Translation in Translingual/Transnational Narratives: Politics, Theory, and Practice

This seminar examines some crucial interconnections between burgeoning scholarship in postcolonial theory, applied linguistics, and translation studies on language contact and the politics and problematics of translation across difference. The seminar prepares participants to explore new perspectives on translation and writing as practices of creation in what Mary Louis Pratt has so aptly called the ‘contact zone.’ The point of departure for this seminar is that all interpretive and communicative acts are acts of critical translation, in that the very medium that makes textual transactions possible—language itself (and English in particular)—is already and always in translation.

Building on the various theories and approaches to personal writing, language, and translation, we will be conducting close readings of a collection of narratives of crossing language and cultural borders by voices that cannot be identified as belonging to one specific nation and using one specific language/language variety. More particularly, we will explore how these writers compose translingual and transnational experiences while (re)shaping content, conventions, structure, linguistic choices, stylistic patterns, and theoretical positions.