Online Lecture Series

This online lecture series, launched in November 2024, represents cutting-edge knowledge in the various areas covered by the EPISTRAN project. Lectures are given by members and consultants of the EPISTRAN team, as well as by some outside scholars who have been invited for the purpose. The lectures will mostly take place on Thursday afternoons between 5 and 6.30 pm (WET), and are open to anyone interested. Please, leave your e-mail at this form for us to send you the link for each session beforehand: https://forms.gle/jQqc8DpzDhPSwV9L6 

 

The schedule for the Autumn/Winter lectures is as follows:

 

Thursday 21st November (6-7.30 pm)

(Strand B) Translating Cosmovisions: Knowledges in Transformation

Rafael Schögler (University of Graz): The epistemic dimension of translation: Identifying cosmovision factors

Christina Korak (University of Graz): Translating the Jaguar: Transgressing boundaries of knowledge through translation

 

Thursday 28th November (11.30am – 1pm) 

(Strand A) Stabilizing Philosophical Categories as Interepistemic Translation

Douglas Robinson (Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen): Wittgenstein, Austin, and Grice.

Xiaorui Sun (Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen):  The entanglement between ‘abnormal' Western philosophy and traditional Chinese thought

 

Thursday 12th December (5-6.30pm)

(Strand E) Cyber-Translation

Marco Neves (Nova University of Lisbon/CETAPS): Cyber-Translation: Proposals for studying human-machine epistemic translation

Raluca Tanasescu (University of Galway): Literary Translation in Cyberspace: Medium theory and epistemic dimensions

 

Thursday 19th December (5-6.30)

(Strand C) Early Modern Experiments in Inter-Epistemic Translation

Karen Bennett (Nova University of Lisbon/CETAPS): The Jesuits as inter-epistemic translators in the Americas

Christian Miguel Torres Guttíerrez (University of Oslo): The Mexican Cabinet of Natural History: Scientific (Missed)translations of the Natural World


Thursday 16th January (5-6.30 pm)

(Strand C) Translational Processes in the History of Science

Jennifer Dobson (Nova University of Lisbon/CETAPS): Tracing nomenclature in translation: how the antiphlogiston paradigm made its way into anglophone scientific discourse (and stayed there)

Pedro Navarro (U. São Paulo/CETAPS): Title to be announced

 

Thursday 23rd January (5-6.30)

(Strand A) John Ødemark (University of Oslo): Bridging knowledge: Exploring medical translation through Translation Studies and the Cultural History of Science

 

Thursday 30th January (5-6.30)

Literary Transformations

(Strand A) Marco Neves (Nova University of Lisbon/CETAPS): Science translated into literature: from Ian McEwan's novels to Richard Dawkins’ metaphors

(Strand D) Oliver Currie (University of Ljubljana): Translating landscape into poetry and translating landscape poetry: the Scottish Gaelic poem Moladh Beinn Dòbhrain (“In Praise of Ben Dorain”), its eco-political interpretations and English (re)translations

 

Thursday 6th February (5-6.30)

(Strand D) Eco-Translation

Şebnem Susam-Saraeva (University of Edinburgh):  Translation rights of the more-than-human

Helen-Mary Cawood & Xany Jansen van Vuuren (University of the Free State, South Africa): Urban wildlife photography as activism: A visual translation of solastalgia


Thursday 13th February (11.30am-1pm)

(Strand D) Asemic Nature Writing

Harriet Carter and Ricarda Vidal (King’s College London): The Nature of the Asemic: drawing on the more-than-human experience

Madeleine Campbell (University of Edinburgh): title to be announced

 

Thursday 27th February (5-6.30)

(Strand A) Translating between Law and Economics

Fabrizio Esposito (Nova University of Lisbon): Epistemic translation in law and economics: a tentative typology

Anne-Lise Sibony (Catholic University of Louvain): Translating economic thinking and behavioural insights into legal argument

ABSTRACTS

 

