Professor Luise von Flotow, a distinguished translation theorist of University of Ottawa, was invited and gave a talk entitled “Translation Pedagogy and Ethics: How 'post-positivist' translation theories affect training and ethics of translation” in Room 426 of Red Tile Building of our university on May 3rd, 2018.
Her talk covers contemporary translation theories (produced in the Anglo-American Eurozone by authors such as Michaela Wolf, Michael Cronin, Maria Tymozcko, Lawrence Venuti, and others) may be called post-positivist in that they query the notions of equivalence, fidelity, loyalty that have traditionally driven translation theory and especially pedagogy. Still today, students are trained and expected to produce equivalent texts when they translate. Post-positivist theorists, however, as well as those subscribing to the manipulation school have demonstrated time and again that equivalence is hardly possible, and that difference is what marks any translated text. Her talk presents their ideas, and then explores how these finding might be reflected in the equally current discussions about translation ethics, and translation pedagogy.
Professor von Flotow has taught Translation Studies since 1996, and her main research interests revolve around feminism/gender and translation, cultural diplomacy and translation, and audiovisual translation. Her most recent academic publications include Translating Women, Different Voices and New Horizons, eds. Luise von Flotow and Farzaneh Farhazad, Routledge Publishers, October 2016; Translation Effects: The Making of Contemporary Canadian Culture and Translation, eds. Kathy Mezei, Sherry Simon and Luise von Flotow, McGill Queens UP, 2014 and Translating Women, ed., University of Ottawa Press, 2011. She also works as a literary translator - from German and French into English; recent works are Four Roads Hotel, tr. of France Théoret`sL’hôtel des quatre chemins, Toronto, Guernica Editions, 2017, and They Divided the Sky. Re-translation of Der geteilte Himmel, by Christa Wolf, 1963, for University of Ottawa Press, 2013.
（From Dr. Zhou Xiaomei）