CfP: The affordances of the Sinophone literary translator in the age of AI
Time: 13-14 December 2024
Place: M+, Kowloon, Hong Kong
The Department of Translation at Lingnan University and the Hong Kong Translation Society will hold a symposium on the affordances of the Sinophone literary translator in the age of AI, at which the distinguished scholar-translators Michael Berry and Douglas Robinson (with Sun Xiaorui) will deliver keynote addresses.
First proposed by the psychologist J. J. Gibson in 1979 as a way of understanding the way an animal affords itself of opportunities for support and sustenance that it perceives in its environment, the concept of an affordance soon went viral, and has become a term of art in both the social sciences and the humanities if not the life sciences. Scholars have been applying it to literary translators in recent years. A substantial article on the topic was published last year by Douglas Robinson, who glosses affordances as resources (among other terms) and focuses on the uses to which a literary translator can put these resources. This symposium is an opportunity to focus more narrowly on the uses to which translators of literary works in Chinese languages have put the resources available to them, including the resources they have mined and refined. Anyone who is working on some kind of Sinophone literary translation should not find such a “narrow” focus confining; we invite scholars and translators alike to think along the following lines (without being limited by them):
- The use of lexical or grammatical resources to create a distinctive literary idiom
- The use of literary resources to reinvent a work in another genre
- The use of intermedial resources, for instance taking inspiration from film or drama
- The use of interpersonal resources, such as innovative ways of working with authors or editors
- The use of institutional resources, including different sources of funding and channels for publication and canonization
- The use of technological resources, from Double Dragon/Dictate to DeepL/ChatGPT
The latest resource that translators might exploit is AI technology, which seems to hang like a sword of Damocles above our necks (thanks to Andrea Musumeci for the simile), but which might allow us to slice our way through some particularly knotty problems.
We are not expecting you to submit a conference paper, but we will be inviting you to “write it up” into a chapter for a collection.
Important Dates
Please submit an abstract (~200 words) and a short bio (~100 words) to organizers Darryl Sterk (shidailun@gmail.com), Bai Yunfei (yunfeibai@ln.edu.hk), and Li Bo (b1li@ln.edu.hk) by 30 June, 2024.
You will be notified of acceptance in early July.
The symposium will be held 13-14 December, 2024 at M+ in Kowloon, with the potential for virtual panels.
About the Keynote Speakers
Michael Berry is Professor of Contemporary Chinese Cultural Studies at UCLA, and a prominent scholar of Chinese-language cultural production and a noted literary translator, most recently of Han Song’s Hospital trilogy.
Douglas Robinson is Professor of Translating and Interpreting at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and one of the most influential scholars of translation, not to mention that he is a literary translator from the Finnish.
Works Cited
Gibson, J. 1979. “The Theory of Affordances.”
Musumeci, A. 2024. Rethinking Translators: Constraints, Affordances, Postures (譯者再思:約束、可供性、姿態). Dissertation, City University of Hong Kong.
Robinson, D. 2023. “The Affordances of the Translator.”
Posted by: Darryl Cameron Sterk <shidailun@gmail.com>