Translating Cosmovisions: Knowledges in Transformation 


The epistemic dimension of translation: Identifying cosmovision factors

Rafael Schögler (University of Graz) 

Starting from the premise that any translation is a form of knowledge-making and knowledge is power in the sense that it is “a capacity for action” (Stehr, 1994), we will reflect upon the connection of epistemic power and translation in general terms, before taking this reflection into the context of translation for/by indigenous peoples. Our input will draw on findings from the research project “Towards a Cosmovision Turn – Challenging Basic Translation Theory” to identify the “cosmovision factor” in translation. Starting from the definition of cosmovision by the Consejo Regional del Cauca (2004, 83) that describes cosmovisions as “diverging ways of perceiving world(s) and acting in them”, we will connect dimensions of knowledge-making and knowledge-transformation with forms of acting and agency. Identifying “cosmovision factors” in translation thus means to acknowledge difference in meaning-making, but also in forms of acting in world(s).

 

Interpreting the jaguar: Transgressing boundaries of knowledge through translation 

Christina Korak (University of Graz)

Our analysis of an interpreting scene comprising the important Amazonian figure of the jaguar and the meñera (jaguar shaman of Ecuador’s Waorani people) provides a case in point for such an acknowledging of indigenous ontologies through translation. We base our contribution on perspectivist notions on translation as brought forward by Viveiros de Castro (1998) but link these to indigenous peoples’ current struggles for the respect for their collective rights. Thus, our analysis of how the Waorani people of Ecuador proceed to interpret a message of the jaguar, who had possessed the body of the meñera, from the indigenous language Waoterero into Spanish shows that identifying cosmovision factors in translation also bears important political ramifications. We argue that the effects of the jaguar’s message have to be contextualized within the Waorani’s struggle for an intact territory free from oil exploitation for both the contacted family groups and even more urgently for the groups who still remain in isolation. Shapeshifting in and through translation thus turns also into a political quest of acknowledging indigenous ontologies for translation theory-building as well as translation practices.

 

Rafael Schögler is Associate Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Graz, Austria. He studied translation studies and sociology and has spent time as a visiting researcher at both CenTras, London and CTIS, Manchester. His research deals with divergent aspects of knowledge translation ranging from questions of internationalization to the politics of book translation. In this context he published the edited volume Circulation of Academic Thought. Rethinking Translation in the Academic Field (2019) as well as the open access monograph Die Politik der Buchübersetzung. Entwicklungslinien in den Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften nach 1945 (2023). Currently, he is involved in the project Towards a Cosmovision Turn. Challenging Basic Translation Theories that deals with translation in indigenous communities and its links to the development of translation theories in the context of missionary work.

 

Christina Korak works as interpreter for migrants and is PostDoc researcher at the Department of Translation Studies, University of Graz. In the project Towards a Cosmovision Turn - Challenging Basic Translation Theory, she explores to which extent study programmes and diplomas for interpreting and translating in indigenous languages in Peru, Mexico and Ecuador contribute to a decolonisation of translation theories. In-between worlds of capitalism, indigenous knowledge and cosmovisions were also the focus of her large field study on interpreting and translating between the Waorani hunters and gatherers of the Ecuadorian Amazon, oil companies, missionaries and NGO workers. In 2024, Promedia will publish her book Den Jaguar dolmetschen. Sprachgebrauch und Rechte der Waorani Ecuadors (Interpreting the Jaguar. Language use and Rights of Ecuador’s Waorani people).

 

Stabilizing Philosophical Categories as Interepistemic Translation 

Douglas Robinson (Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen)

Xiaorui Sun (Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen)

 

The theme for this mini-conference is the interepistemic translationality of the way a certain kind of thinker or intellectual tradition imposes a false stability on philosophical complexity. The implicit (or sometimes explicit) context for that theme is the assumption that a lived/situated/embodied experience and/or attitude is better (more realistic, more useful) than a false stability/structure; sometimes stabilization is presented as a corrective to lived complexity, other times as bad theory that calls for retheorization in lived/situated/experienced complexity.

