.pt/index.php/tm/issue/view/458