The first of three annual EHRC workshops on translation will be held on 1-2 November 2013 in TORCH (The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities), Woodstock Rd, and in the Taylor Institution, St Giles.

Conveners: Martin McLaughlin and Javier Muñoz-Basols, with the assistance of Dr Elisabetta Tarantino

The idea and practice of translation are as old as the most ancient recorded languages.  As David Bellos recently pointed out, one of the earliest words for translator (which survived into nineteenth-century English as ‘dragoman’) is first found in Mesopotamia in the third millennium BCE, as a version of an even more ancient Sumerian word.  Today translation is ubiquitous; from every internet page that is not in the searcher’s language to the constant use of translation by the mass media, it is a tool that produces insights into different cultures and linguistic traditions. The ever-rising interest in translation studies has materialized itself in many new university courses and programmes. In this exhilarating context for translation, the European Humanities Research Centre (EHRC) of Oxford University is organizing three annual workshops on different aspects of the translation of European languages.  The first such workshop will be held on 1-2 November 2013 and is devoted to three of the main features that have accompanied translation in all languages, namely the History, Ideology and Censorship of translations.   The three Keynote Speakers at the first workshop are Professor Mona Baker (University of Manchester), Professor Theo Hermans (University College London) and Professor Raquel Merino-Álvarez (University of the Basque Country), all international experts in these fields.  The papers in the various sessions will cover the three areas of the workshop’s focus, as well as dealing with translation into and from several languages, including Basque, Catalan, Dutch, English, French, German, Galician, Greek, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.  Full programme to follow.