Oxford Translation Day 2025
Friday 13th June
18:00-19:00
Ten Versions of Kafka, in partnership with AHRC-funded Kafka's Transformative Communities
Taylor Institution
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Maïa Hruska's prize-winning book Dix versions de Kafka asks what happens to a writer's work when it is translated, especially when his name is Franz Kafka. In the mid-1920s, ten writers brought his works to life outside the language and place where he had conceived them, saving them from the oblivion to which authoritarian regimes had condemned them. Exploring how Kafka became Kafka, these stories of translation are also stories of discovery, censorship, political struggle, and liberation.
Join post-doctoral research fellow Ian Ellison in conversation with author Maïa Hruska at the Taylor Institution, followed by audience Q&A and drinks reception.
Maïa Hruska is a graduate of Cambridge University and King's College London, and having also studied at Sciences Po Paris and now works at the Wylie publishing house in London. She collaborated with the daily newspaper L'Opinion when it was launched.
Saturday 14th June
09:30-10:45
Creative Workshop: Manifestos for Activism in Translation
Seminar Room 9, St Anne’s College
Register via Eventbrite, here.
In this creative workshop, participants will put together mini manifestos for themselves on the subject of activism in translation. Whether they are practising translators, or avid readers of translated literature, this session will be an opportunity to reflect on their positioning and the things they might do to engage and resist, actively and consciously, in the social, political and economic dynamics of literary translation.
The session will open with a discussion on the practical aspects of activism in translation, to support participants in identifying the ways they might want to bring activism into their reading and writing of translations. This might relate to linguistic and creative choices, or the selection of texts to read and translate, the publishers they work with and buy from, for example. Participants will then be able to make zine-style manifestos for themselves, using an array of fun, colourful materials to inspire them. There will also be photocopies of websites, articles and social media posts from translators and organisations working on these issues, which will be used for the discussion and which participants way wish to quote from or cut up and stick into their mini manifestos.
Alyssa Ollivier-Tabukashvili is a current DPhil student at the University of Oxford. Her thesis addresses the need and potential for decolonising literary translation, with a focus on francophone Algerian writing, through the subjects of World Literature, plurilingualism, and transnational feminism in conversation with the activist role of the translator and the pursuit of justice. More broadly, she is interested in literature and expressions of resistance from the Maghreb and southern/eastern Africa, including its queer and feminist intersections. She has been awarded the 2025 Javett-UP BRIDGE Fellowship, where she will be researching artistic and literary representations of the self in cross-temporal and transnational resistance movements.
"The One Who Has Arrived Late": Bengali Translation Workshop
Seminar Room 7, St Anne’s College
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In this workshop, we will collaboratively translate a Bengali poem into English with a focus on translating emotions and affect. The poem in focus moves between different affective registers, among them irritation, grief, love, longing, and accrues around the act of waiting. How do we work through these registers and move them across languages? No prior knowledge of Bengali is required.
Utsa Bose is a second year DPhil candidate in History at the University of Oxford. His current research focuses on infectious diseases and pandemics in colonial South Asia between the late-19th/early 20th centuries. He was also the Graduate Teaching Assistant for the MSt in Comparative Literature and Critical Translation (CLCT) between 2023-2024. He enjoys translating and writing fiction, and his translations have appeared in journals such as Asymptote, while his original fiction has been published by Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters.
11:00-12:15
Translating Multilingual Literature: Workshop with Dr Sheela Mahadevan
Seminar Room 8, St Anne's College
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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).
Translating Onomatopoeia: Creative Translation Workshop with Polly Barton, in partnership with the Queen’s College Translation Exchange
Seminar Room 8, St Anne's College
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What are the possibilities and limits of translating onomatopoeia and language with onomatopoeic qualities? This workshop, led by award-winning writer and translator Polly Barton, will consider the questions and challenges that arise when onomatopoeia is moved across languages and cultures. From translations of Japanese mimetic language to creative and multilingual reimaginings of onomatopoeia in English, participants will explore the phonic properties and potentialities of language and translation.
No prior knowledge of Japanese, or any other language, is required. This workshop is in partnership with the Queen’s College Translation Exchange.
