Collaborations at the University of Michigan: Decolonizing Translation Studies

Abstract

CHRISTI A. MERRILL is professor of South Asian literature and postcolonial theory jointly appointed in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures and the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she has helped establish an interdepartmental program in critical translation studies and leads the digital project Translation Networks. She is translating the life story of the Dalit activist Kausalya Baisantry from Hindi and writing essays on human rights literature in translation. Ten years ago when Yopie Prins and I organized a college-wide theme semester at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, we were heartened to see how many of our colleagues across the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA) proposed courses relevant to translation. We hoped to build on long-standing ties with units offering language study where many of us in the Department of Comparative Literature held joint appointments, and where many of our graduate students and undergraduates regularly took classes. Many of the proposals we received did indeed emphasize translation in the sense of interlingual transfer—a German course that helped students study for the professional American Translators Association certification exam, a Korean course that asked students to join fans in subtitling popular videos online, a history course where students worked together to publish translations of eighteenthcentury political tracts from French—but we found our colleagues were also using translation to think critically and creatively about reinterpretation across cultures, disciplines, eras, and media too. This more capacious understanding helped broaden the appeal and deepen the resulting collective insights that we continue building on today. Public events that semester featured a South Indian American dance performance, the innovative subtitling of a silent Japanese film, a discussion of Spanglish in popular TV shows, a student performance of a play in Latin, a storytelling session in Urdu by a visiting dastangoi (based on my own English translation of a Rajasthani storytelling cycle, quite serendipitously), a panel discussion on abolitionist movements across languages, and collections of interviews with elders who grew up speaking Anishinaabemowin. Many events, like