Abstracts and bios

Mohammad ABOOMAR

American anti-evolutionism in Arabic translation: scientific knowledge filtered through religious worldviews

The incongruence between the evolutionary and creationist worldviews is in essence an aspect of the incompatibility between what Bennett (2023, p. 445) characterises as knowledge that is rational, objective and universal and knowledge that is culturally embedded, embodied or performative.While the paradigms of modern science rationally adopt an evolutionary worldview,competing religious paradigms adopt variations of the creationist worldview depending on their respective brands of culturally embedded knowledge. Nonetheless, these paradigms inevitably interact in order to exchange information and interpretations. This paper views the knowledge exchange between these paradigms as a form of epistemic translation that involves recontextualization and/or reinterpretation.

A recent translation flow of American creationism into Arabic by a number of Islamic organisations based in different countries brings epistemic translation into focus. Considering that American creationist literature is rooted in the Christian tradition and produced primarily for a Christian audience, what triggered this translation flow and how have these works been adapted to fit the Islamic context? These questions are pursued in the paratexts of 37 translations published from 2014 onwards, as paratextual elements are expected to be a significant site for epistemic translation to reveal itself. Preliminary results suggest that the works in question are being translated epistemically as well as linguistically. For example, while the translated works are presented as scientifically viable refutations of the evolutionary worldview, conceptions of intelligent design are adapted to neutralise the specifically Judaeo-Christian connotations, while  accounts of young earth creationism are utterly rejected and removed from the texts because they disagree with Islamic accounts. Arising from ideological motives, such shifts suggest that translation between epistemic systems is at hand.[1] 

Bio: Mohammad Aboomar is an Egyptian PhD researcher based in Dublin City University, Ireland. Funded by the Irish Research Council, Mohammad is currently studying representations of biological evolution in contemporary Arabic discourse. His research interests include scientific translation, translation history, retranslation, indirect translation, Arabic corpus linguistics, and science popularisation.

Talbi Sidi AHMED

The concept of memory between quantum neuroscience and oriental epistemology

This paper dwells on the concept of memory, approached from three main perspectives. The first involves explicating the quantum neural formation of memory, where unspecific axons and dendrites are activated in the hippocampus and cortex  stimulating neural pathways as the genesis of memory. This activation involves a heightened level of entanglement. Hence, the quantum argumentative turn is embraced to assure the multidimensional scales of memory.

The second perspective looks at memory in the light of Zhuangzi's philosophy of flow and forgetfulness, in which memory is contemplated in conjunction with Daoist terms for "attention", "focus", “oblivion” and "mindfulness" - a paradigm of knowledge embedded in the neurophysiological dimension of Daoist meditation. Based on this introductory delineation, the question is: how can the mind be unravelled from memory knots, which are repetitive neural cycles of sub-consciousness synapse connections in the sake of a flourished mind, reattached with the joyful energy of the "flow"?

Thirdly, and in relation with translationality, I attempt to shed light on the nature of inter-epistemic knowledge transmission between quantum neurology and the epistemology of Daoism. As a conclusion, I extrapolate the interpretative requisite of inter-epistemic translation as precondition of multiphase evolution in knowledge and emphasise the reciprocal correlativity of different knowledge systems uncovered in the process of translation.[2] 

Bio: Talbi Sidi Ahmed has a PhD in Philosophy of Interpretation in Translating Philosophy, obtained from Faculty of Letters and Humain Sciences, Rabat, Morocco. He is currently exploring the spectrum of translationality in science in the context of hermeneutics of translation, with a focus on the convergences between neurology and quantum physics, a new phase in philosophical representations, and the multidimensional evolution in knowledge. His main research interests include: translating science, hermeneutics of translation and philosophy of interpretation.

Karen BENNETT

Popular science as inter-epistemic translation: a case study

This paper analyses a popular science article from the National Geographic magazine (Bhattacharjee 2017) as an instance of inter-epistemic translation. Taking as its source text a research article previously published in the scientific journal Child Psychology (Talwar and Lee 2008), it compares the two with a view to determining the strategies used by the author to re-package the research for a new readership. It concludes that these are no different, in essence, to those employed in conventional interlingual translation, and argues that consideration of the processes involved can shed light not only on the ‘operating norms’ (Toury 2012) at work in the production of popular science but also on the construction of (specialised and non-specialised) discourses more broadly.

Bio: Karen Bennett has an MA and PhD in Translation Studies, and teaches Translation at Nova University, Lisbon, where she is Associate Professor and Coordinator of the Master’s programme in Translation. She also coordinates the Translationality strand at the research unit CETAPS (Centre for English, Translation and Anglo-Portuguese Studies). As regards her editorial activities, she is general editor of the journal Translation Matters and member of the editorial board of the Brill series Approaches to Translation Studies.

Anémone Loko BILLE

Transmission of the life and earth sciences in Duálá through epistemic translation

According to the 1996 constitution and the 1998 law on the orientation of education in Cameroon, national languages are ensured a presence in the educational system through imposition of the Head of State. However, despite experimentation with models such as extensive trilingualism (Tadadjeu, 1997), the trajectory model (Bitjaakody, 2012) or extensive quadrilingualism (Assoumou, 2005), minority languages are still underused as vehicles for the transmission of knowledge and their presence is generally limited to terminological translation. This study questions the meaning-making processes that occur within the transmission of life and earth sciences in the (minority) Duálá language. Drawing on an interdisciplinary theoretical framework from translation studies, social semiotics and educational science, it studies the epistemic and intersemiotic translation processes involved in transmitting western science in an African language. Semiotic artefacts and classroom interactions are observed and recorded, and pupil’s self-reflections are taken into account, supplemented with considerations of multimodality. This study brings new insights in favour of the introduction of minority languages in Cameroonian educational system.

Bio:Marthe Anemone Loko Bille Matio is a PhD student in Translation Studies and Assistant Lecturer in the Department of Translation and Interpreting of the Faculty of Social Sciences and International Relations (FSSIR) at the Protestant University of Central Africa (PUCA), Yaounde-Cameroon. Within the framework of this project, she researches the intersemiotic translation processes that occur in knowledge transmission into minority (particularly African) languages (Strand B).

Audrey CANALÈS

Performative translation as decolonizing experience

How do we study artistic performance from a translational point of view, and why does it matter? In a globalised world where knowledge from the political North is the norm, it is very difficult to even imagine different perspectives, outside the prism of capitalism, colonialism,and the patriarchy (Santos 2018). In this presentation, I will show how artists can be visible translation agents who have the creative power to let social realities emerge. I will explain how self-defined post-Mexican artivist Guillermo Gómez-Peña uses their body as a translation zone and plays with depriving their North American audiences of linguistic translation. I will put Gómez-Peña’s work in parallel with Wolastoqiyiksinger Jeremy Dutcher, in Canada. Whereas Gómez-Peñais opting for abrasive ways to engage with the public, Dutcher uses his platform to invite a wider audience to listen to stories of healing and resilience, reclaiming the name Wolastoqiyik (People of the beautiful bountiful river) instead of the colonial name Malecite (Broken talkers) and the concept of Motewolonuwok (spiritual person, magician), which is the title of their latest album. As translation scholars, studying such performative translations pushes the boundaries of our imagination (Canalès 2020) and forces us to look at our discipline differently, in order to propose new interdisciplinary tools and think in terms of territories rather than existing maps (Sánchez 2017). Considering artistic performance as translation is as important and can feel uncomfortable. However,  I hope to convince you that it holds the keys to necessary acts of experiential and intellectual magic.[3] 

Bio: Audrey Canalès is a translation theorist with a background in information technologies and visual arts. After first training in translation, she worked as an IT consultant for private and institutional clients. This multidisciplinary professional journey has nurtured her reflections on the translational processes at work on screens and on stage. Her recent research explores the links between translation and contemporary narrative forms, such as transmedia storytelling. Her story-oriented approach re-problematizes text as a narrative fabric that encompasses various media including books, series, videos, board games, and play. She is now an assistant professor of audiovisual translation at the University of Sherbrooke, Canada, where she focuses on media accessibility and inclusivity problematics.

Tiago CARDOSO

Mary Delany’s scientific knowledge in British Flora (1769) through the lens of epistemic translation

In 1769, Mary Delany, an English woman better known for her botanical paper collages, translated the first Linnaean work on British flora to be published in England, William Hudson’s Flora Anglica (1762), from Latin into English. Largely due to the properties of her text, which remained handwritten and unpublished, Delany’s work, unlike those of other Early Modern English women translators of science such as Aphra Behn and Elizabeth Carter, has been overlooked until now. Stemming from a forthcoming book chapter entitled “Mary Delany’s British Flora (1769): Female Agency in the Translation of Science” (in Translation and Transposition in the Early Modern Period, Eds. K. Bennett and R. M. Puga, Routledge, 2023), which analyses Delany’s work as a scientific translator in her time and place and the constraints and opportunities inherent to her endeavour, this paper interprets the transfer of scientific knowledge from  Hudson’s Flora Anglica to her British Flora as a form of inter-epistemic translation. A systematic comparison between source and target text reveals that Delany indeed frames the work for a different readership, simplifying the plant descriptions and inserting drawings, amongst other things. Though the manuscript could have been for her personal use, it may also have been directed at other women, such as her niece, Mary Dewes, and other non-specialised readers, for whom the terminology and language of the source text could have proved difficult. With this presentation, the author ultimately hopes to shine a light on the particularities of Delany’s scientific knowledge in British Flora and the text’s role as Flora Anglica’s “other” and to contribute to the dissemination of the concept of inter-epistemic translation.

Bio: Tiago Cardoso (MA in Translation Studies, focus on translation history) is managing editor at Cogitatio Press and a member of the Translationality strand at CETAPS, Portugal. With the production and circulation of ideas and knowledge at the centre of his study, his research focuses on book history, translation history, and intellectual history in the Early Modern period.

Angelo CATTANEO

Translating wor(l)ds[4] : world cartography in Early Modern missionary contexts in Asia

This paper analyses the translation, migration and transformation of cosmographic ideas and cartographic representations and devices from Europe to Japan and China, showing their long-distance transformative journeys in space and time.

During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, despite Copernicus’, Kepler’s and Galilei’s heliocentric visions, most European scholars and natural philosophers continued to conceive the universe (mundus) as geocentric. As an example, Alessandro Piccolomini’s La sfera del mondo (Rome, 1540) and Christophorus Clavius’ edition of Sacrobosco’s De Sphaera (Rome, 1570) – both fundamental works for astronomical and cartographic education in Europe – conveyed the notion of a geocentric universe. These books were also important for Jesuit education and in Jesuit missionary contexts in Asia: they were among the very few Western books materially available to Matteo Ricci SJ when he started his mission in China, and began to draw planispheres and introduce Western cosmology, cosmography and cartography to the Chinese literati in around 1585.

