Translating beyond humans: translation as an ecological encounter between humans and non-humans
Description
In the Anthropocene, human activities profoundly reshape the climate and environment, disrupting ecological balance and transforming humans into a potent geological force. Dominant strands of Western thought from Descartes to Heidegger have contributed to reinforcing this perceived superiority of humans over other beings, thereby calcifying a dichotomy between the human and the non-human. In the field of translation studies, this human-centered focus has historically been echoed through the discipline’s sustained attention to human languages and culture. However, posthumanism and post-anthropocentrism, which advocate the interconnectedness between humans and non-humans, have challenged the centrality of anthropos in translation.
Critiques of human exceptionalism and extractivism have prompted scholars to investigate the evolving role of translation, particularly regarding how it connects humans with the broader natural world from various perspectives (Hu 2013 and 2024; Cronin 2017, Marais 2018, Dasca and Cerarols 2024). Some translation studies scholars have begun to consider what it would mean to include non-human voices in the study of translation from the perspectives of literary translation, philosophy, biosemiotics and more. However, these studies have only begun the difficult work of establishing both theoretical and practical methods, such as the ontology of translation and interdisciplinary frameworks, leaving significant room for further contributions.
It is also crucial to signal that many Indigenous and First Nations communities have long understood human language to emerge through communion with the sounds of the land. In Pewma ull: El sueño del sonido, the Mapuche singer Soraya Maicoño observes, “In the forest, everything speaks: / the stone speaks / the water / the rain / the birds / the spiders speak / the ants, / every being / has its own language.” In the Mapuche cosmology, language (Mapudungun) is understood as the translation of the distinct languages of every living thing. Such understandings enrich and cast light upon the ostensibly “emerging” quality of these translational debates.
Alongside these approaches, the field of digital bioacoustics has begun to imagine the possibilities of inter-species translation, given that developments in digital technologies have allowed researchers to register the complex communication systems of plants and animals (Bakker 2022, Elephant Listening Project, The Earth Species Project). Translation emerges as a central framework in these studies for thinking about the "grammar of animacy" (Robin Wall Kimmerer 2017) and our relationship to the nonhuman world.
Considering ongoing ecological and intellectual transformations, this session aims to explore how translation can serve as a means of fostering solidarity with non-humans and of (re)imagining the complex interrelations between humans and the more-than-human world. Papers may take up one or more of the strands of research mentioned above or explore the relationship between translation and the natural world from another vantage point. In particular, this seminar seeks to emphasize the entanglement of theory and practice to ask: What does it mean to translate more than human languages, including the communications of other organic life? We invite papers that inquire into how to (re)conceptualize the relationship between humans and non-humans, the identity of humans (for example, is post-anthropocentric translation possible?), methods of translating non-human communications, the ethics of eco-translation and more.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Jonathan Godinez is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Wellesley College. His research focuses on Mexico's 20th and 21st-century science fiction and environmental humanities. This paper is part of a larger project that examines the relationship and intersection between science fiction, posthumanism, and hydropolitics in Mexico.
Speaker Bio
Éric Trudel, Professor of French at Bard College, is the author of La Terreur à l’œuvre (Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2007) and of scholarly articles on 19th-, 20th- and 21st-century French literature. He also co-edited several volumes and journal issues on a wide range of topics (illegibility, lists and enumerations, misappropriations, literary remakes, the documentary impulse, writers as prophets of doom).
Speaker Bio
Hongyang Ji is a PhD candidate at the University of Alberta, specializing in translation studies. He has been a translation freelancer with various companies for over four years. His current research focuses on the ecological approaches to translation theory and practice. His research interests include translation theory, sociological translation studies, philosophy and translation, eco-translation and biosemiotic approach to translation.
Speaker Bio
Soyoon Bae is a PhD student in the English department at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. She received both her BA and MA from the Department of English Language and Literature at Seoul National University. Her research interests are Asian and Asian American contemporary literature, environmental humanities, and speculative fiction.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Edith (Edie) Adams is an Assistant Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Bowdoin College. Her research and translation work centers on contemporary Mapuche poetics, with a particular interest in translation theory and practice. She is also a literary translator, with work appearing in various literary journals and anthologies. Most recently, she is the translator of Guerrilla Blooms (Eulalia Books 2024) by the Mapuche poet, Daniela Catrileo.
Speaker Bio
Marina Klimenko is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of English at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation explores how contemporary writing from Canada's West Coast works to translate local waters into English texts, transforming English from a language that easily travels to one that is respectful and responsible to local waters and lands. Her criticism has appeared in Studies in Canadian Literature, while her short fiction internationally online and in print.
Speaker Bio
Marc Charron is an associate professor in the School of Translation and Interpretation at the University of Ottawa (Canada), where he also currently serves as the Dean of the Faculty of Arts. His French translation of Ocean Vuong’s internationally acclaimed and 2017 TS Eliot winning poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon Press, 2016) was a finalist for the 2018 Literary Translators’ Association of Canada Prize.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Nobuto Sato is a Ph.D. candidate in comparative literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His dissertation explores aurality such as sound, voice, and music in U.S., Japanese, and Yiddish modernist writings.
Speaker Bio
Sophia Lencioni is a PhD student in the Department of Comparative Literature at UCLA. She received her training in German and Comparative Literature from Northwestern University and is a native speaker of Spanish, being from Mexico City. Her research combines theories from translation studies, posthumanism, and border studies, to draw connections from Germanic literatures and Latin American literatures from the 20th and 21st centuries.
Speaker Bio
Peter Dziedzic is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University, where he is pursuing a degree in Islamic Studies and Comparative Literature. This paper is rooted in his broader dissertation research on early modern Kashmiri Rishi Sufi poetry.
Speaker Bio
Carolyn Shread is Senior Lecturer in French at Mount Holyoke College and teaches translation at Smith College. Her research areas include 20th-century and contemporary French and Francophone literature, with a special interest in Haitian literature and women's writing. Shread has translated eleven books into English, of which eight by philosopher Catherine Malabou. In the field of translation studies, Shread has published on feminist, decolonial and eco-translation.