Month: September 2013

False Friends: Translation and Alliance Formation

Organised by the Division of Literature and Languages, University of Stirling

With the generous support of the Institut français du Royaume-Uni, the Scottish Funding Council, and the Scottish Government

UNIVERSITY OF STIRLING

Pathfoot Building, A7
November 1 (Starts: 11.00am) – November 2 (Finishes: 12.30 pm)

Friday November 1

11am-12pm: Opening Lecture & Demonstration: Audrey Cameron (Scottish Sensory Centre) with Tania Johnston (Royal Observatory, Edinburgh)
‘Making Sense of Astronomy in British Sign Language’
Chair: Cristina Johnston (University of Stirling)

In the Opening Lecture and Demonstration session, Audrey Cameron from Scottish Sensory Centre based at the University of Edinburgh and Tania Johnston from the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh will discuss the development of new BSL signs for specific terms related to disciplines such as astronomy and astrophysics. This Scottish Government-funded project has developed from the realisation that British sign language can convey the contemporary meaning of specific scientific terms visually.

12-1.30: Lunch

1.30-2.30: Science and/in Translation
Speakers: Cristina Johnston (University of Stirling); Pippa Goldschmidt (University of Edinburgh)
Chair: Aedín Ní Loingsigh (University of Stirling)
From an initial career as a research scientist, Pippa Goldschmidt shifted into policy, then moved into creative writing. She published her first novel in 2013 (Falling Sky) and has most recently been working as a Writer in Residence in Edinburgh University’s Physics Department and at the Royal Observatory. Her presentation will focus on the adaptation and translation of her own initial scientific research as well as her knowledge of astronomy for a range of audiences and readerships that include fellow researchers, civil servants and general readers. Cristina Johnston will discuss the Fox Talbot Correspondence Project. Photographer and polymath William Henry Fox Talbot wrote the majority of his letters in English but there were also a good number in French, Italian and German, charting his correspondence with many of the key figures in the history of science of the mid-19th century. Dr Johnston was involved with the task of translating many of these documents while the project was housed at the University of Glasgow, and her paper will focus on the use of languages in that mid-19th-century scientific community that coincided with the birth of photography.

2.30: Coffee

3.00-5.00: Gender, Sexuality, Feminism and Translation
Speakers: Virginie Sauzon (University of Stirling); Stéphanie Kunert (Post-doctoral Researcher, 2012-2013, de l’Institut Émilie du Châtelet); Stéphanie Benson (University Bordeaux III)
Chair: Siân Reynolds (Emeritus Professor, University of Stirling)
This panel will consider translation from a feminist perspective in order to examine the complex, yet fruitful relationship between French and Anglo-American texts and contexts in recent years. The speakers will question the poetic and political implications of these intercultural exchanges: what do translators consider when translating gender-related texts from English into French, or vice versa? How do feminist discourses, lexicon and references travel? Does translation help to develop new international networks, or does it merely highlight theoretical and linguistic specificities? Virginie Sauzon will introduce the panel by exploring how the transmission of Anglo-American discourses on gender and feminism in contemporary France requires translation, whilst questioning the consequences and cultural implications of the untranslated. Stéphanie Kunert will present a paper on the circulation, transformation and alteration of discourses on gender and sexualities through a range of media. Reflecting on her own practice as a translator, Stéphanie Benson will present the key challenges she encountered when translating Virginie Despentes’s King Kong théorie into English, and Fiona Shaw’s Tell it to the Bees into French.

6.30: Reception and Reading (with Wendy Delorme) followed by Conference Dinner at 8pm

Saturday 2 November
Coffee: 9.30

10-12pm: Translation and Minority Languages
Chair: Charles Forsdick, AHRC Theme Leader for Translating Cultures
Speakers: Mike Cormack (Sabhal Mòr Ostaig); Wilson McLeod (University of Edinburgh); Michael Cronin (Dublin City University)
This panel will examine translation’s role in the often fraught contact zones of minority and global languages. Mike Cormack will offer an analysis of language choice and media interaction amongst bilingual Gaelic/English speakers in order to examine the role of the media in bilingual communities. This assessment will form part of a more general focus on the question of language preference and the role of media consumer choice, the use of language as identity marker, and the impact of social media. The contribution of Wilson McLeod will return us to a more textual centred discussion of translation (including the practice of literary translation). He will present and illustrate the key issues concerning translation into and out of Gaelic in the twenty-first century, highlighting the different issues that arise in relation to literary and non-literary texts, prose and poetry. Michael Cronin will conclude with a critical examination of what he terms the ‘messianic’ theory of translation, the notion that translation is always about breaking down barriers, building bridges, overcoming difference. His contention is that translation is as much about defining limits as transcending them and nowhere is there more evident than in the case of minority languages.
12-12.30: Closing Discussion with the Organisers

