Online Seminar

The Experiential Translation Online Seminar (ETOS) is an informal forum serving the examination of how the in-the-moment, relational, material, embodied, and ludic process of experiential translation is employed, explored and shaped across different disciplines and how it can help us understand more about our being and acting in the world.

The ETOS is free and open to anyone with an interest in the subject matter, regardless of whether you’re presenting or not, but please be prepared to contribute to post-presentation Q&As and discussions. If you’d like to present please see the rolling CFP on the right.

If you’d like to attend, please register for each event separately (see programme below) so we can send you the zoom link.

Forthcoming meetings take place on the following Fridays:

16th January 26, 3 – 4:30pm CET (2 – 3:30pm UK)
Danica Maier, Shifting Perspectives: Applying Intersemiotic Translation to Enable Aspect Seeing through Unrepeating-repeats in a Contemporary Art Practice
Emily Butler, Towards a curatorial translation zone

13^th March 26, 6 – 7:30pm CET (5 – 6:30pm UK)
Tamara Bakarat, Experiential translation in the creative oral history archive
Book Presentation with Gita Hashemi and Elena Basile rumi roaming: contemporary engagements and interventions (Subversive Press and Guernica Editions, 2025)

24th April 26, 6 – 7:30pm CET (5 – 6:30pm UK)
Workshop with Anna Dot: Conceptual translation or the art of jumping from field to field

29th May 26, 6 – 7:30pm CET (5 – 6:30pm UK)
Silvina Katz, Translating Silvina Ocampo’s Atmospheres
Jessica Atkinson,Translating in music therapy: collaboration or relegation?

Rolling CFP

We invite proposals for short presentations of 10-15 mins, longer talks of 20-30 mins, or workshops of 60-90 mins. You can present work-in-progress, try out a theory or an interactive practice-based approach; or you could present a new book (your own or someone else’s), a project, or a translation (finished or in progress); or you could set a challenge or provocation.

Please send proposals of 200 words
and a bio of 100 words to
info@experientialtranslation.net and indicate on which dates you would be able to present. Please indicate as many as you can. If no dates work for you or no dates are available, don’t despair and get in touch anyway as more dates will be added in due course.

The ETOS Committee:
Ricarda Vidal, Madeleine Campbell, Harriet Carter, Joanna Kosmalska, Sofía Lacasta Millera

Past meetings and presenters:

12th December 25, 3 – 4:30pm CET (2 – 3:30pm UK)
Terry Bradford and Xiaorui Sun,
14^th Nov. 25, 6 – 7:30pm CET (5 – 6:30pm UK): Kasia Szymanska 
25th April 25, 6 – 7:30pm CET (5 – 6:30pm UK): Riku Haapaniemi & Mattia Thibault and Zeina Dghaim
14th Feb. 25, 12:30 – 2pm CET (11:30 – 1pm UK): PartSuspended Artist Collective
29^nd Nov. 24, 5pm – 6:30pm CET : Lily Robert-Foley
21^st June 24, 10am – 11:30am CET: Angela Tarantini and Ruoyu Duan   
22^nd March 24, 6pm – 7:30pm CET : Karen Bennett and Arianna Autieri
12^th Jan. 24, 6pm – 7:30pm CET: Douglas Robinson and Delphine Grass
24^th Nov. 23, 10am – 11:30am CET: Terry Bradford and África Vidal Claramonte

On translating a non-existent text: Boris Vian’s third ‘Major’ novel
Terry Bradford
University of Leeds

Having translated Trouble dans les andains and Vercoquin et le plancton for Wakefield Press (US), I started ‘translating’ a follow-on novel (which Vian never wrote). Titled L’Arrondissement du Cor aux Russes, it features the main protagonists of these novels: the Major and Antioch(e). A work in progress (c.15,000 words), it seeks to generate/create Vianesque narrative using techniques acquired/learnt through the process of translating Vian, whilst playing with aspects of translation. Famously, Vian hoaxed the world as the ‘translator’ of Vernon Sullivan. My aim is not to hoax. Midway through the process, I ask: Is this fan fiction, transcreation, ghost translation, or a parody of research? And where can I find a publisher?

