The New England Translators Association (NETA) will be holding its annual conference on Saturday, May 14, 2016 in partnership, for the first time, with UMass Boston and welcomes papers written by graduate students and students and panels organized by professors from all universities and colleges in New England. This is an invaluable opportunity for students interested in translation and interpreting studies to present their work, talk with working translators and interpreters, and explore the profession.

Keynote Address: “Collaborative and Situated Translator Training. Moving towards the Profession” by María González Davies, Senior Lecturer and Researcher in Foreign Language Learning and Translation Studies, University Ramon Llull, Barcelona, Spain

The Theme: Collaboration

Collaboration is a major issue in the classroom, in commercial translation, in translation and interpreting studies and research, in using and developing web resources, in negotiating with agencies, authors, publishers, in teamwork, and even in solo work. While translation is impoverished by a lack of collaboration, the collaborative process raises numerous questions, depending on the type and purpose of the translation:

• Does the author always take precedence over the translator?
• Can collaboration result in what appears to be a different work? At what point does it cease to be a translation?
• What is the role of queries? What sorts of queries work best?
• In commercial translation, how harmful is the lack of collaboration with the original producer(s) of a document? Under what circumstances?
• When is it or is it not important to maintain the author’s voice? What is the author’s voice in the absence of the translator’s?
• Is it possible to collaborate with a dead author?
• How does collaboration across disciplines enrich the translation process?
• Can one collaborate with oneself? What does that imply?

Deadline: February 15, 2016

Panel and paper proposals: In your proposal for a panel, please provide: 1) the panel title and a sentence or two about the topic, 2) the names and short bio stating academic affiliation for each panel member (chair, three panelists, one or two discussants) as well as a 250-word abstract for each paper. In your proposal for a paper, include the title with a 250-word abstract, your name, and short bio stating academic affiliation. Submit your proposals for papers or panels to: call_for_papers@netaweb.org

For questions, please contact Ellen Elias Bursac at eliasbursac@gmail.com