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Call for Publications
Theme: The (Self)translation of Knowledge
Subtitle: Scholarship in Migration
Publication: Target: International Journal of Translation Studies
Date: Issue No. 36 (2024)
Deadline: 30.10.2021
Over the last decade, armed conflicts, oppression, and poverty have
forced millions of people into flight from their homes. Meanwhile,
over the last several decades, the globalized economy has enticed
people in various careers to relocate — both eastward and westward —
for work. These contemporary migrational dynamics have promoted a
focus within Translation Studies on geographic relocation as a
driving force behind interlinguistic and -cultural transmission of
(translated) texts, of loan words, (translated) concepts, and
(appropriated) traditions. The description and analysis of migratory
processes qualify as interesting objects for Translation Studies
because authors who migrate seldom fully “arrive.” They tend to
swing, voluntarily and involuntarily, back and forth between the
languages and cultures of their new and old “homes.” This linguistic
and cultural pendulum motion of migrational (self)translators poses
in turn methodological challenges to the conventional understanding
of translation as a teleological move from source to target texts and
cultures (cf. Inghilleri’s Translation and Migration (2017) and
Polezzi’s special issue of Translation Studies (2012), also titled
Translation and Migration).
The figure of the self-translator commands special interest within
the migrational turn in Translation Studies, and yet the field has
devoted far more attention to literary authors and their strategies
than to other self-translating “crosscultural interlocutors” and
“culture brokers” (Cordingley 2013, 7). The supposition is that
literary self-translators often enjoy unusually wide latitude in
their translational choices (Castro, Mainer, and Page 2017) although
such freedom is just as readily observable in the work of
self-translating academics (Keller and Willer 2020). To break with
this traditional privileging of literary forms of discursive
participation, this special issue explicitly aims at highlighting the
centrality of academic migrants who, on the one hand, influence their
host cultures through the work of self-translation within
institutional spaces of knowledge production and, on the other hand,
are influenced by their new cultural and linguistic work environment.
For displaced academics to continue research abroad requires complex
acts of self-translation, not only into a new academic language, but
also into a new academic and intellectual culture, and these
self-translations leave neither the host discourses and cultures nor
the self-translating actors themselves unaffected. An intellectual
history of academic migration has the challenging task of
investigating why certain self-translations achieve influence by
accounting for social, linguistic, discursive, disciplinary, and
institutional mechanisms of adaptation, integration, and advancement.
The humanities make for especially interesting cases of academic
self-translation because terminology and argument construction
function more flexibly in discourses in the humanities than in other
fields, so that translational traces can be detected in our
specialized language and reasoning more frequently and reliably than
in more empirical disciplines. It is hardly surprising that it is
most often humanists who explicitly problematize the linguistic
difficulties inherent in the self-translation process (Hannah Arendt
remains perhaps the most iconic example). However, extant historical
research suggests that language is not always the main hindrance to
self-translation into a new academic culture, and the articles in
this special issue are expected to help delimit the boundaries of
linguistic and non-linguistic factors in academic success in
(self)translation, such as one’s social and academic prestige and the
suitability of one’s work to academic research trends or to the
political climate within local university cultures.
The study of (self)translated humanistic scholarship promises insight
into academics’ degree of self-awareness regarding the conditions for
the success of their self-translation. Such research could also
reveal what academics consider (un)translatable in their lives and
work, for whom their work is (not) translatable, and which rhetorical
resources they draw on to bridge perceived gaps. If non-linguistic
factors prove decisive, these might include social prestige, academic
pedigree (including language and nationality), and the suitability of
one’s work to academic research trends and the political climate at
the relevant university.
The editors of this special issue of Target have recently led a
workshop on the forced adoption of English and American academic
culture by (primarily Jewish) scholars and intellectuals fleeing the
Third Reich (https://forcedtranslation.uni-mainz.de/). For this
special issue we explicitly want to broaden the scope to highlight
configurations of interlingual migrant academic, i.e., humanistic
production in the geographic contexts of South America, Africa, and
Asia — as well as work on the relationship between the wealthy hubs
of academic production and the “peripheries” (Canagarajah 2002) or
“semi-peripheries” (Bennett 2014) of global academia.
We welcome proposals for conceptual papers as well as case studies
and empirical research contributions that address the following
aspects of academic (self)translation (though this is not intended as
an exhaustive list of possible topics).
