A South African, an Italian and a Hungarian end up together in a Belgian port. What might sound like the start of a stereotype-filled joke was actually the start of an enriching international collaboration in Translation Studies between three young academics.
Marike van der Watt (Stellenbosch University and KU Leuven), Paola Gentile (University of Trieste, University of Namur and a research fellow at SU) and Fruzsina Kovács (Pázmány Péter Catholic University) met one another in Antwerp in 2018 at the KU Leuven's Centre for Translation Studies, or CETRA.
After that CETRA contact, they convened a panel at the ninth triennial European Society for Translation Studies (EST) congress in 2019 (held in Stellenbosch). Then came another successful collaboration with a special issue of the journal Translation Spaces.
In this issue, the emphasis is on what happens when Translation Studies, Reception Studies and Imagology are linked to investigate transnational image building. Put differently, how can we use these three disciplines to examine the way in which we create and perpetuate certain images of other countries, nationalities or groups? As they put it,
“Readers' images of a country are constructed on the basis of texts that are first selected for translation, for example, and the particular ways in which translated books are subsequently promoted and packaged within their specific book covers. Cultural images thus undergo an evolution: they are constantly re-elaborated, re-shaped, re-processed, and filtered through marketing, promotion and reviewing phases."
Luckily for everyone interested in the topic, the special issue is not the end of things. Marike van der Watt is not only busy with a PhD in Translation focusing on imagology (with Prof. Ilse Feinauer, the Ton and Anet Vosloo Chair in Afrikaans Language Practice, and Prof. Luc van Doorslaer of KU Leuven as supervisors). She is also involved in a transnational research project funded by the Nederlandse Taalunie (the Dutch Language Union) and executed in collaboration with the University of Trieste and KU Leuven: “Binnenlandse vogels, buitenlandse nesten: de hedendaagse Vlaamse literatuur in vertaling en haar relatie tot het Vlaamse letterenbeleid" [“Domestic birds, foreign nests: contemporary Flemish literature in translation and its relation to Flemish literary policy"].