Bio: My teaching at Leeds focuses on French language, translation (from Level 1 to MA), and interpreting (Levels 2& 3). My research interests embrace the pedagogy of translation/interpreting, as well as creative translation (literature, song, BD). Much of what I teach overlaps with past professional experience – I have 16 years experience working as an interpreter. And I have worked as a translator since 2001. In recent times – having hit my 50s, I have begun to seek to get literary translation work published. Wakefield Press (US) published a Boris Vian translation in 2022 – with another to come in 2024. Liverpool University Press have published my translation of Sinon j’oublie by Clémentine Mélois.

Sensuous translation: Rewriting non-western knowledges
África Vidal Claramonte
Universidad de Salamanca

Taking don Juan as my guiding shaman, I am interested in exploring the differences between indigenous epistemology and forms of knowledge in the West. Don Juan will show us that indigenous knowledges possess an epistemology that is completely different from the epistemology of the West. All bodies participate in the entanglement and interaction with their surroundings. This interaction gives rise to an indigenous epistemology that eschews Western epistemicide and makes possible a “pluriverse”.
New modes of communication arise from this indigenous epistemology. Instead of transmitting meanings through words, communication happens through human and non-human bodies. Through the use of magic and metamorphosis the shaman invites us to expand knowledge and to communicate through alternative ‘languages’ that go beyond the phonetic alphabet.
I will deal with forms of knowledge which are far away from the one-world world western (not in capital) scientific epistemology. Based on the assumption that there are other non-Western epistemologies and alternative forms of human and non-human communication, I will finally argue that those non-Western epistemologies need to be translated by using a non-Cartesian, pre-logic translation. My proposal is a corporeal, sensuous ethnotranslation which no doubt is in line with experiential translation because it does not rewrite knowledge with the intellect but with all the senses and that rewrites everything communicated by humans and non-humans.

Bio: África Vidal teaches at the University of Salamanca, Spain. She is a practising translator specialized in the fields of philosophy, literature, history and contemporary art. Her research interests embrace contemporary art, gender and migration studies.

Experiential as Experimental: Transforming Translation
Douglas Robinson
Chinese University of Hong Kong

I will briefly introduce some of my recent work in experimental translation and experimental translation studies. My first published experiments with translation were fairly passing moments in my 2017 translation of Aleksis Kivi’s 1870 novel Seitsemän veljestä as The Brothers Seven, including deliberate anachronisms, allusions to target-language memes, playing the alphabet game (starting each word in a long sentence with the next letter in the English alphabet), etc. In my monograph on translating Kivi, Aleksis Kivi and/as World Literature (2017), I theorized those passing moments as “minoritizations” of Kivi.
My next experiment was my transcreation of Volter Kilpi’s Gulliver’s Voyage to Phantomimia, which combined several different transformative experiments into a single text: Kilpi pretended to have found an authentic eighteenth-century manuscript apparently written in English by Lemuel Gulliver and translated it himself into Finnish, so I decided to have pretended to have found the same manuscript and edited it myself, along with various critical pieces on the text as a kind of faux critical edition. I have theorized that project too in a series of critical works, beginning with Translating the Monster: Volter Kilpi in Orbit Beyond (Un)translatability and especially The Experimental Translator.
Another ongoing project has been to translate Walter Benjamin’s “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers” experimentally: 1) in the mode Benjamin himself preferred, Hölderlinian radical etymological literalism; 2) in a showcase of different experimental translation strategies, one for each paragraph; 3) using methods borrowed from James Joyce in Finnegans Wake. That third Benjamin constitutes the entire fourth chapter in Lessons Experimental Translators Can Learn from Finnegans Wake: Translouting that Gaswind into Turfish (Routledge, 2024).

Bio: Douglas Robinson is Professor of Translation Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. He is author of more than 30 monographs, including The Translator’s Turn (1991), Translation and Empire (1997), The Dao of Translation (2015), The Deep Ecology of Rhetoric in Mencius and Aristotle (2016), Translation as a Form: A Centennial Commentary on Walter Benjamin’s “Task of the Translator” (2023) and Translator, Touretter: Avant-Garde Translation and the Touretter Sublime (2024). He is the author of the world’s leading English-language textbook for translators, Becoming a Translator (1997, 2003, 2012, 2020), and editor of the world’s leading English-language anthology of translation theory, Western Translation Theory from Herodotus to Nietzsche (1997, 2014). He has been translating from Finnish since 1975, most recently Aleksis Kivi’s The Brothers Seven (Zeta) and Mia Kankimäki’s The Women I Think About at Night (Simon & Schuster) and his transcreation of Volter Kilpi’s Gulliver’s Voyage to Phantomimia (Zeta).

