TRANSLATING
The Translating Research Section (RS) has two interrelated objectives: (1) to empirically study relational processes of translating, exploring their role in the (un)making of worlds and knowledge regimes in everyday life as well as in globalising discourses; (2) to rethink the conceptual and ethical challenges of universalisms, with the combined aim to advance lateral universalism as an ethical method of open-endedly negotiating our common world(s), across languages and epistemes. The RS seeks to describe and analyse everyday transformative practices and processes in African and African-diasporic life-worlds as translating, as well as to interrogate powerful mechanisms of world-creation or negation that occur in and through translation.
The RS aims to focus on contingent multilingual dynamics of comparison, discussion, conversion, oppression, evaluation of and disagreement over words, concepts, ideas, or policies. To connect these practices to power relations and pursue the question of how worlds are made and unmade, This RS will investigate how translations are variously stabilised, validated, altered, questioned or marginalised, as well as which other inter sectional categories impinge on emerging translations, beyond language. This also implies the need to be attentive to continuously emerging universalist claims of – or to – originality, purity or fidelity, for example. RS will create synergies with those of the Ecologies and Re:membering RSs. RS will also actively engage RS Digitalities in a critical debate on AI-generated translations (Yusuff, 2019).
Spokesperson:
Clarissa Vierke Clarissa.Vierke@uni-bayreuth.de
Members:
AMRC Bayreuth: Tim Dorlach, Andrew Harvey, Gilbert Ndi Shang, Alena Rettová, Eva Spies, Clarissa Vierke
AMRC Lagos: Oluwatoyin Olokodana-James, Akinmayowa Akin-Otiko
AMRC Moi: Mark M. Kandagor, Catherine Kiprop, Christopher J. Odhiambo
AMRC Ouagadougou: Ousséni Soré
AMRC Rhodes: Sally Matthews, Linda Spencer