cultural translation

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Cultural Translation 11 th December 2009 Programme Cultural Translation: An Interdisciplinary Conference Bute Building, Room 1.50, Cardiff University 10.00- 11.15 Mieke Bal Keynote Presentation 11.15- 11.30 15 min break 11.30- 13.00 Sharif Gemie The Veil : A Bridge Between Cultures? Rebecca Beirne Diasporic and Local Representations of Same-Sex Female Desires in Indian, Indian- Canadian, Indian-Scottish and Indian-American cinema’ Floriana Bernardi Fatema Mernissi and cultural translation 13.00- 14.00 1 hour lunch 14.00- 15.00 Veronica O’Neil Kinship in Walter Benjamin’s Task of the Translator Ruth J. Owen Death by Cultural Translation 15.00- 15.10 10 min break 15.10- 16.10 Ariela Grosz-Rophe Intellectuals as Culture Transmitters Caterina Sinibaldi Dangerous comic strips 1 School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, Race, Representation and Cultural Identity Research Group; School of European Studies,

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Cultural Translation

11th December 2009

Programme

School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, Race, Representation and Cultural Identity Research Group; School of European Studies,

Cultural Translation: An Interdisciplinary ConferenceBute Building, Room 1.50, Cardiff University10.0011.15 11.1511.30 Mieke Bal Keynote Presentation 15 min break

11.3013.00

Sharif Gemie The Veil: A Bridge Between Cultures? Rebecca Beirne Diasporic and Local Representations of Same-Sex Female Desires in Indian, Indian-Canadian, Indian-Scottish and Indian-American cinema Floriana Bernardi Fatema Mernissi and cultural translation 1 hour lunch Kinship in Walter Benjamins Task of the Veronica ONeil Translator Ruth J. Owen Death by Cultural Translation 10 min break

13.0014.00 14.0015.00 15.0015.10 15.1016.10 16.1016.20

Ariela Grosz-Rophe Intellectuals as Culture Transmitters Caterina Sinibaldi Dangerous comic strips 10 min break

16.2017.20 17.2017.20

Fists of confusion: Bruce Lee and Paul Bowman Monolingual Cultural Translation David Huddart Emblems of cultural translation 10 min break

Sarah Maitland First do no harm: Power, agency and 1

Cultural Translation 17.3018.30

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cultural translation in the post-colonial context Alexis Nuselovici, The moir effect Glenn Davidson, Wyn Mason

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Sharif Gemie Rebecca Beirne 11.3013.00 Floriana Bernardi 13.0014.00 Sharif Gemie 1 hour lunch

The Veil: A Bridge Between Cultures? Diasporic and Local Representations of Same-Sex Female Desires in Indian, Indian-Canadian, Indian-Scottish and Indian-American cinema Fatema Mernissi and cultural translation

The Veil: a Bridge Between Cultures?

Western interest and concern about Muslim veiling practices seems inexhaustible. In the western media, the veil has become a common clich: an instantly recognizable signifier for themes such as exclusion, oppression, reactionary thinking and the separation of cultures. Such points have a certain validity, but they are almost exclusively based on outsiders perspectives. While accepting that compulsory veiling constitutes an unacceptable breach of human rights, this paper will explore other dimensions of veiling in western and Muslim societies. It will discuss the Muslim veil as fashion statement, as passport between different worlds, and as symbol of a new, globalized, trans-national Islam. Some specific examples will be drawn from French experience, where the presence of veil-wearing women has become a contentious and politicized issue, and from Iranian society, where the varieties and nuances of veil-wearing are more complex than often supposed. The paper will conclude by suggesting a post-Orientalist perspective on this issue. Rebecca Beirne Diasporic and Local Representations of Same-Sex Female Desires in Indian, Indian-Canadian, Indian-Scottish and Indian-American cinema This paper examines the similarities and differences in the depiction of same-sex female desire in films from both Indian and Indian diasporic contexts. It will seek to determine what level of cultural translation is being undertaken in the representation of both female same-sex desire and Indian cultural identity in six films: Fire (India/Canada, Deepa Metha: 1996), Chutney Popcorn (USA, Nisha Ganatra: 1999), Girlfriend (India, Karan Razdan: 2004), The Journey (India, Ligy J. Pullappally: 2004), Ninas Heavenly Delights (UK, Pratibha Parmar: 2006) and The World Unseen (UK/South Africa, Shamim Sarif: 2007); exploring the role directorial nationality and setting play in translating how lesbian desire is represented across cultural contexts. When the earliest of these films, Fire, was 3

