The ICLA Translation Committee seeks twenty-minute papers for a virtual ACLA panel on “Digital Memory and the Translation of World Literature,” exploring ways in which digital archives and data infrastructures inform conceptions of world literature, cultural heritage, and canon formation. Extending our work from previous seminars analyzing how translation relates to memory and historiography and plays a part in constructing different literary publics, we consider how the database participates in the preservation of world literatures and in the algorithmic curation of cultural memory.

We explore digital infrastructures both as crucial means of democratizing access and assuaging the loss of marginalized literatures and as systems complicit in “un-homing” texts from their original contexts. These archives and digital repositories are both invaluable troves of memory and forums in which established epistemological and geopolitical borders are reinscribed through metadata and curatorial design. We ask how the abundance of digitized texts and worldwide databases may expose the limits of digital universality and reiterate the standardization of language, the denial of nuanced translation, and/or the invisibility of the archivist-translator. 

Papers can be drawn from various perspectives including literary studies, digital humanities, archival studies, and other theoretical and practical modes. Papers might address:

•         Translation as database curation and metadata creation 
•         Digital archives and the preservation or loss of cultural memory 
•         The translation of marginalized languages into global digital architectures 
•         Database curation as historiography  
•         Translating oral histories into searchable texts  
•         Algorithmic searchability and challenges to untranslatability 
•         Digital anthologies and the remapping of world literature