ALTA47 Accepted Sessions
Note: A draft of the ALTA47 schedule will be shared in late July. Titles and descriptions have not yet been copyedited.
Accepted Panels
Session Title: A Disparate Chorus: Who do anthologies speak for?
Moderator: Padma Viswanathan
Panelists: Sarah Coolidge, Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Geoffrey Brock, Madhu Kaza
Session Description: As with translation, anthologizing lends itself readily to metaphor: are we assembling a bouquet, making a mix tape, creating a mosaic? Contemporary anthologies of translation often seek to elevate lesser-heard voices, but this doesn’t obviate difficult choices. If an editor is working from an underrepresented language, should they choose more- or less-established writers or translators? An anthology might purport to represent a language, culture or country, but how many pieces from how many eras, regions or genres must be included before such a claim feels legitimate? A panel of translators and editors who have been down the anthology-making road (from dream to reality via budgets and other constraints) will discuss these and other tough questions together with the audience.
Session Title: Are We Literary Unicorns? Translating Out of Our “Mother Tongues”
Moderator: Izidora Angel
Panelists: Denise Kripper, Bruna Dantas Lobato, Jenna Tang
Session Description: Popular discourse posits that you should translate into your native tongue. Four women writer-translators working from Taiwanese-Mandarin, Brazilian-Portuguese, Argentine-Spanish and Bulgarian, challenge this discourse through a painstakingly curated body of work that can only exist from people whose blood courses with the language, culture and voices of their homes. The panelists will present a case for why existing in the liminal space between geographies by translating from our native languages into our adopted ones is a privilege that grants us powerful creativity while giving our audience a unique and powerful perspective. In addition to their work as literary translators, all four presenters have published or are in the process of authoring their own books in English.
Session Title: Bridging Worlds: Translating South Asian Literature into English
Moderator: Daisy Rockwell
Panelists: Quamrul Hassan, Jason Grunebaum, Ammara Ahamad, Janani Ambikapathy
Session Description: This panel brings together distinguished and emerging translators to explore the rich and complex landscape of translating South Asian literature into English. The discussion will cover the challenges and rewards, the status and impact of South Asian literature in the Global Stage, and the contemporary trends in the translation industry. Join us for an insightful conversation that delves into translating South Asian literature and celebrates the efforts of those who bridge linguistic and cultural divides through their work.
Session Title: Building a Translator-led Nonprofit to Support Literary Translators
Moderator: Kyle Semmel
Panelists: Paul Russell Garrett, Jordan Barger, Sharon Rhodes
Session Description: In 2018, a group of volunteers founded the nonprofit Association of Danish-English Literary Translators (DELT) to bring Danish translators together in a supportive community. DELT regularly hosts virtual and in-person readings, workshops, mentoring opportunities, and networking events for its members, as well as an online forum for information exchange and encouragement – all while promoting Danish literature in the anglophone world. In this panel, co-founder Paul Russell Garrett joins K.E. Semmel, Jordan Edward Barger, and Sharon E. Rhodes to discuss the organization’s genesis, purpose, and aspirations – from the role it plays in nurturing Danish literary translators to serving as a model for literary translators of other languages.
Session Title: Collaborative Grammars: Poetry’s Practical and Political Lives
Moderator: Cindy Juyoung Ok
Panelists: Kareem James Abu-Zeid, Hai-Dang Phan, Mayada Ibrahim
Session Description: Poetry translators collaborate not only with authors, but also their texts’ generative syntaxes and line breaks. How does such research happen, whether in conversation or on the page, through historical consideration of diction or lyrical prioritization? Translators of Arabic, Vietnamese, Korean, and French discuss the shape and politics of varied efforts alongside poets they have translated and their poetic voices. Though translation’s philosophies and logistics are often contrasted, this panel gathers the two threads and shares publication stories amid the practical and political lives of poetry as coordinating with one another. In a closing audience Q&A, panelists expand on translation’s collaboration, methodology, politics, and more.
