Translations, Adaptations and Modalities

 

Joint IASH / VARIE (Visual Arts Research Institute Edinburgh) Research Theme, June 2008 - May 2011

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Art in Translation

Conference: Art Writing: Translations, Adaptations and Modalities

IASH Fellowships

 

University of Edinburgh's Translation Studies Graduate Programme

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Context
Description
Events
Fellowships

Context

In August 2007 the South African musical show 'Truth in Translation' was staged at the Fringe of the Edinburgh International Festival. In this drama about the Truth and Reconciliation hearings of the 1990s, translators tasked with translating every testimony into the eleven official languages of South Africa come to realize that there are as many versions of the truth as there are languages. Ostensibly dispassionate, employed as transparent media of communication, they find themselves involved as witnesses and perpetrators at every level. Their dilemma - precisely located as it is both temporally and culturally - may stand as a dramatic exemplification of issues that concern modern Translation Studies more generally: what is the meaning of accuracy? What kinds of truth survive, or are created, in translation? How are they conveyed in languages? What are the responsibilities and culpabilities of the translator? What is the relationship between translation and interpretation, and how may communication be effected? What are the consequences of mistranslation?

From Biblical Studies to contemporary politics, these are issues of pressing concern in an age of global communication. The practice of translating has a long history; Translation Studies, by nature interdisciplinary as well as multilingual, is a relatively recent formation, whose rationale and methods inform lively comparative scholarship across the humanities and social sciences, from architecture to music, and philosophy to International Relations and Social Policy. 'Modernity,' the Latin American critic Ilan Stavans has asserted, 'is not lived through nationality but … through translationality.'

Description

Translation has always been conceptually contentious, regarded variously as traducing, enriching, mechanical, creative, impossible …. This IASH research theme aims to sustain lively debate in the field and to carry forward recent scholarship in the multi-disciplinary aspects of translation studies into new contexts and combinations; its focus will be less on the linguistic practice of translation than on the implications of transformative shifts for modalities of meaning, expression or structure. Modality has technical meanings in Law and Philosophy which connect with more broad-ranging considerations of manners or states of being or behaving, as distinct from substance or identity. The politics and ethics of translation offer further expansion of the theme. Transgressive modes of translation (forgery, ventriloquism, performance, impersonation) provoke legal, ethical and cultural responses.

Interest may focus on what is preserved, what is transformed, and what lost in translations, adaptations and modalities of all types; equally, it may be concerned with the invisibility or intrusiveness of transformative processes, and those who accomplish or suffer them. Movement between 'source' and 'target' may emphasise origins and originality, or call them into question. Translation and transmission of cultural memory (the survival of texts and images, memorializing strategies) and cultural continuities, are active concerns in several current research groups, including STAR (Scotland's Transatlantic Relations Project) at IASH, and VARIE (Visual Arts Research Institute Edinburgh, which hosts the journal Art in Translation).

Translation theory's vocabulary of 'equivalence' and 'function' offers suggestive possibilities for processes and comparisons in many disciplines; there are opportunities, too, for considering issues of domestication and estrangement. Subjects for discussion and study in the programme for this theme will include the interaction of translation and culture; appropriations and colonisation; movement between media and contexts; new ways of thinking about influence; processes of re-inscription and critique; metaphor; interpersonal or inter-textual transference.

Local resources of interest to participants in this theme include BOSLIT (the Bibliography of Scottish Literature in Translation), established in 1994 by the University of Edinburgh and the National Library of Scotland to create a complete online record of Scottish literary works in translation. In addition to poetry, drama and prose, and translations of material from the oral tradition, this database includes writings by Scottish historians, philosophers, scientists, theologians and other works of aesthetic, intellectual and cultural significance.

While Literatures, Languages and Cultures might seem the natural base, colleagues from Arts, Culture and the Environment, African Studies, East and South Asian Studies, Divinity, Scottish Studies, Politics, Philosophy and Sociology all have interests in this area; events will seek to represent the full range of the topic, and applications for Fellowships are welcome in any aspect of translation study in its widest senses.

Events

For further information about these events and to subscribe to the Translations mailing list please email Maria Filippakopoulou (maria.filippakopoulou@virgin.net)

Fellowships

Applications for Fellowships in relation to any aspect of this theme are invited from researchers in any field of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. See the Fellowships Programme.

 

 

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