CHAMPAIGN,Ill. – About 70 noted scholars and practitioners from around the world will convene at the University of Illinois Oct. 14-16 for an international conference about translation and its effect on the humanities.
The conference, “Shifting Paradigms: How Translation Transforms the Humanities,” was coordinated by a bilateral committee from the co-sponsoring universities in France and the U.S., according to Elizabeth Lowe, the director of the Center for Translation Studies at the U. of I., which is co-sponsoring the event with the Université Denis-Diderot, in Paris.
The conference came about as the result of an agreement that the universities signed in 2009 to foster collaborations on educational exchanges, research and events.
A unit in the School of Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics, the translation studies center is in its third year. It offers undergraduate and graduate certificate programs that prepare students for careers as translators or language and cross-cultural communications specialists.
About 50 students are enrolled in the certificate programs. Lowe expects enrollment to “really take off” during the 2010-2011 academic year if the master’s degree program in translation that has been developed is approved and begins enrolling students for next fall.
The conference will focus on the nexus of theory, practice and institutional settings where translation takes place, including literary translations, medical texts, psychoanalysis, politics and popular culture.
“The fact that we’re getting such an impressive array of important thought-leaders in the translation field as speakers at the conference is a testimony to the fact that translation is becoming of great interest to scholars in the humanities and people who design curricula for humanities disciplines,” Lowe said. “We think it’s a very timely moment to introduce this topic and a wonderful way to raise the visibility of translation studies at Illinois.”
The opening keynote speech will be given by Catherine Porter, a faculty member at Cornell University and the State University of New York at Cortland and a past president of the Modern Language Association. Porter is the author of 35 books, book chapters and translations of articles by authors such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault.
Also scheduled to speak at the conference:
- Florence Binard, a faculty member at the Université Paris Diderot, a researcher on feminism, gender and queer theories and the author of several articles on women and eugenics.
- Marilyn Booth, a former faculty member at the U. of I. who is the Iraq Chair in Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and an award-winning translator of Arabic fiction.
- Jean-Noël Robert, a scholar of Japanese and Japanese culture and professor at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris known for his translations of sacred Japanese Buddhist texts that were almost unknown outside of Japan.
- Ilan Stavans, the Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College and a writer, commentator and translator of authors such as Pablo Neruda and Isaac Bashevis Singer.
- Lawrence Venuti, a faculty member at Temple University and noted theorist, historian and translator from Italian, French and Catalan whose recent translations include Ernest Farré’s “Edward Hopper: Poems” (Graywolf Press, 2009) and Massimo Carlotto’s crime novel “The Goodbye Kiss” (Europa Editions, 2006).
The conference will be in the Levis Faculty Center, 919 W. Illinois St., Urbana. Registration is $250. Registration for non-U. of I. graduate students and postdoctoral students is $125. U. of I. faculty members and students may attend the sessions for free but must purchase tickets in advance if they wish to attend the Thursday evening reception ($20 each) and the banquet ($40 each).
Online registration, the conference schedule and speaker biographies are available on the event’s website, www.conferences.illinois.edu/translation/. For questions about the conference, contact Nancy Simpson at Conferences and Institutes, in the Office of Continuing Education, at 217-244-9687 or e-mail nsimp1@illinois.edu.
