The 1st World Congress
on Translation Studies
10-14 APRIL 2017
Paris West University Nanterre-La Défense
on the theme
Translation Studies: an autonomous discipline
General Description
The World Congress on Translation Studies,
initiated by the French Society for Translation Studies (SoFT), will
take place every three years. Its aim is to review this vast field of
research and define collectively and officially its orientations in
order to affirm its autonomy.Its work will focus firmly on the most pertinent and recent conceptual and methodological developments while taking into consideration the three principal branches of the discipline: the history, practice and theories of translation.
The Congress is open to all specialists (researchers, teachers and translators) who are currently reflecting on translation theory and practice.
Description of the Congress in 2017
Several factors determine the autonomy of a
discipline: its place as an object of reflection in the history of the
intellect, the quality of its engagement in other disciplines, and its
impact on society.
Translation is one of the very first responses in actu
to the temptation of explaining the meaning of human language. And
beyond linguistic considerations and crossings between
languages-cultures, translation relates to a crucial reflection on its
very nature, its ontological foundations and the nature of reality
perceived and represented through consciousness. Well before the
translator Cicero made a few remarks on the dependance of language on
the philosophical environment in which it unfolds, readers and
translators of Heraclitus « the obscure » were confronted with the
central difficulty of translating the form of discourse of the
presocratic philosopher that was susceptible to imitate the structure of
reality, this possible isomorphism, intended or not, but which changes
the framework in which the translator operates. From this period in
time, right up to Octavio Paz and Yves Bonnefoy, there remains the
question of the translation of the pre-rhetorical and pre-conceptual
nature of the form, as well as the translation of “culturemes”,
“philosophemes” or “cognemes”.
During the XXth and XXIst centuries, not
only a growing number of disciplines have contributed to the enrichment
of translation studies but they have even been enriched by the theories
and concepts developed within the field of translation studies. This
transversal work has today gone beyond the first stage of
pluridisciplinarity – that wary relationship of proximity –, followed by
interdisciplinarity, the entente cordiale, to reach finally
that of transdisciplinarity, an assumed puerperium which alone leads to a
new painless delivery. Language sciences, on the one hand, comparative
literature, on the other hand, the philosophy of language and even
theology can no longer oversee by themselves (whether they be separated
or in groups) a discipline that has its own concepts, its own specialist
community, and above all, one that is based on its own practice.
The constant recourse to translation in all
the spheres of contemporary society – and as a result, the use of an
increasing number of professional translators –, the multiplication of
training courses and research further increases the tightening of the
links between practitioners as key players and theorists in this
discipline. Even if the university authorities in numerous countries do
not yet officially recognise translation studies, either through a lack
of awareness or for any other reason that escapes the world of
specialists, the fact remains that such a discipline, defined as the
reflection on all the dimensions of the act of translating, cannot be
lumped together with others. And indeed the principal objective of this
congress is to establish translation studies as an autonomous
discipline.
With this principle in mind, the congress
will therefore be organised around six key domains with as many
disciplined-based subsets that could combine all languages. Each domain
is divided into four sessions and each session into four or five related
workshops. A workshop will have between seven and eight papers spread
over a single day and followed by a debate where other presenters can
participate.
The first domain, which is more generalist and factual, will chart the state of play for translation studies in the world today.
An attempt will be made to give an update on the teaching of
translation studies in a large number of countries and across the
different continents, whether it be within schools or faculties of
translation or university courses from year one to doctorate studies.
Moreover, we will be able to focus on the progress in translation
studies research, the development of centres for research or specialist
publications, and the evolution of editorial policies for translation
studies or translations.
The second domain will try to provide an overview of the history of translations through its most varied aspects, both from the point of view of discourse and concepts encountered through the history of translation studies
to the specific genres it deals with, including, for example, literary
or scientific texts. This second domain aims at positioning itself as a
continuation of a dominant French model which, in recent years, has
concentrated on in-depth encyclopaedic research by teams of specialists
studying the History of Translations into French (the HTLF, directed by
Yves Chevrel and Jean-Yves Masson, Sorbonne University). This research
has led not only to exploring the history of the reception of
translations, but also to the history of translation practices, their
theories or the theoretical assumptions that their works reveal. Further
still, this congress in 2017 will provide an opportunity for an
important number of workshops to focus on the history of the
translations of philosophical or religious texts and, by doing so,
explore domains that are still rarely consulted, as shown in the results
provided by the HTLF.
