Translating Cultures: Reflections on a Theme

The lecture will provide an overview of ongoing work relating to the Arts and Humanities Research Council research theme ‘Translating Cultures’, a major programme that now encompasses around ninety grants (a mixture of fellowships, networks and larger collaborative projects) from across the Arts and Humanities subject domains. By yoking together ‘translating’ and ‘cultures’, the theme seeks to explore the ways in which translation – understood in a broad sense as a term federating a variety of processes relating to the transmission, interpretation, transformation and sharing of languages, values, beliefs, histories and narratives – may be seen as actively constitutive of culture and society. The aim of the presentation is to outline the scope of research relating to the theme, to reflect on the possibilities of cross-disciplinary approaches to questions of translation, to situate this collaborative working in relation to translation studies, and to consider the extent to which translation is increasingly central to a variety of areas of contemporary public concern. The talk will conclude with an overview of some of the conceptual, theoretical and methodological innovations emerging from the theme activity, covering issues such as multilingualism and post-monolingualism, translation and self-reflexivity, public understanding of languages, and translation as a form of knowledge creation.