Centre for Translating Cultures

Description

The Centre provides a context to draw together work on ‘Translating Cultures’ within the University, and more specifically for the Languages, Cultures and Visual Studies Department (LCVS) within Humanities. The Centre interprets ‘Translating Cultures’ broadly, hosting talks on literary and cultural studies, migration studies, border-crossing, exile and diasporic literatures, adaptation, intermediality and multimedia from antiquity to the present day.

Members trace the trajectories of authors, texts and ideas that cross national borders: diasporic authors, musicians, composers, artists and filmmakers, including African filmmakers in France, literary translation in Russia, transnational trends in early-modern court culture and Global Dickens travelling texts like English film in China, transnational poetry in the 1930s and beyond, European game culture and poetic engagement 1350–1550; the migration and interaction of medieval musicians and the transmission and reception of medieval song; Woolf in Spain; roving ideas like German Romanticism in Spanish theatre, the ‘middlebrow’ in world cinemas, postfeminism in European cinema; wandering words like peninsular Portuguese in East Timor; language contact and multilingualism and variation in, and varieties, of French as expressions of culture in different social contexts; flowing images such as Chinese landscapes in 17th–18th-century Europe.

The Centre’s research investigates intermedial cultural translation, including adaptations of literary texts to film and TV; ekphrasis; the reception of the Middle Ages in visual media; redeployment of literary texts in visual media.

Second, it probes the translation of cultures across time, and members investigate: the transition of Soviet-era texts in post-Soviet culture; seventeenth-century French theatre in contemporary art; the legacy of the II Spanish Republic in contemporary Spain.

Third, the Centre’s digital scholarship considers the migration of texts across different formats: the digitization of German nineteenth-century literature and of medieval French lyrics and songs; the reinterpretation of medieval manuscripts via digitised image and App; and the intermedial reinvention of theatre texts as digital media and as mixed reality installation.

Next, the Centre’s research considers translating cultures intergenerationally: such as memories of Nazism in contemporary Germany; Holocaust narratives; legacies of wars.

Lastly, Translation Studies work focuses on translation and the construction of identities, the role of translation in the development of discourses of homosexuality in China and explores how the role of translating Chinese landscape images facilitated the reconstructions of social and moral structures in Europe in the 17th–18th century.

All the examples above refer to current or recent research projects by LCVS academic staff and postgraduates.

Offers funding

No, this infrastructure does not provide funding.

Founding year

2013

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University affiliation(s)

University of Exeter
Exeter