Workshop of the SPP 2130-TransUnit 'Mapping Translation'

Programme and Report

While global approaches to early modern history have so far concentrated mainly on the seafaring nations of Western Europe and their colonial empires, this workshop focuses on global encounters in early modern Germany. It also serves as a forum to think methodologically and systematically about current approaches to global history (to the full programme).

Interdisciplinary Roundtable with Dr. Anna Piotrowska live and online—that is, in a hybrid and family-friendly form.

In an open discussion atmosphere, Dr. Piotrowska set forth her conception of musical translation and applied it to processes which in music theory are classically subsumed under transfer, adaption, or appropriation, an approach represented by Prof. Dr. Andreas Haug of Würzburg in the role of responder.

Productive exchange on the possibilities of translating music and translating with music followed. The discussion revolved in part around qualifying the catch-all phrase ‘music as a universal language’ because, as Dr. Astrid Dröse and Dr. Sara Springfield showed in their SPP project on song translation, melodies frequently adapt to cultural contexts. On the other hand, the participants also critically reflected on the term ‘non-translatability’. Within this context, paratexts proved to play a role in music translation as well—a role whose importance is still frequently underestimated.

Lawrence Venuti will be our guest as Mercator Fellow at the 3rd annual conference, and on the days preceding it will offer a workshop in Wolfenbüttel. Interested junior researchers are welcome to register for the workshop with the SPP 2130 office by 31 June 2021. [read more…]

As a Mercator Fellow of the SPP 2130, Dr Hilary Brown will give a workshop for postgraduate researchers and offer a broad introduction to the study of gender in translation history. The aim is to explore the links which have traditionally been made between women and translation, and discuss different approaches to researching women translators in the past (programme enclosed). The workshop will be held in hybrid format, so interested parties are cordially invited to register for digital participation via Zoom with Annkathrin Koppers (spp2130@uni-wuerzburg.de).

This workshop aims to explore the movement of ideas across territorial and linguistic borders in early modern Europe by means of translation. It will combine research in intellectual history with new work on translation studies and book history, and will attempt to enhance our understanding of cultural transfer processes by studying ideas from their original inception, through the textual production process, down to their readers and users over time.

For more details and a Zoom link to the event, please contact gaby.mahlberg@newcastle.ac.uk or thomas.munck@glasgow.ac.uk.

This roundtable event will explore the feasibility of building a pan-European translation database for the early modern period. Our vision is for a comprehensive online analytical catalogue of translations which would provide information on source text(s), manuscript and print versions, and the different agents involved in the translation process, and which would link where possible to digital texts. Researchers are increasingly benefitting from databases and other digital projects which focus on a defined corpus or language area, but a bigger-scale European database along these lines has not yet been attempted. In this roundtable event participants will share experiences of developing online bibliographical/translation resources for the early modern period, and discuss the opportunities and challenges of embarking on an ambitious ‘umbrella’ database project. [read more…]