Translation as Creative-Critical Practice: An Eco-Critical Perspective
Delphine Grass
Lancaster University

In this session I propose to present my recent book Translation as Creative-Critical Practice and to explore how I intend to develop its findings for a new project on eco-translation practice. This publication questions the separation between practice and theory in translation studies through my analysis of creative-critical translation experiments. Focusing on contemporary literary and artistic engagements with translation such as the autotheoretical translation memoir, performative translations and ‘transtopian’ literary and visual art works, the book argues for a renewed engagement with translation theory from the point of view of translation as artistic and practice-based research capable of reframing translation theory. The presentation will explore key arguments of the book and other similar scholarship in the field of experiential translation (Campbell and Vidal 2019, Lee 2022, Robinson 2022, Vidal Claramonte 2022, Robert-Foley 2024) and will reflect on how creative-critical translation can become creative-ecocritical. How can experiential translation, as a translation practice which centres the senses, address and question the anthropocentrism of translation practices? Can translating the Anthropocene decolonize the Anthropocene?

Bio: Delphine Grass is Senior Lecturer in French and Comparative Literature at Lancaster University (UK) where she teaches on the MA in Translation. Her most recent academic publications include Translation as Creative-Critical Practice (2023, CUP) and two forthcoming collective volumes on translation and experimental life writing she is co-editing with Lily Robert-Foley (Montpellier III). She is currently conducting research on creative-critical translations which explore semiotic borders between humans and non-humans in ‘multinatural’ as well as multicultural contexts. She is collaborating, as part of the writing collective D(r)aft, on a creative-critical project entitled ‘Composting: Translation in Remains’.

Ezra Pound and his contemporaries: Experiential translators avant la lettre
Karen Bennett

This paper explores the connections between the type of translation currently being explored under the rubric of experiential (Vidal and Campbell, forthcoming), experimental (Lee 2022, Robert-Foley 2023, Robinson 2023) or avant-garde (Lukes 2023, Grass 2023) translation, and the translation experiments of high modernists like W.B.Yeats, T.S. Eliot, and particularly Ezra Pound.   

At a time when translation was conceptualized as the transfer of information between two (verbal) languages and predicated upon a notion of ‘equivalence’ that privileged semantic invariance above adaptation or experimentation, these poets went against the grain by using it as a vehicle for their own creative output, in part to fulfil the modernist agenda of cultural renewal through engagement with the past and with non-European traditions. Practicing a foreignizing strategy designed to expand the creative possibilities of English, they produced works that consciously foregrounded the material aspects of the text, blurring the boundaries between author/translator, source/target texts and the verbal/visual/musical.  

This paper begins by exploring some of the translation experiments undertaken by Ezra Pound and his contemporaries, before going on to consider their parallels and connections with the objectives of the Experiential Translation Network. Particular attention will be given to the contextual factors influencing the drive towards creative translation in each case.  

Bio: Karen Bennett is Associate Professor in Translation Studies at Nova University, Lisbon, and Coordinator of the Master’s programme in Translation. She also coordinates the Translationality strand at CETAPS and is general editor of the journal Translation Matters. As a member of the Experiential Translation Network, she has edited a special issue of Translation Matters, resulting from Network’s recent conference and exhibition held at King’s College, London.  

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Translating or performing? Joyce’s fugue in experimental translation.
Arianna Autieri

Following James Joyce’s claim that the “Sirens” episode of Ulysses imitates a fuga per canonem, scholars have variously sought to identify a fugal form in it (e.g. Zimmerman 2002, Witen 2018), or to define its other musical qualities (e.g. Shockley 2009). Where disagreement between scholars makes it unclear for the reader of “Sirens” how music and language can interact in the episode, Kathrine O’Callaghan has recently drawn scholars’ attention to the performative dimension of music, emphasising the need for a more active role on the part of the reader in bringing to life the language of “Sirens” to appreciate its musical qualities (2009; 2018, 2020).

