The following conversation took place over Zoom on 10 March 2022 and was chaired by Chantal Wright and Kathryn Batchelor. Audience members were asked to read Karen Van Dyck’s (2021) ‘Migration, Translingualism, Translation’ and Souleymane Bachir Diagne’s (2018) ‘Cultural Mediation, Colonialism and Politics: Colonial Truchement, Postcolonial Translator’ in preparation for the conversation. Both pieces point towards the need for a kind of translator and interpreter who is able to read context, who can look beyond the immediate text and situation to assess what is at stake, and then act upon their reading and their interpretation, exhibiting agency. In the case of Oumar Sy, the interpreter presented in Diagne’s chapter, this agency manifests as a very powerful interventionist one, exerted in a colonial context of life and death. In the case of the two later 20thcentury Greek novels discussed in Van Dyck’s article, it is a desired agency, an agency to move towards, a call for a more creative and ethical approach to translating translingualism in literary texts, for which Van Dyck models a way forward. Both authors offer a vision of translation and interpreting as an opportunity to rebalance a power dynamic. The transcript of the Zoom conversation has been edited and extended.
Keywords: translation, mutuality, translingualism, migration, colonialis
