News

New Book: Mapping Memory in Translation

27 April 2016

The latest publication from CTIS member, Siobhan Brownlie, Mapping Memory in Translation, presents a map of the application of memory studies concepts to the study of translation. A range of types of memory from personal memory and electronic memory to national and transnational memory are discussed, and links with translation are illustrated by detailed case studies. Published by Palgrave Macmillan.

PhD Success: Study of Translation of Children's Literature in Iran

18 March 2016

Congratulations to Shabnam Saadat who passed her viva with flying colours. Through analysis of bibliographic data, interviews with leading translators and textual analysis, Shabnam investigated the impact of socio-political circumstances on the publication and circulation of children’s and adolescents’ literature in post-revolutionary Iran, with a particular focus on the contextual factors influencing translators’ actions and decisions, and the consequences of those actions and decisions in promoting or resisting hegemonic norms and values. 

New Book: Dialogue Interpreting

20 February 2016

The latest book by a CTIS member is Dialogue Interpreting: A Guide to Interpreting in Public Services and the Community, co-authored by Rebecca Tipton and Olgierda Furmanek and published by Routledge as the inaugural volume in their Routledge Interpreting Guides series. Dialogue Interpreting is an essential guide for practising interpreters and for all students of interpreting within advanced undergraduate and postgraduate/graduate programmes in translation and interpreting studies, modern languages, applied linguistics and intercultural communication.

"This is a landmark textbook. Being thoroughly grounded in empirical research on interpreter-mediated interaction and institutional discourse, it deserves a wide readership, not only among students of interpreting and early-career interpreters, but also among those who are dependent on interpreter-services as public-sector professionals." - Cecilia Wadensjö, Stockholm University, Sweden

New Book: Translating Dissent: Voices from and with the Egyptian Revolution

30 November 2016

Discursive and non-discursive interventions in the political arena are heavily mediated by various acts of translation that enable protest movements to connect across the globe. Focusing on the Egyptian experience since 2011, Translating Dissent, edited by Mona Baker, brings together a unique group of activists who are able to reflect on the complexities, challenges and limitations of one or more forms of translation and its impact on their ability to interact with a variety of domestic and global audiences.

Drawing on a wide range of genres and modalities, from documentary film and subtitling to oral narratives, web comics and street art, the 18 essays reveal the dynamics and complexities of translation in protest movements across the world. Each unique contribution demonstrates some aspect of the interdependence of these movements and their inevitable reliance on translation to create networks of solidarity. The volume is framed by a substantial introduction by Mona Baker and includes an interview with Egyptian activist and film-maker, Philip Rizk.

Genealogies Project Award Announcement

Genealogies of Knowledge: The Evolution and Contestation of Concepts across Time and Space

19 November 2015

The Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies (CTIS) has recently been awarded a large Research Grant by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

From 31 March 2016, CTIS members will work with Professor Peter Pormann (Lead Co-investigator, Classics and Graeco-Arabic Studies, University of Manchester) and Dr Saturnino Luz (Senior Research Associate, University of Edinburgh) on a 4-year project that will investigate two sets of interrelated issues:

1. The historical evolution and transformation through translation of two constellations of key concepts in political and scientific thought that can often be traced back to the ancient Greek world, focusing on three historical lingua francas (Arabic, Latin and English) and seminal moments of change in the reception and reproduction of translated texts and their meanings by subsequent readerships.
2. The ways and means by which civil society actors involved in radical democratic groups and counter-hegemonic globalisation movements contest and redefine the meanings of such cultural concepts today.

For both strands of analysis, the study will build large, diverse electronic corpora of Greek, Arabic, Latin and English and develop a range of open-source tools for corpus analysis and visualisation that harness the power of the computer to process, compare and visualise patterns across these very large textual repositories.

The project team will be supported by an Advisory Board consisting of Manchester-based academics: Dr Guyda Armstrong (Italian Studies), Professor David Langslow (Classics), Dr Maeve Olohan (Center for Translation and Intercultural Studies), Dr Matthew Philpotts (German Studies), Professor Myriam Salama-Carr (Center for Translation and Intercultural Studies), Professor Jacqueline Stacey (English and American Studies) and Dr Andreja Zevnik (International Politics).

