The Tasks of the Translator: Developing a Sociocultural Framework for the Study of Translation across the Early Modern World (15th-18th Centuries), Saint Louis University, March 20–21, 2017

The Center for Intercultural Studies at Saint Louis University invites proposals for papers for its upcoming conference, “The Tasks of the Translator: Developing a Sociocultural Framework for the Study of Translation across the Early Modern World (15th-18th Centuries),” to be held in St. Louis on March 20-21, 2017.

The conference aims to bring together historians, social scientists, and literary scholars whose work explores the experiences, backgrounds, and legacies of translators and interpreters across the world from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Studies of early modern interculturality, globalization, and empire are increasingly taking language and translation into account when analyzing cultural encounters and transmission. Analyzing institutional and individual practices and strategies as well as the social and cultural contexts in which translators and interpreters were embedded can offer new perspectives about such encounters and cultural transmission. This approach also promises to reveal new insights about the social, political, and intellectual networks that translators and interpreters participated in and helped construct.