| The Labour of Translation |
[Apr. 8th, 2010|01:09 am] |
The Labour of Translation
A Public Roundtable Discussion on Working amid Languages
With Rada Ivekovic, Julie Boeri, Arianna Bove and Matteo Mandarini
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
4-6pm
School of Business and Management, Queen Mary, University of London
Arts 1.28 (Francis Bancroft Building)
The work of translation is often rendered invisible in academia and
fares little better in daily life generally. It has repeatedly been
remarked how both the intellectual and political dimensions of
translating become subsumed under the normalising drives of authorship,
clarity, and efficiency. Less noticed is the way the actual work of
translating gets discounted in the process, and academic translators too
often form an undercommons of labour in the university. Organising
efforts like the National Union of Professional Interpreters and
Translators do much to formalise and concretise this labour both inside
the university and beyond in the social factory more generally. The
discounted way working amid languages is treated in the academia is
reflected in society as a whole. Migrants who negotiate multiple
languages and their social codes often get coded themselves as
unskilled. Working class, ethnic, and regional dialects, accents, and
vocabularies may be acknowledged on their own but those who employ them
rarely get credit for the skills of translating, matching, or switching
with dominant languages. In social movements, the work of translation
can very often be taken for granted, yet volunteer networks of
interpreters such as Babels are indispensable in making
transnationalisation possible. The informal labour of translation, the
migrant's multiple communications, the global address of social
movement, the secret vocabularies of new affinities, and the
code-switching of personal technologies still pass unnoticed. Valorised
immaterial labour is apparently elsewhere. This roundtable will bring
together working translators and working academics, often in the same
bodies, to discuss not the politics of translation alone but the
politics of the labour of translation.
All Welcome
Contact: Emma Dowling e.dowling@qmul.ac.uk
Directions to campus: http://www.qmul.ac.uk/about/campus/mileend/index.html |
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