The third domain will concentrate on all the most salient and innovative aspects of the theoretical approaches to translation in the XXIst century. Umberto
Eco in particular will be honoured this year. The transdisciplinary
approach will therefore be emphasised often in order to highlight the
theoretical links, at the heart of translation studies between, for
example, semantics and cognitivism, symbolism and semiotics, or between
feminism and gender studies, and even between certain psychoanalytical
concepts and some of the “theorems for translation”.
The papers in the fourth domain, will concentrate essentially on the methodologies for literary translation,
whether they be developed by professional translators or translators
from the world of academia. The presentations will thereby emphasise the
four most innovative or recurrent aspects of recent research into the
methods or the problematics of translation: textual genetics which has
developed since the 1970s and has recently led specialists in
translation studies to be interested in the contribution of this
discipline and to reconstitute, in a dynamic way, the very act of
translating in order to highlight the doubts, the flaws and the
achievements of the translator during the birth of the target text; the
growing challenges of untranslatability: the untranslatability
of certain texts belonging to recent disciplines such as law and the
humanities; aporiae in the translation of poetic, religious or philosophical texts, that have been revisited; or further still, the aporiae that arise from translating different types of oral discourse including its most contemporary, literary or dialectical forms.
The fifth domain will show the new calmer orientations taken by terminology-translation studies,
in the well-established translation fields of economics and commerce as
well as political discourse, and also try to pave the way for the new
field of legal translation studies and revamped sociolingusitics.
Electronic dictionaries, the fruit of recent research in general
linguistics and knowledge engineering, will be dealt with not only as
electronic tools for lexicological research, but also the latest
advances in ergonomics and meta-cognitition. Translation studies in the humanities develop
in terms of transposable and not superposable terminology. They do not
lend themselves to unity and normalisation. The workshops will shed new
light on the status of translation in relation to literary and
specialised translation that will bring together philosophers,
philologists and linguists.
Finally, the sixth domain will explore, in the context of the digital revolution and the upheavals in the audiovisual sector,
the linguistics of the corpus which, for several years now, has opened
up new fields for exploration and application for researchers in
translation studies by proposing corpus processing tools – aligned or
simultaneous –, automatic translation or translation tools, the creation
and management of data bases for terminology. This domain will also
explore the new translation tools using mobile phones and voice
recognition techniques, as well as the new professions that are entirely
linked to the evolution of digitalisation for post-editing, quality
assurance and project management. The physical, cognitive or
organisational ergonomics of professional translation activities will be
studied along with the development of collaborative tools. Finally,
this domain will show the need for even more cutting-edge reflection for
translation studies in relation to the cinema, subtitling, dubbing,
video games, and will also include the latest advances in the field of
sign languages.
***
All papers will be given preferably in French or in English, but also in Spanish.
NB : A handout in English (photocopies or PowerPoint slides) is required for presentations in Spanish that will include a description of the paper with a detailed plan.
Length of papers : 30 minutes
- Length of inaugural conferences on Monday: 45 minutes
- Length of keynote conferences: 45 minutes
Publication
The World Congress on Translation Studies will lead to on-line and printed publications.
The on-line publication will contain a series of films of the presentations, and printed texts.
The printed version with the Éditions Classiques Garnier in the review From Words to Acts
by SoFT and SEPTET will include a selection of the presentations. The
texts must not have been published previously, and they must be sent by
the presenters within three months of the Congress (30,000 characters
including spaces), i.e. before July 1st 2017. The publication standards of the Classiques Garnier must be followed carefully for the article to be accepted after examination by the review committee.
Δεν υπάρχουν σχόλια:
Δημοσίευση σχολίου