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released in India, it was met with so much indignation on behalf of the public that some cinema theatres were destroyed as audiences rioted during the films screenings. A later, more mainstream, Indian film featuring a lesbian relationship, Girlfriend (India, Karan Razdan: 2004), was protested by both the religious right and Indian gay and lesbian activists for its negative depiction of female homosexuality. The Journey (India, Ligy J. Pullappally: 2004), released in 2004, while directed by a filmmaker who had lived in the U.S. for her adult life, was based upon a series of same-sex desiring youth suicides in the Kerala district, and was shot on location in the local language, with efforts made within the film to emphasise a sense of localism. The films Chutney Popcorn and Ninas Heavenly Delights represent a different context, set within Indian communities in diaspora in the United States and Scotland respectively. What representational impact does this diasporic context have upon the narrative and the ways in which both lesbian desire and Indian culture are articulated? Each of these films share a more classically Westernised narrative structure than films set in India, such as Fire, Girlfriend or The Journey, following the clear generic conventions of romantic comedy and the coming out story. The World Unseen takes on yet another context that situates the Indian community and its female protagonists in a liminal space in 1950s South Africa. Cultural translations take place in each of these films to reflect the contexts of their directors, cast and crew, and intended audiences. Floriana Bernardi Fatema Mernissi and cultural translation. Women and cyber-Islam. My paper is intended to survey and describe the role of the Moroccan sociologist and writer Fatema Mernissi as a cultural translator between the East and the West. Focusing on Moroccan cultural specificities and deconstructing the several stereotypical representation of her community as far as gender, media and education concerns, Fatema Mernissi has been translating the actual system of values and cultural practices of the Moroccan society (and, more generally Eastern societies) destroying those betrayed senses and common places which both media and the different forms of art have engendered and transmitted throughout time. Particularly, the paper will focus on the crucial role of IT, satellite televisions and the Internet to deconstruct the stereotype of Arab women, mainly represented in the western imagery as downtrodden, subdued to the patriarchal power and as sex symbols in tv commercials and video clips. On the contrary, according to Fatema Mernissi, a mind-blowing civilizational shift is happening in the Arab world and internet cafs are the places and means to foster it. In Internet cafs people can access IT, socialize and discuss about political issues and ruya, that is a clear vision of the future where [the youth] have a role to play as defenders of an ethical planet (Mernissi 2005: http://www.mernissi.net/books/articles/digital_scheherazade.html). There, besides, young bloggers and social networkers meet to assure the circulation of internationally relevant news often protecting them from dictatorial censorship and promote participation to civic initiatives, which inevitably influence mainstream public discourse. 4

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Kinship in Walter Benjamins Task of the 14.0015.00 15.0015.10 Veronica ONeil Kinship in Walter Benjamins Task of the Translator. Translation theory assumes difference: whether it is to obliterate it through domestication or to emphasise it through foreignisation. Benjamin, with his emphasis on kinship, shifts this focus, potentially reflecting a similar emphasis on cultural kinship and placing the translator in the role of mediator. Translation theory is characterised by opposing polarities. The literal/free debate often takes centre stage, focusing on techniques used in the process of translation. Closely linked to this is the debate about the relationship between source text (ST) and target text (TT), by extension source language (SL) and target language (TL), and by further extension source culture (SC) and target culture (TC). ST/L/C typically loses out, becoming swallowed and regurgitated unrecognisable by domesticating techniques such as paraphrase and imitation. In practical translation, this favouring of a domesticating approach to translation often goes unquestioned. Schleiermacher opens the debate with On the Different Methods of Translating (1813), and most theorists respond to him in some way, advocating either a foreignising approach that favours the ST/L/C or a domesticating approach that favours the TT/L/C. The importance of this debate cannot be overstated, however, whether the SL or TL is favoured, the focus is still on the difference between languages. Such a focus assumes difference, takes difference as its foundation. Benjamin, with his emphasis on kinship of languages, removes this focus, and potentially reflects a similar emphasis on cultural kinship. Emphasis on kinship does not strive to find (or create) likeness, as in ethnocentric translation, instead, the fundamental relationship of the SL to the TL is central: the fact that they are both language. With this kinship as fundamental, the need to find (or create) likeness is not so urgent, and while difference between SL and TL is not removed, it is no longer perceived to be a problem. If the translator is no longer starting from the point of trying to obliterate the difference of the SL in the ST, and by extension the SC, they move into the role of mediator. Ruth J. Owen Death by Cultural Translation: Ophelia in German Ophelia can be considered an instance of cultural translation across time, across media and across languages. Shakespeares Hamlet constitutes the point of origin for centuries of Ophelia texts and images. In Hamlet, Ophelia is the young 6 Veronica ONeil Ruth J. Owen 10 min break Translator Death by Cultural Translation