Polly Barton is a Japanese translator and writer. Her translations include Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda, Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa, There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura, and Mild Vertigo by Mieko Kanai. Her translation of Asako Yuzuki’s Butter was named Waterstones Book of the Year 2024. She is the author of Fifty Sounds and Porn: An Oral History.
12:30-13:30
Starting Out in Translation Studies: Early Career Reflections
Seminar Room 7, St Anne’s College
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What does it mean to begin a career in translation studies today, amid a shifting academic landscape and increasing precarity in the humanities? In this roundtable, early career scholars reflect candidly on their journeys into the field - sharing insights into job applications, research proposals, interdisciplinary positioning, and the challenges and opportunities of working in translation at a time of institutional change. Each speaker will offer a short reflection before opening up to audience questions and wider discussion. This is an event for anyone considering a future in translation studies, or simply curious about what that future of the field might look like.
Georgia Nasseh is Research Fellow in the Literatures of the Global South at King’s College, Cambridge. She completed a DPhil in Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford in 2023. Her DPhil research was concerned with multilingualism and translationality, with an emphasis on the work of Angolan author José Luandino Vieira, which she is in the process of turning into a book on which the relationship between Portuguese and Kimbundu has been represented in literature. Her forthcoming publications explore the circulation of Angolan literature in translation in Scandinavia and of bilingual periodicals in Southern Africa. She has recently held positions as Departmental Lecturer in Brazilian and African Portuguese at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, University of Oxford, and as Co-ordinator of the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation (OCCT) Research Centre.
Minna Jeffery is a Junior Research Fellow in Drama at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford. Her research centres around theatre translation, women’s playwriting, queer and feminist theatre, and Finnish theatre. She completed her PhD by practice as research at the University of Kent in 2023, where her doctoral research proposed and examined strategies for feminist theatre translation through translating Minna Canth’s The Worker’s Wife (1885) from Finnish to English. In addition to her research and translation work, Minna is a theatre-maker producing work with her company Good Friends for a Lifetime.
Aoife Cantrill is Laming Junior Research Fellow at Queen’s College, University of Oxford. After completing her PhD at the University of Oxford in 2022, she has worked as a research fellow at National Taiwan Central Library, as Lee Kai Hung Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Manchester China Institute and as lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. Her research looks at textual culture in Chinese-speaking territories of the Japanese Empire, with a particular focus on gender, material culture and postcolonial translation. She is currently completing her first monograph, titled Reproductive Text, which looks at women’s writing, gendered citizenship and translation politics in Taiwan from 1930 to the present day.
Mary Katherine Newman is an incoming Quirk Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London. She has recently completed her PhD at the University of Oxford where he research focused on the understanding and rhetorical use of the five senses in the accounts of the Spanish Empire's invasion of Wallmapu (now Chile). Her postdoctoral work looks at how sensory experiences were translated between languages and cultures in the early accounts of the Spanish invasion of the Americas. She is currently Co-ordinator of the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation (OCCT) Research Centre.
14:00-15:15
Between Tongues: Poetry and Self-Translation in Celtic Languages
Tsuzuki Lecture Theatre, St Anne’s College
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This roundtable brings together three contemporary poets who write and translate their own work in Welsh and Scottish Gaelic, navigating the creative and political terrain of composing between languages. Through readings and conversation, the poets will explore what it means to carry a poem across linguistic boundaries when both tongues are their own - and when those tongues carry the weight of marginalisation, revival, and cultural memory. Audiences will hear poems in both original and translated form, followed by a discussion on identity, poetics, and the responsibilities of self-translation in the context of Celtic and Indigenous British languages.
