Hunter College CUNY Translation Pedagogy Conference, April 6-7, 2019

I am at the Hunter College CUNY Translation Pedagogy Conference today and tomorrow. What a marvelous conference and confluence of practitioners! Here from left to right we have the roundtable “Translation by Any Other Name: Living in Translation Outside the Classroom” with stellar moderator Julie Van Peteghem of Hunter College and four brilliant Hunter College undergraduates/recent grads with some truly humbling language pairs: Aziza Babaeva (Russian and Tadzhik>English), Darya Badikova (Russian>English), Fatima Tariq (Pashtun, Urdu, and Arabic>English), and Kimberly Martinez (Spanish and Japanese>English). Hearing them speak about TIS (Translation and Interpreting Studies), and about their experience studying TIS formally after being informal translators/interpreters for family members for years, was just superb. Thank you to Margarit Ordukhanyan and her cadre of dedicated student volunteers for organizing this conference!

Memorable conference phrases so far include (but are not limited to) “our literature in translation courses should be haunted by the specter of all the books that were not translated” (from Brian J. Baer’s introductory keynote), how disruptive technology actually is (from Caitlin Walsh’s talk), the Queen James Bible (from Adrian Izquierdo’s talk), and Aron Aji’s concluding keynote on using a practice-centered translation pedagogy to—among other things— open the learning space to heritage languages and thus to lives that otherwise sit silent in the classroom. Glad to see so many abilities, modalities, nationalities, and other ties being celebrated at this conference!