Mª del Carmen África Vidal Claramonte
África Vidal is Professor of Translation at the University of Salamanca, Spain, since 1998. She is the Principal Investigator of the Research Group “Traducción, Ideología y Cultura”, focussed on cultural and ideological aspects of translation seen as a key epistemological concept of our globalized society. Her research interests include translation theory, post-structuralism, post-colonialism, contemporary art, and gender studies. She has participated in international conferences and has been invited guest-lecturer at many universities in Spain and universities in England, Ireland, Italy, France, Germany, Iran, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Chile and Argentina. She has published 12 anthologies (among them Routledge Handbook of Spanish Translation Studies, 2019, co-edited with Roberto Valdeón, and Translation/ Power/ Subversion, coedited with Román Álvarez, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1996), more than a hundred chapters and articles, many of them in leading journals (Meta, Perspectives, TTR, Linguistica Antwerpiensia, The Translator, Translation Studies, Translating and Interpreting Studies, Translation, Translation and Interpreting, European Journal of English Studies, Forum, Journal of Multicultural Studies, Terminology, etc.) and 22 books, including Translation and Objects (Routledge, 2024); Translation and Repetition: Rewriting (Un)original Literature (Routledge, 2024); Translating Borrowed Tongues: The Verbal Quest of Ilan Stavans (Routledge, 2023); Translation and Contemporary Art: Transdisciplinary Encounters (Routledge, 2022); Ilan Stavans, traductor (Granada: Comares, 2022); Traducción y literatura translingüe: voces latinas en Estados Unidos (Madrid/Frankfurt: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2021); La traducción y la(s) historia(s): nuevas vías para la investigación (Granada: Comares, 2018); “Dile que le he escrito un blues”: del texto como partitura a la partitura como traducción en la literatura latinoamericana (Frankfurt: Veurvert Iberoamericana, 2017); La traducción y los espacios (Granada: Comares, 2012); Traducción y asimetría (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2010); Traducir entre culturas: diferencias, poderes, identidades (Frankfurt, Peter Lang, 2007); En los límites de la traducción (Granada, Comares, 2006); El futuro de la traducción (Valencia: Alfons el Magnànim, 1998); Traducción, manipulación, desconstrucción (Salamanca, Ediciones Colegio de España, 1995). She has supervised to completion 24 PhD theses. She has been included (2015) in Routledge’s collection Great Linguists and Translation Theorists, which offers articles that highlight work published both by and about key translation theorists throughout the years. She is member of the International Advisory Board of several international journals and a practising translator specialized in the fields of philosophy, literature and contemporary art.
Address: Salamanca, Castilla y Leon, Spain
Address: Salamanca, Castilla y Leon, Spain
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Published Books by Mª del Carmen África Vidal Claramonte
Hypertranslation refers to a vast and virtual field of mobile relations comprising the interplay of signs across languages, modes, and media. In hypertranslation, the notions of source/target, directionality, and authenticity are set in perpetual flow and flux, resulting in a many-to-many interactive dynamic. Using illustrations drawn from a wide range of literary and artistic experiments, this Element proposes hypertranslation as a theoretical lens on the heterogeneous, remediational, extrapolative, and networked nature of cultural and knowledge production, particularly in cyberspace. It considers how developments in artificial intelligence have led to an expansion in intersemiotic potentialities and the liquidation of imagined boundaries. Exploring the translational aspects of our altered semiotic ecology, where the production, circulation, consumption, and recycling of memes extend beyond human intellect and creativity, this Element positions hypertranslation as a fundamental condition of contemporary posthuman communication in Web 5.0 and beyond.
In recent decades, there has been a steadily growing interest in dialogical epistemologies. Disciplines ranging from historiography and philosophy to anthropology are calling for this universalist idea of knowledge to be modified. Thanks to this change of perspective, other forms of knowledge, which until now have been ignored, are gradually coming to light. Indigenous knowledges are not constructed with the scientific, binary, static, Cartesian, univocal logic characteristic of Western societies. Non-Western types of knowledge incorporate senses, emotions, body, objects, and matter. It is impossible to reduce indigenous knowledges to Western conceptualizations. The types of translation covered in this book assume that knowledge is not transmitted only in the Western way and that there are world views that take into account the emotions and body as well as the intellect. This includes all types of beings: human, non-human, and extra-human. In the face of this plurality of epistemologies, this book affirms that the static Western conceptual traditions characterized by a binary logic are of not useful, and that there is a need to translate outside the scope of these traditions.
