Practical Information
On Friday, September 20 (from 9.45am to 3.30pm), the research groups TRACE (Translation and Culture, UGent) and CLIV (Center for Literature in Translation, UGent/VUB) will be organising a symposium on Translation and Resistance.
This multilingual symposium will be held in honour of the retirement of Désirée Schyns, and will take place at De Krook, De Blauwe Vogel room, Miriam Makebaplein 1, Ghent. Its aim is to explore the importance, impact, and ethical-political dimensions of resistance in translations. A celebration and a reception to mark Désirée Schyns’s retirement is to follow the symposium (from 4 pm). Registration is free but mandatory.
Theme and Scope
Resistance is the ability of individuals or groups to refuse or avoid external coercion. It manifests in various forms, from overt conflict to microtactics designed to undermine a prevailing order. Translators continuously engage in resistance: in their choice of source texts or translation strategies, in determining their stance towards market mechanisms and unequal power relations, or in advocating for better working conditions. How do translators combat entrenched ideas about monolingualism or the inviolability of the original? What judgments do they make when they retranslate canonical texts? How do they contend with the dilemmas that arise from translating accounts of a violent past or from translating postcolonial works? This international symposium will explore how translation can operate as a lever of resistance, and how it may do so in a range of ways: as a concrete translation practice, as an analytical category, and as a theoretical concept.
Programme
9.30 – 9.45: Welcome and coffee
9.45 – 10.00: Opening words
10.00 – 12.00: Translation and resistance
- 10.00: In search of resistance (Eva Wissenburg, in Dutch)
- 10.20: Translation as resistance and resistance to translate: Translation agents and policy in Spain and Latin America (Guillermo Sanz Gallego, in English)
- 10.40: Translating resistance: The Holocaust correspondence of Mrs. Sword (Bettina Brandt, in English)
- 11.00: Resisting translations: Big details in Norwegian translations of Patrick Modiano’s work (Geir Uvsløkk, in English)
- 11.20: Discussion
12.00 – 13.30: Lunch
13.30 – 15.00: Transcultural writing as a form of resistance
- 13u30: L’ « effet de traduction » dans l’écriture transculturelle comme forme de résistance au « monolinguisme de l’autre » (Myriam Geiser, in French)
- 13u50: Emancipation or capitulation: Edgar Caïro’s Temekoe/Kopzorg (Kim Andringa, in Dutch)
- 14u10: Traduction et résistance chez Laura Alcoba : Raconter la violence politique et l’exil entre la France et l’Argentine (Claudia Jünke, in French)
- 14u30: Discussion
16.00 – 20.00: Emeritus celebration followed by reception