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girl in love, who loses her mind and dies in an overhung brook. This figure, whose origin is English, theatrical and seventeenth-century, is prolifically re-written in a tradition which is German, lyric and twentieth-century. Interrogating the transmission reveals the translatability of Ophelia, with the concomitant loss of meanings and gain of meanings. This interrogation of the German Ophelia pursues the question of what has facilitated her intercultural mobility. Part of the story of German cultures local use of Ophelia seems to be linked to the intense political force-fields in which German writers were being read. Her afterlife in cultural translation coincides with the sustained politicization of culture in the Weimar Republic, through Nazism, to postwar division. Whilst Ophelias nonGerman status may be essential, Shakespeare had been claimed uniquely German in spirit. Ophelia not only comes loose from his Hamlet in English, but is continually incorporated into new sets of meaning as she comes up against the discontinuities of German cultural history. Later appropriations enter into dialogue with one another; they form clusters of connection to each other; in the end, there is an Ophelia myth so embedded within German literature that it goes on generating new texts and images, updating her, adapting her to different lyric modes. My analysis shows that, above all, Ophelia survives in cultural translation as a drowned girl. To open the channel between cultures seems to require female death and a body in, or at least near, the water. This paper suggests that the textuality of her dying, and the gaps in Shakespeares account, are crucial to her intercultural mobility.

15.1016.10 16.1016.20

Ariela Grosz-Rophe Caterina Sinibaldi 10 min break

Intellectuals as Culture Transmitters Dangerous comic strips

Ariela Grosz-Rophe Intellectuals as Culture Transmitters Cultures immigrate, or are translated in many ways. This paper focuses on the role of intellectuals as culture transmitters. I will examine cultural translation as an import of cultural elements from abroad, from the French cultural field, and their plantation in the local field of Hebrew culture during the second quarter of the twentieth century. The Jewish settlement in Palestine was an immigrants' society, in the process of nation building and creation of a national culture so these intellectuals undertook a difficult task. The intellectuals I would like to present here were poets who studied in Paris and returned to Palestine carrying a load of components of French culture. They struggled for the distribution and impregnation of these foreign elements in the emerging Hebrew culture in the literary field as well as in the political field against the local hegemonic imperatives. As intellectuals they were poets, but they also published essays and 7

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articles in major daily Hebrew newspapers, spreading their ideas widely. From the variety of cultural elements imported by these poets, I choose to concentrate on poetical modernism; on some modernist ideas as universalism, and the rejection of nationalism and of war; and on some behavioral patterns. The analysis of their endeavor enables a detailed inspection of such a transference of cultural components (their reception by conscious and unconscious processes, the strategies of their dissemination) and some insights regarding the successes and the failures of efforts to challenge the hegemonic cultural imperatives. Caterina Sinibaldi Dangerous Strips. The reception of American comics under the Italian Fascist regime. The present paper aims to investigate the widespread success of American comics under Italian Fascism and their subversive position within the Italian polysystem. Comic strips are a relatively understudied phenomenon, which is nonetheless significant in relation to the role played by translation in Fascisms production of culture. As a narrative form which didnt find an equivalent in the target context, they introduced a new genre into the Italian literary system, while also stimulating a national production. Moreover, since they addressed a particularly vulnerable and valuable sector of Fascist society, comics are revealing of the norms of writing and translating for children dominant at the time. American comics were imported into Italy around 1910, and appeared for the first time in the Corriere dei Piccoli, a popular journal for middle-class children. Officially despised and yet privately enjoyed by most Italians, comics opened up the possibility of a different world, a daunting perspective for a dictatorial regime. However, they were for long tolerated by Fascist censors, who issued a first ban against them only in 1938, in occasion of the Bolognas Conference for Childrens and Youth Literature. Drawing on the theoretical framework of Translation Studies, it is my intention to look at the primary and operational norms that regulated the reception of comics, focusing on the modes of selection and manipulation of the original products. Specifically, I will look at comics as an interesting space where alternative discourses took place, within a highly controlled and politicised cultural system such as that of Fascist Italy. My analysis will follow the different phases of their reception, and will especially focus on their interaction with Italian comics, as highly significant in revealing the process of identity negotiation involved in translation. Moreover, it is my intention to examine the economic and ideological aspects which contributed to the regimes tolerance towards comics, as well as the reasons behind their progressive rejection. Being comic strips a traditionally popular, low genre, the relationship between the status of a text type and its strategies of translation will be also investigated. This will lead to broader considerations about translating for children, as an activity which is subject to special constraints, while also allowing for creativity and innovation. 8

