CfP: Translation Studies and Children’s Literature

CfP: conference
Translation Studies and Children’s Literature – Current Topics and Future Perspectives

KU Leuven_Centre for Reception Studies (CERES) and University of Antwerp, Brussels (19 October 2017) and Antwerp (20 October 2017), Belgium.

Call for Papers

Since the publication of pioneering works by Göte Klingberg, Riitta Oittinen and Zohar Shavit in the 1970s and 1980s, the translation of children’s literature has attracted the attention of many scholars in various fields. On 19 and 20 October 2017, KU Leuven and the University of Antwerp (Belgium) will organise an interdisciplinary conference on Translation Studies and Children’s Literature that aims to investigate the intersection between translation studies and children’s literature studies, offer a state of the art of current trends in the study of children’s literature in translation, and consider future perspectives for this field. How can the concepts, methods and topics used to study children’s literature contribute to the field of Translation Studies? What research questions are opened up by studying children’s books from a Translation Studies perspective? And what potential avenues have only recently been opened up, or remain as yet uncovered? The conference will take place on the occasion of the academic retirement of Prof. dr. Jan Van Coillie (University of Leuven), a pioneer in this area of study.

We welcome proposals on topics relating to promising lines of research integrating Translation Studies and Children’s Literature Studies, including:

globalisation/localisation/glocalisation (including English as a lingua franca)
ideological shifts in the translation process
ethical aspects of translating children’s literature
the reception of translated children’s books
the role of institutions and mediators (translators, publishers, agents, critics etc.)
intermedial translation (including digital picturebooks)
the benefits of applying literary approaches such as digital humanities or cognitive sciences to the study of children’s literature in translation
new impulses from established approaches such as stylistics, memory studies, genetic criticism or reception studies

The conference will be held in Brussels (19 October 2017) and Antwerp (20 October 2017) and will be preceded by a master class on translating Children’s Literature (for Dutch-speaking students) on 18 October 2017 in Brussels.

Languages of the conference

The working language of the conference will be English although simultaneous interpreting can be provided upon request (please indicate in your proposal).