EEPS Roundtable: Dancing in Chains: Translation and/as Research

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

Despite considerable discussion of the intellectual, critical and creative demands made on practitioners by translation, the academic world still tends to regard the practice as something other (and less) than scholarship. In this way our professional field can discourage and marginalize the work of making translations, particularly by those for whom it is not their main discipline. Yet translation is both exacting as a scholarly endeavour and crucial for the circulation of ideas. This roundtable explores the relationship between translation and research by exchanging the experiences and experiments of participants who have approached translation from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and languages (Croatian, Czech, English, German, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, and Ukrainian), highlighting translation as a process of investigation and interpretation that articulates questions, produces concepts and generates new knowledge – as well as being a creative practice in itself. The panel thus argues for the liberation of translators of all stripes from the oppression of academic convention, and in so doing supports the efforts of the journal EEPS (East European Politics and Societies & Cultures), which has awarded the Michael Henry Heim Prize in Collegial Translation since 2014 to promote translations of scholarship by colleagues in the discipline.

Sub Unit

• Linguistics/Language Pedagogy/Translation

Chair

• Andrzej W. Tymowski, American Council of Learned Societies

Roundtable Members

• Wendy Bracewell, U College London (UK)

• Sibelan E. S. Forrester, Swarthmore College

• James Krapfl, McGill U (Canada)

• Madalina Meirosu, Arizona State U

• Antonija Primorac, U of Rijeka (Croatia)