This research looks at how linguistic, cultural and inter-epistemic translations of Western cosmology, cosmography and cartography developed at the time of the encounters between European missionaries, Japanese Buddhist monks and Chinese Confucian literati, and tries to understand the different functions, strategies, forms of curiosity and communication that occurred in local contexts of interactions in Japan and China.

Bio: Angelo Cattaneo holds a Ph.D. in History from the European University Institute in Florence. He is currently a Researcher for CNR (National Research Council of Italy) and a Foreign-Affiliated Researcher of CHAM (Centre for the Humanities, NOVA FCSH, Lisbon). His research spans the 13th to the 17th centuries and focuses on the cultural construction of space (cosmography, cartography and travel literature) and the history of cross-cultural encounters at the interface of the European and Asian empires. He was the co-P.I. of the project Interactions between Rivals: The Christian Mission and the Buddhist Sects in Japan (1549-1647) and the P.I. of the exploratory project The Space of Languages: The Portuguese Language in the Early Modern World.

Helen-Mary CAWOOD

Photography in a constellation of eco-translation: reflections on the epistemic translation of the ‘veld’

The focus of this paper is on analysing how photography, as an inter-epistemic translation of human experience, is able to translate complex and interconnected experiences of the non-human other, namely the South African ‘veld’ (i.e. open rural and semi-rural South African environments such as farmland and grassland). To do this, it  uses Michael Cronin’s (2017) notion of eco-translation as a framework in which the particularity of the context and the unique identities of different relationships within such a context are translated. Cronin articulates the importance of developing a paradigm of political ecology through studying the “social, cultural, political and economic factors affecting the interaction of humans with other humans, other organisms and the physical environment” (2017, p. 2). To do this for the South African context, the work of Louise Green (2020) will be used, which arguably complements and extends these arguments by Cronin, especially with regard to her own articulation of the need for a critical epistemology for translating, interrogating and critiquing differing knowledges. Aside from the context-specific inclusion of the unique characteristics of the South African post-colony, Green’s framework of the ‘constellation’, as drawn from Walter Benjamin, has a number of similarities to eco-translation, specifically in relation to the crucial need to confront environmental and human distress in the Anthropocene by “assembl[ing] research from different orders of knowledge to address a crisis that brings into proximity geophysics, history,habit, culture, and capital” (Green, 2020, p.29). From this integration of the theoretical frameworks of Cronin and Green, which could broadly be called a ‘constellation of eco-translation’, this paper explores the potential of photography to translate differing experiences of the veld. These differing experiences refer to the veld as: 1) an ‘escape’ from the pace of modern life; 2) a necessary dwelling space for homeless people in the city; and 3) as habitat for the indigenous fauna and flora that flourish in these spaces. In capturing images of these experiences of veld, a process of eco-translation can begin to take place. By identifying photographs and subsequent discussions of the veld on public platforms (in particular social media) this paper will explore ways (if any) in which photographs of the South African veld allow for this to take place.[5] 

Bio: Helen-Mary Cawood is a lecturer and researcher at the Department of Philosophy at the University of the Free State, South Africa. Her focus areas of research are eco-philosophy, post- and decolonial philosophy, critical social theory, memory studies, and the Nostalgia industry. Her recent research has been explicitly interdisciplinary with a colleague from Translation Studies where they have focused on urban wildlife photography as translation of solastalgia, as well as reconceptualising ecofascism in the Global South through an ecosemiotic approach to problematising marginalised nostalgic narratives.

She spends her happiest days running and hiking amongst the beetles, butterflies, birds and bushes of the most beautiful mountain trails of South Africa, which deeply informs her approach to her work and research.  

Flávia COELHO

Conception of a Chinese philosophical tradition in the Portuguese linguistic and cultural system: analysis of Chinese-Portuguese translations of the classic 道德经 (Dàodéjīng)

The aim of this study is to analyse the transposition of Taoism concepts in three recent European Portuguese translations of the first chapter of 道德经 (Dàodéjīng), particularly delving into the intricate challenge of articulating these concepts within a linguistic framework predominantly shaped by Judeo-Classical philosophical traditions. The paper will also explore some concepts from Taoist philosophy, particularly the concept of 'dao', as understood within Chinese language and culture. The study then evaluates whether the translations are source-language (SL) or target-text (TT) oriented, and examines translators' decisions as regards terminology and other linguistic elements, considering their approach to the conventions of classical writing in a contemporary context. It will explore how translators handle the transfer of cultural and philosophical knowledge and assess the presence or absence of interference in the translations. The theoretical framework includes descriptive translation studies introduced by Toury in the 1970s; hermeneutics, explored through Steiner (1975), Gadamer (1960/1990), and Stolze (2011); and intertextuality, as outlined by Venuti (2009), all of which share a common emphasis on the significance of interpretation and the cultural factors that influence translators. References to Cheung (2002), Qing Chang (2017) and Robinson (2015) will contribute to a comparative analysis of translation strategies, revealing the dynamic exchange undertaken by translation. Lastly, Wolf's notion of interference from the third space (2008) will aid in understanding cultural identity through translation. The findings aim to contribute to translation studies by shedding light on the intricacies of conveying philosophical ideas across languages and cultures.

Bio: Flávia Coelho holds a PhD in Modern Languages: Cultures, Literatures and Translation (speciality Translation Studies) from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Coimbra. She has a bachelor’s degree in Translation and Interpreting (Portuguese/Chinese) from the Polytechnic Institute of Leiria, where she has worked as a teacher of translation and interpreting in the same language pair since 2016. Her main fields of interest include translation as a foreign-language learning tool; the relationship between pragmatics, context and cultural aspects in both translation and interpretation; the multimodal translation-based approaches and the Communicative Language Teaching approach. She is also a researcher in CETAPS at Nova University, Lisbon.

Ana Sofia CORREIA

A practical approach to Plain Language Summaries

In today's world, the rapid global dissemination of medical and scientific information underscores the critical need for clarity and accessibility in healthcare communication. My paper will focus on the crucial role of Plain Language Summaries (PLS) in making complex research accessible to a broad, non-specialist audience. My key focus will be on PLS as a form of intralingual translation between paradigms. This includes examining the strategies for breaking down complex scientific and medical concepts into easily digestible, plain-language content without losing the essence and accuracy of the original research. I will provide detailed, actionable guidelines for crafting materials that are not only clear and concise but also engaging and relevant. This involves considering the nuances of language simplification, narrative structuring, and cultural sensitivity, ensuring that the materials resonate with diverse audiences. Additionally, I will tackle common challenges encountered in this translation process, such as maintaining scientific rigour while ensuring readability, addressing potential misconceptions,and the ethical considerations in simplifying complex data. In summary, this talk aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the pivotal role of Plain Language Summaries in bridging the information divide and enhancing equitable access to important scientific and medical information.

Bio: Ana Sofia Correia is an English-to-Portuguese medical translator and writer based in Portugal (www.anasofiacorreia.com). For the past 16 years, she has worked with life-sciences companies, contract research organisations, language service providers, and medical communication agencies. After 12 years as an in-house translator at the Center for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra and the Nursing School of Coimbra, she became a full-time freelancer in 2019. She is a member of APTRAD (where she is also a mentor), ATA, MET, Tremédica, EMWA, APMW, and SciComPT. In addition to her translation and writing services, she runs the Medical Translation Mentoring program, a community-based mentorship program specifically designed for medical and life sciences translators.

Oliver CURRIE

Visible and hidden translation in 19th-century folklore collection: a case-study from the United Kingdom and France

Translation has always had a central role in the collection of folk knowledge and traditions in the sister disciplines of folklore, ethnography and anthropology, not only for the obvious reason that the material was generally documented and published in different languages (typically central) from those (typically peripheral) of the communities from which it was collected. Translation is also, in a less visible way, so deeply integrated into folklore methodology, to the extent that determining where translation begins and ends, or even distinguishing between original and translated texts can be problematic. Folklore translation differs crucially from prototypical translation processes, where the translator is independent of the original, as the folklore collector is often at the same time the translator and co-author, and informant, of the original text. This paper explores some controversial aspects of the non-transparent use of translation in folklore collection in 19th-century United Kingdom and France, at a time when folklore was emerging as a discipline. The United Kingdom and France were both multilingual and multinational nation states with hegemonic national official languages – English and French – coexisting with a number of peripheral minoritised languages. Most folklore was collected from rural (“peasant”) communities speaking peripheral languages – e.g. Gaelic-speaking Ireland and Scotland in the United Kingdom; Breton-speaking Brittany, the Basque Country, Corsica, the Occitan-speaking South of France – but often published primarily or exclusively in English or French. At a key time for nation-building, folklore was seen as a national cultural treasure and marker of identity both for hegemonic nation states and national minorities subsumed within them. However, the publication of folklore (especially folktale) collections only in translation – where the use of translation was not even always disclosed – led controversially to the appropriation of the cultural heritage of national minorities as that of the hegemonic nation state. Further, preconceived ideas of what constituted the proper object of folklore study meant that certain aspects of folklore were recorded and preserved at the expense of others, and that the form, and to a lesser extent, content of folklore was decontextualised and modified during the collection, translation and publication processes.

Bio: Oliver Currie is an assistant professor at the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, where he teaches translation and historical linguistics. His research interests include translation in the early modern period (particularly the Bible), translation to and from peripheral languages, and the translation of folklore and oral literature. He also has research interests in historical linguistics (in particular syntactic variation and change), sociolinguistics and language contact, with a focus on the Celtic languages (particularly Welsh), English and French. He did a BA in Modern and Medieval Languages and an MPhil Linguistics at the University of Cambridge and completed his PhD in Linguistics at the University of Ljubljana on the development of verb-initial word order in Early Modern Welsh.  

Mira CZARNEKA

Translating sites – the story of a hometown

In her Introduction to Translation Sites. A Field Guide, Sherry Simon explains that translation sites are polyglot places, which offer  competing versions of history and unequal struggles between present and past. In her book, she invites the reader to explore hotels, markets, museums, checkpoints, gardens, bridges, towers and streets across the world as sites of translation. Amongst other things, she considers the linguistic landscape of Eastern Europe, shaped by a succession of political regimes, and explains that the fall of the Habsburg Empire, two World Wars and the end of Communism affected the cosmopolitan cities of Central Europe, which became a subject of many forms of language makeovers. In this paper, I would like to draw the reader's attention to the history inscribed in the site of my hometown of Debica,situated in South-East Poland, which survived the Communist era to reveal a vacuum of history. Remaining in the sphere of the influence of the Soviet Union did not involve the imposition of another language so much as the distortion of reality, the robbing of history, so that no connection to the town’s and the country’s past could be retrieved. Thus, the discussion in this paper centres around the translation of absence (the term used by Sherry Simon in her book). I will talk about a few selected places in my hometown, whose bleak appearance exemplified the non-history of the socialist years, but which now look different, testifying in some cases to an alternative past and triggering inquiries into the history of other buildings, still neglected or whose pre-socialist story has yet not been recovered. For illustration, I will use the photos of those places from different moments in the town’s history. The discussion will also draw on the work of David Hume, who in The Past is a Foreign Country – Revisited, writes about the interrelation of memory and history, how messages from another time recall people who have been expelled or annihilated, and how history, as a translation of reality, can be manipulated in the attempt to erase memory.