Session Title: Collective & Individual: Translating Political & Apolitical Voices
Moderator: Gabriel Gudding
Panelists: Jordan Barger, Lau Cesarco Eglin, Kathleen Maris Paltrineri, Magdalena Zurawski
Session Description: "Voice" as a trope used to describe authors can manifest at points of collective action and political tension (eg, "underrepresented voices" or "dissenting voices") and as a defining marker of individuality (eg, "inimitable voice" or "singular voice"). Because the trope of voice as a qualitative descriptor is freighted with both collectivizing and individuating dimensions, this panel explores how translators straddle this vital tension in the voices of writers who may or may not think of their work as political or representative of a moment or a group. If our writers themselves are not aware of how their own voices are functioning culturally, politically, or individually, where do we as translators find our footing?
Session Title: Collective Translation: For Practice and In Practice
Moderator: Jan Steyn
Panelists: Abby Ryder-Huth, Aron Aji, Jan Steyn, Bela Shayevich
Session Description: Embracing translation’s potential for poly-vocality, this panel explores methodologies and aims of collaborative translation in professional, creative, and classroom settings. We consider the limits of the “solitary translator,” and discuss how our projects, practices and pedagogical approaches can be enriched by working collaboratively. Panelists will share insights on the opportunities and challenges of sharing a source text with one or more fellow translators, facilitating or organizing multi-translator projects, and utilizing collaborative methods in the classroom. Join us to think together about mediations not between author and translator but translator and translator.
Session Title: Evolution: Exploring Translator Pay
Moderator: CJ Evans
Panelists: Jeremy Tiang, Julia Sanches, Lizzie Davis
Session Description: Literary translators are not paid enough for their work. Small publishers exist on the thinnest of margins. Editors at large publishing houses are constrained by the managers that approve their budgets. So, in this precarious environment, what can we do, collectively, to better the pay, working conditions, and opportunities for translators? Are there new methods, beyond the traditional fee and royalty structure, to make translation more sustainable? Are there ways to grow equity for languages and countries/regions that don’t have funding support and to widen the pipeline for translators from diverse backgrounds? Editors and translators come together to try to envision something new, and to listen to the bold ideas of the larger community.
Session Title: Experiments in Voice: Listening to Sound and Silence in Translation
Moderator: Jacqui Cornetta
Panelists: Madhu Kaza, Janet Hendrickson, Mayada Ibrahim, Stine An
Session Description: This performance conversation will consider what we listen for when we translate and how we activate translation through sonic and embodied experimentation. The music of words, the silence between them, something ineffable in a text’s slippery whole. We listen for voices that have been erased or silenced. And echoes of delight that draw us to the texts we translate. After sharing experimentations of and/or on translation and discussing their work, panelists will invite attendees into the conversation for a Q&A.
Session Title: Fraught Intimacies of Translation
Moderator: Amanda L. Andrei
Panelists: Bonnie Chau, Cindy Juyoung Ok, Noelle de la Paz
Session Description: Translation is an inherently intimate act. In most obvious terms, it requires a closeness between the translator and the author. Beyond this, it often drags in intimacies with other languages, people, and cultures. On this panel, translators who come to the craft from a variety of approaches and connections and will share examples of their own fraught intimacies with their work. One translator grapples with systems of romanized transliterations. Another panelist finds herself circling restlessly around the early internet writings of an author who has long since moved on to very different work. In addition, we will consider how the process of translation changes our relationships with our primary language, co-translators, family members, ancestors, primary language, and beyond.
Session Title: Grammar in the Trenches: How Words Become Weapons in Times of Conflict
Moderator: Brian James Baer
Panelists: Alta L. Price, Sasha Senderovich
Session Description: During times of war, the translator is rarely a neutral mediator and even the choice of toponyms becomes charged. This panel will delve into specific examples from historical and contemporary conflicts, illustrating the profound impact that linguistic choices can have on public perception and propaganda. The panel will also explore the ethical dilemmas faced by translators working in conflict zones and the responsibility they bear in shaping narratives. The panel seeks to open discussion on the power of language in shaping wartime realities and fostering post-conflict reconciliation.