In my forthcoming monograph, I contribute to studies in this field from the standpoint of a translator, a reader who concretely “performs” the ST’s score with the linguistic material of the target language. Specifically understanding translation as “interpretive” and “partial” rather than “faithful” and “total” (e.g. Lukes 2023; Reynolds 2019), I rely on “experimental translation” (Robert-Foley 2020) as a means to make visible my translator’s “performance” of the ST (Scott 2018), graphically foregrounding my musical reading and interpretation of the ST’s “word music” (Scher 1970), the songs embedded in the main text (Bowen 1995), and the leitmotifs of “Sirens”. This paper will introduce some of the key principles of my forthcoming study and will present some examples from my experimental musical translation of “Sirens”.

Bio: Arianna Autieri is a Lecturer in Translation Studies and Deputy Programme Coordinator of the MA in Translation at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research interests include literary translation, experimental translation, musico-literary criticism, modernism, and James Joyce. She has published several articles on Joyce, music and translation, for instance, “Translating Joyce’s Musical Language: ‘The Dead’” in Language and Languages in Joyce’s Fiction. Joyce Studies in Italy, vol. 21, 2019. Her first monograph, entitled James Joyce’s Music Performed: The “Sirens” Fugue in Experimental Re-Translation, is forthcoming with Legenda, Routledge, and includes her experimental translation of “Sirens” into Italian.

Patterns of Performativity: Strategies by Sign Language Interpreter-Performers to Translate Music into Sign Language
Angela Tarantini
Utrecht University

Translating the Body in Chinese Contemporary Art
Ruoyu Duan
Universidad de Salamanca

InterReal: Exploring Interreal Translation in the Media Multiverse
Riku Haapaniemi and Mattia Thibault
University of Tampere

The InterReal research project (ERC-StG) investigates the ongoing emergence of a media multiverse. The media multiverse indicates the shape that our mediascape is acquiring and is comprised of all kinds of media-generated alternate realities integrated with and co-existing alongside the primary physical reality, ranging from immersive Virtual Reality (VR) and layers of Augmented Reality (AR) to the permanent worlds of digital games. Within the multiverse, different objects and subjects move across these realities thanks to forms of interreal translation. Interreal translation, in turn, refers to the semiotic mechanisms that permeate the multiverse: specific forms of intersemiotic translation that transfer objects, spaces, and subjects across realities. The InterReal project combines approaches from speculative research and translation studies (TS) to advance our empirical understanding of interreal translations, develop our methodological capacity to approach them, and create a theoretical framework to understand the media multiverse.

This presentation provides a brief overview of how our InterReal research team will accomplish these goals. We propose that a semiotic perspective on translational phenomena can provide a detailed understanding of the inner mechanisms of interreal translations (in terms of participants, products, processes, and contexts), while a speculative approach can offer a critical look at the present opportunities and future possibilities related to the development of the media multiverse. InterReal will combine the two approaches into an innovative methodology that: 1) applies semiotic and translation-theoretical methods to a new object of study, and 2) imports the methodological approach of speculative design from human-computer interaction into the field of translation with the aid of a semiotic framework. InterReal explores creative work as a means of critical engagement through speculative design and utilises translation concepts to map the complex interrelations between physical spaces and objects, digital media, and human experience. This way, InterReal expands the research field of TS – along with a number of neighbouring disciplines, from semiotics and media studies to the digital humanities in general – towards multiversal research.

Bio: Dr Mattia Thibault is an Associate Professor in Translation in the Creative Industries at Tampere University and has a PhD in Semiotics and Media (Turin University). His research interests include semiotics and translation, extended realities, speculative research, and playfulness in the built environment (real and digital). He is the leader of the InterReality Research Group which focuses on the relations between different virtual spaces (and their inhabitants) and their connections with the “real” world. He is PI of the projects InterReal (ERC-StG), NEXR (Business Finland Co-Research) and Mobility Mindshift (funded by Net Zero Cities, EU).

Bio: Dr Riku Haapaniemi is a postdoctoral researcher in the InterReality Research Group at Tampere University, Finland. He works as a project coordinator for the InterReal research project. His PhD in the field of Translation Studies concerns the concept of materiality and its implications for translation research from the perspective of semiotics and textual theory.

Project Presentation: The Translation of Flower Theories 
Zeina Dghaim
Western University London

Inspired by three flowers—Alstroemeria, Bird of Paradise, and Passiflora—Translation of Flower Theories is an experiential art translation project that reimagines the essence of these blooms in alternative realities through three distinct artworks. This project delves into the process of translating the natural world into other forms of existence, inviting viewers to reflect on the meaning of inspiration, the role of nature in creative processes, and the meditative practice fostered through art-making. 

