The CETRA Blog

As in earlier EST congresses, the 10^th EST Congress will mainly be organized around thematic panels.  Papers can adopt various (inter)disciplinary, methodological, conceptual, professional, historical or geographical approaches relating to the concept or experience of the conference theme Advancing Translation Studies.

Below, you can find the description of a thematic panel that is organized by CETRA members Francis Mus (University of Antwerp) and Pieter Boulogne (KU Leuven), about ‘Popular music and cultural transfer’.

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Popular music and cultural transfer

Conveners: Francis Mus, Pieter Boulogne

The complaint that “translations have by and large been ignored as bastard brats beneath the recognition (let alone concern) of truly serious literary scholars” (Holmes 1978, 69) has functioned more or less as the birth certificate of our discipline, but there are still “bastard brats” around that we ourselves have been overlooking. The translation of popular music, for instance, has not yet received a great deal of attention. When in the 1990s the translation of music grew into a normal object of study, canonical genres (opera, art songs) were privileged. The first studies dealing with translated popular music tended to be carried out by practitioners in the field rather than by scholars. Since two decades or so, song translation is receiving more and more academic coverage. Even so, as Lucile Desblache (2019, 27) denounces, “musical transnationalism, transculturalism and translation in the narrow (translation involving song lyrics or writings about music) or wide (transcreation or mediation of musical styles and genres) senses of the word, remain largely unexplored.” Drawing on insights from both Translation Studies and Cultural Transfer Studies, this panel aims to shed light on the various ways in which popular music, be it in the original form or in translation, spreads around the world, both historically and currently. Clearly, popular music tends to circulate and cross national borders at a very fast pace. When the lyrics are translated, the translation strategies applied to vocal music can greatly differ. In other cases, a full comprehension of the original lyrics is considered of minor importance. Sometimes, the relative inaccessibility of the song text in a given receiving community can even be advantageous to its success. Envisaging a scholarly discussion that goes beyond individual case studies and the multimodal comparison of source texts with corresponding target texts, this panel proposes to focus on the general mechanisms that are brought into play when popular music is transferred to a new cultural environment. Possible subtopics and approaches may include but are not limited to:

• What are the similarities and differences between the transfer of popular music and the transfer of other cultural products, such as poetry?
• What are the motives for the (non-)translation of popular songs?
• What selection mechanisms and translation strategies are adopted for popular music?
• What factors determine whether a translated version of a popular song is received as an autonomous cultural product?
• What is the status of the author/translator/performer in the case of translated popular music?

References

DESBLACHE, Lucile. 2019. Music and Translation. New Mediations in the Digital Age. London : Palgrave Macmillan.

FRANZON, Johan. GREENALL, Annjo, K. KVAM, Sigmund. PARIANOU, Anastasia. (eds.) 2021. Song Translation: Lyrics in Contexts. Berlin: Frank & Timme.

GORLÉE, Dinda L. (ed.). 2005. Song and Significance: Virtues and Vices of Vocal Translation. Amsterdam/New York : Rodopi.

HOLMES, James S. 1978. “Describing Literary Translations: Models and Methods.” In Literature and Translation: New Perspectives in Literary Studies, edited by James S. Holmes, José Lambert & Raymond van den Broeck, 69-82. Leuven: Acco.

MINORS, Helen. (ed.) 2013. Music, text and translation. Camden : Bloomsbury.

SUSAM-SARAJEVA, Sebnem. 2008. Translation and Music. Special issue of The Translator. 14-2.

For an overview of the different thematic panels, see https://www.hf.uio.no/english/research/news-and-events/events/conferences/est22/call-for-papers/list-description-panels.html At the upcoming EST conference, there is also another panel dedicated to the topic of music and translation. It indicates there’s a growing scholarly interest in this fascinating research topic.

Papers presentations would comprise a presentation of 30 minutes in total, 20 minutes for presenting and 10 minutes for discussion. Papers can be submitted as part of a particular panel or as an individual presentation. Submissions to panels are highly encouraged.