Menna Elfyn is an award-winning Welsh poet and playwright whose fifteen collections in Welsh and English has achieved worldwide acclaim. Some of her most well-known collections in Welsh and English are Peffaith Nam/ Perfect Blemish (2007) Murmur (2012 PBS Recommended Translation), Bondo (2017) by Bloodaxe Books and her most recent Welsh language collection ‘Tosturi’ (2022) Barddas, shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year. She is President of Wales PEN Cymru and the first woman Professor of Poetry in Wales and Professor Emerita at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, and she was made Welsh Children’s Poet Laureate in 2002. Winner of many prizes and awards: Aderyn Bach mewn Llaw, was Welsh Book of the Year in 1990. She received the Anima Intranza International Foreign Poetry Prize in 2009 in Sardinia for her contribution to European poetry, She received a Chomondeley award from the Society of Authors Great Britain for her contribution to poetry in 2022, the first time for a Welsh language author to receive such a recognition. She is the best known and the most travelled of all Welsh poets and her work has been translated into over 20 languages including Chinese, Spanish, Italian, Lithuanian, Catalan and Hindi. She performs her work mostly in English and Welsh and has adopted a unique style by interweaving extracts of the musicality of Welsh into English translations, and in so doing reflecting the cultural diversity of the Uk and beyond.
Petra Joana Poncarova’s poems have appeared in New Writing Scotland and Aimsir. They are often inspired by paintings, the experience of living between different languages, and by unexpected connections between Scotland and North Bohemia, and they betray a landlocked person's fascination with the sea. In 2025, she received a New Writers Award from the Scottish Book Trust and the Gaelic Books Council. In her daily life, she is an academic, researching Scottish Gaelic literature, and a translator working between Czech, English, and Gaelic.
Mererid Puw Davies, MA, MSt, DPhil (Oxon), FLSW is Professor of German Studies at UCL, where she teaches and researches on German and comparative literature, film and cultural studies, as well as literary translation. She is also interested in Welsh literatures and cultures, which form an increasing, often comparative focus in her work. In addition, Mererid is a poet and essayist in Welsh, and a Contributing Editor of the literary and cultural review O’r Pedwar Gwynt.
15:30-16:30
In Conversation: Polly Barton and Monica Cure
Tsuzuki Lecture Theatre, St Anne’s College
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In this wide-ranging conversation, Monica Cure (writer, scholar, and guest judge of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize) joins award-winning translator and author Polly Barton to explore translation as a form of activism, resistance, and care. Drawing on their work across genres and languages, the speakers will reflect on the ethics of voice, the politics of representation, and the translator’s role in unsettling dominant narratives. This is a chance to hear two leading voices in contemporary translation thinking aloud about the possibilities, and responsibilities, of their craft.
Polly Barton is a Japanese translator and writer. Her translations include Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda, Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa, There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura, and Mild Vertigo by Mieko Kanai. Her translation of Asako Yuzuki’s Butter was named Waterstones Book of the Year 2024. She is the author of Fifty Sounds and Porn: An Oral History.
Monica Cure is a Romanian-American writer, poet, literary translator, and dialogue specialist. She is a two-time Fulbright grantee and the author of the book Picturing the Postcard: A New Media Crisis at the Turn of the Century (University of Minnesota Press). Her poems have appeared in journals such as Poetry Northwest, Salamander, and Graywolf Lab and her poetry translations have been published internationally in Kenyon Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, Asymptote, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2023 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize for her translation of Liliana Corobca’s novel, The Censor’s Notebook (Seven Stories Press UK). Her translation of Corobca’s novel Too Great a Sky was shortlisted for the 2025 EBRD Literature Prize. She is currently based in Bucharest.
16:45-18:00
“This is Why”: Translators on Translating, Editors on Editing
Seminar Room 7, St Anne's College
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Join acclaimed literary translators who have featured on prestigious shortlists and longlists and their editors to hear more about the practices and choices in producing and publishing translated literature. They will discuss a short poem or passage that they have recently translated or edited and give the audience insight into the “hows” and “whys” of their approach.
18:30-19:45
Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize Short List Readings and Prize-Giving
Tsuzuki Lecture Theatre, St Anne’s College
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The Oxford–Weidenfeld Prize is for book-length literary translations into English from any living European language. It aims to honour the craft of translation, and to recognise its cultural importance. It was founded by Lord Weidenfeld and is supported by New College, The Queen’s College, and St Anne’s College, Oxford. This celebration of literary translation will feature readings from the work of the shortlisted translators, and the presentation of the prize.
