Call for papers: New England Modern Languages Association 2015
NeMLA 2015
Toronto, ON, Canada; April 30-May 3, 2015)

Translating the Past: Studies in the Transmission of Literature Across Time and Space

The translation of non-contemporary literary texts highlights a number of difficulties that are distinct from the problems of translation of contemporary texts. This panel will explore cases in which the translation of a text is separated from the source text by significant amounts of time, whether significant for length or for historical events. The work of many translation studies scholars, following the lead of Gideon Toury and the descriptive turn, focuses on translation as a process and translations as cultural artifacts of the target, or receiving culture. This prompts a number of questions in regard to translations that are historically distant from their source texts. How does chronology affect the significance of these processes or artifacts? How does…