Araceli María Alanís Corral and Ali Arjmandi present Life Writing as Translation at Uni Mail, Geneva; life writing mediates languages and identities

Araceli María Alanís Corral and Ali Arjmandi present Life Writing as Translation at Uni Mail, Geneva; life writing mediates languages and identities

Life writing Écritures de soi et traduction and translation 18 &19 June - Uni Mail, Geneva Book of abstracts

1 Life Writing as Translation: Reading Hajeb’s Translational Life Araceli María Alanís Corral – University of Salamanca Ali Arjmandi – Independent Researcher In Jang-e Zendegi [Life’s Battle] (2023), Maryam Saeedi presents a biography of Hajeb (1898–1982 CE), one of the first publicly recognized women translators in Iran. The biography examines her professional journey and personal experiences, acting as a translation of her life through the eyes of another translation scholar. Life writing involves transposing memory, identity, and experience into narrative form, as the works by Karpinski (2012), Grass and Robert-Foley (2024), and Tavener-Smith (2024) show. Arguing that life writing is indeed an act of mediation and translation, rather than a transparent recording of lived experience, this paper addresses the question of how a translator’s life can be a source of translation and, particularly, how this biography is a translation of Hajeb’s life into narrative form. To this end, it argues that the translator’s life, analyzed through methods such as genetic translation studies and the materiality of translation, illuminates both the process of life writing and the practice of translation itself. The double mediation of (Hajeb’s life in) translation and (a translation of) her life, conveys how the translator’s life is an endless act of negotiating languages, cultures, and identities. Thus, examining Jang-e Zendegi as a translation reevaluates biography as a creative act of translation, and contributes to the field of TS by developing the studies on Iranian women translators from the perspective of genetic and material translation. References Grass, D., & Robert-Foley, L. (Eds.). (2024). The translation memoir [Special issue]. Life Writing, 20(1). Karpinski, E. C. (Ed.). (2012). Borrowed tongues: Life writing, migration, and translation. Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Tavener-Smith, T. (2024). Establishing narrative voice and encountering the “I” through identity creation in life writing. Life Writing, 21(3), 471–482.

2 Writing, Learning, and Translation: Brick-by-Brick Alison Bouhmid – Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 My husband is outside and I am inside. He is building and I am writing. He is building a wall and I am writing a memoir. I look up key words for his activity: ‘build’ – bna ﺑﻨﻰ And wall – ﺣﯿﺖ -heet.

My husband is building a wall now becomes a distinct possibility. I translate: راﺟﺎي ﻛﯿﺒﻨﻲ اﻟﺤﯿﻂ Let me give you the inside story: my memoir is about learning his language. This, I am finding out, means it’s actually about a lot of other things too and one of those things has got to do with walls. When I hear Darija (husband’s language) spoken I don’t so much as hear words as a wall of sound. To understand, I am going to have to break through that wall at some point. I am aware that walls are often there for a reason but as a language teacher (as well as a learner) I’m a sort of professional wall-breaker.

My learning memoir, a practice-based, creative-research PhD project in progress, aims to explore language learning in and through creative writing and in doing so hopes to contribute to the ongoing conversation between learning, translation and teaching. Translation currently recognised in the CEFR as a tool for language learning via the concept of mediation, is revealing itself to be at the very core of my writing-learning process as words, images, ideas, memories, feelings and selves are translated and transformed into narrative. Creative writing renders accessible, even to beginner learners, these transformations, both imaginative and real, which in turn become loci for learning. My learning memoir, a story ‘of one (subject, language, culture, text) as it unfolds into the multiplicity of translation’ (Grass and Robert-Foley, 2024,2) will be the basis for a performed communication. References Council of Europe. 2020. Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, teaching, assessment – Companion volume. Council of Europe Publishing, Strasbourg. Grass, Delphine, and Lily Robert-Foley. 2024. “The translation memoir: An introduction.” Life Writing 21 (1):1–9. https://doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2023.2281044.

3 Inter-epistemic Interpreters in Interreligious Encounters with Tibetan Buddhism: A Case Study Yunfei Bai – Lingnan University James Cobb Burke (1915-1964) was a maverick American photojournalist. He was born to Methodist missionary parents in Shanghai, China, where he spent his early childhood before moving back to the United States as a young adult. Throughout the 1940s, he spent most of his time in China working as a Chinese-speaking correspondent for various North American magazines. This presentation draws on Burke’s unpublished diaries, photo captions, memoirs, and notebooks I recently recovered from the Rose Library of Emory University to reconstruct his role as the indispensable interpreter behind a curious interfaith dialogue taking place at Mount Gongga in eastern Tibet in the summer of 1945. This encounter brought together Burke and his travel companion—the renowned Australian journalist and writer George Henry Johnston (1912–1970)—with members of the local Sino-Tibetan Buddhist community, including the ninth Bo Gangkar Rinpoché karma bshad-sgrub chos-kyi seng- ge (1893–1957) and his Chinese female disciple Shen Shuwen (1903–1997), who later became a key propagator of Tibetan Buddhism in Taiwan. Building on Douglas Robinson’s theory of inter-epistemic translation, I seek to answer the following questions: Why did Burke fail to bridge the epistemic gap between his and Johnston’s Western worldview and that of tantric Buddhism? To what extent did his singular positionality as a Mandarin-speaking American journalist/interpreter of Christian background contribute to this failure?