Potential topics and subtopics
1. Transhistorical conditions shaping academic language choice,
(self)translation, and migration
- Globalization and its effects on academic language choice, pressure
to migrate, and academic self-translation
- Lingua franca as incentive (and/or product) of self-translation
practices
- Scientific internationalism and self-translation as everyday coping
strategy
2. Academic self-translation en masse in periods of increasing
historical upheaval
- Turning points in intellectual history inaugurated by the migration
of academics
- (Self)translation of scholarship in periods of (de-)colonization
between local and colonial languages in Asian, South American, or
African contexts
3. Case studies of the emergence of specific academic
self-translations in the context of voluntary or involuntary
migration (with a preference for case studies that expand the
geographic scope beyond Europe.)
- Rhetorical habits of academic migrant self-translation in specific
cases, periods, languages, or language pairs
- The translation, publication, and editorial politics of specific
(self)translating scholars
4. Dichotomies and methodological (in)compatibilities that highlight
differences between:
- Academic migration and other experiences of migration
- Self-translation and other-translation
- Forced and voluntary academic migration
- Ancient, medieval, and modern cases of academic migration
- Migration in eras where one lingua franca predominates in the
sciences — in contrast to migration in eras of “Scientific
Babel” (Gordin 2015)
Submissions
Please send abstract (700-800 words excluding references) to both
editors of the Special Issue Lavinia Heller (hellerla(at)uni-mainz.de)
and Spencer Hawkins (shawkins(at)uni-mainz.de).
Deadline for abstract proposals: October 30, 2021
All contributors will be notified of the outcome of their submissions
by November 31, 2021. All accepted contributors will receive further
instructions and information with their notification of acceptance.
All accepted contributions will be double blind peer-reviewed.
Publication schedule
October 30, 2021:
Deadline for abstract proposals
September 30, 2022:
Submission of full paper
October 2022 – March 2023:
Double-blind peer review process and subsequent revisions
June 30, 2023:
Submission of final versions of papers to guest editors
October 31, 2023:
Submission of full manuscript to permanent editors
2024:
Publication
Editors
Prof Dr Lavinia Heller & Dr Spencer Hawkins
Faculty of Translation Studies, Linguistics and Cultural Studies
Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
Germany
Email: hellerla(at)uni-mainz.de & shawkins(at)uni-mainz.de
Journal website:
https://benjamins.com/catalog/targetCall for Publications
Theme: The (Self)translation of Knowledge
Subtitle: Scholarship in Migration
Publication: Target: International Journal of Translation Studies
Date: Issue No. 36 (2024)
Deadline: 30.10.2021
__________________________________________________
Over the last decade, armed conflicts, oppression, and poverty have
forced millions of people into flight from their homes. Meanwhile,
over the last several decades, the globalized economy has enticed
people in various careers to relocate — both eastward and westward —
for work. These contemporary migrational dynamics have promoted a
focus within Translation Studies on geographic relocation as a
driving force behind interlinguistic and -cultural transmission of
(translated) texts, of loan words, (translated) concepts, and
(appropriated) traditions. The description and analysis of migratory
processes qualify as interesting objects for Translation Studies
because authors who migrate seldom fully “arrive.” They tend to
swing, voluntarily and involuntarily, back and forth between the
languages and cultures of their new and old “homes.” This linguistic
and cultural pendulum motion of migrational (self)translators poses
in turn methodological challenges to the conventional understanding
of translation as a teleological move from source to target texts and
cultures (cf. Inghilleri’s Translation and Migration (2017) and
Polezzi’s special issue of Translation Studies (2012), also titled
Translation and Migration).
The figure of the self-translator commands special interest within
the migrational turn in Translation Studies, and yet the field has
devoted far more attention to literary authors and their strategies
than to other self-translating “crosscultural interlocutors” and
“culture brokers” (Cordingley 2013, 7). The supposition is that
literary self-translators often enjoy unusually wide latitude in
their translational choices (Castro, Mainer, and Page 2017) although
such freedom is just as readily observable in the work of
self-translating academics (Keller and Willer 2020). To break with
this traditional privileging of literary forms of discursive
participation, this special issue explicitly aims at highlighting the
centrality of academic migrants who, on the one hand, influence their
host cultures through the work of self-translation within
institutional spaces of knowledge production and, on the other hand,
are influenced by their new cultural and linguistic work environment.
For displaced academics to continue research abroad requires complex
acts of self-translation, not only into a new academic language, but
also into a new academic and intellectual culture, and these
self-translations leave neither the host discourses and cultures nor
the self-translating actors themselves unaffected. An intellectual
history of academic migration has the challenging task of
investigating why certain self-translations achieve influence by
accounting for social, linguistic, discursive, disciplinary, and
institutional mechanisms of adaptation, integration, and advancement.
