FremdVerstehen: Translation and Cultural Transfer

This year’s Eichstätter Wintervortragsreihe of the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt takes an interdisciplinary approach to the phenomena of translation and cultural transfer. They will be addressed from the perspectives of translators, English studies, classical philology, translation studies, foreign language didactics, cultural history, and cultural studies.

In a globalized world with multicultural societies, translations play a central role. They enable the international reception of both literary and non-fiction texts, thus facilitating understanding and providing cultural transfer. Cultural transfer is a consciously controlled process of acculturation that creates new meanings through the adoption and modification of foreign cultural assets. Current research is re-evaluating the creative potential of translation and highlighting the achievements of translators. As Lawrence Venuti has repeatedly pointed out, a translation transforms its source text by inscribing in it an interpretation that is understandable and interesting to its intended audience. With the advent of AI writing assistants, translating is increasingly being done by non-human actors. What do AI tools like DeepL mean for the art of translation? Does translation have feminine connotations, as Lori Chamberlain has argued? What might gender-sensitive translation look like? Where are the boundaries between translation and adaptation? Are translators also authors? How do translations avoid exoticism and contribute to foreign understanding? Do translations help with multilingual language learning?

With lectures on translation and AI, cultural transfer and global history, 'glocalizing' narratives of Netflix and Co, authorship and translation in Romanticism, African literature and culture in Europe, multilingual language learning as well as on intersectional cultural transfer in German-language translations of Latin texts, this year's lecture series offers an interdisciplinary overview of the topics of translation and cultural transfer.