4 Translating the Self: Learner Diaries, Metaphor, and Identity in the Translation Classroom Micòl Beseghi – University of Parma This paper reports on a pedagogical experiment conducted within a university course on English Language and Translation, in which students were invited to keep learner diaries documenting their translation activities and reflections. Drawing on Jhumpa Lahiri’s In Other Words (2016) and Translating Myself and Others (2022), the study investigates how autobiographical writing can serve as a mode of engaging with translation as both practice and self-exploration. Lahiri’s reflections on translation and linguistic rebirth provide a framework for interpreting how students articulate feelings of displacement, agency, and belonging in their learning narratives. The diaries were analysed qualitatively to examine how students conceptualise their translation experience through metaphor, and how these metaphors reveal evolving perceptions of linguistic and cultural identity (Cameron, 2003; Ellis, 2001). The analysis adopts a thematic and linguistic approach, focusing in particular on the relationship between “subject reality” and “text reality” (Pavlenko, 2007). By situating learner diaries within the broader field of life writing and translation pedagogy (Li, 1998; Shih, 2011), the paper highlights their potential as critical tools that foster reflection, empathy, and awareness of translation as an identity-forming process, transforming the translation classroom into a space where linguistic practice and personal experience intersect. Preliminary results show that, by narrating the story of the Self, students gained access to both the metacognitive and emotional dimensions of learning. The diaries became a space for constructing self-representations in which translation is perceived as an integral part of personal identity. References Cameron, Lynne. 2003. Metaphor in Educational Discourse. London: Continuum. Ellis, Rod. 2001. “The metaphorical construction of second language learners.” In Learner contributions to language learning: New directions in research, edited by M. P. Breen, 65–85. Harlow: Pearson Education. Lahiri, Jhumpa. 2016. In Other Words. Gurgaon: Penguin Books India. Lahiri, Jhumpa. 2022. Translating Myself and Others. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Li, Defeng. 1998. “Reflective journals in translation teaching.” Perspectives 6(2): 225–234. Pavlenko, Aneta (2007) “Autobiographic Narratives as Data in Applied Linguistics.” Applied Linguistics, 28(2): 163–188. Shih, Claire Y. 2011. “Learning from writing reflective learning journals in a theory-based translation module.” The Interpreter and Translator Trainer 5(2): 309–324.

5 L’auto-entretien comme outil auto-ethnographique Maxence Bigan – Université de Genève En partant des apports de la réflexivité en auto-ethnographie (Koopman et al., 2020), de la verbalisation rétrospective en traduction (Hong, 2025) ainsi que d’une expérience personnelle lors d’une recherche en traductologie, je propose l’utilisation d’une méthode de collecte de données qualitatives au sein des recherches auto-ethnographiques : l’auto-entretien. Cette méthode implique que la chercheuse se soumette elle-même à un entretien. Je distingue deux catégories d’auto-entretien : celui d’introspection et celui de participation. Sur la base des éléments de l’entretien compréhensif (Kaufmann, 2016), j’apporte une méthodologie afin de définir le processus pour la mise en place d’un tel outil. Bien que l’auto-entretien osre des avantages tels que la possibilité d’introspection, l’aide à la collecte de données et la favorisation de l’empathie, il présente aussi des limites, notamment la disiculté de distanciation et les pressions implicites. Cette méthode contribue à compléter les ressources possibles lors de travaux (auto)ethnographiques en traduction, particulièrement lorsqu’ils touchent des sujets sensibles. Ce résumé est rédigé au féminin générique.

6 Translating Life Writing through Autoethnography: The Case of Ernaux’s L’événement into Maltese Claudine Borg – University of Malta This paper reflects on my experience of translating Annie Ernaux’s memoir L’événement into Maltese, a literary translation that formed part of a broader research project. Drawing on diaries from her student years to reconstruct her lived experience, Ernaux narrates her illegal abortion in 1960s France in a raw and unflinching way. Approaching the translation as an autoethnographic endeavour, I kept a diary documenting my translation process of this life writing text, thus producing what may be described as meta-life writing. I will begin by outlining the research project, its objectives, and its adoption of analytic autoethnography (Anderson 2006; Atkinson 2006). I then discuss the diary method (see e.g., Borg, Heine and Risku 2025), presenting the data collected and the approach to its analysis. As a reflective practitioner-researcher, I ask: What kinds of insights does such a diary produce? What remains absent or elusive in this form of data? What are its value and analytical potential for translation research? The translation of highly personal, culturally situated life writing poses specific ethical and textual challenges. Given that abortion in Malta remains illegal except when the mother’s life is at risk, I will also reflect on issues of translator positionality, subjectivity, and activism, including the rationale for selecting this source text for translation, the negotiation of particular translation decisions, exchanges with the editor, and the asective dimensions of the work. References Anderson, Leon. 2006. “Analytic autoethnography.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 35 (4): 373-395. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891241605280449 Atkinson, Paul. 2006. “Rescuing Autoethnography.” Journa