Special Issue
‘Translating Academia‘, Social Science Information, 62(4), 2023.
Read the introduction to the special issue here
International Workshop
Sala de Juntes, Facultat de Ciències Polítiques i de Sociologia
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 3rd June 2022
This international workshop brought together academics from translation studies and sociology, translators and journal editors. The focus was the role of translation in knowledge production in the humanities and the social sciences, with an emphasis on Southern Europe. To emphasise the importance of multilingual practices, the presentations were in English and Spanish.
During the morning session, there were two keynote speakers: Karen Bennett (Associate Professor in Translation at Nova University of Lisbon) and Fruela Fernández (Lecturer in English Studies at the University of the Balearic Islands). Bennett discussed Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s term ‘epistemicide’, her application of it to translation and more recent shifts in the production and dissemination of knowledge caused by the multilingual paradigm and the constant reshaping of English. Fernández advanced the concept of ‘expanded translation’ in the example of how the ‘commons’ has been adopted and modified through collective, non-centralised and unequal processes in Spanish politics after the 15-M or indignados movement.
In the afternoon, some preliminary results from the ‘Political Translation’ research project were provided. Esperança Bielsa (Associate Professor in Sociology at UAB) and Carmen Bestué (Associate Professor in Translation and Interpreting at UAB) presented on a series of semi-structured interviews conducted with academic translators (Catalan or Spanish to English). This included information on their professional profiles, backgrounds and working conditions, as well as on translating strategies and collaborative practices between academic authors and translators. Mattea Cussel (Doctoral candidate in Translation Studies at UPF) offered an analysis of a translocal reader study of the Spanish translations of US Latina/o writers.
The international workshop ended with round table presentations from Oriol Barranco (Associate Professor in Sociology at UAB), Jan Engberg (Editor of Fachsprache, Alan Lounds (academic translator and member of Mediterranean Editors & Translators), and Peter Wagner (Editor of Social Science Information). In a stimulating, open discussion, the participants exchanged views and experiences of academic translation based on their various roles in this process.
