Manchester in Translation 2024: Online Translation Conference

About the event

Welcome back to our annual online mini-conference Manchester in Translation, held in partnership with Manchester City of Literature to coincide with International Mother Language Day 2024. 

This three-day conference will feature a series of panels, talks and translation workshops to celebrate Manchester's language diversity and all things literary translation. The conference is completely FREE. Panels can be streamed via our YouTube page, @MrCommaPress, and you can sign up via eventbrite for workshop tickets (German and Arabic general sale now sold out - get in touch on isabella.barber[at]commapress.co.uk to claim tickets for Manchester residents)

Key Information: 

• 19th-21st February
• Held online via Zoom and YouTube Live stream
• Sign up to the events you'd like to attend via eventbrite

Featuring: 

• A Keynote Speech by celebrated author and translator Anton Hur.
• A panel discussion on the topic of Decolonising Translation with Kavita Bhanot, Kathryn Batchelor and Respond Crisis Translation
• A panel discussion on the topic of Working with a Writer, featuring Daniel Hahn, Adam Talib and Mui Poopoksakul
• Three translation workshops into English from Arabic, German and Bangla/Bengali. Please note that there is a limited number of places available for the translation workshops. Participants must have reading proficiency in the source language and high proficiency in English. Translation workshops are available for UK-based participants only. A number of places are reserved for Manchester-based participants. Should you wish to claim one of these, please get in touch via the email address below. 

About the Speakers:

Anton Hur is the author of Toward Eternity (HarperVia) and No One Told Me Not To (Across Books). He was born in Stockholm and currently resides in Seoul. He won a PEN Translates grant for his translation of The Underground Village by Kang Kyeong-ae and a PEN/Heim grant for Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny, the latter of which was shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize and the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature. His translation of Sang Young Park’s Love in the Big City was longlisted for the same prize in the same year. His translation of Violets was longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Awards and a finalist for the Firecracker Award. His co-translation of Beyond the Story: 10-Year History of BTS debuted at #1 on the New York Times Bestseller List. He has taught at the British Centre for Literary Translation, the Ewha University Graduate School of Translation and Interpretation, and the Bread Loaf Translators Conference.

Kavita Bhanot is a writer, editor, researcher, translator, teacher and organiser. Her fiction and non-fiction has been published widely, including the influential essay Decolonise not Diversify. She is editor of three short story collections, including Too Asian, not Asian Enough (Tindal Street Press) and Book of Birmingham (Comma Press), along with Violent Phenomena: 21 Essays on Translation (Tilted Axis). Ma is Scared, her translation from Hindi, of Anjali Kajal's stories won a Pen Translates Award and was published by Comma Press last year. Her first novel won third prize in the SI Leeds Literary Prize. She founded and co-organises Literature Must Fall and Jaag: Panjabi and Pahari-Pothwari Language and Literature Festival. Kavita teaches Creative Writing at Birmingham University.

Kathryn Batchelor is Professor of Translation Studies and Director of the Centre for Translation Studies at UCL, UK. She is the author of Decolonizing Translation (2009/2014) and Translation and Paratexts (2018) and has co-edited six volumes of essays, including Intimate Enemies: Translation in Francophone Contexts (2013, with Claire Bisdorff), Translating Frantz Fanon across Continents and Languages (2017, with Sue-Ann Harding), and Translation, Trouvailles (2024, with Chantal Wright). Kathryn’s primary research interests lie in translation theory, postcolonial translation, translation history, and translation philosophy.

Meg Sears on behalf of Respond Crisis Translation, a coalition of language practitioners fighting to dismantle systemic language rights violations. They use translation skills to enable access to legal support, social services, healthcare, and all other human rights. Meg is a founding member of the Respond Crisis Translation collective and currently leads operations and outreach. She is based in Berlin, where she's a graduate student of Middle Eastern Studies at Freie Universität, and is working on research at the intersection of language access, justice, asylum and resettlement. She speaks Spanish, Moroccan Darija, Palestinian Arabic, and is working on learning German.

Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor and translator, whose recent books include Catching Fire: A Translation Diary, and translations of books (fiction and non-fiction) from Angola, Argentina, Portugal and Venezuela. He is currently translating a Peruvian novel, editing a collection of Brazilian short stories and writing a book about Shakespeare and translation.

Adam Talib teaches at the American University in Cairo and is a co-editor of the journal Middle Eastern Literatures. He is an award-winning literary translator of Arabic into English – his co-translation with Katharine Halls of Raja Alem’s The Dove’s Necklace (published by Overlook Press, US, and Duckworth, UK, in 2016) was joint winner of the 2017 Sheikh Hamad Award for Translation. The original Arabic edition Tawq al-Hamam was joint winner of the 2011 International Prize for Arabic Fiction. Other translations include Cairo Swan Song by Mekkawi Said, shortlisted for the first International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2008, and The Hashish Waiter by Khairy Shalaby, both Hoopoe Fiction/AUC Press).

Mui Poopoksakul is a lawyer-turned-translator with a special interest in contemporary Thai literature. Her latest translations, Venom and The Understory by Saneh Sangsuk, were published in the UK last year by Peirene Press and are soon forthcoming in the US from Deep Vellum. She has also translated a pair of books each by Prabda Yoon and Duanwad Pimwana. A native of Bangkok, Thailand, Mui now lives in Berlin, Germany.

About the Workshop Leaders:

Katy Derbyshire (German) lives in Berlin and translates contemporary German writers including Judith Hermann, Heike Geissler and Olga Grjasnowa. Her translations of Clemens Meyer have twice been longlisted for the International Booker Prize. She has taught translation in New York, New Delhi and Norwich and co-hosts a monthly translation lab.

Amy Parsons (Bangla/Bengali) is a UK based literary translator, and teacher of Bengali at the Language Centre, SOAS University, London. Experienced across a range of translation practices, she holds an MA in Bengali Language and Culture specialising in the short fiction of ‘Banaphool’, Balai Chand Mukhopadhyay. Her current projects include works by Bangladeshi writer Shahaduzzaman and the late Kolkata-based author Sirsho Bandopadhyay. Amy’s expertise includes the life and work of Jibanananda Das, narratives of the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War and relations between Portuguese and Bengali. As well as Bengal she has a keen interest in the Lusophone world and enjoys dabbling in the translation of European Portuguese.

Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp (Arabic) is a literary translator working into English from Arabic, Russian and German.  Her work has been shortlisted for the Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize, the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize and the GLLI Translated YA Prize. She has several times been awarded a PEN Translates grant for her translations, which include fiction and nonfiction from Germany, Jordan, Morocco, Palestine, Russia, Switzerland, and Syria. Arabic authors she has translated include Ahlam Bsharat, Samar Yazbek, Fadi Zaghmout, and children's books by Gulnar Hajo, Abir Ali, Amina Hashimi Alawi, Maya Fidawi, and Nadine Kaadan. Ruth's translations are published in two Comma Press anthologies: The Book of Cairo, ed. Raph Cormack, and Banthology: Stories from Unwanted Nations, ed. Sarah Cleave.

If you have any questions, please contact isabella.barber@commapress.co.uk