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Selected examples of both American and Italian comic strips will be shown, in order to illustrate the different phases in the reception of foreign comics, and the dynamics of cultural negotiation at stake.

Fists 16.2017.20 17.2017.20 Paul Bowman Fist of (Con)Fusion: Bruce Paul Bowman David Huddart 10 min break

of

confusion:

Bruce

Lee

and

Monolingual Cultural Translation Emblems of cultural translation

Lee

and

monolingual

cultural

translation The opening of Bruce Lees Fist of Fury (1972) depicts the funeral of a Chinese martial arts master, in a Chinese school in the Japanese-dominated area of the Shanghai International Settlement, circa 1908. This is already a fraught moment of cultural transmission: indeed the eulogists expend most of their energy emphasizing to the assembled martial art students that they know the correct way to preserve their masters lineage and their tradition. But the funeral is rudely interrupted by the arrival of belligerent representatives of a Japanese martial arts school, who contemptuously present the Chinese with a large framed piece of calligraphic writing, which reads Sick Man of Asia. The Japanese issue a challenge, via their translator, the creepy and culturally and sexually ambiguous Hu En. The senior Chinese elders prevent any of the Chinese students from answering the challenge, in order to preserve decorum. At one key point a senior Chinese teacher addresses the translator, Hu. In the dubbed English version, the Chinese senior asks Hu, Look here, just what going on here? In the English subtitles, however, this exchange is rendered as, Look here, are you Chinese? These are significantly different renderings. Hus answer in the subtitled version is that whilst he is Chinese he shares a different destiny to them. In the dubbed version, however, Hu shortly proceeds to speak of the superiority of we Japanese. Deliberately without having sought to establish whether the different combinations of Dutch and Mandarin subtitles and dubbing replicate this disjunction or introduce others, this paper assumes the likelihood of these and other possibilities. It does so in order to explore several interconnected issues of translation. Firstly, various theories of translation and their imbrication in various models of culture and tradition; and secondly, Benjaminian arguments about the text as construct Fist of Fury is clearly a complex (and internally contradictory) construct, with all sound added post-production and hence lacking any original 9

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as such and the complexity of such putatively simple popular cultural texts as Fist of Fury when approached as the arcades of cultural translation. In order to explore such a massive set of problematics in such limited time and space, the paper will focus specifically on the two key dimensions of this opening scene: first, the fact that the funeral of the founder is already a fraught scene of rupture/tradition, transfer/loss, continuity/disjunction indeed, of cultural translation here supplemented secondly by the double, duplicitous (cultural) status of the (literal/linguistic) translator, Mr Hu. The reading of this scene will be organised by Rey Chows contribution to theories of translation in her essay, Film as Ethnography; or, Translation Between Cultures in the Postcolonial World (1995), which itself begins from a consideration of the Italian expression Traduttore, traditore Translator, traitor. David Huddart and : emblems of cultural translation This paper interprets Peter Careys Wrong About Japan (2005) as a text that foregrounds cultural translation while simultaneously blocking it. Careys book fictionalizes a journey undertaken to understand the international significance of anime and manga (or komikku): it stages an intercultural encounter explicitly in order to understand an intercultural encounter. Carey, in desiring to explain cultural translation operating in one direction, occludes its operation the other way, and implicitly assumes a kind of barrier to translation. He assumes this barrier through a specific attitude to English in Japan, the presence of which is elided. Carey is licensed to make his assumption by artists like Miyazaki Hayao, interviewed by Carey. With other artists, Carey tests his theories about anime and manga, always to be made to feel wrong about Japan. Miyazaki and Carey communicate without language more effectively than Carey communicates with the others. Miyazaki is scornful about comparisons with Disney (despite Disneys international distribution of Studio Ghibli movies), and insists upon an inviolable cultural specificity: he functions to confirm Careys understanding of the uniqueness of the culture being translated. One example seems to back this assumption. While the translated title of Spirited Away (2001) is useful, it cannot capture Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi, which takes some of its meaning from a literal removal of language: strokes removed from kanji. English cannot capture Japanese culture, and part of the attraction of manga for Carey is that English has been vaporized. However, this is only apparently the case, and the book pursues a strategy that downplays the significance of English. Indeed, a notable treatment of the language comes in the form of a fictional friend for Careys son, who confirms many stereotypes regarding Japanese English. The book misses the cultural translation that is everywhere evident in the production of Japanese English, which can be compared to other World Englishes. Rather than seeing English as a form of cultural imperialism, it is increasingly recognized that English in Japan has been acculturated: adapted for local requirements, only some of which involve translating other cultural values for Japanese people. Careys work is elsewhere notable for its celebration of adapted Englishes, most obviously Australian but 10