The examples given in this book show that translation is not only a process involving Western and non-Western languages. Translation is not a mere substitution of one word for another because knowledge is not only transmitted through words. It also involves non-verbal elements. Knowledge is transmitted through objects, songs, sensations, and emotions as well as through words. Moreover, many non-Western traditions do not translate with language systems but rather with other semiotic systems, such as knots, threads, colors, and bodies in movement. This is timely, topical and transdisciplinary reading, of interest to advanced students and researchers in translation studies, anthropology and beyond.
The ideas of displacement and constant movement are key throughout these pages. Migrants live translation literally, because displacement is a leitmotif for them. Translation and Objects analyses migrant objects –such as shoes, stones or photographs– as translation sites that function as expressions as well as sources of emotions. These displaced emotional objects, laden with meanings and sentiments, tell many stories, saying a great deal about their owners, who almost never have a voice. This book shows how meaning is displaced through the materiality, texture, smells, sensations, and forms of moving objects.
Including examples of translations that have been created from a non-linguistic perspective and exploring linguistic issues whilst connecting them to other fields such as anthropology, and sociology, Vidal sets out a broad vision of translation. This is critical reading for translation theory courses within translation studies, comparative literature and cultural studies.
In Western thought, repetition has long been regarded as something negative, as a kind of cliché, stereotype or automatism that is the opposite of creation. On the other hand, in the eyes of many contemporary philosophers from Wittgenstein and Derrida to Deleuze and Guattari, repetition is more about difference. It involves rewriting stories initially told in other contexts so that they acquire a different perspective. In this sense, repeating is often a political act. Repetition is a creative impulse for the making of what is new. Repetition as iteration is understood in this book as an action that recognizes the creative and critical potential of copying.
The author analyses how our time understands originality and authorship differently from past eras, and how the new philosophical ways of approaching repetition imply a new way of understanding the concept of originality and authorship. Deconstructing these notions also implies subverting the traditional ways of approaching translation. This is vital reading for all courses on literary translation, comparative literature and literature in translation within translation studies and literature.
While much has been written on Stavans’ work as a writer, there has been little to date on his work as a translator, subversive in their translations of Western classics such as Don Quixote and Hamlet into Spanglish. In Stavans’ experiences as a writer and translator between languages and cultures, Vidal locates the ways in which writers and translators who have experienced migratory crises, marginalization, and exclusion adopt a hybrid, polydirectional, and multivocal approach to language seen as a threat to the status quo. The volume highlights how the case of Ilan Stavans uncovers unique insights into how migrant writers’ nonstandard use of language creates worlds predicated on deterritorialization and in-between spaces which more accurately reflect the nuances of the lived experiences of migrants.
This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars in translation studies, literary translation, and Latinx literature.
The volume builds on Bassnett and Johnston’s “outward turn” as well as Edwin Gentzler’s work on “post-translation” which have focused on traversing the disciplinary boundaries of translation. The book takes as its point of departure the idea that texts are comprised of not only words but other semiotic systems and therefore expanding our notions of both language and translation can better equip us to translate stories told via non-traditional means in novel ways. While the “outward turn” has been analyzed in literature, Vidal directs this spotlight to contemporary art, a field which has already engaged in disciplinary connections with Translation Studies. The volume highlights how the unpacking of such connections between disciplines encourages engagement with contemporary social issues, around identity, power, migration, and globalization, and in turn, new ways of thinking and bringing about wider cultural change.
This innovative book will be of interest to scholars in translation studies and contemporary art.
Table of Contents
Preface, by Susan Bassnett
1. Translating in a Visual Age. Transdisciplinary Routes.
2. The Artistranslator’s Gaze
3. Translating with Art
4. Concluding Remarks
Traducir es dejarse seducir por las palabras, y también seducir a las palabras. Lo realmente difícil de traducir no es averiguar lo que el texto dice sino lo que no dice explícitamente, a través de sus ruidos y melodías. La música y la traducción son formas de comunicación, y lo que comunican es información pero también emociones. Ese es el objetivo de este libro. Reflexionar sobre la sabiduría que se torna audible al oído que piensa. El conocimiento hecho música. La cuestión de cómo piensa el oído, de qué pensamos al escuchar o de cómo y qué escuchamos al pensar. Y es que a todos, pero especialmente a los traductores, las palabras nos abren los ojos y nos meten en el mundo y nos animan a mirar de reojo y a cantar. Con ellas reconstruimos tristezas ajenas en lágrimas propias y reinventamos laberintos al recibir mensajes a veces indescifrables.
