Translation is often mistaken as a vehicle for the process of globalization, or more specifically, for the global ascendancy of English and the death of many other cultures and languages. How might translation be understood as a process of transformation, and a way to deepen rather than diminish our understanding of places, people, cultures, and languages? Working in various media with diverse academic and cultural organizations, this research group will explore the scholarly, pedagogical, artistic and social aspects of translation.

Stay connected

Please follow our work at the Translation site for a continually updated and evolving insight into our activities. Our primary activity is a monthly seminar meeting during Fall 2015.  The site also features dialogue spurred by the readings and featured guests organized for each meeting, as well as a seminar directory and monthly texts accessible to participants who reach out directly. Workshops are by invitation. If interested in learning more, please get in touch here.

Faculty Co-leaders

Debra Caplan is Assistant Professor of Theatre in the Department of Fine and Performing Arts at Baruch College, City University of New York. Her research focuses on Yiddish theater and drama, theatrical travel, artistic networks, and immigrant theater and performance. She was the founding Executive Director of Harvard’s Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research and is currently a member of the Mellon School’s Advisory Board. She is the co-founder of an interdisciplinary research collective, The Digital Yiddish Theatre Project, which is currently developing several projects that apply digital humanities tools to the study and preservation of Yiddish theater. Debra is also a stage director, dramaturg, and translator for the theater. From 2012 – 2014, she was the dramaturg for Target Margin Theater, working with director David Herskovits to develop two seasons of Yiddish theater material.

Cheryl C. Smith is Associate Professor of English at Baruch College, where she directs the Great Works of World Literature program. She teaches courses in great works, the arts in NY, advanced non-fiction writing, lyrics and literature, and American literature. She co-edited the book, Making Teaching and Learning Matter: Transformative Spaces in Higher Education (2011) and also co-edits the Journal of Basic Writing. She is currently working on three short projects: an essay on teaching literature in translation for an upcoming MLA volume, Approaches to Teaching Lu Xun; an article about the intersection of protest, poetry, and feminism at City College during Open Admissions; and a collaborative article on the pedagogical challenges and affordances of teaching literature in hybrid learning environments. She is also developing a book-length project that looks at the loss of creativity in schooling, which she traces to several factors including increasing emphasis on testing, standardization, and assessment in K-12 and beyond; disregard for teacher input and individualized instruction; and shifts in “consumer” attitudes toward higher education and its value(s). She defines and promotes creativity as a force in developing literacy and offers techniques for college faculty to engage student creativity through exercises in literary translation, writing in digital environments, and collaborative writing.

Community Partners

Words Without Borders
Target Margin Theater

Partner Biographies

David Herskovits is the Founding Artistic Director of Target Margin Theater in New York City, where he stages work from Shakespeare to Stein and devises new work based on existing sources. David has directed plays and operas at theaters, festivals, and universities in the USA and abroad.

Eric M. B. Becker is an award-winning literary translator and writer, and serves as editor at Words without Borders. A translator primarily of Brazilian literature, his translations of Mozambican writer Mia Couto earned a 2014 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant.

Nadia Kalman is the education consultant to the Words without Borders Campus project. Currently in the beta phase of development, Words Without Borders Campus (wwb-campus.org) is a free online platform for bringing the best of contemporary international literature to high school and college classrooms; our goal is to create a virtual learning space without borders, leading to meaningful, and lasting, cross-cultural understanding and a lifelong interest in international literature.

Karen Phillips is the Executive Director of Words without Borders. Previously, she worked at Americas Society, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and freeDimensional, and as a consultant for international cultural organizations. Karen holds an M.P.A. from NYU Wagner and studied Spanish literature and art history at Smith College. A recipient of a Robert Bosch Foundation fellowship and a Federal Foreign Language and Area Studies grant, Karen speaks fluent Spanish, and is conversant in German, French, and Portuguese.

Projects

International Literature and Its Publics: Translation, Pedagogy, and Collaborative Reading

The translation group is working on programs related to the art of literary translation, literary translation in and as scholarship, translation and performance, and translation and pedagogy. Together with our community partners, Works without Borders and Target Margin Theatre, we are developing programs at and around CUNY for promoting new networks between translators and their publics, both in and out of the classroom. Plans include a seminar series for scholars and writers of translation, public performances and readings of new works in translation, the development of online spaces for students of literature in translation, and a new interdisciplinary undergraduate course in the art of translation.

Goals

Short term, we are looking at ways to bridge our efforts in developing digital pedagogies, new publishing platforms, and community programming such as public readings or seminars focused on literary translation. Words without Borders and CUNY serve different constituents, so our collaboration has the potential to extend our work to new audiences and further vitalize it. For instance, we can bring literary translators who publish through Words without Borders to classrooms and to events at the GC, and we can provide classroom access to Words without Borders for piloting their new programming.

Long term, Words without Borders and undergraduate programs like Great Works of World Literature at Baruch, which serves nearly 4,000 students per year and employs many graduate student instructors, could develop a sustained partnership for sharing resources and readerships.

CUNY Impact

We hope to include Words without Borders in our seminar series at the CUNY Graduate Center, which will bring together graduate students, faculty, invited speakers, and other community members who do or study literary translation in their scholarship, creative work, and the classroom. As a result of this kind of cross-dissemination, classroom study of international literatures and students’ own original translation work will be invigorated and may find new audiences. We also hope to help create and promote new networking opportunities for graduate students, faculty, and local translators.