---
title: "Araceli María Alanís Corral and Ali Arjmandi present Life Writing as Translation at Uni Mail, Geneva; life writing mediates languages and identities"
sdDatePublished: "2026-06-13T13:37:00Z"
source: "https://www.unige.ch/lifewritingtranslation/application/files/6517/8121/0177/Book_of_Abstracts.pdf"
topics:
  - name: "college and university"
    identifier: "medtop:20000405"
  - name: "literature"
    identifier: "medtop:20000013"
  - name: "education"
    identifier: "medtop:05000000"
locations:
  - "Schleswig-Holstein"
  - "Romania"
  - "Trøndelag"
  - "Puerto Rico"
  - "Washington"
  - "Portugal"
  - "North Korea"
  - "China"
  - "Mecklenburg-Vorpommern"
  - "South Korea"
  - "Brandenburg"
  - "Massachusetts"
  - "Vietnam"
  - "Poland"
  - "Munich"
  - "North Rhine-Westphalia"
  - "Iran"
  - "Vestland"
  - "United Kingdom"
  - "Ireland"
  - "Rhineland-Palatinate"
  - "Quebec"
  - "California"
  - "North Carolina"
  - "Morocco"
  - "British Columbia"
  - "Oslo"
  - "Taiwan"
  - "Iowa"
  - "Lower Saxony"
  - "Baden-Württemberg"
  - "Mexico"
  - "Germany"
  - "Berlin"
  - "Spain"
  - "Hamburg"
  - "Bremen"
  - "Texas"
  - "Ontario"
  - "Estonia"
  - "Geneva"
  - "Saarland"
  - "France"
  - "Hessen"
  - "Malta"
  - "Alberta"
  - "Nova Scotia"
  - "New York"
  - "Kentucky"
---


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