Author: Pieter Boulogne

The CETRA Roundtable ‘Translating the Holocaust’ (14/9/2022) was a part of the 3-day seminar ‘Voicing the Silence: New Approaches in Russian and Ukrainian Literature on the Holocaust in the 21st Century’ (13-15/9/2022): an initiative of the CoHLIT-21 consortium and KU Leuven’s Department of Literary Studies, that looks into the afterlife of the Holocaust in contemporary Russian- and Ukrainian-language literature. The colleagues who organised this event were Marina Balina (Illinois Wesleyan University), Roman Katsman (Bar-Ilan University) and, last but not least, Kris Van Heuckelom (KU Leuven).

The invited experts of the roundtable, moderated by Pieter Boulogne (KU Leuven), included Yuliya Ilchuk (Stanford University), Anja Tippner (University of Hamburg), Olga Bukhina (New York) and Mateusz Świetlicki (University of Wrocław).

We talked about the translation of historical events into the Holocaust master narrative, the different approaches towards this narrative in Russia, Ukraine and Poland in the post-Soviet time, the circulation of children’s literature (e.g. The Diary of Anne Frank) on the Holocaust across national, linguistic and cultural borders. To conclude, the question was asked whether Russian literature is to be blamed for the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war, which has important implications for the Holocaust remembrance. In the midst of war, can (translated) literature make a difference?

To attend this CETRA roundtable online, please click here: <https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_OWI5OTIzNjctYzcxMS00NTJkLThkY2ItYzYyNzEwMmRjNTI0%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%223973589b-9e40-4eb5-800e-b0b6383d1621%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%2213ec855c-5ec1-4ff7-9f59-75df558fb5ca%22%7d>

Meeting ID: 322 020 415 945
Passcode: bT7tRN

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Today, after two intensive weeks of lectures, webinars, Q&A sessions, workshops, break-out room conversations and presentations, the 33th CETRA Research Summer School in Translation Studies was concluded with two very rich panels of students’ presentations. Many thanks to the 25 participants, all promising translation scholars, this year’s chair professor, Kaisa Koskinen, and the numerous teaching staff members and colleagues for their fruitful efforts to make it yet another worthwhile edition!

We already look forward to organizing the 34th CETRA Summer School (especially our colleague Jack Mc Martin, who from October will be the new director of CETRA). Speaking of which: as announced during the opening of the 33th Summer School, the 2023 Chair Professor will be Hanna Risku, from the University of Vienna. A call for participants will be launched in due time – follow our blog or subscribe to our newsletter to be kept posted.

If you are interested in participating, please fill out this online registration form by Friday, September 9 at the latest. 

Here you can watch the second lecture of Kaisa Koskinen, the Chair Professor of the 33th CETRA Research Summer School in Translation Studies, in which she reflects on the lines of our discipline. Due to the absentmindedness of CETRA’s director, the recording started with a 10-minute delay, for which he apologizes.

This video consists of a word of welcome by Kris Van Heuckelom, Vice Dean for International Affairs of the KU Leuven Arts Faculty, a friendly but repeatedly interrupting barking dog, a word of welcome by Pieter Boulogne, CETRA’s Director, and, more importantly, the Opening Lecture by CETRA Chair Professor Kaisa Koskinen (Tampere University, Finland), entitled ‘Translation, affective labour and sticky affects‘.

Dear Madam Dear Sir Dear colleague We would like to invite you to the online academic opening session on Monday 22 August 2022, at 10.30 AM. The programme looks like this: Kris Van Heuckelom, Vice Dean for International Affairs of the Faculty of Arts, Welcome Pieter Boulogne, CETRA Director, Welcome Kaisa Koskinen, CETRA Chair Professor 2022, Introductory Lecture: Translation, affective labour and sticky affects The online lectures of CETRA Chair Professor 2022, Kaisa Koskinen (Tampere University, Finland), are freely accessible: On Translatoriality on Tuesday 23 August at 10.30. Using and reusing concepts on Thursday 25 August at 9.00. Fieldwork methods and creativity on Monday 29 August at 10.15. Division of academic labour on Wednesday 31 August at 9.00. You can find abstracts of these lectures and a short bio of the Chair Professor at https://www.arts.kuleuven.be/cetra/people/kaisa-koskinen.        Participation in the Academic opening and the lecture is free, but registration is required. Here you can register for the academic opening and lectures. A Teams meeting link will be sent to you a few days before the Academic opening/lecture. We hope to welcome you in large numbers! Best regards Pieter Boulogne Director CETRA