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also, for example, Malaysian; in eliding Japanese adaptation, this specific book assumes a fixity of cultures, between which there is movement, but only of the kind we expect and can account for in advance.

Sarah Maitland 17.3018.30 Alexis Mason

First do no harm: Power, agency and cultural translation in the post-colonial

context Nuselovici, The moir effect

Glenn Davidson, Wyn

Sarah Maitland First, do no harm: Power, agency and cultural translation in the post-colonial context Cultural translation interprets one culture to another, rewriting the foreign and carrying it across from its original context towards the receiving culture. This process of intercultural encounter reshapes thoughts, translating them between nations. Yet in a post-colonial context, the extent to which this cultural translation symbolises cultural imperialism, or offers an opportunity for a new ethics of intercultural understanding, is a question that divides post-colonial critics and translation theorists alike. This paper considers how cultural translation has been theorised both as an exploitative device in the toolkit of empire, and as a hermeneutical opportunity to recognise and engage with otherness. For some, cultural translation operates as a technology of appropriation, exoticising and ultimately assimilating the Other to the dominant norms of the translating culture. The Derridean diffrance inherent in the Other is thus re-written in the transparent discourse of the receiving culture, and the reductive familiarity that results is linked to ideologies of reception that choose certain texts over others, freezing them into native informants for their culture and therefore symbolising the asymmetrical power relations between cultures. Yet others also view cultural translation as a process that interprets and engages with the Other, rather than seeking to essentialise or appropriate it. By rewriting a foreign experience in the receiving culture, translation from this perspective recognises and respects the difference of the other, and it is this untranslatability that causes us to re-examine how we understand our own culture in relationship with others. This recognition of cultural irreducibility and the opaque rhetoricity of which Spivak writes effects a re-examining of extant power relations and breaks down the barriers of essentialism that seek to fix one perfect meaning within the original work.

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This paper will therefore interrogate the politics of translation and the process behind the carrying across of works from one cultural context to another, examining how contemporary theories of cultural translation conceptualise the practice of intercultural encounter as an activity that both exacerbates power differentials between nations and respects the fundamental irreducibility of cultural difference. Alexis Nuselovici , Glenn Davidson, Wyn Mason The moir effect: a new paradigm for transcultural studies The description and understanding of the new cultural landscapes drawn by the contemporary massive forced or voluntary migratory movements need a new conceptual and rhetorical lexicon. Images of bridges or thresholds are weak metaphors to express the realities of transnational/transcultural identities and prove to be useless with regard to the problems of social integration within European countries. We propose to use the moir effect as an analytical tool to approach this issue. The term moir (or moire) has itself a transcultural history, crossing the Arabic, French and English languages and is used to designate a type of textile or pattern. It is also used in digital imaging and computer graphics techniques to name a specific pattern formation (e.g., checkered surfaces or multiple layering).

