TLRH | Translation Multiples: From Global Culture to Post-communist Democracy

Tuesday, 27 April 2021, 4 – 5pm A talk by Dr Kasia Szymanska (TCD Russian and Slavonic Studies) as part of the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies Research Seminar Series in association with Trinity Long Room Hub. All webinars take place at 4pm. Presenters speak for a maximum of 45 minutes, followed by a Q&A. In recent decades, projects called "translation multiples" have emerged with translators, writers and intellectuals multiplying different translation variants of the same originals. In this talk, Dr Szymanska will discuss the cultural and political implications behind this new genre of writing. The seminar will look at the context of global English to explain how similar projects may resist the hegemony of the global lingua franca. Second, it will examine the unexpected significance of translation multiples for the post-1989 political transformation in Poland while also stressing the pluralist role of translation in face of the rising tide of political tribalism. This talk is based on Dr Szymanska's first book project, Translation Multiples: From Global Culture to Postcommunist Democracy. Dr Kasia Szymanska is Thomas Brown Assistant Professor in the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultural Studies at Trinity College Dublin. She is also a research associate of the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation research centre, which she co-convened in 2016-2019 during her Junior Research Fellowship at the University of Oxford. Her work has appeared in PMLA, Contemporary Literature, Slavic and East European Journal, and several edited volumes such as: Translations in Times of Disruptions (Palgrave 2017), Prismatic Translation (Legenda 2019), and Retracing the History of Literary Translation in Poland (Routledge 2021). She was awarded the 2015 EST Translation Prize, represented Oxford in the 2019 CHCI-Mellon Global Humanities Institute "Challenges of Translation" and remains involved in the AHRC/OWRI “Creative Multilingualism” research grant at Oxford. Learn more at: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/