1813-2013: Two centuries of reading Friedrich Schleiermacher’s seminal text “About the different methods of translation”

Two hundred years after his famous lecture at the Royal Academy of Science in Berlin, during the Napoleonic era, Friedrich Schleiermacher still remains an assiduous presence in Translation Studies bibliography all over the world.  His definition of two (and only two) methods of translating has become indispensable to the common core vocabulary of both translators and researchers of translation alike.  This binary opposition dates back to Saint Jerome, or even Cicero (De Oratore) and still retains all of its attractiveness, being referred to by different designations such as translation methods, strategies, procedures or norms.  Among its best-known contemporary representatives are Gideon Toury’s initial norm of adequacy vs acceptability (Toury 1995) or Lawrence Venuti’s foreignizing vs. domesticating strategies (Venuti 1995), in either empirical or post-modern studies.  Many other researchers, however, also structure their reflections on translation according to binomials that, when submitted to closer scrutiny, immediately reveal their close resemblance to Schleiermacher’s proposals.   However, such proposals are far from being circumscribed to the definition of methods of translating, since they encompass a basic reflection on the relationship between thought and discourse, the translator, the typologies of translation, translation quality assessment, the reader/addressee, or even the need for a translation policy within the framework of a language policy, which is evidently relevant for the cultural dynamics he aspired to find in his country and language at that time.  Despite some features that may be considered controversial nowadays (such as the idea that “one must be loyal to one language or another, just as to one nation, or else drift disoriented in an unlovely in-between realm”, which is so dear to the proponents of the hybridity and the “in-betweenness” of the translator), Schleiermacher still inspires important reflections on translation to this day.  This conference seeks to offer a privileged forum for such contemporary reflection on translation.

Keynote Speakers Lawrence Venuti, José Justo

Organization Research Centre for Communication and Culture, Catholic University of Portugal – CECC, UCP University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies, ULICES Department of German Studies, Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon – DGS, FLUL

Organizing Committee:  Alexandra Assis Rosa (Coordinator), Alexandra Lopes, Rita Bueno Maia, Maria Lin Moniz, Hanna Pieta

Scientific Committee  Teresa Seruya (Coordinator), Patricia Odber de Baubeta, João Ferreira Duarte, João Flor, Alexandra Lopes, Reine Meylaerts, John Milton, Anthony Pym, Alexandra Assis Rosa, Kate Sturge, Carol O’Sullivan, Michaela Wolf

Conference Languages: Papers may be presented in Portuguese, English and German.

Email: [email protected]

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