Mieke Bal is Mieke Bal, a cultural theorist and critic, is Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Professor (KNAW). She is based at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), University of Amsterdam. Her areas of interest range from biblical and classical antiquity to 17th century and contemporary art and modern literature, feminism and migratory culture. Her many books include A Mieke Bal Reader (2006), Travelling Concepts in the Humanities (2002) and Narratology (3rd edition in press due for release in February 2009). Mieke Bal is also a video-artist, her experimental documentaries on migration include A Thousand and One Days; Colony and the installation 12

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Nothing is Missing. Her work is exhibited internationally. Occasionally she acts as an independent curator. Rebecca Beirne is the author of Lesbians in Television and Text after the Millennium (Palgrave 2008) and the editor of Televising Queer Women: A Reader (Palgrave 2008). She is a Lecturer in Film, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Newcastle, Australia, and her current research monograph is a comparative history of the representation of lesbianism in world cinema. Floriana Bernardi is PhD Student in Theory of Language and Sign Sciences, University of Bari. Paul Bowman is Director of the Race, Representation and Cultural Identity Research Group in the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University. He is author of Theorizing Bruce Lee (2010), Deconstructing Popular Culture (2008) and Post-Marxism versus Cultural Studies (2007), editor of The Rey Chow Reader (2010), The Truth of iek (2006), Interrogating Cultural Studies (2003), Reading Rancire (2010) and numerous journal issues, including forthcoming issues of Social Semiotics, Postcolonial Studies, and Educational Philosophy and Theory. Glenn Davidson is a digital artist (Artstation,) and artist in residence, Chapter, Cardiff University. Sharif Gemie is Reader in History at the University of Glamorgan, who teaches on Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Europe, principally France and Spain; Israel and Palestine; whose research interests include the histories of modern Brittany and modern Galicia (Spain) and the experiences of refugees during the second world war. Sharif is author of Brittany 1750-1950: the Invisible Nation (UWP, 2007), Galicia: A Concise History (UWP, 2006), French Revolutions, 1815-1914: An Introduction (Edinburgh University Press, 1999), Women and Schooling: Gender, Authority and Identity in the Female Schooling Sector, France, 18151914 (Keele University Press, 1995), and is currently completing a book on the experience of Arabs in Europe. Ariela Grosz-Rophe is based in Tel-Aviv, and works across several disciplines: history, history of intellectuals or cultural history, cultural sociology, and 13

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literature. Her PhD is entitled Intellectuals Between Cultures: From French Modernism to the Field of Hebrew Culture (1920-1948). David Huddart is a lecturer in the Department of English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is author of Postcolonial Theory and Autobiography and Homi K. Bhabha. Sarah Maitland is a doctoral candidate at the School of Languages, Literatures and Performing Arts, Queens University Belfast, where she is researching cultural translation, community relations and interculturality. Her academic interests include post-colonial translation theory; hermeneutical approaches to the foreign in translation; and theory and practice of translating for the stage. Before commencing her doctoral studies, Sarah worked at the United Nations as a researcher and has managed an international peacebuilding and community relations research programme in Northern Ireland. She is a practising translator of contemporary Spanish drama, and a number of her translations have been published and produced for the stage. Her recent work includes Agrippina, by Fermn Cabal, Hurbineks Mapmaker, by Juan Mayorga; and Mad King Ludwig, by Lourdes Ortiz. Wyn Mason is senior lecturer in the Department of Media and Communication, University of Glamorgan. Alexis Nuselovici is Professor of Modern Cultural Studies at Cardiff University. His research interests focus on two main areas: European culture and Translation Studies. His other areas of research include cultural expressions of exilic and diasporic experiences, cultural hybridity and mtissage, convergence between Black memory and Jewish memory, aesthetics of modernism and postmodernism, Holocaust literature. Veronica ONeil is a PhD student at NUI Galway. Her PhD focuses on Walter Benjamin on translation. Ruth J. Owen is Senior Lecturer in German at Cardiff University. Her research focuses on German poetry. She has written about the relationship between 14

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political history and poetry, with respect to the Wende of 1989 and the impact of unification. Further publications have explored questions of national identity, as expressed in poetry about urban landscapes; contemporary poetry about science; and the representation of the human body in poetry through different eras of the twentieth century. More recently, she has been working on how the Ophelia figure from Shakespeares Hamlet has been appropriated by Germanlanguage culture. Caterina Sinibaldi is a PhD research student in the Department of Italian at Warwick University, UK. Her PhD title is Translating for Children in Italy under the Fascist Regime. Conference Organising Committee: Dr Paul Bowman, Director of the Race, Representation and Cultural Identity Research Group Dr Rachael Langford is co-Director of the Representing Migration and Mobility in European Cultures Network Professor Alexis Nuselovici is Professor of European Cultural Studies Dr Margaret Topping is co-Director of Representing Migration and Mobility in European Cultures Network

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