Centre for Translation Studies

Prof. Dr. Vera Elisabeth Gerling, Dr. Hannah Pardey und Dr. Tasun Tidorchibe present preliminary results of their E-Learning projects in the field of Translation Studies and put them up for discussion.

Projects that will be discussed:

• Demarginalising Orature: Translating Minor Forms into the Digital Age (Prof. Dr. Eva Ulrike Pirker & Dr. Tasun Tidorchibe, 2023-I),
• Didaktik des Literaturübersetzens mit TEI (Prof. Dr. Vera Elisabeth Gerling, 2024-I), and
• Computational Methods for the Study of Multilingual Literary Texts (Prof. Dr. Kevin Tang & Dr. Hannah Pardey, 2024-I).

Short descriptions of the projects can be accessed here. (https://www.elearning.hhu.de/elearning-foerderfonds)

In his guest lecture within the framework of Professor Doctor Birgit Neumann's seminar "Migration and Refugee Narratives: Self-Translation, Mis-Translation and Non-Translation", Professor Doctor Jan Rupp analyses life-writing as 'site of refuge' and 'hospitable form'.

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.

The International Symposium "Decolonising Knowledge in the Humanities", will take place from 12-16 December 2023 in Accra and focus on minor forms in African cultures of knowledge, literature, and the arts as significant means of decolonising knowledge. Scholars will explore the relational complexities, challenges, and implications associated with minor forms, particularly in the context of African and African-diasporic cultures. The symposium aims to contribute to the ongoing discourse on decolonizing academia by engaging with alternative spaces of knowledge production and preservation.

More information here.

Heike Reissig is DUF guest lecturer for the winter term 2023/24. She teaches a seminar on artificial intelligence and literary translation entitled “Künstliche Intelligenz und Literaturübersetzen”.

She is a translator for English and French. Having worked as a product manager in the music industry for six years, she started work as a self-employed translator specialized in marketing in the year 2000. Since 2011 she translates English novels and non-fiction by writers such as Mary Beth Keane, Lauren Weisberger, Maria Popova, and Dizz Tate.  

We congratulate Hypolite Kembeu on the successful disputation of his dissertation on the topic: "Politisch korrekt übersetzen? Zum Einfluss von sozialhistorischen und -politischen Faktoren auf das Übersetzen von postkolonialen afrikanischen Literaturen ins Deutsche."
Read more in German

Professor Ranjan Ghosh will be Alexander von Humboldt-Guest Professor and CTS fellow during the winter term of 2023/24. Professor Ranjan Ghosh teaches in the Department of English, University of North Bengal. His many books include Thinking Literature across Continents (Duke University Press, 2016, with J Hillis Miller), Philosophy and Poetry: Continental Perspectives ed. (Columbia University Press, 2019), Plastic Tagore (Oxford University Press, forthcoming) and the trilogy that he is completing to establish the discipline of plastic humanities: The Plastic Turn (Cornell University Press, 2022), Plastic Figures (Cornell University Press, 2024, forthcoming) and Plastic Literature (forthcoming). To know more about him, see here. For more information on his upcoming guest lecture click here.