A proposal should consist of name and affiliation of the paper/poster presenter(s), a title, a general description of approx. 350 words, and an essential bibliography (max. 5 publications).

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Please send your proposal by October 15, 2021. Notification of paper acceptance will be given by December 20, 2021.

To submit your proposal, please follow the instructions on this EST web page.

Today, the 32nd CETRA Research Summer School in Translation Studies began. This year’s CETRA Chair Professor is Brian James Baer, Professor of Russian and Translation Studies at Kent State University (Ohio, US). His inspiring opening lecture, ‘The Cultural Work of Translated Texts, or Translation and the Semiotics of Culture’, will (relatively) soon be published on the blog of CETRA.

Meanwhile, you can register for his upcoming online lectures:

• Translation and the Making of Literary History: The Cultural Work of Anthologies on Tuesday 17 August at 10.30.
• Translation in Diasporic Communities: Is This an In-between? on Thursday 19 August at 9.00.
• What Translation Can Do for Global Sexuality Studies on Monday 23 August at 10.15.
• Queering Translation, or What Queer Theory Can Do for Translation Studies on Wednesday 25 August at 9.00.

You can find abstracts of these lectures and a short bio by the Chair Professor at https://www.arts.kuleuven.be/cetra/people/brian_james_baer.      

Participation is free, but registration is required. To register, please send an email to our administrative administrator Steven Dewallens: steven.dewallens@kuleuven.be. 

The SISU Baker Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies, Shanghai International Studies University, is pleased to announce that the Martha Cheung Award for Best English Article in Translation Studies by an Early Career Scholar is now accepting applications for the 2021/22 round. 

The Award is established in honour of the late Professor Martha Cheung (1953-2013), formerly Chair Professor of Translation at Hong Kong Baptist University. It aims to recognize research excellence in the output of early career researchers, and since its establishment in 2018 has attracted a substantial number of high quality applications that have positioned it as one of the top awards in the field.

The Award

The award is conferred annually for the best paper published in English in the previous two-year period, and takes the form of a cash prize of 10,000 RMB (equivalent to around 1,500 USD). A certificate from the SISU Baker Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies will also be presented. The work of the award winner and any runners-up is publicized widely by the Centre and featured on the website (see https://www.sisubakercentre.org/martha-cheung-award-winners/).

Timeframe

Application closing date for the 2022 Award:           31 October 2021

Announcement of award winner:                               31 March 2022

Eligibility and Submission Criteria

Applicants must have completed their PhD during the five-year period preceding the deadline for submission of applications or be currently registered for a PhD, and their article must be single-authored. The article must have been published between 30 September 2019 and 30 September 2021.

For further details of the Award, including the full set of eligibility and submission criteria, please visit the Award website at: https://www.sisubakercentre.org/the-martha-cheung-award/.

“Following from the 2019 Congress of the European Society for Translation Studies, we are compiling an edited volume under the provisional title Translation flows: Exploring networks of people, processes and products, to be published by John Benjamins Publishing. The book will be a peer-reviewed volume of full-length contributions showing the interconnectedness of different thematic fields in translation studies through the productive framework of networks and flows.

The 2019 Congress theme of “Living Translation” included numerous current topics, such as the role of translation in the lived experience of the Other, in fake news, mass communication, power and ideology, oral histories, the hegemony of English, accessibility, inclusivity, education, gender, and transformation, since these practices all imply, implicate or employ translation in some way. Furthermore, the interaction between translation studies and many other fields of study was also foregrounded, both in traditional links like those with linguistics, cultural studies and literature, or with more recent developments and concerns like Big Data, the Anthropocene, globalization, and the like.

A common theme that came to the fore in numerous contributions, whether as a methodological or analytical basis, or as a subject in itself, was that of “flows”, both within networks and between them. Translation and translation studies are clearly concerned with flows of languages, peoples, cultures, products, and numerous other societal and technical aspects. Furthermore, translation studies in itself is dynamic and ever-changing, fluid and flowing in its own right.