Registration Fee: £10
Free for Postgraduate Students

For further information and to register, please contact the organisers:
Cristina Johnston (cristina.johnston@stir.ac.uk)
Aedín Ní Loingsigh (aedin.loingsigh@stir.ac.uk)
Virginie Sauzon (virginie.sauzon@stir.ac.uk)

Please register before Monday 28th October.

Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies

In association with Liverpool University Press

Francophone Postcolonial Studies and Book Culture

Friday 22 & Saturday 23 November 2013

Institute of Modern Languages Research, University of London,Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU

Registration for this event is now open.

Please visit www.sfps.ac.uk  for more details.

Friday, 22 November 2013

10.00-10.20 Registration10.20-.10.30 Welcome

10.30-12.00

Panel 1: Book Prizes

Megan MacDonald,‘Death and Prizes: Moroccan Francophone Literary Cultures: Reading from the Outside In’· Alessandra Benedicty,‘Fetishizing Poverty? Contemporary ‘Postcolonial’ Prize-Winning Fiction in French: Ananda Devi and Dany Laferrière’· Madeline Becarré, ‘Le Rôle de la francophonie comme institution culturelle’

12.00-2.00 Lunch/AGM

2.00-3.30

Panel 2: Parallel Sessions
Panel 2a: (Mis)Translation

Marcella Frisani, ‘”A Literature with a New International Perspective”: Les Conditions sociales de circulation de la contemporary fiction “francophone” dans le marché britannique de la traduction’· Caroline Williamson,‘Disinterest, Mistranslation, Misrepresentation: Translator and Editorial Interventions in the Testimonies of Rwandan Genocide Survivors’· Tobias Warner,‘Mariama Bâ in Translation: World Literature and the Legibility of Feminist Critique in the English and Wolof Versions of Une si longue lettre’

Panel 2b : National Book cultures

Raphaël Thierry, ‘Situation de l’édition camerounaise au sein du marché global du livre’· Ursula Gonthier, ‘Print and Power from Persia to Paris : Djavann rewrites Montesquieu’· Faisal Sahbi and Mehdi Souiah, ‘La nouvelle littérature algérienne au miroir de la presse algérienne francophone : lectures dans les stratégies de subversion et de connivence’

3.30-4.00 Coffee/Tea

4.00-5.00 Panel 3: Parallel Sessions

Panel 3a: Books and the Internet

Roxanna Curto, ‘The Internet Poetics of Patrick Chamoiseau and Edouard Glissant’· Stella Cambrone-Lasnes,‘La Re-présentation de l’espace francophone Caribéen à travers la promotion en ligne de romans antillais contemporains’

Panel 3b: Archives

Patrick Corcoran,‘Genetic Criticism and the Archive(s): Rethinking Les Soleils des Indépendances· Lia Nicole Brozgal,‘The October 17 Archives: Literary Scholarship, Historical Documents’

5.00-6.00 Plenary Session – Chair: Ruth Bush
Publishers’ Panel: Publishing Francophone African Literature in TranslationJames Currey (James Currey Publishing)Becky Nana Ayebia Clarke (Ayebia Clarke Publishing)Pete Ayrton (Serpent’s Tail)

6.00-7.00 Vin d’Honneur

7.30 Dinner

Saturday, 23 November 2013
10.30-11.30 Panel 4: Parallel Sessions
Panel 4a: Paris Publishing

Claire Ducournau, ‘Du Débrouillard à “Continents Noirs’: les editions Gallimard et les auteurs issus de l’Afrique subsaharienne francophone’· Patrick Crowley, ‘Manifeste pour une Cité internationale de la littérature and the ghost of Bourdieu’

Panel 4b: Manuscripts

Rachel Douglas,‘Genetic Criticism à la postcoloniale?’· Paul R. Davis, ‘Alpha Yaya Diarra and Arts Fra-Den le Soudan’

11.30-12.00 Coffee/Tea

12.00-1.00

Panel 5: Parallel Sessions
Panel 5a: Globalisation of the Book Industry

Ines Bugert,‘Strategies of Globalizing Maghrebian Authorship: Kebir Ammi and his Work, Apulé, mon éditrice et moi’· Audrey Small, ‘“Works Written in French Should be Taken to be Published in Paris: Towards a Fair Trade in Francophone Literature’

