REQUEST vol. 27. n.2 (2025): Translating the Other: a debate on untranslatability

This dossier aims to receive articles that problematize the relationship that is projected in literary translation through what is called ‘the other’ (Seligmann-Silva, 2022). Our hypothesis is that bringing up the debate on untranslatability (Cassin, 2022, Campos, 2013) points to new perspectives for literary theory and translation studies in Brazil, whose focus is specially on interlingual translation (Jakobson, 2013). For Cassin, untranslatability points to differences in culture, worldview and language, never to the impossibility of translation. Translation is precisely the mechanism of savoir-faire with difference and is therefore a political act. In other words, the gap between the language of the educated narrator and the language of the poor man reveals a literary and/ or translation project with linguistic and political issues that motivate the lexical, semantic and syntactic choices of Brazilian authors and/or translators in an intra/interlingual translation process. In the light of this understanding, we hope to collect articles that discuss literary translation in different countries from an interdisciplinary perspective: translation studies, linguistics and Brazilian literature. In this sense, it seems relevant to us to look at linguistic strategies for representing the Other, taking into account geographical and social class particularities, so that we can finally understand literary translation as a bridge to understanding the relationships drawn between different languages by the author and the narrator in the constitution of the character.

Request for submission: 07/07 to 07/09/2025

 

Organizers:

Prof. Dra. Maria Alice G. Antunes (UFPB)

Prof. Dr. Wagner Monteiro (UERJ)

Prof. Dr. Fabio Regattin (Università degli Studi di Udine)