Bio: Mira Czarnecka has a PhD in literature and is a senior lecturer at the Chair for Translator Education, Pedagogical University in Cracow, Poland. She also translates American and British literature into Polish. Her research interests focus on literary translation, and specifically the translation of non-standard language, as well as postcolonial and feminist translation theory. Her other interests include English for business, and business communication.

Ivan DELAZARI

Retranslating musical knowledge: Adrienne Kennedy’s She Talks to Beethoven as an inter-epistemic and intercultural cluster

The paper argues that intersemiotic translation, defined narrowly by Jakobson (1959) as a one-way “interpretation of verbal signs by means of … non-verbal sign systems'' but stretched in intermedial studies (e.g. Bruhn & Schirrmacher 2022) to all reciprocal transpositions between arts and media, necessarily involves an inter-epistemic transfer. Music, whose reputation as either a sign or knowledge system is, at best, controversial, holds a huge stock of communicative and intercultural currency as a “language” empowered to transmit affective (somatic and icotic, in Robinson’s [1997, 2001, 2017] terms) information across individual, national, and civilizational borders. Once Cartesian dualism is undermined by cognitive theories that recognize the role of emotions in the embodied mind’s configuration of knowledge, and/or incorporate non-western thought (Varela et al. 1991; Damasio 1994; Lakoff & Johnson 1999; Robinson 2016), music as a portal of knowledge appears less counterintuitive, yet Robinson (2017) uses Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker not Orfeo as a cornerstone study case of inter epistemic translation. This paper discusses the use of Western classical music and its star composer’s aura in the dense cluster of embodied knowledge encoded in African American dramatist Adrienne Kennedy’s one-act play She Talks to Beethoven (1989). Set in the newly independent Ghana of 1961 and naming Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah, and Léopold Sédar Senghor alongside Beethoven as its protagonists’ virtual interlocutors, the play has “the music...equal in length the text” and (per)forms a musical stimulacrum (cf. Delazari 2021) as a token of translationality between the global North and South (cf. Santos 2016).

Bio: Ivan Delazari is an assistant professor in the Department of Languages, Linguistics and Literature at Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan. His two PhDs in Philology and in English are from St. Petersburg State University (2004) and Hong Baptist University (2018), respectively. He is the author of Musical Stimulacra: Literary Narrative and the Urge to Listen (Routledge, 2021), a book-length study of intersemiotic musicality in three contemporary American novels, and numerous other publications in comparative literature, word-and-music studies, and narrative theory, including peer-reviewed journal articles “Overhearing Diegetic Music” (Narrative 26.2), “Contrafactual Counterpoint” (CounterText 5.3), “Literary ‘Sonatas’” (Comparative Literature Studies 58.2), “Madeleine Thien’s Chinese Encyclopedia” (Genre 54.2) and, with Jason S. Polley, “Covert Multimodality” (Style 56.4). He was a Fullbright Visiting Scholar at the University of Mississippi in 2009 and a Hong Kong PhD Fellow between 2014 and 2017.

Jennifer DOBSON

Lavoisier’s chemical revolution as inter-epistemic translation: the grammar, terminology, values and ideologies of a paradigm shift

Known as the “father of modern chemistry”, Antoine Lavoisier (1743–1794) is now considered a key figure in the paradigm shift between the old theories (notably vestiges of alchemy and belief in the hypothetical substance, phlogiston) and the new, modern conceptualisation of chemistry, devoid of alchemy and phlogiston. As stated by Bennett, the acceptance of a new knowledge paradigm “depend[s] partly upon the grammatical and terminological resources available in the target language, but also [...] upon the values and ideologies that hold sway in the culture of reception” (2023: 444). Conceptualising the chemical revolution as a translation event, I will consider how each of the four above-mentioned aspects was involved in the communication and acceptance of Lavoisier’s theories. Three texts in particular were central to Lavoisier and his colleagues’ communication of the new ideas: La méthode de nomenclature chimique (tr: Chemical Nomenclature Method) (Lavoisier et al. 1787), Lavoisier and colleagues’ French translation of Kirwan’s Essay on Phlogiston, which included their arguments against the phlogiston theory (1788), and Lavoisier’s Traité Elémentaire de Chimie (Elemental treatise of Chemistry) (1789). I will position these key texts within the shifting values and ideologies of the scientific community at the time and assess how, if at all, they form a bridge, or translation, between the “embedded and embodied” knowledge of alchemy, and the “objective [and] rational” empirical knowledge of modernity (Bennett 2023), framing this within the four elements of paradigm shift cited above. The terminological resources introduced in the method of nomenclature (Lavoisier et al. 1787) have already been discussed at some length (e.g. Lefèvre 2018). This study will highlight the mechanisms by which the new terminology packages the new ideology, and focus on how the new terminology is presented and integrated into the subsequent texts. The grammatical resources mobilised by Lavoisier et al. will be discussed in more detail, paying particular attention to how the key texts relate to the ongoing development of scientific discourse and analysing features of that discourse within the texts, such as grammatical metaphorization in the form of nominalization, grammatical removal of the agent, and use of verbs to describe lexico-semantic logical relationships (Halliday and Martin 2004). Through this project, I aim to show that the conceptualisation of Lavoisier’s chemical revolution as inter-epistemic translation can reveal new insights into the mechanisms of paradigm shift and provide greater understanding of how Lavoisier and colleagues’ work came to be accepted.[6] 

Bio: Jennifer Dobson is a second-year PhD student in the Translation Studies programme at UCP and NOVA in Lisbon. She holds a BSc in Chemistry with French, and an MSc in Scientific, Technical and Medical translation. She has professional experience as a scientific and medical translator, and is particularly interested in research at the intersection of translation studies with these disciplines.

Joanna DYBIEC-GAJER

Born to be translated: the practices of knowledge-sharing in non-fiction picture books for younger audiences

This paper analyses educational, non-fiction books, created primarily for younger audiences, in the light of mechanisms involved in knowledge-transfer and mediation. It focuses on translation(ality) in a dual, inter-epistemic and intercultural/interlingual perspective. First, it argues that designing, writing and illustrating popular non-fiction picture books for children constitutes an act of epistemic translation as it involves “narrative reframing ‘which is never a “cloning” of knowledge, of course, but always involves... “translationality”: adaptation, transformation’ (Robinson 2017: 200). It focuses on how such texts are constructed, especially with respect to text-image relations, and on strategies of knowledge-sharing aimed specifically at young audiences. Secondly, it analyses how such picturebooks are transformed in intercultural, interlingual translation, and investigates to what extent and on what levels shifts occur that affect how knowledge is transferred into new cultural and linguistic settings. Rooted in the methodology of Descriptive Translation Studies, the research uses writer- and reader-oriented methods of data collection (interviews, focus groups). The corpus consists of selected contemporary artistic non-fiction picture books of the Polish school of illustration, which enjoy critical acclaim and have been widely translated, and as such are worth of systematic, academic enquiry.

Bio: Joanna Dybiec-Gajer has a PhD in Literary Studies from Universität Paderborn and is Associate Professor at the Pedagogical University of Kraków, where she is Head of the Chair for Translator Education and Coordinator of the EMT affiliated translation programme.  Her main research interests concern picture books and comics in translation, translating for younger audiences, fan translation, translator training and translation studies methodology.

Pietro GORI

Incommensurability and (un)translatability in Thomas Kuhn's mature philosophy

This paper aims to explore Thomas Kuhn's mature reflections on the issues of incommensurability and translatability. In the mid-1980s, Kuhn delivered a series of lectures and started working on a new book (which sadly remained unfinished) in which he tried to develop a theory of meaning change that would strengthen his philosophy of science. In those texts, Kuhn argues that to master a language is to become socialised into a particular culture and to see the world through the lens of its natural and social taxonomy. Therefore, in order to explain why past beliefs were reasonable and plausible in their own epistemic context, the historian must behave as an anthropologist, acquiring the conceptual vocabulary of past communities and then using his own language to teach that vocabulary to others. In fact, for Kuhn, an out-of-date statement can only be understood within its own lexical structure, within the system of beliefs formed by the assumptions of its users; hence, most statements elude translation, in the sense that what they say is ineffable in later lexicons. Since scientific knowledge is embodied in the language in which those statements were cast, in order to understand that knowledge the historian needs to master the structured lexicon of past scientific communities - a lexicon that is typically incommensurable with his own. As we read in the closing remark of the 1986 lecture "Scientific Knowledge as Historical Practice", in which Kuhn displays an interesting account of his late developmental view of science, "no significant transformation of our understanding of science can take place without transforming our understanding of knowledge as well".

Bio: Pietro Gori is senior researcher at the NOVA University of Lisbon (Institute of Philosophy), where he also acts as invited lecturer for the chairs of Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Knowledge. His academic expertise focuses especially on Modern and Contemporary Philosophy; History and Philosophy of Science; Epistemology; and Philosophical Anthropology. He has worked extensively on the representatives of an anti-foundationalist turn in philosophy (e.g. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ernst Mach and William James), publishing on this topic monographic essays, edited collective volumes, and a relevant number of book chapters as well as articles in peer-reviewed international journals and series.

Giuseppina DI GREGORIO

From picture books to cartoons and back: analysing the popularisation strategies of scientific discourse for children in Blaze and the monster machines and its intersemiotic translations

What happens when cartoons are supposed to vehicle STEM concepts? As part of both formal and informal learning, attention has been paid to multimodal products that can entertain children while at the same time transmitting knowledge about physics, mathematics, and technology. Several new entertainment products have been designed to widen the offer: after Bob the Builder by HIT Entertainment and Hot Animation, Nickelodeon produced Blaze and the Monster Machines, while Netflix decided to air two series of The Magic School Bus, with a marked didactic structure.

Considering an informal context of learning, where parents fulfil the role of mediators, and taking into account the results of two pilot studies by R. Campos and K. A. Leech et al., this paper analyses Blaze and the Monster Machines as the result of an epistemic translation process in order to assess the main characteristics of the popularization of scientific discourse for children in multimodal products. In fact, a single episode, Wind Power, is experienced by children and their parents in two different ways: a first group watch the cartoon first and then read the book aloud with parents; a second group does the reverse. Results are assessed thanks to a questionnaire for parents and group interviews with children.