Sin embargo, traducir siempre es posible, aun en aquellos casos en los que las palabras nos crean y nos recrean, nos hacen creer y descreer, nos obligan a anudar incertidumbres y a acariciar lo que tal vez de otro modo, desde otra profesión, nunca nos hubiéramos atrevido a tocar.
Hypertranslation refers to a vast and virtual field of mobile relations comprising the interplay of signs across languages, modes, and media. In hypertranslation, the notions of source/target, directionality, and authenticity are set in perpetual flow and flux, resulting in a many-to-many interactive dynamic. Using illustrations drawn from a wide range of literary and artistic experiments, this Element proposes hypertranslation as a theoretical lens on the heterogeneous, remediational, extrapolative, and networked nature of cultural and knowledge production, particularly in cyberspace. It considers how developments in artificial intelligence have led to an expansion in intersemiotic potentialities and the liquidation of imagined boundaries. Exploring the translational aspects of our altered semiotic ecology, where the production, circulation, consumption, and recycling of memes extend beyond human intellect and creativity, this Element positions hypertranslation as a fundamental condition of contemporary posthuman communication in Web 5.0 and beyond.
In recent decades, there has been a steadily growing interest in dialogical epistemologies. Disciplines ranging from historiography and philosophy to anthropology are calling for this universalist idea of knowledge to be modified. Thanks to this change of perspective, other forms of knowledge, which until now have been ignored, are gradually coming to light. Indigenous knowledges are not constructed with the scientific, binary, static, Cartesian, univocal logic characteristic of Western societies. Non-Western types of knowledge incorporate senses, emotions, body, objects, and matter. It is impossible to reduce indigenous knowledges to Western conceptualizations. The types of translation covered in this book assume that knowledge is not transmitted only in the Western way and that there are world views that take into account the emotions and body as well as the intellect. This includes all types of beings: human, non-human, and extra-human. In the face of this plurality of epistemologies, this book affirms that the static Western conceptual traditions characterized by a binary logic are of not useful, and that there is a need to translate outside the scope of these traditions.
The examples given in this book show that translation is not only a process involving Western and non-Western languages. Translation is not a mere substitution of one word for another because knowledge is not only transmitted through words. It also involves non-verbal elements. Knowledge is transmitted through objects, songs, sensations, and emotions as well as through words. Moreover, many non-Western traditions do not translate with language systems but rather with other semiotic systems, such as knots, threads, colors, and bodies in movement. This is timely, topical and transdisciplinary reading, of interest to advanced students and researchers in translation studies, anthropology and beyond.
The ideas of displacement and constant movement are key throughout these pages. Migrants live translation literally, because displacement is a leitmotif for them. Translation and Objects analyses migrant objects –such as shoes, stones or photographs– as translation sites that function as expressions as well as sources of emotions. These displaced emotional objects, laden with meanings and sentiments, tell many stories, saying a great deal about their owners, who almost never have a voice. This book shows how meaning is displaced through the materiality, texture, smells, sensations, and forms of moving objects.
Including examples of translations that have been created from a non-linguistic perspective and exploring linguistic issues whilst connecting them to other fields such as anthropology, and sociology, Vidal sets out a broad vision of translation. This is critical reading for translation theory courses within translation studies, comparative literature and cultural studies.
In Western thought, repetition has long been regarded as something negative, as a kind of cliché, stereotype or automatism that is the opposite of creation. On the other hand, in the eyes of many contemporary philosophers from Wittgenstein and Derrida to Deleuze and Guattari, repetition is more about difference. It involves rewriting stories initially told in other contexts so that they acquire a different perspective. In this sense, repeating is often a political act. Repetition is a creative impulse for the making of what is new. Repetition as iteration is understood in this book as an action that recognizes the creative and critical potential of copying.
The author analyses how our time understands originality and authorship differently from past eras, and how the new philosophical ways of approaching repetition imply a new way of understanding the concept of originality and authorship. Deconstructing these notions also implies subverting the traditional ways of approaching translation. This is vital reading for all courses on literary translation, comparative literature and literature in translation within translation studies and literature.
While much has been written on Stavans’ work as a writer, there has been little to date on his work as a translator, subversive in their translations of Western classics such as Don Quixote and Hamlet into Spanglish. In Stavans’ experiences as a writer and translator between languages and cultures, Vidal locates the ways in which writers and translators who have experienced migratory crises, marginalization, and exclusion adopt a hybrid, polydirectional, and multivocal approach to language seen as a threat to the status quo. The volume highlights how the case of Ilan Stavans uncovers unique insights into how migrant writers’ nonstandard use of language creates worlds predicated on deterritorialization and in-between spaces which more accurately reflect the nuances of the lived experiences of migrants.
