Calls for papers for conferences taking place in December 2024

Conference: Training Translators and Interpreters Today: Perspectives and Evolutions.
Venue and date: IULM University, Milan; 2-3 December 2024.
Deadline for proposal submissions: 15 September 2024.

In the last few years, increasing recourse to ever more efficient technologies and artificial intelligence has radically  changed the interpreting and translating professions, triggering an evolution process whose outcomes are  currently difficult to predict, but what is certain is that translators and interpreters have to do their best to respond  to the changing requirements of a highly diversified market. 

In these professions, as in many other sectors and professional activities, there has been a radical  change in the procedures enacted and the technological options available – from translation memories to the  extreme case of artificial intelligence (in the case of translation), from CAI tools to speech-to-text technologies (in  the case of interpreting). I n language services, the nature of the final products to be supplied has also changed radically, with a wide diversification in the kind of transformation processes performed on the source text, involving  differing levels of rewriting / reformulation. In addition, the interaction between different modes – written, oral,  audiovisual media – requires the translator and the interpreter to manage a high degree of semiotic complexity and  often also resemiotization. 

Based on the assumption that the new professional contexts of translation and interpreting and the new  ways of producing, transmitting and using knowledge require constant updates, the training of interpreters and  translators cannot ignore these epoch-making changes, but must take them into account, opening up to new  perspectives, new procedures and, consequently, to new teaching and training tools. 

This very complex task cannot be improvised, but can only be based on the results of painstaking scientific research work that investigates the different aspects and directions of evolution in order to be able to  provide students with up-to-date tools, making sure that such tools are not too soon overtaken by the rapid pace of ongoing evolution. 

These are the themes we want to reflect on in the international conference “Training Translators and  Interpreters Today: Perspectives and Evolutions”, which will be held at IULM University, Milan, on 2 and 3  December 2024. The debate intends to take place in an interdisciplinary perspective, hoping to foster a productive exchange of ideas between scholars of translation and interpreting studies, audiovisual translation, linguistics,  corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, language teaching and information technology applied to translation and  interpreting, in order to understand how the training of future practitioners can best be oriented. 

The conference is organized by scholars participating in the project “Translation and interpretation in  motion: contexts, methods, media and technologies. Translation and Interpreting on the Move: variation in  contexts, modes, media and technologies”, approved by the Department of Humanities of IULM University, that follows on a sequence of projects approved by the Department of Humanities and carried out since 2019 in which  this same research group has investigated the evolution and diversification of translation and interpreting activities  in the contemporary world under the impetus of new media and new technologies. 

We invite submissions, in Italian or English (presentation or poster), including (but by no means limited to)  the following topics:

  • Technologies for translator and interpreter training 
  • Use of NMT and AI in translators’ professional activity 
  • Training in the use of translation memories 
  • Training in the different types of post-editing 
  • Teaching remote interpreting (consecutive, simultaneous, dialogic) 
  • Using CAI tools in the teaching of simultaneous interpreting 
  • Terminology and terminological research from the viewpoint of translation and interpreting 
  • Terminological work and glossary compilation in interpreter training 
  • Training in collaborative translation and in the use of dedicated software 
  • Teaching audiovisual translation (dubbing and subtitling for cinema, TV channels and internet-based  platforms – OTT) 
  • Training of specialists in the surtitling of theatrical works 
  • Training of experts in interlingual and intersemiotic translation for the hard of hearing/deaf, visually  impaired/blind 
  • The role of Artificial Intelligence and VR in the teaching of translation and interpreting 
  • Teaching “other” forms of translation: pre-editing, localization and transcreation 

We welcome submissions, in the form of abstracts of max 300 words plus five references, for: 

  • 20-minute presentations or 
  • posters (cm 70×100, portrait orientation)

to be sent by 15 September 2024 to the following email address: marta.muscariello@iulm.it

CFP

For further details, please check the original call inserted below.

(Posted 3 August 2024)


Conference: Translation Times
Location and dates: Craiova, online. 5-6 December 2024.
Deadline for proposal submissions: 23 November 2024.

Organised by The Department of British, American, and German Studies, Faculty of Letters, University of Craiova, in partnership with The Romanian Society for English and American Studies (RSEAS) and The European Society for the Study of English (ESSE).

