St. Jerome's Day

Every year, the University of Alberta celebrates translation and Translation Studies on September 30th. Dr. Anne Malena, translator and professor of translation and Francophone Studies in the department of Modern Languages & Cultural Studies, and Dr. Valerie Henitiuk, then a doctoral student in Comparative Literature, organized the first event in 2003 with so much success that is has now become a tradition. International Translation Day was established in 1991 by the Fédération internationale des traducteurs (FIT) and it is celebrated on September 30th to honour the feast day of St. Jerome (347-420 AD), patron saint of translators, interpreters and librarians. St. Jerome is best known for his writings on theology and for making the bible accessible to many people through his translations from Greek and Aramaic into the Latin Vulgate. As proposed by FIT the day is meant to celebrate and promote translation and to display pride in an essential activity, which too often remains invisible and ignored. Translators, academics, students and the general public, therefore, gather every year in the Senate Chamber located in the Old Arts Building on the University of Alberta campus to spend the day talking about translation in friendly dialogue and stimulating exchange. A keynote speaker is usually invited to start the day’s activities. It is truly a day of celebration for practitioners, critics, literature lovers and language specialists as the list of past themes illustrates:

2003 – Translation I Have Loved and Loathed
(Roundtable Discussion with Ted Blodgett, Louise Ladouceur and Anne Malena)

2004 – Translations That Wouldn’t Be
(Keynote speaker: Suzanne Jill Levine, University of California, Santa Barbara)

2005 – The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful
(Keynote speaker: Tiina Nunnally, writer and translator)

2006 – The Erotics of Translation
(Keynote speaker: Nathalie Stephens, poet and translator)

2007 – War and Peace: Translation as Conflict, Resistance, and Resolution
(Keynote speaker: Paul St-Pierre, Professeur honoraire, Université de Montréal)

2008 – The Translator as Theorist?
(Keynote speaker: Katherine Silver, Translator)

2009 – Translation and Impersonation
(Keynote speaker: David Solway, Poet, Translator, and Essayist)

2010 - Authors‒Translators‒Authors
(Keynote speaker: David Homel, Author and Translator)

2011—Translating Peripheries

(Keynote speaker: Jean Anderson, Translator and Translation Scholar)

 

 

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TranscUlturAl seeks to contribute to the dialogue between cultures and languages by publishing essays that examine interrelationships between translations and cultures, past and present, in global and local contexts. This includes work that ventures beyond dominant geolinguistic and geocultural spaces, in particular those officially defined as either monolingual or bilingual.