 

Doug Robinson’s paper explores these tensions in stabilizing readings of destabilized ordinary-language philosophy (Wittgenstein, Austin, and Grice), while Xiaorui Sun’s explores them in the “abnormal” or “dissident” strain of Western philosophy from Anaximēnēs through Spinoza and Nietzsche to Gilles Deleuze in terms of potential influence from ancient Chinese thought. In her paper the goal is both Chinese qi theory as an “original” complexity that later theorists have attempted to stabilize and Deleuze’s hysteria theory as a corrective complexity that seeks to restore something like qi theory to Western stabilizations.

 

Douglas Robinson is one of the world’s leading translation scholars, with two dozen monographs and five dozen journal articles and book chapters on translation theory—not to mention the world’s leading English-language anthology of translation theory readings, Western Translation Theory from Herodotus to Nietzsche, and the world’s leading English-language textbook for novice translators, Becoming a Translator. Even more important is the fact that almost every book he has ever written about translation is itself an interepistemic translation between translation studies and some other discipline: behavioral economics, Douglas Hofstadter’s strange loops, transgender studies, translational-medicine and the medical humanities, semiotics, rhetoric, etc. He translates literature from Finnish and is Professor of Translation Studies and Head of the Division of Intercultural Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen.

 

Xiaorui Sun is a doctoral student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and author of articles on translation published in the Journal of Translation Studies, Translation Matters, and Babel.

 

Cyber-Translation: Proposals for Studying Human-Machine Epistemic Translation 

Marco Neves (University of NOVA, Lisbon/CETAPS)

 

The connection of artificial intelligence (AI) and digital media has transformed the landscape of knowledge production and dissemination in a way that is still to be fully understood. This lecture inaugurates the 'Cyber-Translation' strand within the EPISTRAN project, focusing on the intricate processes of (inter-)epistemic translation at the human-machine nexus. The lecture will map out a territory for exploration inside our project, presenting six lines of enquiry:

By integrating philosophical perspectives with practical considerations, this new strand aims to investigate AI's role in human epistemology and the complexities of human-machine interactions in the digital age inside a framework of (inter-)epistemic translation

 

Marco Neves has a PhD in Translation Studies and is Assistant Professor at NOVA FCSH and a researcher with CETAPS. He is one of the coordinators of the EPISTRAN project and part of the editorial board of 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, and the way humans interact with artificial intelligence. 

 

Literary Translation in Cyberspace: Medium Theory and Epistemic Dimensions

Raluca Tanasescu

 

This presentation explores the positioning of literary translation in digital space, drawing on Lars Elleström’s medium-focused communication model (2018, 2023) to examine the spatial and sonic dimensions of literary translation within digitally mediated environments. It considers how platform relationality influences the communication model in literary translation and expands it to incorporate multimedial and multimodal approaches, highlighting the epistemic processes undergone by literary translation in navigating and adapting to digital formats. As we enter the second half of the digital revolution, the paper argues that literary translation scholarship must recognize the role of digital infrastructures—including platforms, tools, and algorithms—in shaping literary translators’ perceptions of modality and mediality.

The presentation will highlight the overlooked role of textuality in linking literary translation and digital spaces, challenging the tendency of current research to confine literary translation to print media (Tanasescu and Tanasescu 2022) and to treat digital platforms as mere paratextual novelties. Despite case studies on literary translation and the technoscape (Lee 2015), media convergence (Wang 2022, Tanasescu and Tanasescu 2019), and translators as agents of change (Desjardins, Larsonneur, and Lacour 2021), the material impact of digital infrastructures on translated literary texts remains underexplored. This paper calls for a more nuanced understanding of the communicative model underlying literary translation, urging the integration of medium-awareness and platform relationality. In the process of becoming a ‘digital trace’ (Latour 2014; Venturini et al. 2017), literary translation incorporates the modes of engagement and understanding that accompany the digital medium. As platforms and code mediate the transmission and reception of texts, they impose new epistemic structures on translation, shaping how texts are reconfigured and remediated in cyberspace.

