Translation as a Political Act

Much attention has been reserved, in Translation Studies, to the notion of agency, and a number of recent works have focused attention on interventions by translators in the sphere of radical politics. This was the backdrop to a conference entitled Translation as a Political Act held at the University of Perugia on 9-11 May 2019. The conference, conducted in English, French and Italian, enabled around 70 participants from a large number of international institutions and disciplinary backgrounds to come together to discuss this topic. Issues of particular attention included the linguistic and translational challenges characterising the globalised world of the twenty-first century; the awareness on the part of translators of their often political role; translation in and for political institutions; specific political conflicts and the role of translation in them; the translation of apparently non-political texts which take on political meaning through translation; and translation in particular historical situations. The conference was memorable for the variety of the geographical contexts of the examples discussed, which provided a real sense that these issues are recognized as pertinent on a global scale. The plurality of disciplinary approaches testified to the wealth of work in this field and the conference was thus a small but important step in the recognition of the poverty of national or monolingual approaches to analyses of political power and political action and the many ways in which a multilingual and translational perspective can offer new insights into these analyses.