New forms of translation have emerged in the past decades, powered by a constellation of factors, which suggests an exciting evolution in how we communicate and transform language across mediums and cultures. The remarkable progress in research on the automation of text and speech translation (machine translation, speech synthesis and recognition, articulation between image and text, evaluation metrics, etc.), grouped under the blanket term of Artificial Intelligence (AI), has broadened the scope of application of translation tools. These developments and the democratisation of neural machine translation invite us to rethink the operating methods and organisation of the professions linked to them (Froeliger 2023:3). Among the newly emerged forms of translation, transcreation stands out as a complex phenomenon, whose “role in the translation field, the position it takes in the workflows of the advertising and marketing industries, and the different types of brief […] in this professional context” (Carreira 2020:26) have to be investigated within interdisciplinary landscapes. Focusing on blending AI with transcreation, we can state that transcreation is able to create a more nuanced and emotionally resonant form of meaning transfer and transformation -bridging linguistic and cultural gaps as well as enhancing translators’ empowerment and dynamics of trust.

Conference website: https://litere.ucv.ro/litere/sites/default/files/litere/Cercetare/Colocvii/cfp_translation_times_2024.pdf

For further details, please check the original call inserted below.

(Posted 13 October 2024)


Conference: Ageing, Progress, and Decline in the Victorian Period.
Venue and dates: University of Vienna, AT. Online, 6 December 2024.
Deadline for proposal submissions: 30 September 2024.

Organised by Dr James Aaron Green

Keynote speaker: Jacob Jewusiak (Newcastle University, UK)

Website address 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_SQ32tquoOaLeOzyJ2WC7tW5GcAl2RbkTf56hWGiBtU/edit?usp=sharing (Google Docs page)

Contact details

james.green@univie.ac.at 

For further details, please check the original call inserted below.

(Posted 7 September 2024)


Legacies and Futures – Irish Studies MA Anniversary Workshop.
Venue and dates: Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca (Romania). 6-7 December 2024.
Deadline for proposal submissions: 10 October 2024.

Organiser and venue: Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca (Romania), Faculty of Letters, Horea 31 St., Department of English Language and Literature.

In October 1999, when Babeș-Bolyai University’s MA programme in Irish Studies – initially designed as  Irish Writing and Its Contexts – was inaugurated, it was the first and, to this day, is the only postgraduate  degree offering a cross-disciplinary perspective on Irish culture, literature and history at any Central/Eastern  European university. The time was one of rapid globalising for Irish Studies, backed by Celtic Tiger  optimism, at the start of a decade of hopes for deeper European integration and democratisation in the  region and worldwide. But it would also bring in far-reaching changes that prompted, in our domains of  knowledge and across the humanities, a thorough overhaul of ways of seeing and framing difference. At  the start of the Cluj ISMA, global Irish Studies were dominated by postcolonial rehistoricising and  recontextualising approaches pivoting on rigorous archival studies. Importantly, the decade saw a definite  decline in the understanding of literary culture as part of the anthropological program of “inventing  Ireland”, to quote the title of one of Declan Kiberd’s seminal books that to this day underpins our discipline;  a transition from culture understood as projecting a shared sense of identity and future, to “after Ireland”  (to quote the title of another defining volume by Kiberd), that is, to an understanding of literature as  operating in a planetary field, fully enmeshed with other forms and modes of imagining personhood,  creaturely life and vulnerability. 

Lego, legare: as the Latin etymon of the first word in our title implies, “legacies” translate as chords  binding future developments or meshing their potential unfoldings with that which is bequeathed by the  past, in the sense of both an alignment with existing lines of research and an opening up of fields of inquiry  towards future possibilities. In fact, in the quarter century since the Cluj ISMA started, literary and cultural  studies – Irish Studies included – have shown a pervasive preoccupation with questions of ethics and  biopolitics that cut across lines of gender, class, ethnicity, human and nonhuman geographies and habitats.  Consequently, the curriculum taught today is informed by corporeal studies, trauma studies, new  materialism(s), different posthumanisms, animal studies, and ecocriticism, whose investigations as a rule  reveal the ontological and ethical tangle of literary phenomena with earthly life.