 

Raluca Tanasescu earned her PhD from the University of Ottawa’s School of Translation and Interpretation, with a thesis on Romanian translations of contemporary North American poetry. She is currently a researcher in Translation and Global Media at the University of Galway, Ireland and currently serves as Chair of the Multilingualism and Multiculturalism Committee for the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. She is interested in how digitality upholds intersemiotic and interepistemic translation processes, particularly the ways in which digital writing becomes a form of intersemiotic and interepistemic translation. Her research examines how digital media reshape not only the modes but also the meanings of translation, encouraging a dynamic interaction between texts, images, and sounds.

 

The Jesuits as inter-epistemic translators in the Americas

Karen Bennett (NOVA University of Lisbon / CETAPS)

This lecture looks at the Jesuits’ attempts to transplant European ideas to the Americas as a form of inter-epistemic translation and argues that this operated not only horizontally (across space) but also vertically (through time), in the sense that the new understandings that resulted from their linguistic experiments helped bring about a major philosophical shift that ultimately propelled Europe into the modern age.


When the Jesuits set out on their missions, in the early 16th century, they will have thought the Christian message they were going to transmit constituted an absolute, incontrovertible Truth that would be expressible in any language, no matter how primitive or pagan. However, the experience on the ground seems to have taught them otherwise. Their struggle to make European notions intelligible in languages that lacked the basic conceptual categories necessary for them to make sense seems to have shaken their inherited beliefs in universal grammar and sacred etymologies, and caused them to consider the possibility that meaning might instead be generated through usage in context (“communication theory avant la lettre”).


This lecture surveys the various strategies that the Jesuits used to transmit European ideas in the Americas, focusing not only on religious concepts but also on the scientific knowledge that they took over and how this was related to the indigenous knowledges that they found there. It concludes that, far from being the dogmatic purveyors of reactionary ideas, as they are often portrayed, the Jesuits were very sophisticated inter-epistemic translators who ultimately proved to be a progressive force in the development of human knowledge. 

 

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) and the EPISTRAN project, and is general editor of the journal Translation Matters and member of the editorial board of the Brill series Approaches to Translation Studies.

 

The Mexican Cabinet of Natural History: Scientific (missed)translations of the natural world

Cristian M. Torres-Gutierrez (University of Oslo)

 

Impetus for exploration guided by scientific curiosity made use of imperial global networks in which the circulation of knowledge relied on new epistemic spaces within colonial systems of exchange. One example of this is the role of Cabinets of Natural History. Cabinets were instruments that attempted to create repositories of knowledge employing a scientific methodology that would index and classify the natural world. The collections featured in Cabinets served as technologies into which nature became a sedimented attestation of scientific theories. In this talk, I will explore the role of animal as objects within the Mexican Cabinet of Natural History (1790) as well as the transformations they underwent in order to be displayed. By exploring the processes of translation, taxidermy, and taxonomic classification, I will show how a dissociation in the mode of relating to animals emerged, which was enhanced by a process of epistemic-translation in which the encoding of experience occurred as bodies were transformed into animal-objects displayed and displaced from the endemic place of a natural habitat into an epistemic space for public instruction in natural history.

 

Cristian Torres is a PhD Researcher in Cultural History and Museology at the University of Oslo. His current PhD project titled, Memories still remain: Collecting and Archiving the Indigenous World in Colonial Mexico, explores the preservation and transformation of indigenous knowledge systems in the process of incorporating them as archivable records. Drawing insights from critical archival studies and cultural translation, the project considers the creation of an archive and a collection as reliant on the instrumentation of translation practices that achieve commensurability while emphasising difference. He was previously the Co-Investigator of an Imagining Futures commissioned project that created an archive in the Maya community of Sotuta, Yucatan in Mexico, which recorded contemporary practices stemming from following the foodpaths of the town, including those that pertain to nutrition, therapeutics, and sustainable agriculture. He received a joint MA in Crossways in Cultural Narratives from the Universities of St. Andrews in Scotland, Santiago de Compostela in Spain, and Bergamo in Italy, and a BA in English from the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

