MIIS@work

After several months of collaborative planning with Middlebury colleagues, T&I faculty members Julie Johnson, Max Troyer, Jacolyn Harmer, Minhua Liu, Barry Olsen, María Sierra Córdoba Serrrano, and alumni Yichen Qian and Ruby Lai are in Vermont to participate in the signature academic event of the fall semester at Middlebury: The Clifford Symposium.

Please plan to drop in on some of the sessions via livestream.  Here is a list of some of the Conference highlights, with PACIFIC TIMES.  You can access the complete schedule here.

Thursday, September 26

1:30 pm Making Maigret New – Keynote Address

David Bellos, Professor of French, Italian and Comparative Literature

Director, Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication, Princeton University. Professor Bellos is the author of Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything (2012).

Simultaneous interpretation into Chinese by Yichen Qian and Ruby Lai. Both are professional interpreters who graduated from the Monterey Institute.

5-6:30 p.m., Translation Studies: An (Inter)Discipline Comes of Age

Translation Studies emerged as an (inter)discipline some 40 years ago, actively embracing various fields of knowledge and creating a multifaceted area of study. Panelists Rosemary Arrojo, Professor of Comparative Literature, SUNY Binghamton; María Sierra Córdoba Serrano, Assistant Professor, MIIS; Beverley Curran, Professor of Translation Studies, International Christian University, Tokyo;  Minhua Liu*, Associate Professor, MIIS; and Paul Losensky, Associate Professor of Central Eurasian Studies, Indiana University will talk about their specific areas of research, including literature, gender and postcolonial studies, media, graphic novel, and legal translation, translation sociology, and interpreting studies. Moderated by Karin Hanta (Middlebury College)

* Minhua will speak in Chinese and be interpreted by Ruby Lai and Yichen Qian. 

 Friday, September 27

6:30-8 a.m., Translation as a Career: Experiences in the Field

Professional translators, editors, publishers of translations, and interpreters discuss how they have transformed their passion into a career. The panel will include Susan Harris, editorial director of Words without Borders; Stephen Jensen, Japanese-English technical translator in sustainability; Julie Johnson, professor of interpreting at MIIS; and Chad Post, publisher of Open Letter Book, University of Rochester. Moderated by Barry Slaughter Olsen, Assistant Professor, Translation and Conference Interpretation (MIIS).

9-10 a.m.., Lexilalia: On Translating a Dictionary of Untranslatable Terms – Keynote Address

Emily Apter, Professor of French & Comparative Literature, New York University.

Emily Apter is the author of Feminizing the Fetish: Psychoanalysis and Narrative Obsession in Turn-of-the-Century France (1993), The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (2006), and Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (2013).

 10:30 a.m.-12 p.m., The “Mystery” of Translation: Global Cultural Flows

Translations bridge time and space, connecting peoples and cultures and altering them in unexpected ways. This panel considers the role of translation in mediating cultural exchange across diverse fissures and boundaries. Panelists include Nehad Heliel, literary translator and director of the Middlebury School in Alexandria, Egypt; Carrie Reed, translator of classical Chinese literature and professor of Chinese at Middlebury; and Yumiko Yanagisawa, Swedish-Japanese and English-Japanese translator and feminist activist. This panel will be moderated by Stephen Snyder, Kawashima Professor of Japanese Studies, Middlebury College.

 12:00-2:00 p.m., T&I 2.0: The Next Generation of Translation and Interpreting

Faculty from the Monterey Institute discuss new technologies in interpreting and localization management.

Barry Olsen, Max Troyer and Julie Johnson, moderated by Jacolyn Harmer

5:00-6:30 p.m., (Re)Writers: Translating Poetry and Fiction

Literary translators occupy an anomalous position as “creative imitators.” Publishers and reading practices often mask their existence, preferring an illusion of direct contact between foreign writer and domestic reader. Yet the mediation of translation and the work of translators are crucial in shaping individual works and literary canons. This panel brings together working literary translators to discuss their experiences and attitudes toward their practice, including Middlebury faculty Ahmad Almallha, Timothy Billings, Michael Katz, Stephen Snyder and Paul Losensky (Indiana University). Moderated by Nina Wieda, Assistant Professor of Russian, Middlebury College.

Saturday, September 28,

7-8 a.m., Consecutive Interpretation Workshop

Middlebury students, including the winners of the Translingual contest, perform poetry-in-translation.