Durham University Business School, 31st May - 2nd June 2019
This 3-day international conference includes 1 workshop, 4 keynote speeches, 24 oral presentations, 4 posters, and 1 roundtable discussion. Over 100 participants. This conference is supported by Faculty funding.
Following the tradition of the Durham Postgraduate colloquium, this Sixth Durham Postgraduate Conference in Translation Studies aims to provide a platform for postgraduate scholars in Translation and Interpreting Studies as well as related fields to present their research projects and exchange ideas with peers and more senior colleagues. In line with our teaching and research culture at Durham University, this conference aims to foster collaboration and communication between researchers from different disciplines and encourage theoretical, conceptual, and methodological exchange. This can help us gain new insights into the study of the products, processes, and participants of translation and also address some of the main challenges faced by translation and interpreting studies as it shares a border with various disciplines.
Senate Suite, University College, Durham University, 13th May 2019
This 1-day topic-focused Forum includes 5 plenary presentations and 1 roundtable discussion. Over 40 participants. This Forum is supported by Faculty funding and AHRC OWRI research grant.
Cultures, the realm of ideas and values, were early understood as hybrids. At the end of the nineteenth century, Adolf Bastian, a nineteenth-century anthropologist, insisted that cultures, like races, are never pure as they are products of not only their own evolution but also of diverse interactions with other cultures. If so, translation, broadly conceived, i.e., including verbal and extraverbal transfers, must be an important factor in the nation formation/evolution. While traditionally understanding a nation implies understanding its 'essence', i.e., its language and culture, politics and economy, arts, religion etc., studying a nation's translation history offers an insight into the role of international influences on its 'essence'. The research focus, thus, shifts from the studied nation's internal 'self', from its core to the 'circumferential' aspects of its history, to its interactions with its sociocultural environment through various transfers, which may have played smaller or bigger roles and sometimes introduced paradigmatic changes (e.g., adopting Christianity by Kievan Rus' or implementing the Marxist philosophy in twentieth-century Russia). The goal of the proposed event is to explore the role translation plays in the national evolution and to examine translation as a methodological tool for studying the measure of the international in a national.
Durham University, 12th November 2015
The output of the Conference:
This edited book was based on CIM’s 2015 conference: 1st Durham Huxiang Forum on Chinese Studies, in which more than 20 leading Chinese scholars specialising in traditional Chinese culture were invited to give talks on the application of traditional Chinese culture in modern society, and the whole event had attracted over 2,000 attendees in the UK.
Durham University, 23rd - 25th October 2015
Durham University, September 2015
Context: Durham University Library, the Centre for Intercultural Mediation and the Centre for Contemporary Chinese Studies are holding a one day conference to mark the donation of a copy of the Complete Library of Four Treasuries to Durham University Library by Chin-Kung Multicultural Education Society. Consisting of 1,500 volumes and 3500 works, the Complete Library of Four Treasuries is a monumental landmark of Chinese culture often compared to the Great Wall of China in its significance.
Theme: This one-day multidisciplinary conference looks at Chinese sources from a critical perspective, shifting away from largely positivist approaches of the past, both Chinese and Western, and examining what the new turn in China’s approach and its renewed interest in Chinese sources means, and what its present and future implications are. The conference seeks to understand contemporary China and its future direction within its historical and cultural contexts and to explore how our knowledge of China in Britain is shaped by what we have access to, especially in our libraries and museums, and how this shapes our view of China today.
Durham University, 2nd - 4th October 2014
The Mediating Emergencies Group of the Centre for Intercultural Mediation, with the support of the Institute of Advanced Studies, Durham University and under the aegis of the Institute of Advanced Computing Research, Durham University organise the IV International conference Translating Voices, Translating Regions.
The fourth International conference aims to address questions around the role of interpreters and translators as mediators in situations of sudden or continued emergency. After a landslide, a tsunami, an earthquake and other natural disasters, the arrival of humanitarian organisations, NGOs, and individuals from around the world has become a demonstration of international solidarity. Medical operation and rescue operations take precedence, then reconstruction and collaboration with the local authorities to understand the large mass of data on the causes, effects, and consequences of the event begin. Yet, project managing rescue operations, tasks forces, and their immediate follow-up activities in situations of danger and disaster and coordinating groups of rescuers and local people with different nationalities, emergency procedures, languages, and social behaviour remain problems of mediation.
Durham University, 25th - 26th June 2013
Medieval authors were profoundly aware of the mutability of existence and the corrosive effect of time, as exemplified by the much-evoked trope of Fortune’s wheel. A large part of the power of the theme of translatio studii et imperiiderived from awareness of the inevitability of decline, combined with a respect for the staying power of cultural artefacts from the Ancient World that had survived the ravages of time. Texts in both Germanic and Romance languages drew liberally on the authority of this surviving past, at times directly translating Latin models, at others merely positioning themselves in a line of succession to past regimes of knowledge. Such translations can accordingly be read as operating a doubled dynamic: conferring the authority of the Latin past on modernity, and simultaneously prolonging the existence of the original into an afterlife, a notion explored by Walter Benjamin. Yet Benjamin’s account of the temporal dimension of translation stimulates as much by what it leaves out as by what it includes. Can we think about a translation as a new life, conceptually distinct from the original, and is this helpful? How does knowledge or ignorance of the original text affect the reception of a translation? Can we conceive of a translation that does not acknowledge the authority of its original, either by behaving like a new work or by offering an improvement on the model?
Authors: Thomas Hinton & Luke Sunderland
The following publications emerged from this meeting:
/prod01/prodbucket01/media/durham-university/research-/research-centres/centre-for-intercultural-mediation/83557-Hero.jpg)