 

Tracing nomenclature in translation: how the antiphlogiston paradigm made its way into anglophone scientific discourse (and stayed there)

Jennifer Dobson (U. NOVA, Lisbon/CETAPS)

 

The chemical revolution in late eighteenth-century Europe represented a major shift in scientific understanding, notably the rejection of the phlogiston theory, which proposed phlogiston as a substance present in all flammable bodies, and released when these were burned. The French chemist Antoine Lavoisier led the charge against the theory with a group of French antiphlogiston chemists. The most prominent defenders of phlogiston were the Anglophone chemists Richard Kirwan and Joseph Priestley.


In 1787, the antiphlogiston group published a new method of chemical nomenclature (Lavoisier et al. 1787), one that removed all traces of phlogiston theory (and, incidentally, of alchemy) from chemical terminology. The method was translated into English for the first time in 1788, but the new system was not immediately adopted ubiquitously by the anglophone scientific community, although it ultimately went on to form the foundations of modern chemistry as it still exists today.


This paper will trace the translational processes by which the antiphlogiston paradigm was integrated into English scientific discourse. This tracing will involve textual analysis of translations into English of works by the French antiphlogiston chemists and works published in English by the anglophone chemists. These will include treatises, memoires and letters/communications published in English, for example submissions to Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy. The analysis will also pay particular attention to how the second translation of the method of nomenclature, published in 1794, affected the anglophone chemists’ use of the terminology.

 

Jennifer Dobson is a first-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.

 

 

Francisco de Arruda Furtado: Epistemically translating Darwin in 19th Portuguese popularizations

Pedro Navarro (FFCLRP - University of São Paulo/CETAPS)

 

Departing from a ‘continuum model’ which holds science popularization as inseparable from science communication, this paper examines the popularization of science through the lens of interepistemic translation and translationality. The popularization of Darwinism in Portugal by the Azorean naturalist Francisco de Arruda Furtado (1854-1887) is presented as a case study. Darwin met a lot of public and scientific resistance to his ideas when he first published them in 1859. By the next decade, he himself noticed the change of atmosphere regarding the transformation of species. Evolutionism, Darwinian or not, was now the dominant view (Darwin 1872, pp. 1-2). Arruda Furtado thus popularized Darwin to a readership that was already much more familiar with these issues. However, he did so in a very different context: late 19th Portugal, which was a very Catholic, unstable and peripheral Empire governed by a semi-constitutional monarchy.

Building on my previous work on Brazilian popularizations by Augusto César de Miranda Azevedo (Navarro 2024), this talk emphasizes the importance of translation (interlingual and inter-epistemic) for the global circulation and reception of scientific knowledge.

 

Pedro Navarro is a biologist and biology teacher. Currently he is finishing his PhD in History of Biology at the University of São Paulo with a dissertation on the translations of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species and Descent of Man in Brazil and Portugal.

 

Bridging Knowledge: Exploring medical translation through translation studies and the cultural history of science

John Ødemark (University of Oslo)

                  

We often tend to view translation in purely discursive terms; that is, as the act of carrying over and rendering one language into another. However, in fields like anthropology and the history and philosophy of science, questions about the commensurability of knowledge across different disciplines, places, and times have long been associated with the term “translation” — thus underscoring the inter-epistemic and intercultural aspects of translation. Over the past two decades, moreover, translation has also emerged as a key term in the natural sciences, particularly in medicine, where knowledge translation (KT) refers to a set of research activities united by the common goal of bridging the gap between science in laboratories and clinical practice. More generally, it involves putting research-based knowledge into practice within frameworks for evidence-based policy (EBP).