The following positions will become available under this award:

• PhD Studentship in Corpus-based Translation Studies and History of Knowledge Transfer in the 19th/20th Century (starting in September 2016, to be advertised shortly).
• 2 Postdoctoral Research Associates (starting in September 2016 and January 2017, to be advertised in early 2016).

If you would like to receive updates on the project activities and events, please contact Luis Perez-Gonzalez, quoting ‘Genealogies mailing list’ as the e-mail subject. 

• Luis Perez-Gonzalez - Luis.Perez-Gonzalez@manchester.ac.uk

CTIS strongly represented at Cultural Politics of Translation conference

13 October 2015

CTIS members feature prominently in the Cultural Politics of Translation International Conference in Cairo, 27-29 October, an event co-organised by CTIS and the Department of English Language and Literature at Cairo University.

Theo Hermans' keynote, "Positioning Translators", analyses examples of translations in which translators use various devices to signal their disagreement with, or reservations about, the works they are translating. If we consider this as a form of reported speech, akin to discordant narration in narratology, we can cast the translator as the reporter whose attitude towards the words being reported is relevant. Readers then switch between the framing and the framed discourse to discern or construe the translator’s positioning and give it relevance.

Anna Strowe's paper, "Translation and Transmission: Reflections on Material and Linguistic Access", considers how the concept of access is constructed in both translation studies and book history. She focuses on access as a gateway whose operation can be heavily political, when hegemonic or counter-hegemonic groups gain, control or prevent access. Access can thus be seen as a colonial practice as well as a resistant one, and actual access and narratives of access can be powerful forces in particular political, cultural and social moments. 

Antonio Bibbò's contribution, "Publishing and Staging Irish Theatre in Fascist Italy: From Lord Dunsany to Sean O’Casey" examines how Irish plays, particularly Sean O’Casey’s, infiltrated the Italian cultural field during fascism with potentially subversive ideas that were only partially tolerated by fascist censors, despite providing an anti-British narrative that aptly suited fascist politics. These frequently contradictory responses of the regime’s authorities to Irish theatrical literature are analysed with regard to the political values conveyed.

David Charlston, CTIS PhD graduate, in "Political Disobedience in A. V. Miller’s Translations of Hegel", draws on a detailed study of the life and work of Arnold Vincent Miller (1899-1991) to show how Miller, as translator of six of Hegel's works, left traces of a translatorial disobedience which respectfully but firmly challenges the instrumentalism and hierarchical authoritarianism embodied in the commercialised and increasingly globalised political and philosophical establishment of his time.

Latest PhD completion

25 September 2015

Congratulations to Dinithi Karunanayake on a brilliant performance at her viva today! Dinithi's study is entitled Theatre Translation, Communities of Practice and the Sri Lankan Conflicts: Renarration as Political Critique. Everyone at CTIS wishes her all the very best as she returns to her lecturing post at the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka, in October.

Publication: Scientific and Technical Translation

23 September 2015

Maeve Olohan's new book, Scientific and Technical Translation, is the first volume to appear in the new Routledge Translation Guides series.

This book focuses on texts that are typically translated in scientific and technical domains, including technical instructions, data sheets and brochures, patents, scientific research articles and abstracts, popular science press releases and news reports. It first introduces readers to the typical contexts in which scientific and technical translators work and shows how corpus resources can be used for terminological and phraseological research.

It then explores a range of technical and scientific genres and their translation, with detailed analysis, examples and exercises.

With this book and the recent publication of Audiovisual Translation by Luis Pérez-González, along with the imminent publication of Dialogue Interpreting co-authored by Rebecca Tipton, CTIS members continue to produce key reference material for translation studies.

Lectureship appointments for CTIS graduates

1 August 2015

Recent academic appointments among CTIS PhD graduates include Ruselle Meade's appointment to a lectureship in Japanese studies at the University of Cardiff and Mario Bisiada's appointment to a lectureship in applied linguistics at the University of Pompeu Fabra, Spain.

Congratulations to both!

These positions give Ruselle and Mario excellent opportunities to pursue their interdisciplinary research at the interfaces of translation studies and other disciplines.