Bio: Giuseppina Di Gregorio is Assistant Professor in English Language at the University of Catania, Department of Educational Sciences. She holds a PhD in English and Anglo-American Studies, and she teaches courses of English for Specific Purposes (Tourism; Arts) for undergraduate students and English for Academic purposes for PhD students. Her research interests include translation studies and multimodality; discourse analysis (tourism; ecology; business); ESP teaching; children’s learning.

Maria Constanza GUZMÁN

Traductologías del sur: expanded epistemic possibilities for the Latin American translation experience

This paper argues for the possibility, value, and pertinence of approaching Latin America, its history and its plurilingual and pluriversal experience, from a situated translational perspective. From a decentred viewpoint (not based on the Euro-Anglo American translation studies matrix) and a strategic, non-essentializing understanding of Latin America (seen as a living, organic territory with multiple shared historical layers), this paper will begin by outlining some of the areas of observation this space offers. Positing the importance of the notion of a Latin American translation archive for a genealogy of translation linked to cultural and social history, it will foreground the multilingual epistemic bases of translation thought, and will then mention a few conceptual contributions for a Latin American-situated perspective to translation. Focusing on Cristina Rivera Garza’s proposals for a distinct approach to authorship which “dis-appropriates” writing practices in order to enable “the voices and traces of others” to emerge, it argues that this radical departure from the author-translator binary logic is urgent for a post-monolingual, post-national, and post-individualistic ethic, and for aesthetic translation in the 21st century. The paper will offer a chance to explore links between translation and contemporary intellectual and activist forms of praxis, seeking to enact forms of intervention that create the conditions for a recalibrated epistemic distribution.

Bio: María Constanza Guzmán is professor at York University (Toronto, Canada), where she is affiliated with the graduate programs in Translation Studies and in Humanities. She holds a PhD. in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York, an MA in Translation from Kent State University, and a BA from Universidad Nacional de Colombia. She has published translations, articles, and book chapters on translation and Latin American literature. Her book-length publications include Negotiating Linguistic Plurality: Translation and Multilingualism in Canada and Beyond (co-edited with Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar, McGill-Queen's, 2022), the translation (with Joshua Price) of the novel Heidegger’s Shadow, and the books Gregory Rabassa’s Latin American Literature: A Translator's Visible Legacy (2011) and Mapping Spaces of Translation in Twentieth-Century Latin American Print Culture (Routledge 2020). She currently holds a SSHRC Insight grant for the project Translators' Archives: Voicing Cultural Agency in Print Culture in the Americas (2022-2027).

Suzanne De Villiers HUMAN

Envisioning knowledge — and the land: Laduma Madela, image translations, and landscape categories

The paper takes as its point of departure the coloured-pencil drawings of Zulu myths of origin by the twentieth-century prophet, healer, rainmaker, writer, and artist, Laduma Madela (1908–1996), to reassess, from a combined art historical and image studies perspective, the profundity of colonial image encounters in South Africa. Madela’s exquisite and idiosyncratic drawings produced since the 1950s, which to date have only attracted anthropological description, have never been analysed within the precincts of art history and World Art History. To interpret, contrast, and translate the various visual treasuries of topical knowledge in diverse pictures of the land may spark intricate critical-epistemological questions pertaining to climate change, land ownership, myth, and the sublime. The work of an indigenous artist such as Madela compels re-interpretations and translations of codified knowledge residing in unconventional sub-genres of landscape art which address attitudes and beliefs about the cosmos, nature, and the land. It even has the potential to explode these very categories. By presenting the work of Madela in juxtaposition with South African artists like Jacob Hendrik Pierneef, Robert Slings by and Jackson Hlungwani, and artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Andy Goldsworthy, I propose that visual comparisons  of such diverse epistemic traditions in depictions of the land point to an imperative for visual translations among pictures, pictorial conventions, and image traditions. This need becomes all the more pronounced in an era of contested ecologies and conflicting perceptions of the value of nature and of human connections to the land.

Bio: Suzanne (E S) Human, née De Villiers completed a MA in Art History (Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London) in 1983, Doctoral research (1987-1988) at the Philipps-Universität, Marburg, West-Germany (1987-1988) and a Ph.D (University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa) (1999). She is Assistant Professor, UFS, and was Departmental Head, Department of Art History and Image Studies, Faculty of the Humanities, the University of the Free State (2013 – 2017). Her research interests are: historical and systematic conceptions of the image, the challenges of art history as world art history, art historiography and the history of approaches to the discipline.

Ewelina KWIATEK

Teaching LSP translation through science novels

LSP (Language for Special Purposes) translators deal with highly technical and scientific texts which are often considered as dry, objective and non-creative (Locke 1992). Translation students tend to prefer working with literary texts as they find them more interesting and challenging. However, it is scientific and technical translation that accounts for around 90% of the global translation output (Kingscott 2002: 247). Research on scientific texts indicates that individual style and creativity are intrinsic parts of the scientific process, and the use of metaphors is very frequent in scientific texts (Locke 1992). Scientific texts are not restricted to terminology only and can be creative. Obviously, it depends on the author of the text and their individual writing style. In academic year 2022/2023, only 10% of the MA dissertations defended in the Translation Department of the University of the National Education Commission in Krakow were concerned with specialised language, whereas nearly 50% were on literary translation. However, there seems to be a way to strike a balance between the translation market and students’ individual preferences of translating literary texts and mastering transcreation. One way of bridging this gap could be through the science novel, which offer a way of translating the scientific epistemic system into the literary epistemic system of translation students. The aim of this paper is to explore translation challenges in the English version of the scientific novel Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne from the perspective of literary translation and investigate, in particular, such features as cultural transfer, style, register, tone, names and places, a translator’s relationship with the source-text author.[7] 

Bio: Ewelina Kwiatek is Assistant Professor in the Chair for Translators’ Education at the Pedagogical University of Cracow, Poland. She holds a master's degree in Geodesy and Cartography from Wrocław University of Environmental and Life Sciences in Poland and a master's degree in Translation with Language Technology from Swansea University (UK). She received her PhD degree from Swansea University for a thesis entitled Contrastive Analysis of English and Polish Surveying Terminology. Her research interests include LSP, lexicography and terminology.

Rodrigo LACERDA

Worlds lost in translation? Rethinking the political through an ethnographic approach to the praxis of Guarani “translators” in cultural mediation

This paper analyses the translation challenges faced by the Guarani, who are not trained translators, when working in Indigenous cinema (specifically, the one developed in the village Tekoa Koenju) as well as exhibitions curated by Indigenous peoples at the Museum of Indigenous Cultures in São Paulo, the first institutions of this kind in Brazil with Indigenous co-management. The work of anthropologists and Indigenous intellectuals in Brazil in recent decades has been important for understanding Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies, and reclaiming their relevance in confronting contemporary global crises. In this context, Indigenous peoples, frequently with the support of the state, have developed cultural projects with the objective of changing public perceptions about them. However, the differences between Indigenous and Euro-American ontologies and epistemologies are substantial and, for some, even incommensurate. While anthropologists, including Indigenous anthropologists, dedicate years of ethnographic study to be able to establish equivocations that can be controlled in order to translate (Viveiros de Castro 2004), the everyday life of cultural politics requires a faster turnaround and straightforward, even if equivocal, translations available to the wider public. Additionally, for the Guarani, words may have agency and change the perspective, i.e., the body-spirit of a person, which is different from the political agency of cultural policies based on the Euro-American ontology. Therefore, the paper sets out the following lines of inquiry: What is lost when access to cultural public policies is gained? What is created anew? Do words still have “bodily agency” when translated into another language? What does agency mean in this context and how does it make us rethink the question of the political in translation studies?

Bio: Rodrigo Lacerda is an anthropologist and documentary filmmaker. He holds a PhD in Anthropology: Politics and Displays of Culture and Museology from the NOVA FCSH and ISCTE-IUL, and a master's degree in Anthropology, specialising in Visual Culture, from NOVA FCSH. He is a researcher at the Center for Research Network in Anthropology (CRIA) where he is the coordinator of the Politics and Practices and Politics of Culture research group. He has been an invited assistant professor at NOVA FCSH since 2017 and held that position at the University of Coimbra from 2019 to 2020. His research areas are visual anthropology, Indigenous cinema, Indigenous ethnology, and heritage.

Mariana LEITE

The lapidary in the Libro de Alexandre: proto-scientific excursions in cantar de clerecía

The Libro de Alexandre, an early-13th century Castilian mester de clerecía in verse created from various Latin and French source texts, is strongly didactic in its addition of information external to the Alexander diegesis. Thus, along with many other encyclopaedic elements, which range from historiography to geography, the Libro also features a lapidary, which considerably expands the list of precious stones present in the French Roman d'Alexandre. Using as a pretext Alexander the Great's arrival in Babylon, the narrator details the characteristics and properties of the various precious stones that the Macedonian king is said to have found in the region's rivers.The description is based on Book XVI of Isidore of Seville's Etymologies, although it is not really possible to determine the source used in the Castilian text. Bearing this in mind, I will compare the chapter "De lapidibus et metallis" included in the Etymologies and the lapidary presented in the Libro to assess the functionality of this element in the Castilian poem. The research on this particular feature of the Libro will also contribute to a better understanding of the use of historiographical and literary sources, namely the matter of Alexander, in conveying proto-scientific knowledge.[8] 

Mariana Leite obtained her PhD in Literature from the University of Porto in 2013, with a thesis on the Portuguese reception of the General Estoria of Alfonso X of Castile. She just concluded her postdoctoral research on the presence of Pedro Comestor's Historia Scholastica in Portugal, which included a digital edition of the medieval Portuguese translations of the Latin work. Prior to this, she was a Portuguese language and literature teacher at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon (2014-2016) and at the Universität Zürich (2020-2021); she also taught Medieval Spanish Literature (2017-2019) with Professor José Carlos Miranda and Medieval Portuguese Literature (2023-2024) at the University of Porto. Her research focuses on studying and transcribing medieval texts, with a particular interest in universal historiography. In recent years, she has dedicated her investigation to the presence of sources for universal chronicles (especially Biblical and Classical) in medieval Portuguese culture.