The humanities make for especially interesting cases of academic
self-translation because terminology and argument construction
function more flexibly in discourses in the humanities than in other
fields, so that translational traces can be detected in our
specialized language and reasoning more frequently and reliably than
in more empirical disciplines. It is hardly surprising that it is
most often humanists who explicitly problematize the linguistic
difficulties inherent in the self-translation process (Hannah Arendt
remains perhaps the most iconic example). However, extant historical
research suggests that language is not always the main hindrance to
self-translation into a new academic culture, and the articles in
this special issue are expected to help delimit the boundaries of
linguistic and non-linguistic factors in academic success in
(self)translation, such as one’s social and academic prestige and the
suitability of one’s work to academic research trends or to the
political climate within local university cultures.
The study of (self)translated humanistic scholarship promises insight
into academics’ degree of self-awareness regarding the conditions for
the success of their self-translation. Such research could also
reveal what academics consider (un)translatable in their lives and
work, for whom their work is (not) translatable, and which rhetorical
resources they draw on to bridge perceived gaps. If non-linguistic
factors prove decisive, these might include social prestige, academic
pedigree (including language and nationality), and the suitability of
one’s work to academic research trends and the political climate at
the relevant university.
The editors of this special issue of Target have recently led a
workshop on the forced adoption of English and American academic
culture by (primarily Jewish) scholars and intellectuals fleeing the
Third Reich (https://forcedtranslation.uni-mainz.de/). For this
special issue we explicitly want to broaden the scope to highlight
configurations of interlingual migrant academic, i.e., humanistic
production in the geographic contexts of South America, Africa, and
Asia — as well as work on the relationship between the wealthy hubs
of academic production and the “peripheries” (Canagarajah 2002) or
“semi-peripheries” (Bennett 2014) of global academia.
We welcome proposals for conceptual papers as well as case studies
and empirical research contributions that address the following
aspects of academic (self)translation (though this is not intended as
an exhaustive list of possible topics).
Potential topics and subtopics
1. Transhistorical conditions shaping academic language choice,
(self)translation, and migration
- Globalization and its effects on academic language choice, pressure
to migrate, and academic self-translation
- Lingua franca as incentive (and/or product) of self-translation
practices
- Scientific internationalism and self-translation as everyday coping
strategy
2. Academic self-translation en masse in periods of increasing
historical upheaval
- Turning points in intellectual history inaugurated by the migration
of academics
- (Self)translation of scholarship in periods of (de-)colonization
between local and colonial languages in Asian, South American, or
African contexts
3. Case studies of the emergence of specific academic
self-translations in the context of voluntary or involuntary
migration (with a preference for case studies that expand the
geographic scope beyond Europe.)
- Rhetorical habits of academic migrant self-translation in specific
cases, periods, languages, or language pairs
- The translation, publication, and editorial politics of specific
(self)translating scholars
4. Dichotomies and methodological (in)compatibilities that highlight
differences between:
- Academic migration and other experiences of migration
- Self-translation and other-translation
- Forced and voluntary academic migration
- Ancient, medieval, and modern cases of academic migration
- Migration in eras where one lingua franca predominates in the
sciences — in contrast to migration in eras of “Scientific
Babel” (Gordin 2015)
Submissions
Please send abstract (700-800 words excluding references) to both
editors of the Special Issue Lavinia Heller (hellerla@uni-mainz.de)
and Spencer Hawkins (shawkins@uni-mainz.de).
Deadline for abstract proposals: October 30, 2021
All contributors will be notified of the outcome of their submissions
by November 31, 2021. All accepted contributors will receive further
instructions and information with their notification of acceptance.
All accepted contributions will be double blind peer-reviewed.
Publication schedule
October 30, 2021:
Deadline for abstract proposals
September 30, 2022:
Submission of full paper
October 2022 – March 2023:
Double-blind peer review process and subsequent revisions
June 30, 2023:
Submission of final versions of papers to guest editors
October 31, 2023:
Submission of full manuscript to permanent editors
2024:
Publication
Editors
Prof Dr Lavinia Heller & Dr Spencer Hawkins
Faculty of Translation Studies, Linguistics and Cultural Studies
Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
Germany
Email: hellerla(at)uni-mainz.de & shawkins(at)uni-mainz.de
Journal website:
https://benjamins.com/catalog/target
https://benjamins.com/catalog/target