Translating Multilingual Literature: Workshop with Dr Sheela Mahadevan

This event is free, but registration is required. Register here.

This workshop is open to translators translating from any language. We will explore different forms of literary multilingualism and consider a range of strategies which can be used to translate multilingual texts. Drawing on various existing translations of multilingual texts, we will consider questions such as: what does it mean to erase the multilingualism of the source text, and what are the implications of using italics, footnotes and glossaries when translating multilingual texts? How and why might one compose a multilingual translation?

Dr Sheela Mahadevan is Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies at the University of Liverpool. She is translator of a multilingual Francophone novel Lakshmi’s Secret Diary by Ari Gautier (Columbia University Press, 2024) and author of the monograph Writing between Languages: Translation and Multilingualism in Indian Francophone Writing (Bloomsbury, forthcoming August 2025).