We hereby invite you to submit a chapter based on the work that links to the theme of this book.

Confirmation and abstract submission

1. Please submit your abstract to Ilse Feinauer at aef@sun.ac.za by no later than Monday 19 July 2021.

2. Abstract requirements:

a. Please relate your abstract clearly to the main book theme of “flows”.

b. Please include 5 keywords.

c. Length: 400-500 words (excluding references)

3. Technical requirements for chapters, including length requirements and referencing standards, will be communicated upon acceptance of your proposal.

4. Completed chapters will be expected by 30 November 2021, after which the peer review process will commence.”

Leuven 3rd
June 2021, 11:00 UTC+1

Abstract
Women writers of seventeenth and early eighteenth-century France had a complex relationship with ‘classical reception’. Not only did women rarely have access to classical languages, but the expectations of modesty, shaped by men and women alike, were at odds with the learning and erudition entailed by knowledge of ancient Greek or Latin. In this talk, I will compare how three very different women writers — Madeleine de Scudéry (1607-1701), Antoinette Deshoulières (1638-1694) and Anna Dacier (1647-1720), a novelist, a poet and a translator — constructed their relationship to ancient culture as key to their authorial ethos. I will then examine the relationship between this ethos and their uses of, and engagement with, antiquity. I suggest that these three cases challenge assumptions about gender, knowledge, and canon formation and serve as useful touchstones for interrogating methodologies of reception studies.

About Helena Taylor
Helena is a Lecturer in French Studies at Exeter, having completed her DPhil at St Anne’s College, Oxford. Her first book, published with OUP in 2017, examines the reception of the life of Ovid in 17th-century French culture. In May 2018, she embarked on a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship to work on her second book Savantes: Women Writing Antiquity in Early Modern France.

To receive further practical information and the zoom link, please contact Beatrijs Vanacker (beatrijs.vanacker@kuleuven.be)

Source: https://receptionstudies.be/2021/04/12/ceres-lecture-dr-helena-taylor/

Special issue of ‘Translation in Society’
guest editors: Dilek Dizdar & Tomasz Rozmysłowicz

The social world is not only a precondition for but itself a product of translation processes, as research into the role of translation in the construction of national or ethnic communities has shown (for example Brisset 1996; Cronin 1996; Venuti 1998; Kristmannsson 2005; Dizdar/Gipper/Schreiber 2015). However, translation – used here as an umbrella term for both translation and interpreting – plays an active part in the emergence of many more types of collectivities in various spheres of social life and on different levels of social organization: scientific communities (Stichweh 1984: 434), political movements (Tymoczko 2000; Baker 2013), religious gatherings (Hokkanen 2012), or multilingual dinner parties. How does translation contribute to the formation of these social entities? Are there identifiable general mechanisms and conditions at work? How does this contribution differ across social contexts, time, and space? And how can we conceptualize it? This special issue invites contributions that focus on different forms and contexts in which translation enables and shapes the emergence of groups, movements and communities of any size, form and duration and/or plays a role in moving or dissolving borders between already established collectivities. Such a broad view also allows for the integration of questions which are of increasing academic and societal relevance: translation’s involvement in processes of bordering, inclusion and exclusion, participation, and other related issues. At the same time, this makes it possible to establish a basis for comparing different social configurations in terms of the impact of translation: for instance, how can the impact of translation on nation-building processes be compared to its role in the construction of scientific communities or political movements?

With a thematic focus at the intersection of sociology and translation studies, this special issue aims to contribute to a dialogue between the two disciplines. It invites papers with a focus on theory and methodology as well as empirical contributions.

For more information, please find the call for papers here: <https://www.benjamins.com/series/tris/callforpapers.pdf>.
More information about the journal ‘Translation in Society’ at https://www.benjamins.com/catalog/tris.