When writing and interpreting for imagined audiences or publics across temporal, spatial, and linguistic divides, how do translators and interpreters reiterate or reconstruct imagined communities and cultural memory? To what extent are they able to convey the operations of complex and uncharted translation spaces, e.g., diasporic communities, border cultures, or transcultural cities, and what is the role of the media forms through which translated texts circulate as translators negotiate a relationship with the past, present, and foreseeable future?

This seminar centers on
understanding translation as a phenomenon beyond linguistic conversion that
encompasses broader processes of meaning-making and cultural emergence. We
approach memory as an analytic within translation and explore how translators navigate
tensions between personal and collective memories, and between the inevitable
losses of memory and the gains of positing partial remembrances. We also
consider the status of human translators and editors in the age of AI and ask
how new technologies might both facilitate and impede the preservation of
languages and of oral and written literatures. The task of translation is
inherently imbued with and, often, encumbered by memory, especially in cases of
translating sacred and canonical texts or interpretation during times of
conflict and precarity. We examine intersections of translation studies and
memory studies and propose that the figure of the translator is a rich site
from which to extrapolate the cultural and temporal displacements of memory and
meaning-making.  

This seminar, organized by the ICLA Translation Studies Research
Committee, invites abstracts interrogating translation and memory from a
variety of methodological and theoretical perspectives—literary, historical,
sociolinguistic, ethical—and considers themes including but not limited to the
following: 

-Translation, preservation,
and cultural heritage

-Translation, archives, and digital memory

-Translation, lost memory,
and rewriting

-Translation and oral
literature/oral histories

-Translation, ethnography,
and historiography

-Translation and the sacred

-Translatability and
untranslatability

-Translation spaces

-Translation and the self

-Translation and trauma

-Translation and the nonhuman