CTIS | Research Seminar
| Dates: | 3 December 2020 |
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| Times: | 13:00 - 14:00 |
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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, External researchers, Adults, Alumni, Current University students |
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| Speaker: | Dr Neil Sadler |
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Translation as Circumspection: Or how I learned to stop worrying and love Heidegger
It is common in Translation Studies to worry a lot about theory. A perennial question from students and scholars alike is how exactly theory relates to practice. While I do not doubt that theory can help in understanding translation, my aim in this talk is to reassess the role that theory actually does (and can) play in day-to-day practice. Drawing on the work of the existential philosopher Martin Heidegger, I will argue that much thinking about theory in Translation Studies is grounded in the idea, common in western thought since Plato, that the way human beings relate to things is to have an implicit theory about them. This view, I propose, is mistaken. I will argue that most of the time, translation is grounded in ‘unthinking comportment’, rather than conscious decision making, and in ‘absorbed circumspection’ rather than objective observation. Theory, on the other hand, constitutes a special kind of knowing and looking at things which, while valuable, differs markedly from the normal, everyday way of seeing and acting. This idea has significant implications for how we conceptualise what theory can, and cannot, do for both Translation Studies and the practice of translation.
Speaker
Dr Neil Sadler
Role: Lecturer Translation Studies
Organisation: Queen's University Belfast
Biography: Neil Sadler is Lecturer in Translation at the Centre for Translation and Interpreting at Queen’s University Belfast. His research centres on the uses and nature of multilingual narrative in digitally mediated contexts, particularly in the Arab world. His work has previously been published in New Media & Society and The Journal for North African Studies and he has a forthcoming monograph, published by Routledge, titled Fragmented Narrative: Telling and interpreting stories in the Twitter age.
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