Panel 5b: Languages and the Book

Eugène Tavares, ‘Littératures Africaines : Les anthologies en question’· Anne Ouallet and Soufian Al Karjousli : Lecture postcoloniale de l’islam et des confréries à partir et au-delà du « Livre »’

1.00-2.30 Lunch

2.30-3.30

Panel 6: Parallel Sessions

Panel 6a: Book Culture in Haiti

Justin Izzo, ‘The Nation as Ethnographic Public: Jean Price-Mars’s Haiti (in Book Form)’· Kate Hodgson, ‘The Cry of Freedom: Early Haitian Print Culture and Global Abolitionism’Panel 6b: Paratexts· Catherine Gilbert,‘(Mis)Leading Paratexts? Framing Rwandan Women’s Testimonial Literature’· Nicole Dunham, ‘A Book Within a Title; a Title Within a Book: Dany Laferrière’s Je suis un écrivain japonais’

3.30-4.00 Tea/Coffee

4.00-5.00 Dorothy Blair Memorial Lecture-Chair: Nicki Hitchcott

Lydie Moudileno,‘Building Our Post-Colonial Library’

5.00 Close of Conference

For any further questions please contact the Conference Secretary, Ruth Bush (sfpsconference2013@gmail.com).

The three projects awarded large grants in association with the ‘Translating Cultures’ theme have now been announced by the AHRC alongside another six major awards relating to ‘Digital Transformations’ and ‘Science in Culture’. This constitutes a major development for all of the themes, and I look forward to learning in early 2014 which large grants will be successful under ‘Care for the Future’. These projects are intended to be beacons for the individual themes, but we will consider as they evolve the ways in which they might contribute to the continued development of links across the four themes also.

To focus on ‘Translating Cultures’, almost eighty awards have already been made under the theme, encompassing fellowships, networks and research development, and we have seen excellent progress as researchers address key questions from a range of disciplinary perspectives, in a variety of different locations and across a number of historical periods. These large grants represent a new phase in the theme’s development as they have been awarded to projects believed to have transformative potential — and which will serve as beacons or flagships for the work around ‘Translating Cultures’. The teams of researchers associated with these projects will together contribute to our renewed understanding of the ways in which translation and interpreting form an integral part of culture and society, in the UK and elsewhere. Their approaches are actively cross-disciplinary, exploring the ways in which acknowledgement of the importance of languages can reinvigorate a number of scholarly fields. They also all exemplify the internationalization of research practices, to the development of which the ‘Translating Cultures’ theme aims to contribute significantly, not only through collaborations but also through a careful reflection on the challenges and benefits of researching multlingually.

Full details of the projects will be provided in due course when the new ‘Translating Cultures’ website is launched. Alison Phipps in Glasgow has brought together an international, multidisciplinary team to reflect on questions of translation and interpreting at various borders — most notably of language, the body, the law and the state. The project is particularly interested in exploring how we can operate effectively as researchers in contexts where more than one language is present, underlining the ways in which the internationalization of research practices depends in large part on a challenge to the assumptions of monolingualism. The implications of such an approach — methodological, epistemological and ethical — are likely to be considerable, and the collaboration with Pan African Arts Scotland will have major implications for the ways in which the findings of Arts and Humanities research are translated for and communicated to wider audiences. Angela Creese in Birmingham will be PI on a project investigating translation and translanguaging in superdiverse wards in four UK cities, Cardiff, Leeds, London and Birmingham itself. As such, the project will contribute significantly to developing our understanding of multilingualism in the UK, providing clear engagement via the ‘Translating Cultures’ theme with the wider interest in linguist mapping that emerged when the findings of the 2011 census were made public. Angela and her colleagues will explore how people communicate across diverse languages and cultures, and develop our understanding of how languages are not used separately but in relation to each other as speakers ‘translanguage’. The project will engage actively with a range of other fields, including health and well-being, sport, heritage and law, underlining the importance of engaging with questions of language and translation in a range of disciplinary fields — and also, as is the case with the project led by Alison Phipps, informing the work of policy makers in these and other areas. Charles Burdett in Bristol and his co-investigators in Warwick and St Andrews will lead a team of researchers and collaborators looking at questions of mobility, identity and translation in modern Italy (as it becomes a destination for migrants from other cultures) as well as in diasporic Italian communities elsewhere. One of their key aims is to reflect on the ways in which various forms of mobility, linguistic, geographical and cultural, have defined the development of modern Italian culture — and then to extend this transnational reflection into the development of an urgently needed new framework for the disciplinary field of Modern Languages as a whole. The project will involve collaboration with external partners in a variety of locations, and will complement effectively the focus on multilingualism and border-crossing central to the other two projects.