René LEMIEUX

Incommensurability in (inter)-semiotic translation: the case of NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! and its relationship to law

The poem collection Zong! (Wesleyan UP, 2008) by the Caribbean and Afro-descendant poet, and former jurist, M. NourbeSe Philip, has become an essential work of literature on the transatlantic slave trade. Although this work has not been described as a translation (Philip herself makes very little use of the term), the poetry could be interpreted as such: the poet has taken the words of a court decision ruled after a massacre which occurred on a slave ship named Zong (Gregson v Gilbert [1783] 3 Doug. KB 232) and turned them into a “hauntology”  –  poetry haunted by the ghosts of slavery. Therefore, this work is in itself a translation of technical knowledge from law into poetry. How does such a poetic translation deal with knowledge? How is it transformed? How is it transferred? My aim is to describe the transformation – even transvaluation – between the law case and the poetry. The discourse of law is here understood as a form of “technical” discourse conveying knowledge. One way to look at the issue here is from Kant’s ethical perspective. In Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), Kant wrote: “In the kingdom of ends everything has either value or dignity. Whatever has a value can be replaced by something else which is equivalent; whatever, on the other hand, is above all value, and therefore admits of no equivalent, has a dignity” (trans. Kingsmill Abbott). If translation is the process by which equivalence is produced from one language to another, we then are in the realm of value and not of dignity. As I would like to understand it, M. NourbeSe Philip’s poetry as intersemiotic translation could be seen as choosing dignity over value. How can the concept of dignity in a case like this help us to better understand what takes place in epistemic translation?

Bio: René Lemieux is an Assistant Professor in Translation Studies at Concordia University, where he teaches history of translation, translation of human and social sciences, and research methodology in translation studies. His research focuses particularly on the role of translation in the revitalization of indigenous languages. He contributes to the Awikhiganisaskak Project, a group of scholars working in collaboration with Indigenous communities in the province of Québec (Canada) for the preservation of their languages. He is also the lead researcher of the Observatoire de la traduction autochtone (Concordia University).

Windson LIN

The translationality of neurasthenia/Shenjing Shuairuo: the history of a boundary object in the middle space between Chinese medicine and American psychiatry

The proposed paper examines the case study of neurasthenia/Shenjing Shuairuo, a medical phenomenon characterised by its inter-epistemic translation between Chinese medicine and American psychiatry. Formally known as the “American disease” afflicting predominantly urban Protestant white men, neurasthenia, or nerve weakness, was paradoxically transformed into a Chinese “culture-bound syndrome” in American psychiatry by the end of the 20th century. The paper situates the two processes of knowledge translation in their respective historical moments. The diagnostic term “Shenjing Shuairuo” emerged in Republican China when Chinese Medicine was undergoing major transformation under the existential threat of Western medicine. Through the translation and reinvention of the medical term, practitioners of Chinese medicine conformed to the hegemony of Western science while securing the space for their indigenous medical practice. Conversely, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) re-introduced Shenjing Shuairuo into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) as a Chinese phenomenon from the 1990s, among other “culture-bound syndromes”. By the incorporation of “culture” into their guidelines, the APA attempted to defend their discipline by responding to the criticism of ethnocentrism from medical anthropology and transcultural psychiatry. Regarding translationality as the constitutive component of neurasthenia/Shenjing Shuairuo, the study investigates how coloniality/modernity shaped the two epistemic spaces in which the acts of translation occurred. With a symmetrical analytic structure, the study aims to demonstrate how this ambiguous phenomenon emerged in the middle space of the dual dichotomy between the West and the non-West, as well as the modernist divide between nature and culture.

Bio: Windson Lin is a PhD candidate at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, specialising in History of Knowledge and History of Science. Since his bachelor’s in psychology, he has developed an interest in the theoretical and historical aspects of psychology and psychiatry, with a focus on the conceptualization of "culture" in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Having completed a Master's degree in History and Theory of Psychology, he is now working on his PhD research project tentatively titled "The Movement of Neurasthenia: Knowledge Translation between Chinese Medicine and the DSM in the Twentieth Century."

Rita Bueno MAIA

Inter-Epistemic translation of 19th-Century medical knowledge: a case study of Art of Self-Healing Venereal Diseases

This study examines the French target text entitled Manuel pratique des maladies vénériennes des hommes, des femmes et des enfants [Practical Handbook of Venereal Diseases in Men, Women, and Children] (1834) authored by Godde de Liancourt (1805-1899) as an "inter-epistemic translation," as defined by Robinson in 2017. In this translation, specialised medical discourse is adapted for everyday language. However, due to the unavailability of the French language text for consultation, the analysis will be based on the Portuguese interlingual translation of Godde de Liancourt's inter-epistemic translation titled Arte de se curar a si mesmo nas doenças venéreas, com uma farmacopeia ou receituário correspondente [Art of Self-Healing Venereal Diseases, with a Pharmacopoeia or Corresponding Recipes], penned by Caetano Lopes de Moura (1780-1860) and published in 1839. This case study encompasses three main tasks: (i) identifying the agents involved in producing both the French and Portuguese guides, including their academic backgrounds; (ii) investigating the paratextual framing of the two texts to understand how they were presented and their intended audience; and (iii) reconstructing the translation strategies that constitute the inter-epistemic translation. In summary, this research aims to shed light on the dissemination of medical knowledge in the first half of the 19th century and the dynamics of making scientific concepts accessible to different audiences.

Bio: Rita Bueno Maia holds a PhD in Translation History and is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Human Sciences of Universidade Católica Portuguesa. She is a member of CECC - Research Centre for Communication and Culture, working within the research group ‘Cognition and Translatability’. She has been researching literary and scholarly translations published in Paris by Portuguese and Brazilian emigrants in the late 18th century and the first half of the 19th century. Additionally, she collaborates with the Centre for Portuguese Literature of the University of Coimbra as a member of the research project ‘Mapping Voltaire in Portugal and in Portuguese Literature’. She is also the co-coordinator of the international research network IndirecTrans and has worked as a literary translator for the theatre.

Paola MANCOSU & Domenico BRANCA

Translating worlds: ontological perspectives in Translation Studies and Cultural Anthropology

This paper explores the theoretical category of “inter-ontological translation” through an interdisciplinary approach involving Translation Studies (TS) and Cultural Anthropology. Anthropology began to investigate the concept of cultural translation in the 1980s and in the following decade, in TS, this category and the analytical notion of culture became key to analysing the intercultural implications of translation. However, critical approaches, such as the “ontological turn”, have emerged in recent decades. For this approach, the limit of the cultural perspective is that there are multiple epistemologies about the world but only one way of classifying the real, namely, a single ontology. We define ontology as the inquiry into how entities are categorised and related. It has been shown that beyond the vision of modern Western naturalism, there exist other ontologies that do not contemplate the dichotomy between nature and culture, human and non-human (or do so in a different way). What are the implications if translation implies not only cultures but also ontologies? Recognising ontological alterities in post-colonial indigenous Latin America entails complex socio-political translatological challenges. The relationship between ontology and translation has been examined in ethnography. But has only recently begun to be explored in TS under the category of eco-translation. Taking the case of the Peruvian Quechua writer and anthropologist Ch’aska Anka Ninawaman, we investigate the theoretical-political possibilities of translation between ontologies through an ethnographic methodology and techniques such as participant observation, and in-depth interviews to analyse the metadiscourse on (self-) translation, based on ethnographic knowledge of the indigenous Andean context of Peru.

Bio: Paola Mancosu holds a PhD in Hispanic Philology from the University of Barcelona and a PhD in Translation and Language Sciences from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra of Barcelona. She is a Senior Lecturer in Spanish Language and Translation at the University of Milan (Italy). Her research focuses on cultural translation, sociological translation and postcolonial translation, with particular attention to self-translation in bilingual Andean literature. She has participated in different international congresses and written several articles in journals such as Meta, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Casa de las Américas and Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana.

Bio: Domenico Branca is Assistant Professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Sassari (Italy) where he teaches Anthropology of Heritage and Tourism. He holds a PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (2016). His main interests concern the anthropology and history of social classifications, the anthropology of mountain areas, the anthropology of the city (in particular, tourism and urbanisation and the relationship between urban and rural) and the anthropology of conservation in Highland Peru and Sardinia. In addition to numerous articles, he has published the book Identidad aymara en el Perú: Nación, vivencia y narración (Lima, Horizonte, 2017).

Dina MENDONÇA

Cues for epistemic translations: logical threads in conversation

Conversations can vary immensely in purpose and format, and the way in which people understand one another may require inter-epistemic translation. It may seem strange to suggest that people need to translate each other’s thoughts in a dialogue, especially if participants are using the same language. Yet the pedagogical methodology Philosophy for Children has long identified this issue,and the way in which people explain their ideas and their thinking processes to one another can be described as an epistemic translation (Sharp 1993). Importantly, in all pedagogical settings (philosophy for children, regular philosophy teaching, etc.) there is the need to accommodate the way in which students think. Educators are constantly reminded that the way in which students have understood an idea cannot be measured just by the way they can repeat what has been taught to them. This paper reflects on how dialogue is precisely the ideal occasion to witness the difficulties of epistemic translation and the impact of the success of communication. The insight into knowledge acquisition is given by providing others the logical thread of the thinking process. That is, it is when one pays attention to the logical thread of a conversation that students’ thinking reveals understanding. Not only teachers but also the students themselves can clearly identify their epistemic transformations when troubles in inter-epistemic translation are overcome.The logical thread of a conversation enables identifying moments that highlight epistemic understanding, and suggests that just like difficult moments reveal character, logical moves reveal epistemic translations.[9] 

Bio: Dina Mendonça (Ph.D. University of South Carolina, USA 2003) researches on Philosophy of Emotions and Philosophy of Education with a special concentration in Philosophy for Children. Her research focuses on developing a Layered Theory of Emotions, which takes emotions as dynamic and active situational occurrences. This pragmatist research of Deweyan inspiration aims at elaborating a critical interpretation of philosophical reflections on emotions clarifying different problems and the advantages of different methodological and philosophical approaches, as well as identifying the key issues emotions theories (Paradox of Fiction, shared emotions, etc.) and further complexities of the emotional landscape (variability of valence of emotions, meta-emotional processes, etc.). In addition, she teaches Didactics of Philosophy concentrating on the role of writing for the education and improvement of thinking skills. All her research takes the pragmatist Deweyan perspective on language as a tool for thinking, and argues that inter-epistemic translation is unavoidable in philosophical practice.

Yolanda MORENO BELLO

Health and healing: understanding epistemological clash in medical consultations. A case study from Kenya and Nigeria.

This paper looks closer at the understanding of health and healing between the ideology of western medicine, on the one hand, which focuses on prevention and productivity, and indigenous knowledges on the other, where sickness and death are assimilated as part of life. Concretely, this study will explore western medicine’s impact on traditional methods through its refusal to understand indigenous knowledges (conceptualized as “epistemicide” by Santos, 2016). To showcase this phenomenon, we will observe two specific cases narrated by practitioners gathered through interviews held at community hospitals in Lagos (Nigeria) and Nairobi (Kenya). In these interviews, we explore issues such as maternity, sex and western medicine from the indigenous point of view of Nigerians and Kenyans.

Bio: Yolanda Moreno-Bello holds an international PhD in Translation Studies from  Universidad de Alcalá and Université Saint Joseph- Beyrouth. She has collaborated with a number of universities, such as the University of Nairobi and the Pan-African Consortium of Masters in Translation and Interpreting (Kenya) where she carried out postdoctoral research focusing on access to women’s sexual and reproductive health. Since 2017 she has been a member of CETAPS, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa and is currently carrying out field research in Nigeria. 

