Critical Perspectives on Collaborative Translation

Translation, as we know of today, is majorly understood as a solitary and lonely activity. Such an impression regarding the act of translation, brings into discussion the subjectivity of the translator, her close reading of the text and the resultant understanding which gets reflected in the act of translation. Anthony Cordingley and Celine Frigau Manning, in their introductory essay “What is Collaborative Translation?” published in the volume Collaborative Translation: From the Renaissance to the Digital Age (2017) raise a series of very pertinent questions that challenge the popular image of the translator as a lonely individual at work as the reality of the profession is strikingly different and requires a collaboration of many with different roles. Bélen Bistué (2013), traces the practice of collaborative translation to the Renaissance time. She calls the translation of this time the work of “translation teams” where “two or more translators, each an expert in one of the languages involved, collaborated to produce a translation.” This act of distributing responsibilities among multiple agents involved in the practice helped in the inclusion of skills they brought from different linguistic and cultural traditions.

We invite papers on collaborative translation and how it can enrich the practice of translation. Some of the questions we seek to engage with are as follows:

1. Can collaborative translation help in avoiding issues of epistemological violence and misrepresentation in translation of indigenous texts?
2. How can collaborative translation render the process of translation democratic and inclusive?
3.Since translation is about “listening” to the text, how does collaborative translation encourage translators to “listen” to each other while listening to the text and how does this listening come across in the translation?
4. How does collaborative translation open up the field of representation and meaning-making in translation of indigenous texts?
5. What happens to the language of the text at the other end of translation? Does this language carry many voices, or a singular “voice” in/of the translated text?
6.How are the many selves of the translators interacting with the text and what bearings do they have on the translation process?