#ATA63French: Politicizing Craft

I’m proud to announce that in two weeks, I’ll be a Distinguished Speaker for the French Division at 63rd annual American Translators Association’s conference this October in Los Angeles.

On Thursday, October 13, 2022, at 2:00 PM in San Gabriel C of the downtown Westin Bonaventure, I’ll be speaking on “Politicizing Craft.”

Translation is often dually disparaged as a “craft”: not art, because it’s technical and unoriginal, yet not industry, because it’s artisanal and marginal. Haunting both these stereotypes is a notion of the mechanical—often applied to translation—yet such prejudices are relatively recent. Art is so nebulous a modern category as to require craft’s dialectical opposition to maintain consistency. Dependent on craft, industry doesn’t threaten to replace it, as the usual history goes, so much as to subsume the translator’s skilled labor. Can translation advocacy draw strategies from histories of art and labor in recuperating craft as a term of pride?

#ATA63French