Andrea MUSUMECI

Reframing knowledge from sports science for translation education: enhancing strategic competences through game-based approaches

This paper investigates the potential of reframing knowledge from sports science to enhance translation education through game-based approaches. Translation pedagogy often focuses on theoretical and technical aspects, neglecting strategic skills necessary in real-world scenarios. Drawing from sports education's Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) and Game-Centred Approaches (GCAs), this study proposes a strategic shift in translation pedagogy. The TGfU model, emphasising gameplay and reflection, provides a valuable framework for translation teachers and learners, fostering strategic thinking skills beyond technical proficiency. By incorporating tactical decision-making and game performance into teaching and learning activities, learners can relate to translation as a dynamic, strategic process. This approach aligns with situated learning, emphasizing self-reflection and strategy application in real-game situations. Additionally, Game-Based, Tactical Games, and Game Sense approaches offer practical strategies for translation educators, promoting holistic learner engagement. Repositioning themselves as facilitators, fostering dialogue and questioning, translation educators can create interactive, collaborative learning environments, aligned with active learning shifts in translation studies. Collaboration between translation scholars and practitioners can further enhance learning experiences, bridging theory-practice gaps. In the paper, I argue that integrating game-based approaches into translation education eases targeting strategic competences like pattern recognition, adaptive responses, and reflective thinking. By reframing sports science knowledge and adopting game-centred learning principles, translation educators can create innovative, effective learning experiences, preparing learners to transition into the complex and ever changing language service provision industry.[10] 

Bio: Andrea Musumeci is a final-year PhD candidate at the Department of linguistics and Translation, City University of Hong Kong. His research interests are translation theory, translation pedagogy and didactics, translation learning, action research, interlingual education practices.

Pedro NAVARRO

Science popularisation as translation in Brazil and Portugal: the popularisation of Darwinism by Miranda Azevedo and Francisco Arruda Furtado

It is difficult to peruse the literature on science popularisation without coming across the term “translation” being used more or less rigidly as an explanation for what a popular scientific text should be: a transposition of scientific ideas to the day-to-day language in order to make them understandable and interesting to lay readers in the given field. Thus, the act of popularizing science has already been associated both with the negative view of translation (well exemplified by the saying “traduttore, traduttore”) (Authier 1982) and with its positive and fertile side which allowed for a more thorough understanding of the field (Jacobi 1986; Zamboni 1998; Myers 2003; Vergara 2008; Esteves 2014; Machado 2014). Currently, science popularisation understood as intralingual translation (that is, a translation between different discourses in the same language) is studied by different fields to better understand and improve how science is communicated to the public (Muñoz-Miguel 2012; Rizzo 2015; Wermuth & Verplaetse 2018; Bania & Faridy 2021). However, science popularisation has always been important for the circulation of scientific ideas. In the 19th century, texts published in mass press outlets and public conferences were responsible for spreading the “scientific spirit” to a larger public all over the world (Alonso 2002; Vergara 2008). Thus, starting with a case study on the popularisation of Darwinism in Brazil and Portugal (focusing on the intellectuals and popularizers Augusto César de Miranda Azevedo and Francisco Arruda Furtado), the aim of this paper is to better understand this translational aspect of the circulation of scientific ideas and bring Translation Studies and History of Science even closer by understanding science popularisation as a form of inter-epistemic translation.

Bio: Pedro Navarro is a biologist and biology teacher. Currently, he is preparing his PhD in the History of Biology at the University of São Paulo, working on the translations of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species and Descent of Man. Within the scope of the project, he researches the translational processes involved in the transmission of Darwinism in Brazil and Portugal. 

Elisa NELISSEN

From lab to layperson: towards a translational model of science news circulation

News about scientific research is heavily mediated before reaching the public. The communication chain connecting lab to layperson, which often starts with the publication of an academic paper, can be long and prone to misrepresentations. Prior research in the field of science communication has focused on the tendency to overhype incremental results, refer to humans in coverage of animal studies, confuse correlation with causation, among others. Press releases issued by research institutes and academic publishers have received particular scrutiny, as research shows that any misrepresentations contained in press releases are likely to find their way into subsequent news coverage (e.g. De Semir, Ribas,and Revuelta 1998). Despite the fact that news about scientific research often comes about in multilingual contexts, and the trajectories of science news stories often span cultural, linguistic and media-specific boundaries, existing models of science news circulation tend to neglect issues related to language and culture. Inspired by the work of Dempster, Sutherland and Keogh (2022), who traced the coverage of one scientific study in English media, this paper will add an international, translational dimension by presenting an embedded case study of how two international science news stories found their way into the news media in Flanders, Belgium, and how they were sourced and altered along the way. In doing so, we aim to demonstrate the usefulness of a translational model for examining science news circulation that considers not just the content of the news being shared, but also the (often transcultural and multilingual) context in which it is selected, adapted and finally shared with a specific audience.[11] 

Bio: Elisa Nelissen is a PhD researcher at KU Leuven’s Translation Studies department. She studies the flow of science news from lab to layperson, focusing on how reporters and communication specialists interpret, select, and translate science news at different steps in the communication chain. Previously, she worked as a press officer at Elsevier and KU Leuven.

Marco NEVES

Science translated into literature: from Ian McEwan's novels to Richard Dawkins’ metaphors

This paper will present a reading of Ian McEwan’s novels and Richard Dawkin’s popular science books as translations of scientific discourse (as source text/discourse) into literary discourse (as target text/discourse), contrasting this interdiscursive translation (a specific instance of epistemic translation) with the mere use of science as a theme in other authors. Translation, in this analysis, will be used not as a simple metaphor for communication, but as a conceptualization of techniques applied by the authors to change and adapt source texts (which the article will identify) into target texts (McEwan’s novels and Dawkins’ essays). These epistemic translation techniques can be the same as interlingual translation techniques (explicitation, addition and omission) or specific to interdiscursive translation (e.g. metaphor, defamiliarization, provocation and contrast). The papers will look at both authors at the same time as a way of illuminating how epistemic translation can be found in both fiction and non-fiction and how specific techniques can be found in both authors. In this way, the paper will contribute to create a specific epistemic translation framework that can be applied to other authors.

Bio: Marco Neves has a PhD in Translation Studies and is Assistant Professor at NOVA FCSH and a researcher with CETAPS. He is part of the editorial board of the journal Translation Matters. He has published books and articles on language and culture and is particularly interested in exploring connections between literary, linguistic and scientific knowledge. He is also planning on studying the way humans interact with artificial intelligence.

Piotr PLICHTA

History of a region expressed as graphical-textual concept: can this be properly translated?

In one of the modern Polish illustrated books for young adults explaining popular science, there is a chapter on the concept of the genealogical tree. The elaborate illustration to this chapter is a very interesting graphical-textual concept in which the geography and modern history of multi-ethnic Central Europe is represented through the names and images of the people on the branches of a genealogical tree. This research, based on a survey involving students and professional translators, explores two dimensions in which the above graphical-textual concept can be considered a complex epistemic translation. On the one hand, it proved surprisingly hard to grasp even to the people of Polish origins because it confronts the readers with inter-epistemic translation between the recipients belonging to the same cultural background but to various generations (differing in terms of their historical knowledge and sensitivity). On the other hand, the question arises if such an intricate concept can be fully or partially turned into a successful intra-epistemic translation conveying the ethnic history of a different region expressed in a different language.[12] 

Bio: Piotr Plichta is a lecturer at the Pedagogical University of Kraków (Institute of English Philosophy). His area of research concerns the translation of pre-modern literary texts, particularly English works of the 16th and 17th centuries.

Joshua PRICE

A typology of epistemicide and an ontological approach to translating concepts from Latin American philosophy

The question at the heart of this paper is how to translate concepts from Latin American philosophy while steering clear of the perils of misappropriating subaltern knowledge. The first part provides a partial inventory of the moral hazards and forms of epistemicide that can accompany translations from the Global South. One category involves theft (for example, intellectual extractivism, piracy, cultural appropriation, vampirization, Frankensteinization, and museumification), while another involves destruction (degrading, ridiculing, or simplifying subaltern knowledge beyond recognition, denying its coevalness, rendering it nonsense). These varieties of epistemicide can, and usually do, overlap.The second part focuses on translating concepts. In América profunda, philosopher Rodolfo Kusch argues that a binary between pulcritud (order or cleanliness) and hedor (stench) structures Latin American life. An urban middle class obsessed with an imagined social hygiene pursues orderliness in the realm of politics, aesthetics, and urban planning, while expressing revulsion at anything associated with Indigeneity, disorderliness or insurgency. How to translate? An even tougher challenge is posed by the grammatical distinction in Spanish between estar and ser, two forms of the verb “to be,” on which Kusch bases a complicated ontological distinction informed by Quechua and Aymara thinking. Taking these concepts as points of departure, the paper argues for an ontological pivoting or shift that addresses some of the dangers of epistemic injustice posed by translating within a political ecology characterized generally by colonial predation.

Bio: Joshua Price is an anthropologist and Professor at Toronto Metropolitan University. He writes on translation theory, colonization and structural violence. He has collaborated on the translation of two books of Latin American philosophy, Heidegger´s Shadow by José Pablo Feinmann (with María Constanza Guzmán) and Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América by Rodolfo Kusch (with María Lugones). His most recent book is entitled Translation and Epistemicide: Racialization of Language in the Americas.

Rita QUEIROZ DE BARROS

Translating the Mexican calendar to early modern Europeans: an analysis of Historia de la Conquista de México (1522) and its English translation (1578)

Dated 1522, Historia de la Conquista de Mexico is the second part of Lopez de Gomara’s La Istoria de las Indias, the first published history of the taking of America by the Spaniards. It was an immediate national and international success, and thus a major source of information on the New World for developing and emerging European empires. An English translation appeared as early as 1578, under the title The pleasant historie of the conquest of the VVeast India, now called new Spayne..., and contributed to the expansionist propaganda increasingly present in 16th-century England. Bearing in mind that Descriptive Translation Studies defines translation as a form of intercultural communication involving the transfer of more than linguistic signs, and considers translations to be facts of the target culture, this paper aims to identify and discuss: (i)the procedures used in the Spanish text to present the Mexican calendar to Spanish readers (including an alphabetical representation and glossary of Nahuatl vocabulary and a comparative description of the European and local calendars with interspersed commentary); (ii) shifts between the Spanish source text and the Early Modern English translation. This analysis will contribute to identify, discuss and define procedures used in epistemic translation and address a presentation of the New World that, interestingly, appears less biased than colonial history and modern relations between the global North and South may lead us to expect.

