Colloquium ‘Translation in multilingual cultures’

May 20th, 21st and 22nd 2009 in Leuven, Belgium.

Dates: 20-22 May 2009, Leuven, Belgium. Proposals: of 300 words approximately (English or French) and a short CV should be submitted to the organizers before October 31st 2008. Papers and discussions will be held in English and French. Organizers: Reine Meylaerts, Reine.Meylaerts@arts.kuleuven.be, Lieven D'hulst, Lieven.Dhulst@kuleuven-kortrijk.be, Francis Mus, Francis.Mus@arts.kuleuven.be and Karen Vandemeulebroucke, Karen.Vandemeulebroucke@kuleuven-kortrijk.be The recent understanding of the multilingual character of past and present cultures asks for a reconsideration of disciplinary boundaries that are traditionally language-bound. The complex practice called 'literature' can no longer be fully apprehended (if it ever could) in linguistic isolation, or within constricting frameworks like 'space' or 'nation'. Beyond relatively familiar critical examinations of the national paradigm in the description of multilingual spaces like Canada, Belgium, the Caribbean Islands, Switzerland, Spain etc., it is now also necessary to examine how disciplinary procedures routinely obscure diversity within so-called monolingual cultures, as well as the artificial or fallacious formations that institutions like the Francophonie or the Commonwealth have imposed on regional, urban, island or other literatures. The questioning of linguistic, spatial or national boundaries in relation to which separate literatures are constructed, urges us to rethink the nature of the relationships between literatures: how to replace the familiar distinctions between 'source' and 'target' or between 'import' and 'export'? How do we accordingly describe the complex multilateral relations between major and minor literatures sharing the same territory, or between minor literatures belonging to different spaces? Does Translation Studies offer appropriate concepts and methods to analyse the new literary cartographies, to rethink literary relations in multilingual cultures where the notions of (linguistic) frontier and of (national) space are actually questioned? Is Translation Studies prepared to transgress the distinctions on which it has built part of its raison d'etre? We need to make explicit the discipline's presuppositions, but also the rationale behind the choice of translation corpora, and (re)assess the translational meta-language based on inadequate, reductive, binary distinctions. Thus, the concept of 'translation' itself, complemented with the epithet 'cultural', seeks to broaden its signification, until now restricted to an intertextual and interlingual scope. But is it necessary - by analogy with inter- and intralingual translations (Jakobson) - to distinguish between inter- and intracultural translations? And how do the latter differ from other operations of 'cultural transfer'? The colloquium is open to the totality of these historiographical and translational questions, preferably tackled by means of case studies dealing with European and non-European literatures. It focuses on the period ranging from the birth of monolingual ideologies in the 19th century to their radical questioning during the 20th century. Papers are invited which develop one or more of the following perspectives: - The conceptual and methodological articulation of different 'levels' of cultural translation: discursive, institutional, intracultural, intercultural etc. - The challenges to national literary histories raised by the notion of intracultural translation. - The comparison of forms and functions of translations within such discourses as history, philosophy and literature, in particular during the 19th century in Europe, when young, emerging cultures massively turned to translations. - The interaction between agents of translation that take on the role of intercultural mediators: translators, editors, magazines etc. - The tactics deployed by translations when they are produced in spaces with a strong political or ethnic coefficient? like Ireland (English, Gaelic) or Spain (Castilian, Catalan, Basque) as well as in most of the colonised or formerly colonised spaces. - The cartography of networks of translations (publishers, genres, translators) covering cultures that share the same language: Belgium, Switzerland, Quebec, France or Austria, Germany etc.