Prismatic Translation
Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation (OCCT) in collaboration with the European Humanities
Research Centre (EHRC)
St Anne’s College Oxford, 1-3 October 2015
REGISTRATION IS NOW OPEN
Translation is prismatic when it produces multiple variants. This can happen in the process of a single
translational act, or when a text is translated into different languages, or when it is translated into
the same language several times. Our conference will explore all these aspects of the prism of
translation in order to assess their origins, their effects and their potential.
Questions to be considered include: what do translation prisms show us about the nature of the
texts that are being translated? Can they illuminate the differences between script systems (Roman,
Chinese, Arabic etc)? Is there virtue in translation practices that display variants instead of choosing
between them? Are such practices more at home in new digital media than in the old technology of
the book? Is the culture of translation shifting, with new ventures showing interest in prismatic
translation? Is the discovery of variants a kind of creativity? What should we make of the disto rting
effects of the prism (mistranslation, erasure, collage, pseudotranslation)? Is there political potential
in the way prisms can be harnessed to invert, deviate, split apart? Is it problematic that global
translation is dominated by a few major languages? Can machines contribute to a prismatic
translation culture, or will they blight it? Could translation prisms be a resource for cross-linguistic,
cross-scriptal, cross-cultural study at the micro level?’
Our conference brings together scholars, theorists, translators, writers and artists to explore these
questions.
With keynote presentations from Emily Apter (NYU), Philip Terry (Essex), John Cayley (Brown) and
Rocío Baños Piñero (UCL).
Some bursaries are available for postgraduate attendees. For details, please email Dr Xiaofan Amy
Li on comparative.criticism@st-annes.ox.ac.uk and Alexandra Crosta: alejandra.crosta@modlangs.ox.ac.uk.
To register, please go to:
http://www.oxforduniversitystores.co.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?compid=1&modid=5&deptid=176
&catid=442&prodid=1090
Organising Committee: Prof Matthew Reynolds, Prof Phillip Rothwell, Dr Sowon Park, Dr Adriana
Jacobs, Dr Mohamed-Salah Omri, Dr Ben Morgan, Dr Xiaofan Amy Li, Alexandra Crosta.
Programme
Thursday 1 Oct
9:00-9:15 coffee and registration
9:20-9:30 Welcome (Matthew Reynolds)
9:30-10:30 Keynote 1: Rocío Banos-Pineiro: The kaleidoscopic nature of Audiovisual Translation: a
multiplicity of modalities, landscapes and challenges (chair: Phillip Rothwell)
10:30-10:45 coffee break
10:45-12:15 Panel 1 (3 papers) Resistances (chair: Ben Morgan)
Shuangyi Li: De-pathologizing Perversion: Proust’s Sexual Discourses and Their Chinese Translations
Ahmad Ayyad: Translating Occupied Jerusalem: A Palestinian-Israeli Struggle for Power and
Legitimacy
Jean Anderson : Refracting and Recomposing Cultures
12:15-1:30pm lunch
1:30-3pm Panel 2 (3 papers) Pseudo-writing and refraction. (chair: Matthew Reynolds)
Chantal Wright: The translational prism of commentary. Antoine Berman’s L’Âge de la Traduction in
English.
Dennis Duncan : ‘Less than Paper-Thin’: See-through Translation in Harry Mathews’s Armenian
Papers
Kasia Szymanska: Literary Metatranslations: The Ethics of Prismatic Translation
3-3:15pm coffee break
3:15-4:45pm Panel 3 (3 papers) The Translation Machine (chair: Adriana X. Jacobs)
Cosima Bruno : The Poet and the Machine. Machine Translation in Hsia Yü’s Pink Noise
Tom Cheesman : Translation Arrays
Emily Rose: Translating Intersexuality: Producing Multiple Readings with One Text/Body
4:45-5pm Coffee break
5-6:30pm Artist’s/Writer’s talk: Kilgallon and Eran Hadas (respondent: Adriana X. Jacobs)
Friday 2 Oct
9:30-10:30 Keynote 2: John Cayley: Mirroring Events at the Sense Horizon: translation over time
(chair: tbc)
10:30-10:45 coffee break
10:45-12:45 Panel 4 (4 papers) Shifting Contexts (chair: Kasia Szymanska)
Ellen Jones: Translation or re-writing? Prismatic versions in Isabel del Río’s Cero negativo/ Zero
Negative,
Cecilia Rossi : The Writer’s Archive: A Source for Prismatic Translation
Claudine le Blanc : Tales out of India: Jean-Antoine Dubois’s Translations of Indian Collections of
Stories
Régis Augustus Bars Closel : Five dramatists, a copyist and a censor in search of a Translation: Sir
Thomas More and its Brazilian translation
12:45-2pm lunch
2-3:30pm Panel 5 German panel on translation of the Bible (chair: tbc)
Henrike Laehnemann and Howard Jones
3:30-3:45pm Coffee break
3:45-5:15pm Panel 6 Fragments (chair: tbc)
Audrey Coussy : “T pour Traduction(s) – Translating Nonsense Alphabets into French”
Alexandra Lukes : The Schizophrenic Prism: Louis Wolfson’s Translation System
Patrick Hersant : Coleridge diffracted
5:15-5:30pm coffee break
5:30-6:30pm Writer’s talk: Philip Terry: Oulipo and the prisms of translation (respondent: Matthew
Reynolds)
7pm Conference dinner at St Anne’s College
Saturday 3 Oct
9:15-10:15 Keynote 3: Emily Apter: The Prism-House of Language: Translational Collective or
Corporate Monolingualism? (chair: Ben Morgan)
10:15-10:30 coffee break
10:30-11:55 Panel 7 (3 papers) Script and Image (chair: Xiaofan Amy Li)
Sowon Park : Ancient Egyptian visual literariness between the unspoken and the untranslatable,
Hany Rashwan: Transnational Scriptworlds
Pari Azarm Motamedi : A Lingo-visual Translation of the Poetry of Shafii Kadkani,
12:00-12:30pm Roundtable and conclusion