Experiential Translation Online Seminar: Silvina Katz and Jessica Atkinson

Please join us for the next meeting of the Experiential Translation Online Seminar. We're delighted to host Silvina Katz with a talk on Translating Silvina Ocampo’s Atmospheres and Jessica Atkinson with a talk on Translating in music therapy: collaboration or relegation?

The seminar is free and open to all. 

More about the ETOS

Abstracts

Translating Silvina Ocampo’s Atmospheres
Silvina Katz, Open University

This study presents findings from my research on the creation of atmosphere in Silvina Ocampo’s short stories, exemplified by a detailed analysis of “La Calle Sarandí” (1937). Atmosphere is understood as a mood or feeling, often associated with place (Griffero, 2020), and described with terms such as ‘ambience’ and ‘tone’ to capture the perceived quality of a literary world (Stockwell, 2014, 2020). The study acknowledges that translators must sense or ‘feel’ a text to produce an emotionally alive translation (Robinson, 1991, p. 17); this challenge is further heightened by the ineffable nature of literary atmospheres.
Using a phenomenological methodology that integrates close reading with computer-aided analysis, I explore how sensory cues, distributed across the sensorium, are encoded in the original and its translations. The analysis tracks sensory markers embedded within the narrative structure that shape distinctive atmospheres and elicit emotional responses, emphasising the translator’s embodied and perceptual engagement. This approach aligns with phenomenological approaches in translation studies (e.g., Scott, 2012). The findings highlight the critical importance of attending to sensory and emotional cues to effectively convey atmosphere and affect across languages and cultures.

Translating in music therapy: collaboration or relegation?
Jessica Atkinson, music therapist and writer

In music therapy, participants and therapist meet, make communicative gestures meaningful to themselves, receive communicative gestures meaningful to others; in the fertile space between actors, something entirely new, shared and significant can be co-created. This is music therapy, and life, at its best.
When participants are non-verbal, these musically-communicative gestures are particularly important, because they are the participant’s language, together with their movements, reactions, sensory cues and responses. But this language is vulnerable in the hierarchy of communication. It is fundamental within the session, but beyond it is relegated and must be translated to be taken seriously: despite an intuitive love of musical language in the public, to satisfy commissioners and funders, graphs, scales, statistics and pages of words are used.
This session draws on my recent book Insights from Music Therapy Practice and Research – Other Knowing (2025). I share two forms of other knowing, – my arts-based research process and fictionalised work with nonverbal participants. I propose that awareness of, and fluency in, intersemiotic translation is vital for all involved if we are to avoid ableist prioritisation of verbal communication. Participants deserve agency in their chosen language of communication. The ethical response is for other stakeholders to give up our expertise and learn this language, so as to listen.