October 2005

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MERCATOR MEDIA HOLDS ITS IV MERCATOR INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON MINORITY LANGUAGES

October 2005 – On 26, 27 and 28 October Mercator Media held in the University of Wales Aberystwyth its IV Symposium on Translation of Culture, Culture of Translation: Languages in Films, Television and Literature. Among other issues, the Symposium dealt with the politics of translation, language transfer and cultural transfer, translation and language planning and minority languages and audiovisual media.

Mercator Media’s Symposium sought contributions to the discussion from those active practitioners and policy-makers in the audiovisual and literary fields (producers, directors, broadcasters, subtitlers and dubbers, scriptwriters, publishers, authors, translators) as well as those concerned with these issues in an academic context.

Thus, the conference counted on the participation of representative researchers of the Catalan language and media, Breton cultural expression and Irish translation and language planners, among others. The symposium dealt specifically with language transfer, which included subtitling and dubbing of both film and television as well as literary translation. From the point of view of minority languages these areas were seen as a multi-faceted phenomenon which could be used to disseminate cultures which find themselves outside the audiovisual and literary ‘mainstream’ and to maximise audience or reader numbers for minority cultural products.

As one of the main conclusions, translation into minority languages not only increases the volume of available material in a marginalized or a minority language, but may have a wider cultural impact and contribute to the development of the language as a dynamic creative medium.