Abstract deadline
15 September 2022

Manuscript deadline
31 May 2023

Special Issue Editor(s)

Nasrin Ashrafi, KU Leuven

Diana Roig-Sanz, ICREA and IN3-UOC

Reine Meylaerts, KU Leuven

Relational thinking and Translation Studies: An interdisciplinary dialogue

The aim of this special issue is to reflect upon the intersection of Translation Studies (TS) and the contemporary relational theorizing of society, culture, and persons and to go beyond narrow interlingual conceptualization of translation by highlighting its procedural nature, and inherent potential in cultural and social theory. As such, relational thinking, which has deep roots in the social sciences, seeks to analyze the concept of agency/structure as a relational rather than individual, and it focuses on connections between interactants; that is, networks of relations and interdependencies, both interpersonal and impersonal, in which interactants and their joint actions are embedded (Emirbayer 1997, Crossley 2011, Donati 2011, Powell & Dépelteau, 2013; Depelteau, 2018).

A relational worldview privileges relations rather than things, in this sense, the terms and units involved in any transaction derive their meaning, significance, and identity from the changing roles they play within that transaction. That is to say, interdependency and interconnectedness have repeatedly been conceptualized and visualized through the concept of network that traces relationships in the emergence or development of social or cultural phenomena. Further, the fast-developing field of network analysis, social network analysis (SNA) in particular, offers a wealth of tools for the analysis of the structure (centrality, functional role, triadic closure, community) and dynamics (information diffusion, robustness) of the networked system built on top social relationships, with revealing applications in Art, History and Cultural Studies (Schich, 2014; Park, 2015; Sigaki, 2018), and also in TS ( Buzelin and Folaron, 2007; Ashrafi, 2018; Roig-Sanz and Subirana, 2020; Risku, 2016). Mapping networks of relations allows non-reductionist contextualized analysis of the individual’s actions (micro), the relationships (meso) that are established or built, and the emergent structures (macro) in the guise of patterns of interactions. Thus, in the wake of a relational approach, we might ask, how do networks structure relationships? or, how do relationships manipulate networks for their own purposes? or, how do relationships emerge and evolve? Our point is not only that those individuals (actors) are formed within and are thus inseparable from interactions and relations, but also, in a more semiotically-informed vein, that we can identify translational mechanisms within interactions, relations and networks which help to explain and understand events in the social world.

From a translational perspective, the embedded and relational character of a translation phenomenon lends itself well to theorizing relational networks of heterogeneous actors (actants). The prominent example of such an approach is the concept of Translation in Latour’s actor-network theory and relational ethnography of Desmond (2014), which involves studying fields rather than places, boundaries rather than bounded groups, processes rather than processed people, and cultural conflict rather than group culture. In this sense, translation as a boundary phenomenon can provide conceptual and methodological insights contributing to “culture as translation” (Wolf, 2014).

We particularly welcome papers that draw upon a methodological and/or conceptual dialogue between the relational approach and TS. We can illustrate this most effectively by simply asking: How does Translation as a meaning-making/taking activity contribute to the emergence of the social? (See Marais’s semiotic approach, 2019).

We anticipate that this exploration will open up new avenues for exploring future directions and prospects in interdisciplinary research in TS. With this ultimate goal in mind, we will welcome both theoretical and methodological reflections, as well as papers based on empirical approaches. Topics that could be addressed include, but are not limited to:

• Rethinking the basic sociological/translational concepts of structure, agency, habitus, or norms through the lens of relational approach in a translational context
• The conceptual/methodological contributions of TS to relational sociology
• The role of translational networks/interactions/relations in the emergence of cultures and/or societies
• Rethinking world translation flows and the marginal and/or peripheral cultures/societies
• Rethinking the relational context of (forced) migration as a translational practice
• Rethinking poetics and repertoire as relational constructs
• The significance of networks of relations/interactions in reinforcing /challenging or emergence of a translation policy
• Methodological reflections on the relational embeddedness of a translational practice
• The intersection of activist practices (feminism among them), translation, and relational epistemology

For more details, see this website.

Garda Elsherif and Joanna Sobesto are organizing an issue on ‘Positionalities of Translation Studies and its scholars’ that will be published with University of Leuven Press. Deadline for abstract submission is the 30 september, 2022. Please read the details in the below CfP.