Celebrating twenty-five years since the founding of ISMA in Cluj, we invite proposals for papers,  panels and roundtables on any aspect that taps into reperspectivising these cultural legacies. Like any  anniversary moment, this calls for a retrospective and prospective re-threading of our thoughts on Ireland  and Irish culture, which has often been forced by history to experiment with modes of being, ways of  transmission and aesthetic forms that widely deviated from established norms and genres, received notions  of the status and social role of culture, and canonical aesthetics. Given the rapid, dramatic changes Ireland  underwent since the millennium turn, from an economic powerhouse in a fully globalised world to the  exceptionally progressive post-Celtic Tiger state, Irish culture is again among the “first respondents” to the  multiple, intersectional crises affecting all earthlings. Irish culture’s public framing has similarly continued  to change. An almost symbolic illustration could be the transition from the “greening” of the towering  modernist self-exiles, whose names came to adorn Dublin’s contemporary architectural landmarks (the  “James Joyce” and “Samuel Beckett” bridges across the Liffey designed by international star architect  Santiago Calatrava) to the naming of an offshore patrol vessel participating in UN humanitarian missions  after the latter: the LÉ Samuel Beckett, which rescued around 1,000 refugees in the Mediterranean before  the pandemic.  

We are looking for papers that explore Irish literature and its modes of questioning and provoking  putative certainties, of subverting established norms and forms that corresponded to social, political and  cultural structures of power. Proposals related to these and any other aspects of the multifarious “tense  future” ahead of us are also welcome.  

The workshop will feature the following invited speakers:

  • Professor Eve Patten (Trinity College Dublin)  
  • Professor Sanda Berce (Babes-Bolyai University)  
  • Caitriona Lally, Irish writer  
  • Professor Declan Kiberd (University of Notre Dame)  
  • Professor Nicholas Allen (University of Georgia)  

Proposals for twenty-minute papers, panels and roundtables should include the speaker’s name, institutional  affiliation, title of paper, and a 200-word abstract. Proposals and any other inquiries should be submitted  by e-mail to Erika Mihálycsa (erika.mihalycsa@ubbcluj.ro) and Carmen Borbely  (carmen.borbely@ubbcluj.ro) by Thursday, 10 October 2024. Prospective speakers will be informed about  the acceptance of their proposals by Friday, 25 October 2024.  

Further information to follow.

For further details, please check the original call inserted below.

(Posted 22 September 2024)


Conference: The Status of Myths in New Millennial / post-2000 Cultural Production: What is left of myths in contemporary arts and literature?
Venue and dates: Jean Jaurès University, Toulouse, France; 6-7 December 2024.
Deadline for proposal submissions: 29 February 2024.

Venue: Toulouse-Jean Jaurès University, France – Center for Anglophone Studies
Date: December 2024, 6-7

We plan to publish a selection of papers following the conference.

Please send a 300-400-word abstract (for a 20-minute presentation) with a short biography to: submissions@myths24.fr

Submission deadline: February 29th, 2024

Languages: English or French

Organizing and scientific committee:

  • Lara Cox, Céline Magot, Sophie Maruéjouls-Koch, Jean-François Tuffier  
  • Toulouse-Jean Jaurès University
  • Center for Anglophone Studies

Confirmed guests and keynote speakers:

As founding narratives or idealized representations of historical figures, myths have, from time immemorial, tied humans together, creating communities that grow into organized societies. They have therefore become the safeguards of a vision of History that the arts and literature have ceaselessly spun into stories, in order to better transgress, deconstruct or simply revisit an ever-changing mythos. Contemporary stories reshape the contours of an all-too-often glorified past and they question our cultural heritage at the same time as rekindling it.

Creative imagination feeds on these forms of “poaching” as Michel de Certeau put it. This process is not entirely separable from a certain level of violence. The artist who ventures into the territory of myth challenges authority, creating a tension within the main collective discourse by allowing new voices to emerge. The Black Lives Matter movement gave rise to a wave of protest demanding the removal of statues. This undoubtedly characterizes a world where the expression of singular identities, whether ethnic, gendered, racial and/or social, is transforming mainstream culture. Current artistic productions embrace and question figures or facts that collective memory has mythologized, and this serves a restorative purpose in various ways. It behooves us to enquire into the political, ethical, cultural and economic implications of these rewritings. 

Read more on our website:

myths24.fr

(Posted 25 October 2023)


Conference: Schemas in Language, Music, and Visual Cognition.
Venue and dates: University of Niš, Faculty of Philosophy, Serbia. 6 – 7 December 2024.
Deadline for proposal submissions: 1 Aug 2024.

