CTIS Seminar: Against Translation as Creative Writing: Risks and Opportunities of the Commodification of Literature
| Dates: | 7 November 2019 |
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| Times: | 14:00 - 15:30 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Arts, Languages and Cultures |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, Adults, Alumni, Current University students, General public |
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| Speaker: | Gabriela Saldanha |
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In this presentation I make two, related, arguments. First, that literary translation is a hybrid art from, combining elements of both literary and performing arts. This claim is made against a scholarly landscape that privileges views of translation as a type of creative writing. I explore how the concept of ‘creativity’ has been employed in Translation Studies and in three other disciplines that have looked at the concept in more depth: psychology –neuropsychology, in particular – philosophy and anthropology. I argue that, while the study of creativity may be able to each us something about translation, it is not sufficient in its own right to explain translation as an art. Since artistry is not something intrinsic to a work or a person, we need to go beyond the translation process itself and study the processes of commodification (Appadurai, 1996) and aestheticisation (Svašek 2007) of literature in translation. Using reviews of translated literature, I illustrate how the social and emotional efficacy of translated books is manipulated in a way that appeals to what I call ‘literary tourism’. I conclude by reflecting on the challenges and opportunities of promoting the aestheticisation of translation as part of the creative industries.
Speaker
Gabriela Saldanha
Organisation: University of Birmingham
Biography: Gabriela Saldanha is a lecturer in translation studies at the University of Birmingham, Department of Modern Languages. She has co-authored Research Methodologies in Translation Studies with Sharon O’Brien and co-edited the second and third editions of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, with Mona Baker. Saldanha has published extensively on translation stylistics and is currently investigating the experience of translators as writers/artists and the commodification and aestheticisation of literary translation in a rapidly changing global literary landscape. She has worked together with artist Heather Connelly on projects that explore the prismatic, reflexive nature of translation through art.
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3.44B
Simon Building
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