ALTA 2015: Traffic & Translation [Call for Proposals]

We’re just about prepared to announce the official dates of this year’s American Literary Translators Conference (I can say that it will be the weekend of Halloween and will be in Tucson, AZ), but in the meantime, listed below is the official call for proposals. You have some time—the deadline isn’t until May—but it’s always best to get your thoughts and plans together sooner rather than later.

ALTA 2015: TRAFFIC & TRANSLATION

The annual American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) conference is the largest gathering of literary translators all year. In a different city each fall, hundreds of literary translators, editors, students, professors, and others come together for three days of panels, workshops, roundtables, readings, and meetings with editors.

Translators traffic in words, sounds, meaning, styles, perception, politics, images, information, and voices. Our traffic as translators—whether literary, poetic, or otherwise—shapes larger-scale flows of people, resources and culture across time, space, and thought. Our translations traverse borders, silences, regions, and ages, often unaccompanied by those of us who made them. To paraphrase Mary Louise Pratt: by translating, we become part of the traffic in meaning, though that becoming doesn’t always mean we can control the traffic too. The 2015 ALTA conference in Tucson will explore, among other things, our roles in the traffic in meaning—as translators, scholars, readers, editors, students, publishers, citizens, and teachers.

The ALTA Conference Committee invites session proposals for panels, workshops, and roundtables for the ALTA 2015 Conference, which will take place in the fall of 2015 in Tucson, AZ (dates and venue to be announced).

Session Proposals deadline May 1, 2015. Click here to submit.
Bilingual Readings Series deadline July 1, 2015. Click here to submit.

Questions may be sent to Conference Committee Chair Chad Post at chad.post@rochester.edu or ALTA Managing Director Erica Mena at erica@literarytranslators.org.