Translation in Response to the Turbulent World

On 22–24 September 2022, the Department of Translation and Interpreting Studies at the Faculty of Philology of Vilnius University marked its 25^th birthday by organizing an international conference entitled Translation, Ideology, Ethics: Response and Credibility, which included the Translating Europe Workshop (TEW) on Ethics in the Era of Machine Translation (sponsored by the DGT of the European Commission). The conference served as a platform for revisiting the place, role and impact of translation in the rapidly changing dynamic social and multicultural communicational context. Its starting point was the realisation that any translation never takes place in a vacuum and the need for it emanates in contexts that are saturated with various ideologies, cultures, and stands, and therefore the very process of translation, its product, and participants are affected by these contexts and make an impact on them. The collisions of ideologies, combined with the ethical stances that translators have to assume in response, drew attention to the risks and responsibilities associated with translation situations that extend beyond the text and directly affect the participants in those situations.

The conference was held in a hybrid mode and attracted nearly 100 participants from almost every continent, more than 30 countries, and over 60 universities. The papers presented covered a wide range of topics including translation as a tool of social construction, the role of translation in accommodating tradition and otherness, cultural memory in translation, the questions of translation policies and translation culture, translation in crisis response, translation market, and the pertinent questions of the ethics of translation itself and that of the ethics of translation research. A few large sessions were dedicated to translation and censorship, translation and imagery and media, often touching upon the relation between human translation and translation technologies. The presenters represented various fields of Translation Studies, including literary translation, AVT, interpreting, and translator training. The TEW sessions highlighted ethical aspects related to translation technologies. Keynote talks were given by the leading researchers in the various sub-fields of Translation Studies: Jorge Díaz-Cintas, University College London (United Kingdom); Nike Kocijančič Pokorn, University of Ljubljana (Slovenia); Sharon O’Brien, Dublin City University (Ireland); Elisabet Tiselius, Stockholm University (Sweden); and Joss Moorkens, Dublin City University (Ireland).

The members of our organizing and scientific committees used this great opportunity to talk with our prominent guests about how the field of Translation Studies is changing and why it is important to raise questions of ideology and ethics in relation to translation today. We share these interviews in this and the following special issue of this journal dedicated fully to the topics discussed at the conference. In this issue, Dalia Mankauskienė talks with Joss Moorkens about the technologization of the translation process and the human aspect of translation; Deimantė Veličkienė asks Nike Kocijančič Pokorn about ideological influence on literary translation and the role of translation in peripheral linguistic communities and diasporas; and Agnė Zolubienė and Elisabet Tiselius discuss the cognition processes in interpreting and ethically charged situations the interpreter has to handle.

Ingrida Tatolytė,
Chair of the Conference Organizing Committee

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Published by Vilnius University Press
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