This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars in translation studies, literary translation, and Latinx literature.
The volume builds on Bassnett and Johnston’s “outward turn” as well as Edwin Gentzler’s work on “post-translation” which have focused on traversing the disciplinary boundaries of translation. The book takes as its point of departure the idea that texts are comprised of not only words but other semiotic systems and therefore expanding our notions of both language and translation can better equip us to translate stories told via non-traditional means in novel ways. While the “outward turn” has been analyzed in literature, Vidal directs this spotlight to contemporary art, a field which has already engaged in disciplinary connections with Translation Studies. The volume highlights how the unpacking of such connections between disciplines encourages engagement with contemporary social issues, around identity, power, migration, and globalization, and in turn, new ways of thinking and bringing about wider cultural change.
This innovative book will be of interest to scholars in translation studies and contemporary art.
Table of Contents
Preface, by Susan Bassnett
1. Translating in a Visual Age. Transdisciplinary Routes.
2. The Artistranslator’s Gaze
3. Translating with Art
4. Concluding Remarks
Traducir es dejarse seducir por las palabras, y también seducir a las palabras. Lo realmente difícil de traducir no es averiguar lo que el texto dice sino lo que no dice explícitamente, a través de sus ruidos y melodías. La música y la traducción son formas de comunicación, y lo que comunican es información pero también emociones. Ese es el objetivo de este libro. Reflexionar sobre la sabiduría que se torna audible al oído que piensa. El conocimiento hecho música. La cuestión de cómo piensa el oído, de qué pensamos al escuchar o de cómo y qué escuchamos al pensar. Y es que a todos, pero especialmente a los traductores, las palabras nos abren los ojos y nos meten en el mundo y nos animan a mirar de reojo y a cantar. Con ellas reconstruimos tristezas ajenas en lágrimas propias y reinventamos laberintos al recibir mensajes a veces indescifrables.
Sin embargo, traducir siempre es posible, aun en aquellos casos en los que las palabras nos crean y nos recrean, nos hacen creer y descreer, nos obligan a anudar incertidumbres y a acariciar lo que tal vez de otro modo, desde otra profesión, nunca nos hubiéramos atrevido a tocar.
The main aim of this number is, thus, to provide a critical discussion of our own approaches. In this connection, it attempts to gain insights into what the different schools and approaches do (not) provide, where do their real potentials and limitations lie, what improvements they have brought about as compared with other approaches, or what lines of research are really compatible.
The way the West thinks of the subaltern has opened an extremely necessary research venue in Translation Studies which underlines the importance of improving communication in managing emergencies and crises. Translation is an underdeveloped tool in situations of risk, and therefore the right to language access is in many cases overlooked. It seems things are beginning to change if we take into account the literature on the subject. However, the aim of this is not to analyse how Power harms the subaltern by silencing them but the opposite. By taking a less travelled road, I will try to show how the subaltern’s linguistic diversity, fundamentally ‘queer’ with respect to the normative, is seen as a risk by the status quo. I do not intend to study the subaltern’s vulnerability but the Power they exert through language. My aim is to show how writers who have experienced the structural violence of migratory crises, marginalisation, social exclusion and unbelonging, react not fearing the dominant culture and accepting its language as a way for them to be recognised by Power, but quite the opposite.
The aim of this article is to expand the definition of translation in a transdisciplinary fashion. This is achieved by understanding the cosmopolitan city as a text that needs to be translated. Taking as a case study Ilan Stavans’s particular use of language in a cosmopolitan translanguaging space, this article analyzes his Nuyol as a translation site and a translation zone. The translations of Stavans, a polyglot transmigrant, show how the contemporary interconnection between mobility, space and languages contributes to the construction of complex identities in cosmopolitan cities, particularly in his Nuyol, where people live translated. This is studied following a research avenue that sees contemporary cities both as translanguaging spaces and as translational cities. Combining these two concepts shows how Stavans’s Spanglish may be a force that can be used to deterritorialize homogeneous spaces.
Traducción de "Notas sobre el amor y la fotografía" de Eduardo Cadava y Paola Cortés-Rocca (25-62)
Traducción de "Pintar la vida moderna" de Ralph Rugoff (63-76)
Traducción de "Puara sensación: la pintura basada en la fotografía y el modernismo" (77-89)