Teaching Translation Literacy: Why Translation Matters to the Humanities and Social Sciences

Can you think of a humanities course you took (or taught) that did not include any materials translated into English? Translation is absolutely vital to the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Yet, most educators rarely foreground translation as a linguistic and cultural enterprise in the classroom.

In this presentation, Aria Fani will discuss why translation has been marginal in academic and cultural education in the United States and why this problematic trend is rapidly changing. He will make a strong case for teaching translation literacy as an integral pillar of liberal education. Aria defines translation literacy as follows: the cultivation of a toolkit that enables us to critically foreground the power dynamics, social processes, and linguistic interplay that lie at the core of translation as a cultural enterprise.