Translation and/as Culture A Conference
(Bayview Conference Centre, Clayton
11 - 12 November, 2005
The conference will focus on the relations between translation and culture'. Concepts of translation have developed alongside and as part of a range of different modes of importing and exporting texts and other cultural products in various parts of the world. The emergence in recent decades of a broadly based discipline of translation studies has created a framework that enables us to study these concepts and practices in their historical and cultural contexts. The conference will provide a forum for mapping forms and concepts of translation, adaptation and transformation in diverse cultures, and will seek to address the hermeneutic and methodological issues raised by such comparisons.
Issues addressed will be: the relationship between translation, globalisation and national identity; the ways in which translation processes construct national identities; the commensurability of translation concepts across cultures; the extent to which they are rooted in specific socio-cultural practices; the relation between translation and other forms of creative transformation.
- To what extent can we dissociate concepts of translation and adaptation from specific traditions and modes of importing or exporting texts across cultural boundaries?
- What tools are available for studying translation and related forms of transformation and re-enunciation in radically different cultures?
- What can translation theory learn from contemporary practitioners creatively involved with the movement of texts across languages, cultures and media? What can practitioners learn from theorists?
- What happens to national stories' when they are deterritorialized through global migration?
- How do relationships between cultures of birth and exile affect the core definitions of the native'?
- How do these new, hybrid forms of cultural interaction translate' and domesticate particular political practices?
- How comparable are concepts of translation developed in different parts of the globe?
Guest speakers will include Vrasidas Karalis (University of Sydney, translator of Patrick White into Greek), Simon Patton (University of Queensland, translator of contemporary Chinese poetry) and Andrew Riemer (chief book reviewer of the Sydney Morning Herald, translator of contemporary French fiction).
Register for the conference (Adobe Acrobat format)
This conference is organized by the "Translation and/as Culture" research cluster in the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics. Members of the group include Brian Nelson (convenor), Rita Wilson, Marisa Cordella, Masato Takimoto and Paul Thomas.