CALL FOR PAPERS
EDITED VOLUME: Translating Minorities and Conflict in Literature. Texts, Contexts and new paradigms in literary translation
This volume aims to bring together new insights into the field of translation studies (particularly literary translation) and the study of ‘minorities’ that has until recently been confined to the field of Cultural Studies. It is an interdisciplinary work selection that proves that translation has a direct and organic relationship with social movements born in the periphery and at the same time it is another minorised object of study in Social and Literary Studies itself.
Following in the footsteps of recent conferences (Justice and minorized languages under a post-monolingual order, Castelló de la Plana, 2017; Translating the Minor, KU Leuven, 5-7 May 2021) and publications (Translation and minority, lesser-used and lesser-translated languages and cultures, JoSTrans, 2015), the aim of this conference is to explore the ways in which translating literature can serve to protect and empower minority, minor and lesser-used languages, both in contexts of multilingualism where the power balance of the languages spoken in the same country is often unequal, and in situations of conflict, where authors and translators face the threat of physical harm, coercion, censorship and/or exile.
We understand ‘minorities’ not only as the ethnic, linguistic, religious and political groups whose works have been subjected to tampering, manipulation and censorship during the translation processes, but also as the ‘peripheral’ languages and cultures that struggle to be translated and recognized in the ‘center’, increasingly represented by the Anglo-American culture (Heilbron and Sapiro, 2007, 2018).
With these cultural and sociological turns in mind, we would like to stress Bassnett and Lefevere’s words who, already at the dawn of the discipline of Translation Studies, stated that “the study of the manipulative processes of literature as exemplified by translation can help us toward a greater awareness of the world in which we live” (1993; vii). We would like to broaden this awareness by studying new forms and new ways in which the literary works of minoritized and oppressed groups circulate or have circulated in the past, resulting not only in new literary forms and genres, but also in a new way of representing the Other.
In this spirit, we welcome contributions on the following (or related) topics:
- Translation from/into indigenous languages
- Literary translation and sexual minorities
- Translation in Gendered Contexts
- Migrant literature
- Postcolonial literature
- Cultural transfer peripheral languages and cultures
- Translation in situations of censorship and war
- The literary translator as an activist
- The manipulation of national and cultural images through translation
Publisher: Frank & Timme
SCHEDULE
1 September 2021: deadline for paper submission. Papers shall not exceed 8,000 words, including bibliography. Submissions that are not proofread by an English native speaker will not be accepted.
31 December 2021: notification of acceptance with the comments of the peer reviewers.
1 February 2022: submission of the revised versions (first round of peer review).
31 March 2022: submission of the revised versions (second round of peer review).
30 April 2022: submission of the manuscript to the publisher.
Further enquiries about submission are most welcome to: lr1romum@uco.es; pgentile@units.it
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.