Translation and Translatability

Translation at Bard

Broadly defined, translation is a mode of critical thought, a means of communication, an art form with a rich history, a transnational sociopolitical phenomenon, and a practice undertaken at the horizon of the impossible. The Bard Translation and Translatability Initiative (BTTI) brings together scholars, practitioners, and students to explore translation and its discontents. Translation at Bard is read in both the narrower interlinguistic sense of moving meaning between two languages, as well as through an interrogation of the broad hermeneutic conditions at stake in questions of translatability. This interdisciplinary approach aims to elicit new collaborative insights, develop curricular initiatives, and stimulate experimentation and debate across the Bard network and the community at large.

Our Mission

The goal of the BTTI is to facilitate the recognition of translation as a supralinguistic experience that permeates and shapes modern-day language and thinking. Our aim is to implement translation in a variety of cross-disciplinary approaches to teaching as a mode of reflection that emphasizes interactions between different fields of knowledge.

Photo by China Jorrin '86

What We Do

The BTTI encourages curricular initiatives that promote translation, particularly from a multicultural or multidisciplinary perspective, and aims to bring together scholars, teachers, writers, and artists from the United States and other countries. The BTTI also works with Bard faculty members to elicit new interdisciplinary insights, develop new curricula, strengthen communication, and stimulate experimentation among the College’s four divisions and across its network of international liberal arts and graduate studies programs.

Contact

For information about events and activities contact:

Susan Gillespie, BTTI Fellow
914-388-3506
[email protected]
[email protected]

Upcoming Events

10/28

Tuesday

Tuesday, October 28, 2025
Preston Theater 5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Tawada Yōko is very well-known in the US, especially thanks to the translation in English of The Emissary, which received in 2018 the National Book Award for Translated Literature. Less renowned are, however, her poetry and performances playing with language, media and voices, which Son has been following around the world for the past ten years. The teaser gives a taste of them, but does not encompass their originality, nor the way they ask their audience to interrogate their sense of identity, and their pre-established conceptions of how cultural and language canons operate. Tawada's work is translingual (shifting between her two main languages, Japanese and German, and an expanding repertoire of others) and interstitial, thriving in the no man's lands between and beyond national borders -- and different forms of media production. Her games with audio and video, word and gesture, human and non-human entities (including, at times, generative AI) all converge towards one goal: to give a voice to what and who is often unvoiced.

5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Preston Theater
11/11

Tuesday

Tuesday, November 11, 2025
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
James Joyce and Marcel Proust met only once, at a late-night supper in the Hotel Majestic in Paris in May 1922. This lecture will revisit their brief and awkward encounter and explore what it reveals about the literary and social worlds of early twentieth-century Paris, how artistic value is created and sustained, and the contrasting experiences of exile and belonging that shaped each writer’s work.Barry McCrea is the Donald R. Keough Family Professor of Irish Studies and Professor of English at Notre Dame University. He is the author of three books: Languages of the Night, winner of the American Comparative Literature Association’s René Wellek prize for the best book of 2016; In the Company of Strangers which was awarded the Heyman prize for scholarship in the humanities; and a novel, The First Verse, which won a number of awards including the Ferro-Grumley prize for fiction and a Barnes & Noble “Discover” award. For more information, contact Prof. Éric Trudel at [email protected]

5:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium

Sui Generis

Sui Generis was first published in 1997 as an initiative of the Foreign Languages, Cultures, and Literatures faculty at Bard. It has been published once every spring since and has grown to include new languages that entered our curriculum, such as Arabic and Japanese. The primary goal of this publication is to encourage students to produce original creative work in a foreign language, or to translate the work of other authors. Sui Generis also offers language students new opportunities to work closely with our faculty and Foreign Language Exchange Tutors.