Session Title: Hearing Voices, Inhabiting Voices, Replacing Voices: Making Choices
Moderator: Susanna Lang
Panelists: Lisa Rose Bradford, Armine Mortimer, Gary Racz, Madeleine Stratford
As translators, we make choices at the level of the word, syntax, or form, based on how we hear the writer’s voice. These choices are aesthetic, responding to how the writer sounds in our ears, and/or ethical, as we gauge the writer’s approach to issues and events of our times and theirs. In pondering how to temper our own voice as writers, we may pose these questions: Is this a combative process, leading to a surrender—the translator’s or the writer’s? A struggle to imitate or to make the translated voice sound foreign? A layering of voices? Each member will bring examples illustrating the aesthetic and ethical factors determining our translated voices. We will invite participants to choose between versions we have considered and to pose their own questions.
Session Title: How to Say “I”?: Translating French-Language Self Writing
Moderator: Aubrey Gabel
Panelists: André Pettman, Trask Roberts, Matthew B. Smith
Session Description: This panel will focus on the problem of translating texts that broadly fit the generic category of self-writing—autobiography, memoir, autofiction, creative nonfiction, etc.—from French into English. Panelists will examine ethical problems posed by translating personal memories, of multiple “selves,” which are often culturally or socially situated, alongside the (sometimes more technical) problem of reproducing the author’s voice, across different genres or text types. Diverse authors discussed, including: the Algerian novelist and filmmaker Assia Djebar (1936-2015), Third-Worldist editor François Maspero (1932-2015), Tunisian writer Hélé Beji (1948-), French mathematician Michèle Audin (1954-), and the young gay writer Baptiste Thery-Guilbert (1999-).
Session Title: Human translators with machines: CAT tools and literary translation
Moderator: Shelley Fairweather-Vega
Panelists: Lola Rogers, Steven Capsuto, Viktorija Bilić
Session Description: In an era of ubiquitous hype around translation assisted by artificial intelligence, the smart use of older technology by translators can go unnoticed. This panel features demonstrations of at least four different CAT (Computer Assisted Translation) tools that ALTA members use for literary translation projects, taking advantage of their data-crunching capabilities for glossary management, time tracking, formatting help, sophisticated searching of source and target texts, and more... all while letting translators translate the old-fashioned way, using their own brains. Brief demonstrations of the translation process within each tool will show what CATs can and cannot do to keep human translators more consistent, efficient, and organized, without hampering our creativity.
Session Title: "I chose to stop writing in ___”: How War Changes Language Choices
Moderator: Anne O. Fisher
Panelists: Sibelan Forrester, Olena Jennings, Chana Toth-Sewell
Session Description: For a writer one of the most intimate choices is the language used to write in, and that language is what brings the translator into the writer’s orbit. In cases where a writer has been using the language of an oppressor or a colonizer, the choice to change to another language can be an important political and artistic gesture. When the writer has been using the language of an attacker or an invader, the stakes of switching are even higher. Writers who have chosen to change languages can play on the dissimilarities between languages, making differences more noticeable. How does the translator moderate and mediate these crucial contexts for readers? This panel explores these issues using examples drawn from Ukrainian, Russian, Yiddish, and Croatian.
Session Title: Language and Power in Literary Translation
Moderator: Jennifer Feeley
Panelists: Chenxin Jiang, Lau Yee-Wa, Louise Law, Astrid Liu
Session Description: How do language hierarchies inform the art of literary translation? Who has access to translate from and into certain languages? This panel explores the relationship between language and power in translation, drawing from the experiences of authors, translators, editors, and literary programmers. Considering the power dynamics in both the source and target languages, we discuss the implications for inclusion in translating from and into specific languages. We also strategize ways to build collective platforms that amplify lesser-heard voices, fostering transnational connections over shared struggles through translation. We invite the audience to join us in discussing how translators might navigate these complexities, addressing the power of translation to challenge systemic barriers.
Session Title: Technicalities of Vocal Magic
Moderator: Marguerite Feitlowitz
Panelists: Aviya Kushner, Mary Ann Newman, Tess Lewis, Matt Reeck
Session Description: “Voice” as a concept can sound a little vague, but we sure know it when we hear/see/feel it (and when we don’t!) Technical decisions--line breaks, punctuation, rhythm, performance styles, modes of conjugation and address—are crucial, challenging, and fascinatingly varied among the languages of our panelists: Catalan, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Korean, Spanish, & Urdu.