Bio: Rita Queiroz de Barros has an MA in Sociolinguistics and a PhD in English Linguistics. She is Associate Professor and researcher at the University of Lisbon (CEAUL/ULICES), where she teaches several graduate and pos-graduate courses within English (historical) Sociolinguistics. Since 2021 she is the head of the Language Centre of the same university (2021-). Her main research interests lie within English historical lexicography.

Margarita SAVCHENKOVA

Popularizing prehistory among adults and children: the case of Sapiens and its multimodal translations

This paper examines the representation of prehistory in Yuval Noah Harari’s popular work Sapiens: A Brief Historyof Humankind (2014) and its multimodal(re)translations: a graphic novel, Sapiens: A Graphic History. The Birth of Humankind (2020), and a children’s picture book, Unstoppable Us: How Humans Took over the World (2022). Through these books, the Israeli historian presents a fresh perspective on prehistoric society, challenging prevailing stereotypes and biases that shape our understanding of those distant times. In the context of the new transdisciplinary research paradigm in Translation Studies, Harari’s adaptations of knowledge about prehistory into a non-fiction book for the general public, as well as graphic books for both kids and adults, can be regarded as a form of translation. To analyze how prehistory is translated and retranslated across different mediums—from essay to comic book and children's picture book—,a comparative analysis was conducted using the translatological and sociological model proposed by Pereira (2008). The study reveals that Harari undermines ethnocentric, patriarchal, and heterosexist notions surrounding early human history, popularizing those times and conveying an ideological message that draws parallels between prehistory and the present. His aim is not only to offer alternative interpretations of that era but also to promote awareness of the pluralism that characterizes contemporary society. This research delves into the realm of prehistoric popularization and knowledge dissemination, as presented across three books by an internationally acclaimed best-selling author.

Bio: Margarita Savchenkova holds a Master’s degree in Advanced Studies and Research in History and a Master’s degree in Translation and Intercultural Mediation (awarded with an extraordinary mention), both from the University of Salamanca. She is currently working as a research assistant at the University of Salamanca, where she is pursuing her doctoral degree under the supervision of Professor África Vidal Claramonte, with financial support from the Regional Government of Castile and Leon, Spain, and the European Social Fund. She is also a member of the Research Groups TRADIC and CETAPS. Her fields of research include translation theory, history, and memory studies.

Patrícia SILVA

Yeats as transcultural mediator: encounters with Eastern esotericism and mysticism

This paper explores the instrumental role of the Anglo-Irish poet W.B. Yeats in the transcultural mediation of Oriental epistemologies to Western cultural thought and letters, with reference to 20th century postcolonial cultural nationalisms. It revisits Yeats’s network of relevant personal relations in this regard, such as Madame Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society whose lodge in London he attended, and Mohini Chatterjee, a member of the Society’s Bengal branch whom he met in Dublin as a young man. While the impact of Theosophy and other forms of Eastern mysticism on Yeats’s thought and works in his formative years and throughout his life has been examined at length, notably by his biographers (Brown, Foster) and Georgie’s (Saddlemeyer), less attention has been devoted to his role as mediator of the reception of Eastern epistemologies in western intellectual milieus through his sustained study and dissemination of their doctrines in his cultural and literary production.This paper addresses aspects of that role, with particular focus on Yeats’s encounter with the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, whose strain of Eastern mysticism made such an impact on him that it inspired committed efforts in the reception and dissemination of Tagore’s works in Europe, contributing to his recognition and the awarding of his Nobel Prize in Literature. Centring on their mutual inspiration as champions of literary renaissances in their respective countries, it comparatively examines their cosmopolitan nationalism in relation to Eastern esotericism and mysticism, notably its deployment as a counterpoint to the materialistic modernity of imperialism and as counter-colonial cultural nationalist affirmation.

Bio: Patricia Silva is Associate Research Fellow at the Centre for Social Studies (CES), University of Coimbra. Her research centers on Lusophone and Anglophone transnational modernist networks and movements, and on Transcultural Modernism. She holds a PhD in Portuguese & Brazilian Studies from King’s College London, was Visiting Research Fellow at University of London School of Advanced Study, Queen Mary University of London, and UniFESP (Brazil), and taught at KCL, UCL, and the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Yeats and Pessoa: Parallel Poetic Styles (Routledge, 2020; rpt. 2010) and co-editor of Pessoa Plural 11, Portuguese Modernisms 1915-1917: Contexts, Facets & Legacies of the Orpheu Generation (2017). She has published on Modernism and Avant-Garde Studies, Portuguese and English Literary & Cultural Studies, Comparative Literature and Visual Cultures in numerous peer-reviewed journals and in edited collections with Transcript, Bloomsbury, Peter Lang, and forthcoming volume on Peripheral Modernisms with Palgrave (2024).

Carolina SOARES

Explaining scientific knowledge to children through intersemiotic translation: the case of Once Upon a Time... Life

This paper will investigate how scientific knowledge can be conveyed to children through intersemiotic translation. It will also analyse the specific considerations involved in translating content for children in a media they understand, enjoy and are familiar with. Thus, the primary focus of this work is to examine how intersemiotic translation plays a pivotal role in making scientific knowledge accessible to young viewers. The animated series Once Upon a Time... Life will serve as a case study, as it presents complex biological concepts in a visually captivating format designed for younger audiences. In this light, and focusing on episode seven, “The Heart”, the paper will also evaluate the strategies employed when translating scientific knowledge for children. It poses questions such as: can intersemiotic translation serve as a powerful tool in children’s education by enabling the exploration of complex topics while fostering curiosity and understanding? How does adapting content from one medium to another influence communication effectiveness? What challenges and strategies are involved in translating scientific and technical concepts for young viewers? How does intersemiotic translation affect children’s comprehension and enjoyment of educational content? This work will draw from a diverse range of interdisciplinary literature, including translation studies, semiotics, children’s literature, and media studies. Key sources include Roman Jakobson’s seminal work on intersemiotic translation, Pereira’s assertions on how pictures translate words, Gillian Lathey’s theories on translating children’s literature, and the research of Riitta Oittinen, which provides valuable insights into the cultural and intertextual dimensions of translating for children.

Bio: Carolina Soares is a final-year MA student of Translation at Nova FCSH. She has a BA in Languages, Literatures and Cultures (English and German) and is particularly interested in studying the field of translation aimed at children.

Xiaorui SUN

Hysterical translation: an inter-epistemic exploration between Deleuzian affect theory and the Qi theory in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM)

Hysteria has been a heatedly debated topic in both the medical and the non-medical arenas for around four thousand years. It can be considered as a collection of somatic and/or psychological disorders that are associated with bodily symptoms including jerks, stutters, spasms, etc., as well as emotional turbulence or volatility. However, the different ways it has been translated into Chinese (using strategies of transliteration or free translation) are barely satisfactory from the perspective of inter-epistemic translation since they haven't fully explored the translationalities and the neurocultural organizations between the epistemic regimes of East and West. Therefore, this paper offers a preliminary tracking of the genealogy of hysteria as a (mis)disease and dissection of the hegemonic Western ideological and philosophical constructions behind it, before proposing a counter-hegemonic Western regime that shares quite a few convergences with the Chinese regime based on qi theory. It also  translates inter-epistemically between Gilles Deleuze on hysteria and the qi theory in traditional Chinese medicine. In his 1981/2003 book Francis Bacon: the Logic of Sensation (Francis Bacon: Logique de la Sensation), Deleuze spends one chapter reinvigorating the term “hysteria”with his conceptualization of sensations, figure, and the body without organs. This paper argues that the Deleuzian conception of affect, or the forces contained in and channelled by the body without organs, reveals theoretical and philosophical convergences with the notion of qi in TCM, as both are vibrant, dynamic, and evolving destabilizing and restabilizing forces that always break through fixed organisms and boundaries.

Bio: Xiaorui SUN is currently a Ph.D student in Translation Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. She holds a BA in English and an MA in Translation and Interpreting.

Elin SÜTISTE

Umwelt translation: towards an ecology of knowledges of other species

Aligning with the increasing global concern for climate change, this presentation proposes the notion of ‘Umwelt translation’ as a contribution to the project of eco-translation which covers “all forms of translation thinking and practice that knowingly engage with the challenges of human-induced environmental change” (Cronin 2017: 2). Eco-translation that engages with environmental change necessarily implies inter-epistemic translation, understood as translation from one ‘epistemic system’ to another, or, in other words, transmission of knowledge from one ‘semiotic world’ into another (Robinson 2017: 200). However, neither Robinson’s (2017) ‘inter-epistemic translation’ nor Santos’s (2016) ‘intercultural translation’ were devised to address translation across species or throughout the entire tradosphere, defined by Cronin (2017: 90) as “the sum of all translation systems on the planet which includes translation between living and non-living organisms”. However, translation across different human knowledge systems and translation across species share some similar features, such as having to make sense of and transmit “various embedded, embodied, and subjective forms of knowledge” (CFP Epistran International Conference). This would seem to allow for the application of the notion of inter-epistemic translation to communication and translation across and beyond the borders of the human world, especially since an important factor contributing to the decline of natural environments and extinction of species is expressly the lack of understanding of and empathy towards non-human species. Building on the insights made in bio- and ecosemiotics, cultural and translation semiotics (e.g.Marais 2019, Kull and Marais 2016, Lotman 1977), this paper proposes the notion of ‘Umwelt translation’, seen as a translation strategy aimed at enhancing human understanding of and empathy towards other species. ‘Umwelt’ is a concept introduced by Jakob von Uexküll (1982) who defined it as the subjective world of an organism and described the relations between an organism and its environment as meaningful ‘functional cycles’ (perception-action cycles) based on the organism’s perceptual and motor capacities (see also Tønnessen, Magnus & Brentari 2016). The notion of Umwelt translation builds on Umwelt analysis, based on locating animal expression as a meaningful unit in their subjective world as a whole, and some concepts initially elaborated in the context of human translation (for instance, analogous and homologous translation, part-whole relations in translation, inter-and transmedial translation). The theoretical discussion of the notion of Umwelt translation is accompanied by examples of its application to human representation and communication of other species. 

Bio: Elin Sütiste is Associate Professor at the Department of Semiotics at the University of Tartu, Estonia. Her main research interests fall into the areas of semiotics of translation and semiotics of culture. Her recent publications include “The functional roots of Jakobson’s plural concept of translation” (2021), “Intersemiotic translation” (2021), “Lotman and Jakobson” (2022, together with Igor Pilschikov), “Translation seen through the prism of the Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics” (2021, together with Silvi Salupere).