Organiser(s)

Faculty of Philosophy and Centre for Cognitive Sciences, University of Niš, Serbia

Presentation

We are pleased to announce our conference on the schematic basis of meaning in language, music, and visual cognition. The event aims to gather linguists, psychologists, philosophers, neuroscientists, music, visual cognition, and multimodality researchers interested in schematic structures underlying (conceptual) meaning construction from any theoretical perspective (formal, functional, or eclectic). The phenomena of interest include, but are not limited to, image schemas, conceptual primitives, scripts, cross-modal correspondences, conceptual metaphors, metonymies and blends, semantic frames, mental and simulation models, and multimodal aspects of schematic meaning generation. 

Confirmed keynotes: Ray Jackendoff (Tufts / MIT), Todd Oakley (CWRU), Beate Hampe (Erfurt).

Website address 

Abstract submission to https://forms.gle/bFLkpxz6FEg14uno7, by 1 Aug 2024. We welcome proposals for talks of up to 20 minutes. Abstracts should be no longer than 300 words. Information on abstract acceptance by 1 Sep 2024.

Contact details

(Posted 10 June 2024)


Conference: (Re-) Drawing Borders: When and Where was the United Kingdom? When and Where is it Now?
Venue and dates: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. 12-14 December 2024.
Deadline for proposal submissions: 6 June 2024.

The Centre for British Studies seeks papers for an international conference on the topic of (Re-) Drawing Borders: When and Where was the United Kingdom? When and Where is it Now?, which will take place at the Centre for British Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin on 12-14 December 2024.

The conference will provide an interdisciplinary forum to reassess the significance of border-making in the United Kingdom, both empirically (administrative, societal, and cultural boundaries within the UK as well as between the UK and the rest of the world), historically, and theoretically (concepts, methods, and interdisciplinary dialogue in British Studies). It will include keynote speeches and panels organized in four strands: 

  1. devolution; 
  2. (post-)colonial legacies; 
  3. the UK in Europe; 
  4. UK divisions: early 20th and early 21st centuries compared. 

Keynote addresses 

Confirmed:

  • Catharine Barnard (Cambridge), 
  • Michael Kenny (Cambridge) and 
  • Insa Koch (St Gallen) 

We are hoping to hear shortly from Virinder Kalra (Warwick) and David Olusoga (Manchester).

Disciplines

We welcome established and early career scholars from all disciplines of the broad field of British Studies, including but not limited to 

  • British Literature, 
  • Cultural Studies, 
  • History, 
  • Law, 
  • Ethnology, 
  • Political Science, 
  • Sociology, 
  • Economics, 
  • Media Studies, 
  • International Relations, 
  • Anthropology, 
  • Art History, 
  • Geography, 
  • Border Studies, and 
  • Gender Studies.

Submission

Please send your short paper proposal (title, author, position, affiliation, e-mail, 250-word abstract, up to 5 keywords, proposed strand, estimate of total conference expenses, amount requested from the organizers) as a pdf format to Corinna Radke (corinna.radke@hu-berlin.de) by the deadline of 6 June 2024.

Funding

Speakers without sufficient institutional funding can apply for the reimbursement of travel and accommodation expenses. 

Publication

We plan to publish a selection of papers in an edited publication (special issue and/or edited volume) and are seeking funding for the conference.

Informal inquiries can be sent to Dr Paolo Chiocchetti (paolo.chiocchetti@hu-berlin.de).

(Posted 18 May 2024)


BAAHE 2024 Conference: (Trans)Portable: English in the World.
Location and dates: Hoek 38, 1000 Brussels. 13 December 2024.
Deadline for proposal submissions: 7 June 2024.

Keynote Speakers:

Linguistics: Prof.  Dr. dr. h.c. Christian Mair (University of Freiburg)
Literary Studies: Prof. dr. Madhu Krishnan (University of Bristol)

Presentation

The Belgian Association of Anglicists in Higher Education (BAAHE) unites scholars affiliated to Belgian higher education institutions from all fields within English Studies, ranging from cultural studies over linguistics and literary studies to translation, interpreting, and ELT studies.

The 2024 edition of BAAHE proposes to explore the portability, or transportability, of the English language and its historical and contemporary manifestations in a broad range of socio-political, literary, cultural and educational contexts. As (trans)portable good, it is both charged and charge, subject and object. Undeniably, the English language and the culture it references historically and in the present day is a composite object that has expanded through myriad additions and alterations, so that scholars have come to speak of ‘Englishes’ in the plural and accordingly have developed a pluralized conception of the ‘cultures’ and ‘literatures’ of the English-speaking world. The term ‘(trans)portable’ signals a range of dimensions: as transportable good, English has frequently become an instrument of large-scale expansionist projects and of political oppression; as portable entity it has served as convenience, as a home from home for the exile, as a welcome place of refuge, or as a vehicle of access. English has been im-ported and ex-ported, carried in a range of containers (textual, aural, multimedial) and by a multitude of individuals and groups. The flexibility and malleability gained through these acts of travelling is evidenced in a multitude of sociolects, regional variants, English-based Pidgins and Creoles, which are employed in everyday parlance as well as in canonized literary and dramatic works.