Session Title: Translation as a Writing Paradigm
Moderator: Jennifer Zoble
Panelists: Annie Janusch, Thomas Mira y Lopez, Janet Hendrickson
Session Description: Undergraduate writing programs are increasingly recognizing translation as a generative mode of writing, especially for linguistically diverse students. This panel considers both what translation offers other modes of writing and vice versa. Panelists will present a specific activity they’ve successfully used in their respective writing classrooms to engage translation, including: personal essays that inflect the writer’s other language(s); English-to-English translations of historical texts into contemporary idioms; and draft or unfinished translations that illuminate the process of writing a text in translation. Together we’ll explore what student writers stand to gain from translation exercises that explore and disrupt assumptions about style, voice, language, and language proficiency.
Session Title: Translation of Bangla Literature: Glass Half Full Or Half Empty
Moderator: Quamrul Hassan
Panelists: Anisuz Zaman, Shahab Eunus, Sayan Bhattacharyya
Session Description: The panel will feature translators working in promoting Bangla literature, and they will discuss the challenges they face and the opportunities that are there.
Session Title: Translation's Voice and Its Various Aspects
Moderator: Keith Vincent
Panelists: Dina Famin, Lia Galvan Lisker
Session Description: Faculty and students from Boston University’s MFA in Literary Translation will explore the linguistic and non-linguistic aspects of voice and translation. More than a work’s content and style, and most evident in comparison to other versions or translations, voice is what makes one piece of literature distinct from another. This panel will discuss various aspects of a translation’s voice—the experience and impression of reading the text—such as cover design, illustrations, and audiobook recordings, as well as the translator’s voice, including identity and literary analysis of choices made by different translators of the same text.
Session Title: Who Is The Voice Speaking To?
Moderator: Yaerim Gen Kwon
Panelists: Nuria Alishio-Caballero, Raquel Grove, Bruna Kalil Othero, Madeline Keyser
Session Description: Along with the voice of the poet or prose writer, some literary texts create a particular, if often mysterious, addressee. Who is being spoken to by the imagined writer of the poem or story? Recreating this elusive yet carefully shaped interlocutor—who is both the reader and simultaneously some other very different person or character—is a demanding task in translation. This panel will present five instances of addressees embedded in literary texts in puzzling, complex ways that are crucial to the text in question. Examples will include translations from Catalan, French, German, Korean, and Brazilian Portuguese.
Session Title: The Challenge of Translation
Moderator: Johannes Göransson
Panelists: Daniel Borzutzky, Aditi Machado
Session Description: According to media and news outlets, translation is “having a moment.” Foreign writers like Karl-Ove Knausgaard and Elena Ferrante have become star authors, newspapers run articles about the importance of putting the translator on the cover of books, there’s now a special Booker Award for international fiction, there’s an annual anthology of the best works in translation. Does all of this suggest that translation has lost its transgressive capacities? Does translation still pose any challenge for the US literary status quo? This panel will explore these and related questions. It will look at institutional as well as aesthetic issue, considering how translation might pose challenges to how we read as well as what we read.
Accepted Workshops
Workshop Title: Collective Translation and the Music of Metaphors in Spanish Poetry
Leaders: Sarli E. Mercado, Sally Perret
Workshop Description: Led by the leaders of 4W-WIT (Women in Translation Circle), this workshop highlights the benefits of collective translation, while also focusing on two of the most difficult tasks of translating Spanish poetry into English: musicality and metaphor. Through activities and discussion, this session considers how rhyme and meter are translated. Is it more important to mimic musicality or ideas? What do we do with complex metaphors, whose meaning becomes elusive? To grapple with these questions, we will compare translations of the same poem by canonical authors, and then we will translate together poems from 4W WIT’s project, Translation Ecologies/Unthinking the Binary that underscore these dilemmas, as well as the benefits of group dialogue in the process of translation.
Workshop Title: Impossible Passages: A Workshop on the Untranslatable
Leaders: Clyde Moneyhun, Adam Ray Wagner
Workshop Description: Workshop participants will be asked to bring very short passages (a phrase, a line, a sentence) that are essentially untranslatable but must nonetheless be translated somehow. We will workshop the passages as a group, searching for solutions to the specific dilemmas and also developing a list of general strategies to use in such situations.
