NELC is thrilled to announce that the Translation Studies Hub (TSH) has been renewed for the academic year 2022-2023 by the Simpson Center for the Humanities. The group's new leadership includes Aria Fani (MELC), Nancy Bou-Ayash (English), and Sasha Senderovich (Slavic Languages and Literatures; JSIS). Established in 2019, TSH was directed by Rich Watts (French and Italian Studies), Heekyoung Cho (Asian Languages and Literature), and Michael Biggins (Slavic Languages and Literatures) for three years. During this period, TSH provided scholars, students, and translators at the UW (and in the larger Seattle community) with a scholarly platform for theoretical and practical discussions centered on translation.
The new leadership will build on this work by focusing on making translation studies a visible and integrative fixture of undergraduate humanistic curricula at the University of Washington. The group's ultimate objective is to increase translation literacy across the university, defined as the cultivation of a toolkit that enables the critical foregrounding of the power dynamics, social processes, and linguistic interplay that lie at the core of translation as a cultural enterprise. TSH will pursue its objective by inviting renowned scholars of translation pedagogy to our campus, enable the creation of new undergraduate courses that thematically focus on translation and the design of modules on translation that can be integrated into any course across the UW academic units in both the humanities and humanistic social sciences.