The Experience of Translation

Campbell, Vidal and their contributors expand the notion of translation beyond linguistic, modal and medial borders to embrace posthumanist perspectives through a holistic experiential epistemology which envisions translation as engaged, situated social practice.

The first of two volumes, this book focuses on questions of materiality and play. Drawing together contributions on theory, methodology and practice from translators, scholars and practitioners working in the creative and performing arts, this book explores how contemporary, experiential acts of interpretation, mediation and negotiation can serve to bridge social and cultural discontinuities across time and space. These range from ancestral past to digital present, from rural to urban environments across the globe. Experiential translation applies a transdisciplinary lens to problematize views of translation and untranslatability traditionally bound by structuralist frames of reference and the reserve of professional linguistic translation. The chapters in this book apply this experiential lens to understand a pluriverse of creative translation practices where the translator’s subject position in relation to the ‘original’ is transformed by the role of experimentation, creativity and play.

This book and its companion volume The Translation of Experience: Cultural Artefacts in Experiential Translation will be of particular interest to translators and arts practitioners, scholars and researchers in the transdisciplinary field of humanities.

Funding: This work was supported by UKRI under AHRC Grant AH/V008234/1, awarded to Ricarda Vidal, King’s College London (Principal Investigator) and Madeleine Campbell, University of Edinburgh (Co-Investigator).