ALTA 2015: Translation and Traffic

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 Translation & Traffic, which will take place October 28-31, 2015 in Tucson, AZ.