In this presentation, I will discuss and present the documented process of translating the flower patterns and colours into artwork. The translation process holds equal if not greater importance than the outcome. Documenting this process also becomes an act of life activation, engaging directly with life itself in the pursuit of translation. 

Bio: Zeina Dghaim is an artist, researcher, designer, and museum collections specialist with over a decade of experience working at the intersection of art, culture, and technology. Her artistic practice examines human perceptions, connections to dreams, beauty and the natural world, brought to life through surrealist representations and performances. In addition to her art practice, Zeina helps museums foster stronger connections with their collections, enhancing accessibility and engagement. She is the founder of Camellia Studios, a creative space dedicated to art, installations, and other whimsical explorations that ignite a sense of awe and wonder. 

Pseudotranslating Renée Vivien: a problematic and problematising practice
Terry Bradford, University of Leeds

The practice of pseudotranslation provides material with which to answer Patrick McGuinness’s question (2019: 209): ‘What happens when a translation has no original?’ Brigid Maher (2017: 25) explains that a pseudotranslation is a ‘fictitious translation’ with ‘no single corresponding source text’. For Isabelle Collombat (2003: 145), pseudotranslation serves as a ‘laboratory’. In this experimental light, I have pseudotranslated a number of texts, including one ‘never written by Renée Vivien’. Most scholarly discussion of pseudotranslation deals with its definition, history, and place in literature. Against this background, in contrast, this short paper allows me to describe my method for pseudotranslating non-existent text as well as my particular aims in attempting this. It thereby provides insight into a range of issues at play in the composition of pseudotranslation – this in turn sheds light on questions traductological, including that of translator (in-)visibility. My practice – exploratory, experimental, creative – has led me to reflect critically on the process. It is in this vein that the paper moves on to discuss and problematise the positionality of the pseudotranslator of ‘queer’ fiction.

Bio: Terry Bradford teaches French, translation, and interpreting at the University of Leeds (GB). Wakefield Press (USA) have published his translations of early Boris Vian and Vulturnus by Léon-Paul Fargue. LUP have published his translation of Clémentine Mélois’ Otherwise I Forget. Recently, he has taken to homophonic translation and pseudotranslation as differently creative sidelines.

Transmediality, Intersemioticity, and Interepistemicity: The Adaptation and Translation of Xiongnu Ge
Xiaorui Sun, Chinese University of Hong Kong

Ever since French sinologist Joseph de Guignes attempted to link the Huns and the Xiongnu, it has become increasingly widely accepted that the Xiongnu were a strand of the Huns who started to migrate westward after being defeated by China. This is significant because the Huns lacked a written language and as a result their culture remains obscure and mysterious to modern people. Xiongnu ge, or “Song of the Huns”, a Chinese poem translated from a contemporary Hunnic folk song by Chinese scholar(s) in the Han Dynasty (202BCE-220BC), is generally thought to be the only Hunnic literary work that still survives today. It is a lament for their defeat in the war with Han Dynasty China and the loss of territory. The poem was later adapted in 1986 by the Chinese poet Haizi (1964-1989) in his poems and by Turkish musician Sagucu Tegin as the melody “Gök Dağı” (Sky Mountain) in 2022.
This paper argues that, in spite of a possible loss of “accuracy of the original”, such a transmedial adaptation as an intersemiotic and interepistemic translation process spanning thousands of years of history and multiple cultures—from an unrecorded Hunnic folk song through its contemporary interlingual translation to modern Chinese poetry and Turkish music—allows us to catch a glimpse of the extinct Hunnic culture and share something of the affect of their people.

Bio: Xiaorui Sun is currently a Ph.D candidate in Translation Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. Her research interests lie in post-structuralist / post-foundationalist theories and her most recent articles have appeared in international journals such as Translation Matters and Babel. She is also the co-author of Translation, Pornography, Performativity: Experimenting with That Dangerous Supplement (2025).

