ALTA47 Sessions Seeking Participants
To join a session seeking additional panelists or workshop leaders, write to the session organizer directly using the provided email address. Please do so by July 30 at the latest. Session organizers must send their final lineups to ALTA by July 31, so the sooner you write, the better your chances of joining a panel!
Panels Seeking Additional Panelists
Panels can have a maximum of FIVE total presenters (one moderator and up to 4 panelists). Titles and descriptions have not yet been copyedited.
Session Title: Contracts: What to Know and How to Pass It On
Moderator: Alex Zucker
Panelists: Julia Sanches
Session Description: A contract is a negotiated document—brought about through discussion and compromise. To decide what to discuss and where to compromise, you need a basic understanding of how contracts work and the meaning of key terms. Even more important, you need to know your own bottom line. The panel’s goal is to help translators know how to ask for what they need and share their knowledge and experience with others.
Contact: Alex Zucker, alexz.nyc@gmail.com
Session Title: Dialect and Voice in Ibero-America
Moderator: Jeffrey Diteman
Panelists: Violeta Orozco, Gary Racz, Dixon Abreu
Session Description: The fracturing of Spanish and Portuguese into their many dialects has allowed these colonial languages to adapt to a variety of cultural and environmental landscapes. Factors including geographic isolation, social class, racial marginalization, and contact with Indigenous and African languages have contributed to their distinctive character throughout Latin America. This panel will explore how translators go about representing in English the nineteenth-century gaucho sociolect of Argentina, contemporary Chicano vernacular, the Chocoano dialect of Colombia, and the Cearense dialect of northeastern Brazil.
Contact: Jeffrey Diteman, jditeman@gmail.com
Session Title: Indigenous Languages in Translation
Moderator: Louise Cole
Panelists: Beth Green-Nagle
Session Description: The United Nations declared 2019 the Year of Indigenous Languages to highlight the cultural importance of these languages as repositories of cultural history, traditions, and memory and to bring awareness to the global community of these languages, many of which are in danger of disappearing. Translations into indigenous languages can invigorate a living language while also being a catalyst for linguistic and cultural shifts. Translations of indigenous languages into dominant languages can increase their visibility and share stories and traditions with a larger audience but also continue to run the risk of linguistic erasure. This panel will discuss the potential and challenges of translating either into or out of indigenous languages.
Contact: Louise Cole, alcolephd@outlook.com
Session Title: Performing the Other: Exploring the Ethics and Aesthetics of Voice
Moderator: M.L. Martin
Panelists: Katherine Hedeen
Session Description: What does it mean to make the other speak in your text? As the nexus of sound, meaning, identity, voice is a crucial and challenging aspect of representing a cultural other, especially for those translators who seek to give voice to the voiceless.
This panel will explore how translators use sound, silence, and somatics to reconstruct marginalized voices in translation. Considering the significance of a particular voice within its original language context (whether ancient or contemporary) and the potential significance of that voice for the language culture in which it’s being recreated, we’ll weigh the ethical and aesthetic implications of performing the other in a text or on the stage, and how translation must employ different strategies to create voice for the page versus in the ear.
Contact: M.L. Martin, mlmarti8@asu.edu
Session Title: The Untranslatable: Trans*/travesti authorship in trans*lation
Moderator: Ruth Llana
Panelists: Emi Frerichs, Jeannine Marie Pitas, Ruth Llana
Session Description: Can trans* voices be translated? What challenges surface when translating regional perspectives of gender non-conforming literary production? How do we communicate identities that resist translatability? In this panel, we approach the subject of translating trans*/travesti authorship within the global Hispanic context. We will gather interdisciplinary perspectives on trans*lation to explore the implications of untranslatability as an act that refuses to “erase ways of organizing experience” (Rizki 2021: 534). This panel brings together a group of emerging queer and trans* translators and scholars to offer visibility and sustained conversation about how resisting compulsory translatability is both an act of care and an act of resistance that informs ethical trans*lation practices.
Contact: Ruth Llana, llanafernand@wisc.edu
Session Title: Translating Gender and Sexuality
Moderators: Tabatha Leggett and Sergio Waisman
Panelists:
Gender and sexuality present a particular challenge to translators into English, which is neither a grammatically gendered nor a genderless language. How do we translate from languages with grammatical gender, in which nouns and pronouns carry gender value and cultural connotations? And conversely, how do we translate from genderless languages, which do not assign gender to nouns or pronouns? What are the literary, cultural and political implications of the decisions we make? In this panel, translators of poetry and prose will explore some of the challenges and possibilities they face: how to translate works in which the voice of the text is gendered; how to translate gender-neutral pronouns; questions of translating sexuality that arise alongside questions of translating gender; the question of non-gendered children’s book characters; and more.
Contact: Tabatha Leggett, tabathaleggett@gmail.com and Sergio Waisman, waisman@gwu.edu
Session Title: Translating Theater for Production: Experiences from the Stage
Moderator: Lizzie Fox
Panelists: Amanda Andrei, Jeremy Tiang
Session Description: Translating and producing plays are very different practices, but they inform each other to create moving and worthwhile theatrical experiences. How does preparing for performance influence how we translate plays? How does the translator collaborate with other theatermakers? How does one even begin translating theater? In this panel, translators who have translated and developed pieces of theater will discuss how their literary translation practice influences their work in performance and vice versa. They will also consider translation’s role in theater: today, translated plays are rarely produced in the U.S., or if they are, the translator’s role is often minimized. How can we advocate for healthier attitudes towards theater translators and the production of translated plays?
Contact: Lizzie Fox, elizlfox@gmail.com
Session Title: Whose Voice Is It? Translating Texts That Blur Human and Machine
Moderator: Karen Kovacik
Panelists: Shelley Fairweather-Vega, Katrine Øgaard Jensen
Session Description: Our lively, interactive panel will explore the challenges and opportunities that arise when translating literary texts that incorporate language generated by AI or algorithms. We invite audience members to join our conversation about AI, authorship, originality, and mastery. The uncanny voices in AI-inspired texts raise questions about human empathy, agency, and will. What markers of style—punctuation, sound, repetition, and cadence—help us embody voices unattached to bodies? What sorts of outcomes, including productive mistranslations, derive from our collaborations with AI? How do we create a consistent style for AI characters and distinguish their “translations” from our own? To what extent does AI flatten or erase difference? Join us to talk about all this and more.
Contact: Karen Kovacik, kkovacik@iu.edu