Workshop Title: Paying it Forward: Reviewing Literary Translations (a workshop)
Leaders: Diana Thow, Jan Steyn
Workshop Description: Despite the recent outpouring of useful commentary on how to review a literary translation, too many reviews still resort to assessing translations with one-word adjectives such as “fluent,” and “agile.” Book reviewers draw upon a set of skills that literary translators already have at their disposal, however, and in this workshop we’ll discuss concrete strategies for those interested in penning impactful reviews that promote translation literacy and advance public translation discourse. Participants are encouraged to bring in drafts of reviews-in-progress, or books they are hoping to review, for group feedback. Workshop leaders will offer examples and exercises to guide discussion. All are welcome, from the most seasoned reviewers to the review-curious.
Workshop Title: Performing the Experimental, Visual, and Strange in Translation
Leaders: Ainsley Morse, Bela Shayevich
Workshop Description: In this workshop, we will share and play with strategies for performing translated work that appears unperformable, focussing on concrete and visual poetry. We invite all participants to come in with challenging texts for workshop and experimentation. Beyond sharing and collaborating on performances, we will discuss the expanses and possible limits of performance as interpretation.
Workshop Title: The Future of Global Jewish Literature in Translation
Leaders: Mindl Cohen, Sean Bye
Workshop Description: Jewish literature is a global enterprise, written in countless languages reflecting millennia of diasporic life. Yet the expanse of this literature, its writers & its translators are rarely considered as part of a whole, instead siloed into individual languages. This workshop is the first step in forging a new field in translation, inviting translators of Jewish literature from all languages to shape an emerging ecosystem together. We aim to identify challenges, needs, questions of craft, and potential support for translators, publishers, and other stakeholders. Bring your dreams, frustrations, works in progress, and be ready to discuss! Open to participants of all ethnic/religious/cultural backgrounds who work with, wish to work with, or are curious about Jewish literature in translation.
Workshop Title: Translating the Global South
Leaders: Haider Shahbaz, Ibrahim Badshah
Workshop Description: Due to the long history of translation’s complicity with colonialism and imperialism, translating literary texts from the Global South requires complicated and necessary engagements with both aesthetic and political questions. What needs to be taken into consideration while choosing a text to translate? What are the ethical approaches in bringing marginalized languages and regions into dominant narratives? And what kinds of aesthetic choices—including paratexts and transliteration—may better convey the cultural, historical, linguistic and political contexts of Global South literatures? We will discuss these questions through collaborative exercises and discussions of particular passages. Participants are encouraged to bring questions and copies of passages they would like to discuss.
Workshop Title: Unfixing Translation: A Workshop in Indeterminacy
Leaders: Kanika Agrawal, poupeh missaghi
Workshop Description: It is considered high praise when a translation is deemed “definitive.” This suggests that the goal of translation is to apprehend the literary work in a manner that contains/detains it, making it unavailable or undesirable for other/further translation. Such translation may silence the work even as it purports to amplify it. In contrast, in _Siting Translation_, Tejaswini Niranjana “initiate[s] . . . a practice of translation that is speculative [and] provisional,” one that enables translators to “intervene to inscribe heterogeneity.” In this workshop we will study examples and approaches that release both text and translation from fixture, inviting re-translation, co-translation, and multiple/multilayered translation. Please bring short texts that are clamoring for other possibilities.
Workshop Title: Teaching the Translation of Poetry: Experiences, Insights, Questions
Leaders: Vivek Narayanan, Kirun Kapur
Workshop Description: Haunted by continual reminders of its own impossibility, poetry is probably the most difficult literary translation task, and yet offers innumerable opportunities for creativity. Poetry translation demands an absurdly exacting attention to source texts, but also usually sets itself the goal of making a real, living poem in the target language, imbued with music, irrationality and silences. The organizers will share experiences, insights, and questions from their teaching of classes dedicated specifically to poetic translation. We would like to issue an open invitation to ALTA members; the point is to initiate an open-ended and self-conscious dialogue around the teaching of poetry translation.