Shifting Perspectives: Applying Intersemiotic Translation to Enable Aspect Seeing through Unrepeating-repeats in a Contemporary Art Practice
Danica Maier, Nottingham Trent University  

This presentation explores how hand-drawn repetition, inspired by historical textiles and transformed through intersemiotic translation, fosters embodied audience engagement. Grounded in a recently completed PhD by Creative Works (2025), the research spans six bodies of artwork (2014-23) that reimagine textile processes by bridging drawing, writing, and site-specific practice.
Within the practice-research textiles function as active agents in translation, expanding their role beyond materiality into dynamic, interdisciplinary dialogues. Drawing on Roman Jakobson’s (1959) concept of intersemiotic translation and contemporary explorations by Madeleine Campbell and Ricarda Vidal (2019) and Lee (2022), this research explores how textile processes are translated into drawn textual forms. While textiles have long been studied in cultural contexts, their capacity as catalysts for translation remains underexamined. A further aspect is the “unrepeating-repeat”: iterative variation that disrupts repetition to provoke perceptual shifts. This technique enables aspect seeing, (Wittgenstein 1953/2010), inviting viewers to encounter moments of discovery where the familiar transforms, revealing multiple perspectives.
This presentation outlines how intersemiotic translation, aspect seeing, and the unrepeating-repeat form a cohesive and unique framework for artistic creation. The unrepeating-repeat fosters attentive exploration; aspect seeing activates shifts in perception; and intersemiotic translation expands meaning across modes. This integrated approach transforms the audience’s experience into an active, participatory process, offering a novel understanding of how artistic frameworks can foster embodied discovery.

Bio: Dr. Danica Maier is an artist and Associate Professor in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University, UK. Her artistic research explores intersemiotic translation across drawing, textiles, and text, using the “unrepeating-repeat” to foster perceptual shifts. Working through site-specific installations, performance, and collaborative research, she invites slow looking and embodied engagement. Collaborate projects include Bummock: Artists in Archives, Score: Mechanical Asynchronicity, Returns, and Smatterings. Her recent published research appears in JAR (Journal of Artistic Research), TEXTILE: Cloth and Culture, the Journal of Research in Arts and Education, among others. 

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Towards a curatorial translation zone
Emily Butler, Reading University

Emily Butler presents a summary of her article “Towards a curatorial translation zone”. In it, she argues that in a globalizing world, the act of translation is potentially everywhere (Bassnett 2014; Blumczynski 2016, in Vidal 2022). It involves a creative process of transfer, interpretation, and transformation across sign systems, cultures, and worldviews – an act with profound socio-political implications. Within the visual arts field, it describes the practice of artists and curators who work increasingly internationally as ‘material-semiotic actors’ (Haraway 1988: 595), engaged in renegotiating semiotic and cultural frameworks while questioning the socio-political status quo. Yet, what are the limits of translation? What is lost or gained in this “necessary but impossible” act (Spivak 2022: 69)? Who translates in ‘power-differentiated’ contexts (Haraway 1988: 579-80)? This article outlines how artists and curators explore the possibilities and limits of translation within contemporary art to put forward the poetics of the untranslatable (Cassin 2014; Glissant 1990). It develops the concept of (mis)translation and positions the curatorial space as a translation zone (Apter 2006) – a dynamic, impermanent site of semiotic and cultural renegotiation, where hybrid languages, new forms, knowledges and relations can emerge (Bhabha 1994). In doing so, it embraces a ‘kaleidoscopic totality’ of world views (Bernabé, Chamoiseau and Confiant 1990).

Bio: Emily Butler is a freelance curator and writer. She is also a PhD researcher in Curating at the University of Reading / OnCurating Academy, Berlin, on the topic of artists and curators as (mis)translators, as they work increasingly across borders, between languages, sign systems and cultures. 
Previously, she served as Head of Programmes at the Contemporary Arts Society in Vancouver, Platform Talks Curator at Art Toronto (2024), and Conversations Curator at Art Basel (2021–2023). From 2010 to 2022, she was a curator at Whitechapel Gallery in London. She has also held roles in the Visual Arts team at the British Council, Antony Gormley Studio, and the Centre Pompidou. She contributes to international publications, and has been a visiting lecturer at Emily Carr University, Royal College of Art, OnCurating Academy and London Metropolitan University.

