Sustainability and Translation

Annual conference of the Institute of Culture Studies and Theatre History 2021

Despite its current socio-political urgency and the growing importance of eco-criticism in universities around the globe, the concept of ‘sustainability’ has been slow in carving out a central position in the humanities.

Nevertheless, sustainability is today an essential concept for participating in the global debate on our responsibility towards our planet and our future. Hence, this conference will try to fill this gap by focusing on the relationship between sustainability and translation processes. In particular, it will investigate in what sense translation—understood as both a linguistic undertaking and a cultural cross-cultural negotiation—is a sustainable practice, what makes it such, if there are translations more sustainable than others and to what extent a sustainable translation is a desirable goal.

The conference will, among others, ask questions about what makes certain translation processes more sustainable than others in terms of equity and social justice; what role the sustainability of a translation plays in the transfer and circulation of knowledge; and what criteria can be used to evaluate the sustainability of a translation in highly codified fields such as philosophy and literature.