We are delighted to announce that the recordings of the five lectures by Professor Kobus Marais, CETRA Chair Professor 2025, are now available on the CETRA YouTube channel.
Professor Marais is Professor of Translation Studies at the University of the Free State (Bloemfontein, South Africa) and one of the leading figures in contemporary translation studies. His research engages with complexity thinking, semiotics, biosemiotics, and development studies, with a view to expanding the boundaries of what we understand as “translation.” Among his many publications are Translation Theory and Development Studies: A Complexity Theory Approach (2014), A (Bio)Semiotic Theory of Translation: The Emergence of Social-Cultural Reality (2018), and Trajectories of Translation: The Thermodynamics of Semiosis (2023).
Professor Marais’s lectures offer an ambitious and thought-provoking framework for rethinking translation through the lens of complexity and semiosis. They will be of particular interest to scholars, students, and anyone intrigued by the intersections between translation, ecology, and the philosophy of meaning.
About the Lecture Series
The lectures were recorded during the 36th CETRA Research Summer School (August 2025) and form a series titled The Complexity of Translation. In this series, Professor Marais explores translation as a complex semiotic process that operates across systems, media, and even species boundaries.
The five lectures are:
- The Complexity of Translation: The “Stuffs” That Get Translated
Examines what is actually translated, arguing for an expanded and interdisciplinary notion of translation. - The Complexity of Translation: Epistemology and Ontology
Explores the implications of complexity thinking for how we know and conceptualise translation, introducing ideas such as constraint, trajectory, and soft causality. - The Complexity of Translation: Translation and Semiosis
Extends translation beyond language, situating it within broader semiotic processes of meaning-making. - The Complexity of Translation: Translation and Biosemiosis
Investigates how translation operates in non-human and ecological contexts, drawing links to biosemiotics and the Anthropocene. - The Complexity of Translation: Matter and Spirit
Reflects on the material and immaterial dimensions of translation — how energy, embodiment, and thought intersect in the act of translating.
▶️ Watch the these and other lectures on the CETRA YouTube channel
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