In this talk, I aim both to critique and make a positive contribution to KT by viewing it through lenses from translation studies and the cultural history of science. I maintain that the epistemological paradigm of KT has serious flaws, which also make it vulnerable to attacks from “populist relativism” and other “merchants of doubt.” The paradigm assumes that KT, as science, is a culturally neutral endeavour, whereas other epistemic cultures, including local and traditional knowledge, are considered “barriers” to integrating science into policy and practice. Moreover, the process of generating knowledge is construed as distinct from the translation process, where knowledge is “potted” as a finished product at the beginning of the translation process and then “implanted” in a new context. In contrast, I assume that science is not a universal enterprise to generate context-free facts to be translated intact to local contexts. Rather, both the production and the reception of science are characterized by diverse cultural and epistemic contexts, where both facts and values are regularly contested. Acknowledging this translational epistemology, I maintain, may actually increase the effectiveness of KT.

 

John Ødemark is Professor of Cultural History with an emphasis on cultural encounters. His main research theme is epistemic and cultural translation, early modern cultural encounters, medical humanities, and the history of the human sciences. He is PI of the research project Bodies in Translation: Science, Knowledge and Sustainability in Cultural Translation funded by the Research Council of Norway.  He has published widely in both cultural history and medical humanities. His latest book is the coedited volume The Sociology of Translation and the Politics of Sustainability-Explorations Across Cultures and Natures (Routledge 2024). 

 

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

Marco Neves (NOVA University of Lisbon/CETAPS)

 

This paper will present a reading of Ian McEwan’s novels and Richard Dawking’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 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.

 

Marco Neves has a PhD in Translation Studies and is Assistant Professor at NOVA FCSH and a researcher with CETAPS. He is one of the coordinators of the EPISTRAN project and part of the editorial board of 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, and the way humans interact with artificial intelligence.  

 

Translating landscape into poetry and translating landscape poetry: the Scottish Gaelic poem Moladh Beinn Dòbhrain (“In Praise of Ben Dorain”), its eco-political interpretations and English (re)translations

Oliver Currie (University of Ljubljana)

 

Duncan Bàn MacIntyre’s long poem Moladh Beinn Dòbhrain (“Praise of Ben Dorain”), composed in the mid 18th century (MacIntyre 1978:196-225), is a classic of Scottish Gaelic and Scottish literature more literature more generally; it is regularly included in anthologies of Scottish poetry and has been translated into English no fewer than ten times in the past 150 years, including by Hugh MacDiarmid (1941:43-58), Iain Crichton Smith (1969) and most recently by Alan Riach (2013) and Garry Mackenzie (2019, 2021). Moladh Beinn Dòbhrain is celebrated above all as a virtuoso nature poem, a eulogy of a mountain (Beinn Dòbhrain) and the deer that inhabit it, seemingly from both from the deer’s and hunter’s perspective (Crichton Smith 1986:132-135). At the same time, Moladh Beinn Dòbhrain has been interpreted as a political poem, obliquely asserting the right of the people, symbolised by the deer, to live on their ancestral lands, from which they were soon to be evicted and replaced by sheep as part of the Highland Clearances (Gillies 1977; Black 2001:490-493). The basis for the political interpretation lies not in the text of the poem itself, but rather in its intertextuality and place in a wider Gaelic poetic and cultural tradition, including not only earlier Gaelic panegyric poetry, but also later poems by Duncan Bàn MacIntyre lamenting the lost communities and the changed landscape of Beinn Dòbhrain overrun by sheep (MacIntyre 1978:174-183, 386-391), as well as Sorley MacLean’s influential and explicitly anti-Clearance poem Hallaig (MacLean 1989:226-230).


