Indirect Translation Studies Workshop

Join us for a focused workshop that delves into the often-overlooked field of Indirect Translation Studies. This event brings researchers together to explore the potential of indirect translation as a fertile area of academic enquiry.

Through open discussion and collaborative reflection, we will examine:

• What research has already been done in the field
• What questions remain unexplored
• How indirect translation studies can be useful beyond the analysis of indirect translation case studies

Whether you are already working in this area or are curious to learn more, this workshop offers a valuable opportunity to share insights, identify gaps, and build momentum for future research.

The cost of the ticket for this event covers lunch, snacks and hot drinks.

Nayara Güércio is a teacher, translator and researcher, who is finalising her PhD in Translation Studies at Trinity College Dublin with a generous grant from the Haddad Fellowship. Her doctoral research maps and analyses the evolution and state-of-the-art of Indirect Translation research as a distinct and increasingly recognised subfield in Translation Studies.

Dr Motoko Akashi is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Research Fellow. She holds a PhD in Literary Translation Studies from University of East Anglia. Her research interests centre on commercial aspects of literary translation and translator status. Her current project IMPACTRANS investigates the relationship between the translators in Meiji Japan (1868-1912), their social status, and their approaches to producing indirect translations.

Motoko's session explores the practice of indirect translation through the case of Haruki Murakami. While Murakami is best known outside Japan as an author, in Japan he is also a famous translator. This session focuses on commercial aspects of indirect translation, with particular reference to the German edition of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994–95), which was translated from the American translation rather than the Japanese source text. The session prompts discussion on ethical considerations, reception-based aspects, and power dynamics between translators, publishers, and source authors in the context of indirect translations.

James Hadley is Trinity College Dublin’s Ussher Associate Professor in Literary Translation, Director of the College’s MPhil in Literary Translation, and Director of the Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation. His research is representative of his wide-ranging interests, many of which centre on translation in under-researched cultural contexts, particularly in East Asia. James is active in developing theoretical mechanisms for the analysis of indirect translations. He is also active in Literary Machine Translation and Computer Assisted Literary Translation research, especially in terms of finding ways that emerging technologies can be made maximally useful to literary translation practitioners. James has a methodological interest in integrating Digital Humanities methodologies and empirical research into Translation Studies as a means of bolstering the field’s rigour.

James' session focuses on the concatenation effect hypothesis, which posits that indirect translations are less likely to describe themselves as translations than direct translations, and that indirect translations will tend to be less closely related to their sources than direct translations. This hypothesis is not based on observed facts, but on anecdotal understandings of indirect translations. This session assesses how the hypothesis has developed so far, and what its issues are. Our discussion will centre on whether and to what extent the hypothesis chimes with participants' expectations and experiences of indirect translations.