Strands

1. Science and Humanities: Involving a team of translation scholars with backgrounds in literary studies, linguistics and education, this strand looks at the translational processes involved in: 

• educational science: textbooks, students’ notes, educational picturebooks on scientific and philosophical subjects

• the popularization of science: this includes not only non-fiction books for the general public, articles in magazines or on websites, adult picturebooks and television documentaries and films, but also historical popularizations

• the creation of literary works on scientific themes

• representations by scientists of humanistic knowledge (including religion, mythology, philosophy and the arts)

• translational medicine and science

• the medical humanities

• discourses on and by artificial intelligence and human-machine interaction (i.e. translation)

• analogue-to-digital translation and vice versa [1]: this includes not only computer languages but also systems such as morse code, and the various attempts to create a universal language of knowledge (such as those by Wilkins, Dalgarno, Liebnitz etc, see Eco 1995) by reproducing in verbal language the rigour of mathematics

2. Knowledges of the World: this strand includes anthropologists, and translation scholars with specific interests in non-European epistemologies, who investigate the translational processes involved in: 

• bringing western science (particularly medical and technical knowledge) to indigenous peoples of the Global South (sub-Saharan Africa)

• bringing the epistemologies of indigenous peoples of the Global South (Brazilian Indians) to the attention of the west/north 

• tracing some of the processes by means of which Eastern epistemologies (Buddhism, Dao, Yoga) have been introduced to the west 

3. The Invention of Science: this historical strand looks at the translational processes involved in the Early Modern transition to a scientific mode of inquiry. Objects of study include: 

• the translation of pre-scientific knowledges (such as alchemy, astrology, Aristotelian physics, logic, rhetoric) into the new rational/mechanical episteme

• shifting intersemiotic representations of worldview: cosmology, cosmography and cartography

• the conceptual and linguistic reconstrual necessary to actually enable the scientific worldview to come about (Halliday & Martin 1993; Gaukroger 2006; Wootton 2015). 

[1] See Richard Dawkins (2018: 81) for clear explanation of the difference between analogue and digital communication.