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CFP: Translation Archives
A special issue of the journal Meta: Translators’ Journal is planned with a focus on the archives of literary translators. It is to be co-edited by Anthony Cordingley (University of Sydney) and Patrick Hersant (Université Paris-8).
Literary authorship has long been studied from a genetic perspective, yet only recently have literary translators’ working documents—their research notes, drafts, revisions, proofs, their manuscripts, contracts and correspondence—become a focus of translation process research. The emergence of genetic translation studies (Cordingley and Montini 2015) has coincided with a heightened interest in translators’ creativity and agency stimulated by post-structuralist and sociological approaches, and the advent of ‘translator studies’. Despite a growing number of case studies engaging with translators’ avant-textes, translation studies is yet to have its ‘archival turn’. Unlike other disciplines in the humanities, such as philosophy, literature, history, or sociology, in translation studies there has been little reflection upon the concept or function of the archive. Historically, most translators’ papers survived incidentally, because the translator was also a literary author. However, the general revaluing of translation and the rise of translation studies has begun to attract institutional investment in the form of the purchasing or collecting of translators’ papers, manuscripts and materials, and the creation of translation archives.
Articles are encouraged to introduce transdisciplinary perspectives that resonate with theories or notions of the archive in other disciplines. The translation archive can be conceptualised within book history or sociological approaches to the archive as an artefact or space inscribed with the material history of a translator’s work—such as a hard drive, box of manuscript pages, a private study, an office, an online forum, a curated collection, an uncatalogued library holding— sites that witness the labour of translation and its relationship to its environment, collaborators and other semiotic systems. It may be conceptualised within the parameters of genetic criticism as a dossier génétique, a series of texts that attest a translation’s genesis over time to reveal the evolution of translation strategies. It can be approached from the perspectives of library and information sciences and archive studies to elucidate the value, place and function of translation archives within the development and organisation of libraries and collections, as well as the acquisition, documentation, cataloguing and communication practices that affect translators’ archives and their use by the public, researchers or translators themselves—in short, how records of translation and users interact to make meaning.
Download the full Translation archives CFP here
Abstracts of no more than 600 words to be submitted by 1 May 2019.
Submission of completed articles in English, French or Spanish by 1 December 2019.
Abstracts with a short biographical note can be sent to: translationarchives.meta@gmail.com
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