Experiential translation in the creative oral history archive
Tamara Bakarat, University of Strathclyde

How can experiential translation contribute to the documentation and dissemination of oral histories by survivors of trauma in creative, ethical and politically engaged ways? This question lies at the heart of artist Samia Halaby’s Drawing the Kafr Qasem Massacre, a publication that documents, through oral history and visual art, a massacre perpetrated by the Israeli border police in the Palestinian village of Kafr Qasem in 1956. Based on her own interviews with survivors, Halaby translates into paintings and drawings the stages through which the massacre unfolded. She presents the reader with English translations of the Arabic testimonies she collected, her draft sketches, and in-depth reflections on the methodological and ethical challenges she encountered in translating the survivors’ lived experience.
I will approach Halaby’s publication as both an archive of translated oral history and a translator’s archive. I will demonstrate how her employment of translation as a ‘creative-critical practice’ (Grass 2023) enables her to reconstruct and visualise this fragmented episode of Palestinian memory. My analysis will focus on the experiential, embodied, material, and collaborative translation processes that underlie the artist’s remediation of the testimonies, highlighting their impact on how the past is engaged with in and for the present. In doing so, I wish to open the space for dialogue on how translation can be employed in the creation of egalitarian anticolonial archives in the Palestinian context and beyond.

Bio: Tamara Barakat is a lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Strathclyde. She holds a PhD in Translation Studies from the University of Durham. Her research interests include intersemiotic translation, memory, oral history, and archives. She published a chapter on intersemiotic translation and intergenerational memory in graphic novels (Routledge, 2023) and a chapter on the intersections between translation and memory in the Routledge Handbook of Translation and Sociology (Routledge, 2024). She is currently working on her first monograph.

References:

• Grass, D. (2023) Translation as creative-critical practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Halaby, S. (2016) Drawing the Kafr Qasem Massacre. Amsterdam: Schilt Publishing.

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Book Presentation: rumi roaming: contemporary engagements and interventions
Edited and curated by Gita Hashemi with editorial assistance by Elena Basile (Subversive Press and Guernica Editions, 2025)
http://rumiroaming.net/
Gita Hashemi and Elena Basile

This mulitplatform, multigenre and multilingual anthology invites its readers into a journey of decolonial reactivation of the multifaceted space that the name of Rumi invokes for differently situated readers around the world. Responding to new translations of Rumi’s ghazals by Gita Hashemi, the visual art, video performances, poetry, autoethnographies and critical writings of rumi roaming’s 19 contributors address a wide range of interconnected and urgent themes, including global displacements and relations to land and water, translingual poetics and translation politics, indigenous language revitalization and diasporic language reclamation, and interrogations of spirituality, healing, and social justice. Rather than laying claim to any prescribed and monetized ‘spirituality,’ the contributors claim the spirit of the world they inhabit, with and without Rumi.
Our presentation will highlight especially the book’s decolonizing approach to translation, as an ethos of critical and creative reconnection to, and reclamation of, the enlivening force of translingual poesis, wherein diasporic and colonized experiences of linguistic displacement and erasure are repurposed in the service of communal healing.

Bios: Gita Hashemi is a refugee, a transdisciplinary artist, activist, curator, and writer who works from T’karonto, the “Dish With One Spoon Territory,” the lands of the Anishinaabeg, Haudenosaunee, Huron-Wendat, and most recently the Mississaugas of Credit. She lives near Wonscotonach River. Her home in Shiraz was near Khoshk River. She works in visual, media and performance art, digital and net art, and language-based art including live embodied writing, as well as in curation and publishing. Her work engages with contemporary cultural and political dynamics through decolonial narratives and perspectives. She has  created and/or curated many generative and multi-platform projects that have been presented in Canada and internationally. She is a founder and the publisher at SubversivePress, and published in Fuse Magazine, Public, Journal of Critical Race Inquiry, Refuge, Resources for Feminist Research, and New River Journal of Digital Writing and Art. She is currently working on a new expanded book, Fugitive Transmissions: Tales of Enduring Transience, forthcoming in 2027.  https://gitaha.net 

Elena Basile teaches literature, sexuality, and translation studies at York University and at the University of Toronto. Her collaborative research and art practice seek to stay tuned to the entangled relations of bodies, objects, languages, places, and the complex stories of displacement, resistance and resilience that recursively seep out of their interactions. Besides collaborating with Gita Hashemi on rumi roaming, other transmedia collaborations include Transitions in Progress: Making Space for Place (with Roberta Buiani), an itinerant participatory project of affective mapping of urban multilingual land and sound scapes (P.H. Cocker Architecture Gallery, TMU, October 2015; Glendon College Gallery, York University, November 2016; Museum Toronto, October 2018). Recent and upcoming scholarly publications include Translation, Semiotics and Feminism: Selected Works of Barbara Godard coedited with Eva Karpinski (Routledge 2022); “Per una lingua che ascolti il respiro: note per una  sensibilitàdecoloniale in traduzione” in Al di là dei versi. Tradurre il  colore, il  genere, la storia (Simona Bertacco, Alessandra Di Maio and Biancamaria  Rizzardi, eds, ETS, 2024); The Bloomsbury Handbook of Poetry, Gender and Sexuality co-edited with Heather Milne (2026); and “Attunement” in Translationality, edited by Matthew Reynolds (Oxford UP, 2026).  