This paper first explores how the landscape of the Scottish Highlands is translated into poetry as a form of eco-translation (Cronin 2017:6) in Moladh Beinn Dòbhrain, which not only records the mountain, its vegetation and wildlife in intricate detail but also humanises it, both revealing the human interaction with the landscape and in part anthropomorphising it. Then, the paper explores how the poem has been reinterpreted and (re)translated and linked in turn to contemporary political and ecological issues concerning people’s relationship to the land, such as environmental degradation and restoration, the Highland Clearances, land ownership and land reform as well as tenants’ rights. The translators of Moladh Beinn Dòbhrain have used very different and creative strategies to convey political or other interpretations of the poem, which blur the boundaries of translation, creative writing and literary criticism. These strategies include creative translation combined with creative criticism (MacKenzie 2019, 2021), composing original poems inspired by Moladh Beinn Dòbhrain (MacDiarmid 1941; Crichton Smith 2011) or writing critical articles (Riach 2016, 2015; Crichton Smith 1986) which also function as paratexts to the translations (Batchelor 2018:142) and as a new form of translated intertextuality in English complementing the Gaelic intertextuality in the original. Since much of the biodiversity of Beinn Dòbhrain as well as the Gaelic-speaking communities who lived around mountain have been lost since Duncan Bàn MacIntyre composed his poem, Moladh Beinn Dòbhrain stands as a unique ecological and cultural record, which, in addition to being translated into English poetry, has also been translated in the form of guidebooks to the landscape (Murray 2017:53-122; 2019).

 

Oliver Currie has a BA in Modern and Medieval Languages and an MPhil in Linguistics from 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. He 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; translation to and from peripheral languages and the translation of folklore and oral literature; historical linguistics, sociolinguistics and language contact, with a focus on the Celtic languages (in particular Welsh), English and French. 

 

Translation rights of the more-than-human

 Şebnem Susam-Saraeva (University of Edinburgh)

 

The question “who has the right to translate whom?” has been a key debate in translation studies (see Translation Studies Forum, 2021). Translation of narratives based on experiential and corporeal knowledge, and those founded upon cultural formations that take ‘the body’ and its experiences as their starting point, such as narratives emerging from racial, ethnic and gender-based identities, has been a focal point of these debates. When it comes to the othered bodies of the more-than-human, the same question holds: “who may translate whom?”. Further questions also arise: Who gets the right to be translated and into whose language(s)? Who can avert being translated, and thus remain ‘unknowable’ and ‘uncollectable’? And what is allowed to become a ‘who’ in the first place?

By focusing on the case of cetacean communication systems and the current sustained efforts of decoding them, the proposed paper intends to look at interspecies communication through the perspectives of (eco)feminism, posthumanism and translation studies. It questions the seemingly perpetual oscillation between anthropomorphism and anthropodenial (both highly anthropocentric) in our relationship to non-human intelligence, cognition and communication. Tensions between the discourses of rights and of care will be elaborated on, as well as the (un)translatability of all communication systems, despite the unease this ‘both/and’ standpoint creates for extractivist, colonial, and hegemonic discourses.

 

Şebnem Susam-Saraeva holds a Personal Chair of Translation Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She has published on translation and ecofeminism (amongst other things), as well as (knowledge) translation in climate crisis discourse, and completed the Edinburgh Climate Research Leaders Programme in January-May 2024. She is the co-founder of the Eco-translation Network (with Michael Cronin) and has held a visiting fellowship at Trinity Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin for her work on translation and representation of cetacean communication in arts and music (February-March 2023). She is currently a Leverhulme International Fellow for her project Translation and cetacean communication systems: interactions and synergies (August-November 2024), with particular focus on marine mammal bioacoustics and behaviour studies, for which she is based at research stations and centres in marine ecology in Canada and the University ofS. She is also co-editing the inaugural special issue of the journal Feminist Translation Studies on feminism, gender and eco-translation (with Carolyn Shread). 

 

Urban wildlife photography as activism: A visual translation of solastalgia 

Helen-Mary Cawood and Xany Jansen van Vuuren (University of the Free State, South Africa)

 

This paper attempts to conceptualise urban wildlife photography as activism by reconceptualising the photographer as a visual translator who acts as “a mediator in an experiential process that allows the recipient (viewer, listener, reader or participant) to re-create the sense […] of the source artefact for him or herself” (Cultural Literacy in Europe,  Bennett 2019, 3).


