Translation and the Archive: Performance, Practice, Negotiation

Translating the Archive - Literary Series

Centre for Translation Studies

Events

Download the summer term 2026 programme here!

CTS programme summer 2026 (101 KB, pdf, 06.05.2026)

16.06.2026 | Literaturübersetzen, Anglistik 5

Decolonizing museums demands applicable tools within and beyond the museum space. In view of this imperative, “(Un)Translating the Museum” focuses on the hegemony of the museum concept, as defined by the West, through the lens of translation as a counter-practice. It is about workable perspectives to challenge the term as a pan-global standard. Can we unlearn the term through un-translating, i.e. resisting and reversing cultural imposition?

Read on.

19.06.2026 | Anglistik 5

Artificial Intelligence produced works pose a plethora of questions to the value and formation of art. More often than not, these discussions often center Euro- and Ameri-centric perspectives in the Anglophone world, as they disproportionately impact the world through the development and use of AI.

Read on.

22.06.2026 | Literaturübersetzen, Anglistik 5

How might cinema make revolution and mobilize the masses? Cinematic Guerrillas is a media history of Chinese film exhibition and reception that offers fresh insights into the powers and limits of propaganda. Drawing on a wealth of archives, memoirs, interviews, and ethnographic fieldwork, this book talk examines the media networks and environments, discourses and practices, experiences and memories of film projectionists and their grassroots audiences from the 1940s to the 1980s.

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14.07.2026 | Literaturübersetzen

Was kommt nach dem Studium des Literaturübersetzens? Im Rahmen des ALÜmni Talk berichten ehemalige Studierende von ihren persönlichen Wegen: von der Studienwahl und prägenden Stationen im Studium bis hin zu den ersten Schritten ins Berufsleben.

08.10.2026 | Anglistik 5

The conference will bring together GAPS members and international experts to engage with the nexus between postcolonial studies and a swiftly burgeoning field whose diverse lines of inquiry are collectively referred to as critical internet studies. More specifically, the conference asks: What does it mean to do postcolonial studies in the digital age?

Read on.

Walter Benjamins Aufsatz „Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers“: Ausgewählte Fragen zur Übertragung ins Französische

June 9, 2026

09/06/2026, 18:00, HHU, 23.21.02.22

Gastvortrag Valentin Kretz (Lorraine)
Moderation: Prof. Dr. Vera Elisabeth Gerling (HHU)

Im Vortrag untersuche ich französische Übersetzungen von Walter Benjamins „Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers“ im Rahmen meines Dissertationsprojekts zur Epistemologie der Übersetzung germanophoner Texte in den Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften.

Im Zentrum steht der Begriff der „concordance“ (Stimmigkeit) bei Henri Meschonnic. Anhand verschiedener Übersetzungen soll gezeigt werden, dass mangelnde Stimmigkeit bei der Übersetzung wichtiger theoretischer Texte zu einem Verlust von Zusammenhang und Orientierung führen kann: einerseits für die Leserinnen und Leser des Textes, andererseits für den Text selbst – sowohl auf der Ebene seiner inneren Organisation als „écriture“ (oder: Textur) als auch im Verhältnis zwischen seiner Form, also der Weise, wie er sich darbietet und gelesen werden will, und seinem Inhalt.

The Hypertranslatable, the Untranslatable, and Worlding the “World Literature” in the Digital Age

May 19, 2026

19/05/2026, 18:15, OASE Forum des Austauschs

“What is World Poetry?” asks Stephen Owen (1990) in regard of a new anthology by the Chinese dissident poet Bei Dao. Owen criticized Bei Dao’s as “a poetry written to travel well,” a kind of international poetry that translates itself. It represents a specimen of a creature that never existed before: “world poetry,” detached from any national context and only accidentally written in one national language. Owen’s criticism pioneered a new wave of discussion on “world literature” since the 1990s. While David Damrosch (2003) asks contemporary works to serve as “windows on the world” to qualify as “world literature,” for which translations serve as passports for them to travel through linguistic spaces, Emily Apter (2013) famously argues against World Literature as an institution as endorsing cultural equivalence and substitutability through translations, or celebrating nationally and ethically branded “differences” that have been niche-marketed as commercialized “identities.”

In this lecture, I propose to reexamine this issue in the digital age. Enabled by digital reading platforms, social media, and AI-translation, “passports” that enable literary works to travel across borders are cheaper than ever. Technology hereby generates a new type of literature that is hypertranslatable, truly “accidentally written in one national language.” We thus need to start reconsidering untranslatability not as a hurdle to, but as an affordance for, reinventing a kind of “world literature” that worlds (welten in Heidegger’s term), that opens up new horizons for our linguistic being in the digital world.

This & That

Koloniales Erbe in Düsseldorf neu denken

Vortrag - Podium - Austausch

September 10, 2025

18:00 - 20:00 STADTFENSTER (Zentralbibliothek, Konrad-Adenauer-Platz 1)

Der Arbeitskreis Düsseldorf Postkolonial veranstaltet am 10.9. 18-20 Uhr einen Diskussionsabend mit Input und Podium zum Umgang mit dem „Kolonialkriegerdenkmal" am Frankenplatz.

Den gesamten Flyer können Sie unter diesem Link herunterladen.

Um Anmeldung wird gebeten: https://eveeno.com/koloniales-erbe

Congratulations to Tasun Tidorchibe

We congratulate Tasun Tidorchibe on the successful disputation of his dissertation "Revisiting formalism from a West African perspective: Konkomba folktales across generations and cultural contexts". His research explores the form-content correlation in Formalism from an Afrocentric perspective by employing (a) the explorative technique of foreignized translation (Venuti) and (b) a culturally-sensitive New Formalist criticism of folktales of the Konkomba people of northern Ghana. Additionally, his research project makes available a corpus of Konkomba folktales, their translations, and further information via Translating Minor Forms. Find more information on his research here.