Roundtable Discussion

Translation can be understood in different ways: as a practice, a concept, a technique, a method, a site of contestation. This symposium is especially interested in the unsettling potential of translation as a form of mediation that can either re-enact or challenge structures of power. In this way, translation can afford hermeneutic complexity, which complicates the dynamics of the particular and the universal, the local and the global, that dominate debates on coloniality, imperialism, and neo-liberalism. As much as translation can establish hierarchical equivalences and binary oppositions, it can also expose, or even open, cracks through which attempts at separation, fixation, totalization, and subjugation might be displaced.

In dialogue with the current debates that intersect the field of translation studies with anthropology as well as media, postcolonial/decolonial, gender, and queer studies, this symposium invites reflection on questions such as: What kinds of materiality and mediality are involved in translational processes? What kinds of historical, sociocultural, political, and linguistic transformations are related to translational effects? What is the relationship between translation and positionality in discourse? What are the affordances and limits of translation as a method? This symposium explores the conceptual, methodological, ethical, and political implications of translation as well as the collective nature and historical situatedness of specific translational acts and events.