Venue: Ponderosa Commons Oak House, Multipurpose Room 2012, 6445 University Blvd, Vancouver, BC
Presenters: Bonny Norton, Liam Doherty, Sonam Chusang, Patrick Dowd, Lungrik Gyal, Mark Turin
Light lunch served from 12:15PM. RSVP requested but not required: tinyurl.com/rumakhg
This talk will take place on the traditional, unceded, and ancestral territories of the Musqueam people.
Translation, Multilingualism, and the Global Storybooks Project
The event is co-sponsored by the UBC Department of Language and Literacy Education, the UBC Public Humanities Hub, and the UBC Language Sciences.
Translators have traditionally been positioned as marginalized and even invisible linguistic practitioners, whose role has been underexamined as compared to that of authors. However, recent cross-disciplinary scholarship is beginning to address the diverse multilingual practices of translators and the role of the translator as an agentive participant in negotiations of power, meaning, and identity. In this symposium we draw together theoretical and practical issues associated with the translation of stories for the Global Storybooks project (https://globalstorybooks.net/), in the context of our ongoing work developing multilingual resources for children worldwide. Drawing on our range of experience with two particular sites (Storybooks Norway and Storybooks Himalaya) we offer diverse perspectives on the work done by translators as both enablers and practitioners of multilingual literacy, and demonstrate the ways in which translation is a creative boundary-crossing activity.
Bonny Norton, FRSC, is a Professor and Distinguished University Scholar in the Department of Language and Literacy Education, UBC, and a UBC Public Humanities Fellow. Her research addresses identity, language learning, and open technology. She is the Project Lead of Global Storybooks and Research Lead of Storybooks Canada. Her website is: http://faculty.educ.ubc.ca/norton/.
Liam Doherty is a doctoral candidate in Language and Literacy Education at UBC. His research examines online peer mentoring, digital literacy, and language socialization among learners of Chinese. He is also interested in issues of digital scholarship, the digital humanities, and open educational resources (OER) and is currently a UBC Public Humanities Graduate Fellow.
Sonam Chusang is a lecturer in the Tibetan language at the Department of Asian Studies, UBC. He has taught in the UBC Himalaya Program’s Intensive Tibetan language course with community engagement programs for the past 4 summers. He has taught Tibetan to heritage and non-heritage students for the past fifteen years. He is from Amdo and the educated exile Tibetan community in India and is proficient in both Amdo and Central Tibetan dialects.
Patrick Dowd is a second-year doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology, where his research focuses on the Tibetan culture of language and letters throughout the Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau. He is Killam Scholar, Liu Scholar, and UBC Public Scholar.
Lungrik Gyal is a literary translator from English into Tibetan, a former editor of Tibet Times newspaper based in Dharmsala, India. He was born and brought up in Amdo, Tibet and now lives in Vancouver, BC Canada.
Mark Turin is an anthropologist, and an Associate Professor of Anthropology and First Nations and Endangered Languages at the University of British Columbia. For academic year 2019-2010, he is a Wall Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies. His current SSHRC-funded research project focuses on developing new frameworks for community-informed dictionary work and he holds a Wall Solutions grant entitled ‘Mapping Linguistic Diversity in a Globalizing World through Open Source Digital Tools’.