As colonial language beyond the heydays of the British Empire, as lingua franca and international globalized language, English continues to convey not only governmental and administrative structures in many places but also ideologies and epistemologies, thus raising questions about the ways in which it functions as a mobile scaffolding for certain ideas ‘we live by’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1980) or even serves as a framework for a ‘whole way of life’ (Williams 1960). Kenyan writer and language critic Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has eloquently drawn attention to the impact of language as a problematic carrier of concepts and knowledge that can be as liberating as it can be oppressive. Especially in postcolonial contexts in the latter half of the 20th century, claiming ownership of the language and the liberty to adapt it as ‘nation language’ became a powerful strategy in emancipatory movements (Brathwaite 1984), for politicians and literary creators alike. And yet, some writers have expressed ambivalence about the hegemonic status of the language that had to be mastered, loved even, for lack of access to a different, a lost, tongue (Derek Walcott, James Baldwin). Yet others, from Joseph Conrad to Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi or Petina Gappah, have creatively embraced English as a second language and some have invigorated it with their (m)other tongues, finding themselves in diverse states of translation while doing so (cf. Walkowitz 2015).

The ubiquity and dominance of English as the world’s only ‘hypercentral’ language (De Swaan 2001) has profound repercussions on the way the language is learnt, used, taught, planned, experienced, and imagined across the globe. In the realm of language education, the (trans)portability of English prompts inquiries into issues of ownership, native-speakerism, and accuracy norms. It invites us to look at the creativity, adaptability, and negotiation of meaning among its multilingual learners/users. At the societal level, English language proficiency informs inclusion and exclusion at both ends of the global production chain, easing or complicating the process of acculturation and integration for international migrants. For if the (trans)portability of English disrupts conventional notions of language as foundational to the nation state, it also prompts questions about the language as a conduit for integration and sense of belonging within communities both real and imagined. Does the portability of the language render it culture-free, and as such resistant to emotional identification? Or does the global status and hegemony of English in our current postcolonial world make it an ideal canvas for learners/users onto which to project their desire for self-actualization (Kramsch 2009), creativity, and imagination? The resulting tensions between liberation and control must be navigated by English language learners, users, educators and translators alike.

The 2024 BAAHE conference encourages the scholarly exploration of attitudes to (trans)portable English across centuries, cultural contexts, and disciplines. We invite methodological and theoretical contributions as well as case studies on the (trans)portability of English within the broader scope of English Studies across its various subdisciplines.

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to, the following aspects:

  • English as (trans)portable language in (higher) education and pedagogy, including curriculum-building, language norms, and learning outcomes.
  • English as tool in the multilingual toolkit
  • English in translation and interpreting as source and target language
  • English across media (e.g. film language, subtitling/surtitling)
  • World Englishes and ELF
  • Language variation and language varieties in English
  • Language contact and linguistic change
  • Standardisation, prestige and accentism
  • Linguistic hegemony, bias and AI systems
  • Corporate English and other English-language jargons
  • English as public, organisational and governmental language
  • Communication in the public domain, the internet, service provision, institutions (e.g. the Commonwealth, the EU/Brussels)
  • Internalised English: the language as a home or as refuge
  • English / Anglophone literatures and exile, travel, migration
  • English as a player in the field of world literature and as acquired literary language
  • Representations of English, and its many dialects, in literature
  • English as instrument of colonial rule and oppression, English as tool for emancipation and decolonization
  • Multilingualism in Anglophone literatures

Please send abstracts of no more than 400 words for 20-minute papers and a biographical note of 150 words to baahe24@vub.be by 7 June 2024. Participation in the conference is free for BAAHE members; non-members pay a modest registration fee (lunch not included). Participants are invited to submit papers or proposals for a special issue to English Text Construction, BAAHE’s international peer-reviewed journal published with John Benjamins.

Important dates:

  • 7 June 2024: abstract submission deadline
  • 15 August – 30 November 2024: registrations open
  • 15 September 2024: registration deadline for presenters
  • 13 December 2024: conference day

(Posted 29 October 2024)