Raluca TANASESCU

Digital humanities as epistemic translation

Digital humanities emerged in the early 2000s from the earlier field of humanities computing and involves a double paradigm that exploits computational and digital methods for the benefit of humanities research, as well as established humanities theories, methods and paradigms in the study of digital media and cultures. Willard McCarty’s map of this umbrella-discipline (Siemens 2016) emphasizes the paramount role of the methodological commons (that is, formal methods, analytical tools and data structures) with fields such as literature and linguistics at the receiving end. Remarkably, translation was among the subfields of literature and the arts, alongside creative imagination and rhetoric and design, set to make a difference as a broad area of learning that guaranteed the interdisciplinary nature of humanities research. However, preoccupied with its own twists and turns and with an emphasis on translators as agents of change, the translation studies of the 2010s were slow to board the digital ship (St. André 2018), fighting its own Anglocentric bias (Bennett 2007), establishing firm disciplinary roots in the academia (Cronin 2018) and continuously trying to define itself. To date, TS is still not among the recognized allied fields of DH (Tanasescu 2024, Tanasescu & Tanasescu 2022). This paper emphasizes the role of the digital humanities in bridging the epistemic gap between the humanities and the technological epistemic system and reflects on how this translational dimension of digital humanities has yet to overcome a series of pitfalls in translation studies. By focusing on the particular cases of literary translation on the one hand and electronic literature on the other, a case will be made for the need to articulate a nuanced understanding of contemporary literary text as technologically determined (Kittler 1997/2012). Digital humanities, thus seen as an essentially translational endeavour going beyond the literacy vs. numeracy split, or between quantifying-empirical and narrative-interpreting cultures of knowledge (Krämer 2023), is suggested to be a suitable and productive epistemic stance for literary translation that will both help it overcome its deeply humanistic depth rhetoric of interpretation narrative and broaden its understanding of creative textual features that straddle the humanities vs technology divide.

Bio: Raluca Tanasescu is a researcher in Translation and Global Media at the University of Galway, Ireland. She works at the nexus of translation studies, complexity, and digital humanities, and currently serves as Chair of the Multilingualism and Multiculturalism Committee for the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations.

Xany Jansen VAN VUUREN

Animal welfare work as knowledge translation: an ecosemiotic argument for translating animals in the global South

In South Africa, as with many global South contexts, animals frequently form part of daily human life — as transport and protection, in hunting and herding, as livestock in subsistence farming, and also as companions. However, the animals’ welfare usually only becomes a consideration if it affects human safety, welfare and health (cf. Broom and Johnson, 2019). This is made even more complex and, at times, problematic by the diversity of approaches to the place and purpose of the animals within human thinking (Stibbe, 2001). While research in animal welfare (Bowleset al., 2005; Fraser, 2008; Appleby, Weary and Sandøe, 2014) and related fields such as veterinary science (Ortolaniet al., 2021), behavioural science (Saslow, 2002) and biology (Broom and Johnson, 2019) continually provide new findings about the welfare and health of animals, anecdotal evidence points to a chasm between the acquisition, transmission and application of knowledge, with serious impacts on the welfare of animals. Against this background, this paper asks if approaching animal welfare work as knowledge translation, defined here as translating scientific evidence into practice (cf. Grimshawet al., 2012; Di Micheleet al.,2020) and regarding animal welfare workers as ‘knowledge translators’ can actively bridge the aforementioned chasm. With reference to developments in fields such as ecotranslation (Cronin, 2017), ecosemiotics (Maran, 2020) and of course inter-epistemic translation, it will present data collected from a South African cart-horse welfare outreach programme in order to answer the above-mentioned question[13] .

Bio: Xany Jansen van Vuuren obtained her Ph.D. from the University of the Free State in 2022, where she is also a lecturer in the Department of Linguistics and Language Practice. She teaches interpreting and translation on undergraduate and postgraduate level.

With regard to research, her areas of focus include ecosemiotics, eco-translation, knowledge translation, translation and activism, and interspecies translation and interpreting. She is currently completing her monograph, entitled Interpreting, communication and animal welfare: An ecosemiotic analysis of interspecies translation with De Gruyter Mouton. She is also part of the eco-translation network.

Clare VASSALLO

Culture disguised as nature: Simone de Beauvoir — making epistemic translation visible in The Second Sex

This paper delves into the fact that epistemic systems have a tendency to become invisible through the habitual acceptance of them as paradigms or matrices of conceptual thought. Epistemic paradigms guide societies' perceptions and behaviours creating 'knowledge' that confirms the paradigm itself, as in Kuhn's description of 'normal science'. Invisible conceptual structures determine social behaviour and interpretation through what Peirce described as 'abduction', which though useful as a short-cut to action, shrouds the understanding in habits which deflect from questioning the very concepts we live by. This presentation, which focuses on Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, aims to show how she made use of an epistemic translation technique to foreground the interpretative and habitual nature of something previously perceived to be natural. This challenge to an epistemic system (which Foucault maintains is invisible to the people living in it) not only makes the patriarchal system visible as a conceptual construction, but also ushers in a new epistemic framework through which the sexes come to be perceived as equal human beings in that "existence precedes essence" and characteristics assigned separately to the sexes are actually cultural conceptual constructs and not objectively, biologically, economically or essentially part of what it means to 'be a woman'. The surge in feminist sci-fi that follows the publication and translation of The Second Sex is a reflection of the re-imagining of gender and sex distinctions in other worlds through the possibilities of new epistemic constructions.To follow Jakobson following Peirce, if "for word-users, the meaning of any linguistic sign is its translation into some further, alternative sign, especially a sign ‘in which it is more fully developed’, as Peirce [...] stated", then I propose that in de Beauvoir’s repeated question "What is a woman?", she translated the meaning of the term 'woman' into a more fully developed sign that moves from one epistemic framework into another, resulting in actual changes in the behaviour of both women and men.[14] 

Bio: Clare Vassallo has a first degree in Philosophy, Literature and Linguistics  which she followed with a Ph.D. in Semiotics at the Universita' degli Studi di Bologna. She is Full Professor of Semiotics and Translation Studies at the University of Malta where she teaches on the postgraduate programme in Translation Studies (EMT). Her teaching focuses on courses in translation history; contemporary translation theory; pragmatics, semantics and semiotics; literary translation, adaptation, and transformation; among others. She is also a Literary Translator from Maltese to English and has published a number of prose and poetry translations. Her current interest is in looking at translation as an important vehicle in the 'history of ideas' and in the historic transmission of scientific knowledge through a focus on key translated texts as instrumental in bringing about cultural and social change. She is Co-ordinator of HUMS - Humanities, Medicine and Science Platform at the University of Malta, a platform which seeks to facilitate and encourage inter-disciplinary and inter-faculty research and communication.

Federica VEZZANI & Rute COSTA

Re-conceptualizing specialised knowledge: the interplay of equivalence, variation, and popularization in medical terminology

The transfer of knowledge between different written genres and the study of how knowledge transforms over time are two key aspects in the context of inter-epistemic translation (Robinson 2017). In particular, the evolution of specialised knowledge is closely linked to what, in terminology science, is defined as the process of “conceptualization”, that is the activity of abstraction through which real-world objects are grouped into categories. These categories correspond to units of knowledge called concepts (ISO 704: 2022, Löckinger et al. 2015). Considering the dynamism of specialised knowledge due to scientific and/or technological progress, real-world objects may be subject to“re-conceptualization” which is, therefore, considered as the activity performed by domain experts of rethinking objects and their properties. In this panorama, this study aims to investigate the impact of the re-conceptualization of specialised knowledge on translation processes. In particular, we refer to the re-conceptualization performed in the medical domain about Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD) which is a medical condition characterised by “persistent preoccupation with one or more perceived defects or flaws in appearance that are either unnoticeable or only slightly noticeable to others” (American Psychiatric Association 2013). With reference to this specific case study, we will therefore illustrate how the re-conceptualization of this pathology poses challenges for the translation process in terms of 1) terms’ equivalence (and degrees of equivalence) across different languages taken into consideration (Italian, English, French and Portuguese), 2) linguistic variation that occurs when different designations are used to refer to the same concept, and 3) transmission of medical information to the general public in the perspective of science popularisation.[15] 

Bio: Federica Vezzani holds a PhD in terminology and is an assistant professor in French Language at the Department of Linguistic and Literary Studies of the University of Padova, Italy. Her main research interests are terminology, specialised translation, and technical communication. In particular, she focuses on the management of multilingual terminology according to ISO standard, and she has developed the FAIR terminology paradigm for the optimal organisation of findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable terminological data.

Rute Costa has an MA and PhD in Linguistics and is an Associate Professor with Agregação at the NOVA FCSH and a researcher at CLUNL (Linguistics Research Centre of NOVA University Lisbon). Within the scope of the project, she deals with the description and organisation of multilingual terminologies and the linguistic processes involved in popularisation techniques whose purpose is to make laypersons understand the concepts behind the terms. The results of the methods applied have translational, educational, and communicational purposes.

Margherita ZANOLETTI

Intersemiotic, inter-epistemic and intercultural. The translation character of Stradbroke Dreamtime by Oodgeroo Noonuccal

At the apex of her fame as a poet and socio-political activist, the Australian writer Oodgerooof the Noonuccal tribe (1920-1994, until 1988 known as Kath Walker), published her first book of prose, Stradbroke Dreamtime (1972). This autobiographical narrative presents two aspects of Oodgeroo’s life: the first part includes episodes from her childhood on Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island), while the second part collects traditional stories from Stradbroke Island and the Tamborine Mountains, and legends based on the author’s knowledge of her people and the land. Building upon previous studies (Zanoletti 2017) and applying the conceptualisations of intersemiotic (Marais 2019, Petrilli and Zanoletti 2023), interepistemic (Robinson 2017), and intercultural translation (Sousa Santos 2018), this paper aims to study Oodgeroo’s narrative work from a translation viewpoint. We shall investigate the translational processes involved by Oodgeroo’s work in: 1. turning performative and visual narratives into writing, thus interpreting nonverbal signs by means of signs of verbal sign systems (intersemiotic translation); 2. transferring knowledge and information between two different epistemic regimes, namely, the Australian Aboriginal religion and worldview and the epistemologies of western science (inter epistemic translation) and; 3. Transmitting her own life experience and culture to children and teenagers of all descent and extraction, thus bringing the epistemologies of the First Nations peoples of Australia to the attention of a multicultural and potentially global community of readers (intercultural translation).

BIO: Margherita Zanoletti is a graduate of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan and has a PhD in Translation Studies from the University of Sydney. From 2006-2009 she taught Italian language and translation at the University of Sydney and Macquarie University, and currently serves as Reference services specialist at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, where she guest lectures on modern languages courses. Her publications include: Oodgeroo Noonuccal, My People. La mia gente (edited, Milan 2021); Bruno Munari: The Lightness of Art (co-edited with P. Antonello and M. Nardelli, Oxford 2017); Oodgeroo Noonuccal: with ‘We are Going’ (with F. Di Blasio, Trento 2013).