I am very excited about the prospect of working with Alison, Angela, Charles and their teams of researchers and external partners. These three awards will expand and enhance the ambitious research already conducted under the ‘Translating Cultures’ theme. They will provide urgently needed contributions, from an Arts and Humanities perspective, to our understanding of some of the most pressing issues in the twenty-first-century world: multilingualism, mobility, and the crossing of borders. The aim in each project is to interrogate, analyse and demonstrate the central place of languages and culture in contemporary life, whether in localized contexts or in wider globalized frames. Central to each is also, as I have suggested, an active engagement with a range of partners beyond academia, as well as collaboration with international networks of scholars. These projects will transform academic and public understanding of the theories and practices of translation and interpreting in innovative, exciting and, I anticipate, often unexpected ways.

CONFERENCE: Key Cultural Texts in Translation
University of Leicester
April 29-30 2014

The conference will be the culmination of the AHRC-funded Key Cultural Texts in Translation project, which aims to enhance our understanding of the changes that linguistic and other symbolic representations of identity undergo in translation across times, spaces and media.

The conference will focus on the ways in which cultures define and re-define themselves through the representation in texts and other artifacts (films; paintings …) of their key concepts. What happens to the images of the initial and the receiving cultures when these representations of key concepts are translated? How are key concepts re-represented? What can we learn from this about how peoples can adjust mutually in times of meetings and migration? (Further information in appendix at the end of this announcement).

There will be two keynote speakers, selections of papers, and discussion sessions aimed at engaging audiences across a number of subjects.

SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE
Fransiska Louwagie, University of Leicester; Kirsten Malmkjær, University of Leicester; Adriana Serban, University Montpellier 3; Meifang Zhang, University of Macao.

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Jens Erland Braarvig, Professor of History of Religion, Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo.

Stella Sandford, Reader in Modern European Philosophy, Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University.

OF INTEREST TO

Academicsin literary, historical, religious, social, cultural, linguistic and translation studies.

Policymakers, journalists and everyone engaged in public policy.

HOW TO BOOK
Book your place at the conference by going to https://shop.le.ac.uk/browse/product.asp?compid=1&modid=2&catid=65
and clicking on the “Book Event” button.

SUBMITTING PAPERS
Please send an abstract of no more than 250 words by e-mail to Professor Kirsten Malmkjær at km240@le.ac.uk no later than 1 October 2013. You will be informed by 6 January 2014 whether your paper has been accepted.

APPENDIX
Information about the AHRC-funded “Key Cultural Texts in Translation” network based at the Research Centre for Translation and Interpreting Studies (RTISt), the University of Leicester, UK, with partners at the Département d’études anglophones, Université Paul Valéry – Montpellier 3, France, and The Department of English, University of Macao, P.R. China.

Title of Research Project: Key Cultural Texts in Translation

Principal Investigator: Professor Kirsten Malmkjær (Leicester)
Partners: Dr Adriana Serban (Montpellier); Professor Zhang Meifang (Macao)

Focus
The Network addresses the AHRC’s “Translating Cultures” theme, focusing primarily on the translation of texts, but also on intersemiotic translation in Jakobson’s (1966: 233) sense of “an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems” (or vice versa).

It will identify texts (broadly defined) to be collected in an e-repository accessible through the Website of the Research Centre for Translation and Interpreting Studies (RTISt) at the University of Leicester, and bring together translation professionals and scholars from the UK, Europe and China to discuss and explore the relationships between

·         the characteristics of texts and artifacts through which cultures establish, define, develop, maintain, promulgate and defend their identities
·         the characteristics of translations and retranslations of these across times and spaces
·         the complex matter of movements and relocations of peoples across national and cultural boundaries.

It seeks to disseminate its findings and outcomes widely within and beyond academia.

Registration for University of Manchester’s Writing Beyond Borders interdisciplinary postgraduate conference is now open.

To register your attendance, please go here.

Registration costs £4, and this includes welcome pack, lunch on the day, and the post-conference drinks reception. Registration closes on Friday 10th September 2013.

A provisional programme of the day’s panels can be found here.