Seminar 3 coordinator: U-M Professor Yopie Prins (English and Comparative Literature)
This seminar includes a series of events and workshops to encourage public participation in translating for the common good. Reaching out to multilingual communities within and around the University of Michigan, we will highlight how translation contributes to the making of community.
OCTOBER 1-2, 2021:
TENTH ANNUAL TRANSLATE-A-THON AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
USE THIS LINK for video with interviews about “Translating for Freedom House, Detroit”
Please join us October 1-2, 2021 for the tenth annual Translate-a-Thon, coordinated by the Language Resources Center and co-sponsored by the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan.
A Translate-a-Thon is a short, intense, community-driven translation marathon, where volunteers interested in translation come together to translate materials for the benefit of our local, national, and international community. Our annual Translate-a-thon also creates a sense of community among translators. We encourage multilingual community members of all ages to participate in this annual event, including current students and alums, faculty and staff, teachers and students from local high schools, prospective transfer students, professional translators, and other interested parties.
This year we will highlight translation and migration. We will introduce translation projects for Freedom House Detroit, to support their mission of outreach to asylum seekers. A range of other community translation projects will also be available to work on over the weekend, remotely, or in person. Check out the Translation Gallery with more information for volunteers to translate across many languages! We also welcome colleagues from other colleges and universities who would like to observe our activities on October 1-2 in order to learn about organizing similar events at their own institutions. To follow up, we will host a workshop on “How to Run a Translate-a-Thon” (for further details contact complit.info@umich.edu).
OCTOBER 1, 2021 (3:00-4:30 pm via Zoom):
TRANSLATION AND MIGRATION: A CONVERSATION WITH KARLA CORNEJO VILLAVICENCIO
USE THIS LINK for more information and to watch a video of the virtual conversation on 10/1/21.
To kick off our Tenth Annual Translate-a-thon, UM Professor William Stroebel will sit down for a virtual conversation with Karla Cornejo Villavicencio about the roles, methods, and uses of translation lurking behind and inside the pages of her book, The Undocumented Americans, shortlisted for the National Book Award for Non-Fiction. They will discuss translation between languages, translation between dialects and registers, translation between spoken and written media, translation between genres of translation like interpretation in legal or journalistic settings, and literary translation, along with her current attempts to translate the book into Spanish. Q&A with the audience to follow.
Website for TRANSLATING MICHIGAN:
STORIES OF MULTILINGUALISM AND MIGRATION
USE THIS LINK to the website
In fall 2021 we are launching a website that invites the public to “translate” Michigan. Highlighting vibrant multilingual and migrant communities from across the state, the projects collected on the website show that Michigan is far from a monolingual or homogeneous space. They reveal the many ways that translation is present in our everyday lives. At translatingmichigan.org we feature stories of multilingualism and migration from many perspectives.
Symposium on November 12, 2021:
TRANSLATION AND THE MAKING OF THE ARAB AMERICAN COMMUNITY
This one-day hybrid symposium at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor features three panels that explore how different forms of translation contribute to the making of Arab American communities in the Midwest. The event concludes with a reading by Iraqi-American poet Dunya Mikhail. It is free and open to the public, with live-streaming via zoom.
USE THIS LINK for summary and videos of each panel and the poetry reading!