​​Translating Silvina Ocampo’s Atmospheres
Silvina Katz, Northampton University

This study presents findings from my research on the creation of atmosphere in Silvina Ocampo’s short stories, exemplified by a detailed analysis of “La Calle Sarandí” (1937). Atmosphere is understood as a mood or feeling, often associated with place (Griffero, 2020), and described with terms such as ‘ambience’ and ‘tone’ to capture the perceived quality of a literary world (Stockwell, 2014, 2020). The study acknowledges that translators must sense or ‘feel’ a text to produce an emotionally alive translation (Robinson, 1991, p. 17); this challenge is further heightened by the ineffable nature of literary atmospheres.
Using a phenomenological methodology that integrates close reading with computer-aided analysis, I explore how sensory cues, distributed across the sensorium, are encoded in the original and its translations. The analysis tracks sensory markers embedded within the narrative structure that shape distinctive atmospheres and elicit emotional responses, emphasising the translator’s embodied and perceptual engagement. This approach aligns with phenomenological approaches in translation studies (e.g., Scott, 2012). The findings highlight the critical importance of attending to sensory and emotional cues to effectively convey atmosphere and affect across languages and cultures.

Bio: Dr Silvina Katz is a researcher and practising translator based in Northampton, UK. She holds a PhD from The Open University (2024), where she investigated sensory perception and atmospheric effects in the translation of Silvina Ocampo’s short fiction. Her research interests encompass sensory linguistics, corpus stylistics, phenomenology, and the sensory construction of atmosphere in literary translation. Silvina contributes to both academic and professional communities within experiential translation and sensory studies.

References

•  Griffero, T. (2020) ‘Emotional atmospheres’, in Szanto, T. and Landweer, H. (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Emotion. 1st edn. London: Routledge, pp. 262–274. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315180786-26
• Robinson, D. (1991) The Translator’s Turn. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Scott, C. (2012) Translating the perception of text: Literary translation and phenomenology. London: Legenda.
• Stockwell, P. (2014) ‘Atmosphere and tone’, in Stockwell, P. and Whiteley, S. (eds.) The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 360–374.
• Stockwell, P. (2020) Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction. 2nd edn. London and New York: Routledge..

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Translating in music therapy: collaboration or relegation?
Jessica Atkinson, music therapist and writer

In music therapy, participants and therapist meet, make communicative gestures meaningful to themselves, receive communicative gestures meaningful to others; in the fertile space between actors, something entirely new, shared and significant can be co-created. This is music therapy, and life, at its best.
When participants are non-verbal, these musically-communicative gestures are particularly important, because they are the participant’s language, together with their movements, reactions, sensory cues and responses. But this language is vulnerable in the hierarchy of communication. It is fundamental within the session, but beyond it is relegated and must be translated to be taken seriously: despite an intuitive love of musical language in the public, to satisfy commissioners and funders, graphs, scales, statistics and pages of words are used.
This session draws on my recent book Insights from Music Therapy Practice and Research – Other Knowing (2025). I share two forms of other knowing, – my arts-based research process and fictionalised work with nonverbal participants. I propose that awareness of, and fluency in, intersemiotic translation is vital for all involved if we are to avoid ableist prioritisation of verbal communication. Participants deserve agency in their chosen language of communication. The ethical response is for other stakeholders to give up our expertise and learn this language, so as to listen.

Bio: Dr Jessica Atkinson has been a music therapist for 27 years. Having studied languages as an undergraduate, and learnt Makaton signing for work in different settings, she is continually aware that the sharing of meaning, both within and between verbal systems and sensory ones, is precarious. Her work with diverse groups led her to explore concepts of evidence in her PhD at King’s College London and to question the numerically and verbally expressed measurements of outcome which dominate in the profession. Instead, she suggests that the musical experience is itself evidence of music therapy.