By focusing on the loss of place and belonging experienced by non-human animals in urban ecologies, in particular, this paper intends to explore the activist role of urban wildlife photographers as translators of experiences, specifically that of solastalgia. Originally defined as “distress that is produced by environmental change impacting on people while they are directly connected to their home environment” (Albrecht et al., 2007), solastalgia, we argue in this paper, should be extended to include the experience of the non-human as well. Photography, it is argued here, is an integral form of human communication in which this experience can be visually and critically depicted and translated to a human audience. By means of an interdisciplinary discussion between Translation Studies and Critical Theory, we attempt to explore the conceptual grounding of urban wildlife photography as a form of visual activism.

 

Helen-Mary Cawood is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy and Classics at the University of the Free State, South Africa. Her specialist areas of teaching and research focus on contemporary continental philosophical movements such as environmental and ecological philosophy, issues in critical social theory, the hilosophy of technology, feminism, and decolonial theory.

 

Xany Jansen van Vuuren obtained her Ph.D. from the University of the Free State, where she is also a lecturer in the Department of Linguistics and Language Practice, teaching interpreting and translation. She is also a member of the editorial board for Encounters in Translation. Her research interests include ecosemiotics, ecotranslation, knowledge translation, translation and art, and interspecies translation and interpreting. Her current research projects include work on the role and purpose of Translation Studies in the ecological crisis, and interspecies translation and semiosis.

 

The Nature of the Asemic: drawing on the more-than-human experience

Harriet Carter and Ricarda Vidal

 

In this paper we will present some ideas we’re developing around asemic nature writing and how this can be used as a tool to reconfigure the complex relationship between humans and nature, or humans and non-humans.


As a form of mark-making, asemic writing, i.e. writing without alphabet, has an established tradition as an artistic genre. As a text which looks like writing, but which cannot be read, it enables the artist and their audience to focus on gesture and form rather than content and to explore perception and materiality through a multisensorial lens. The focus on material perception is even tighter when it comes to asemic nature writing, where the artist either isolates or reassembles marks and patterns they find in nature. Examples for found asemic nature texts could be insect traces on an old log which look like writing, or a series of woodworm holes on bark which look like morse code. Examples for assembled asemic nature writing include the arrangement of twigs or thorns on paper as practiced by Cui Fai in her “Manuscript of Nature” or Yuchen Zhu’s Language of Bugs, an encyclopedia ‘written’ by the carefully arranged traces of insects.


We build our exploration on Cronin’s (2017) notion of the tradosphere, which describes the continuous circulation and translation of information between all living and non-living organisms. We agree with Cronin (2017, 71) that we must acknowledge “radical differences” and argue that, in order to avoid the trap of human exceptionalism, i.e. the idea that the human is somehow outside of or above nature, we need to find a common ground from which to communicate across difference. Further, we draw on Fraunhofer’s (2017, 48) description of ethical plant translation  as a process based on experience and the senses embedded in an embodied conversation within a habitat. 


Relying on practice-based methods within the fine arts, cultural and translation studies, our project also answers to calls for a new language which would allow us to “reweave the bond between people and the land” (Kimmerer, 2013, 237).


We want to suggest that asemic nature writing, both as something we actively create as well as something we find (and bring into being through our perception and interpretation), can be such a site of common ground where communication can occur in the form of an embodied and sensual experience which sidesteps the conventions of word-based language, and in particular scientific language and scientific writing.

 

Harriet Carter has a PhD in Fine Art from Birmingham City University and is a practising artist, who has had exhibitions around Britain and elsewhere.

 

Ricarda Vidal is Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Creative Industries at King’s College, London, and leader (with Madeleine Campbell) of the Experiential Translation Network. Her research focuses on an expanded notion of translation, communication and meaning-making across cultures and languages. Her most recent publications include The Experience of Translation: Materiality and Play in Experiential Translation (Routledge 2024) and The Translation of Experience: Cultural Artefacts in Experiential Translation (Routledge 2025).