Looking Out / Looking In:

 New Perspectives in Translation and Interpreting

Welcome to Belfast! And welcome to the Third International Postgraduate Conference: Looking Out / Looking In: New Perspectives in Translation and Interpreting, organised by the Centre for Translation and Interpreting (CTI), and supported by The Graduate School at Queen’s University Belfast on the 4th-5th June 2026.

This third iteration of the conference sets forth our own vision of translation as an open, welcoming, and hospitable discipline – one which allows for a symbiotic flow of understanding between disparate disciplines through an ever-expanding translational centre.

Accordingly, with this conference we are in search of new perspectives. We seek to look both outwards and inwards: outwards, beyond the realm of translation and interpreting, and inwards, asking of ourselves what ways we can further extend the remit of our discipline and practice. In so doing, we extend an invitation to those in other disciplines to look in upon our own circle, to both gain and lend new knowledge.

The conference will platform two keynote lectures from renowned guest speakers: Dr. Sophie Collins (University of Glasgow) and Dr. Sharon Deane-Cox (University of Strathclyde).

Key dates and deadlines

16/01/2026 --- Proposal submissions:                                         

16/02/2026 --- Acceptance emails (internal):                               

28/02/2026 --- Registration opening

31/03/2026 --- Registration deadline for speakers/presenters (early bird)

30/04/2026 --- Registration deadline for speakers/presenters (regular)

30/04/2026 --- Presentation slides submission

04-05/06/2026 --- Actual conference

TBC for the following:

• Registration deadline for attendees
• Social event registration deadline

Call for Papers

We welcome proposals both from researchers, translators, interpreters, and artists working within the discipline of Translation and Interpreting, as well as those whose research will provide valuable alternative perspectives, and allow attendees to recontextualize their understanding of the field. We also encourage those with proposals for more non-traditional forms of presenting to apply, including, but not limited to: workshops, performances, posters, readings, and group discussions.

Please see the full Call for Papers here.

If you wish to submit an abstract proposal for consideration, please fill out this Google form. The deadline for submissions has been extended and will be announced soon.

Fee structure

Attendance fees for:

• Speakers/Presenters: £35
• Attendees: Free

*Payment needs to be made online. The link will be provided when registration opens.

Bursaries

Funding allowing, we hope to make bursaries available, which will be allocated to those who face financial difficulty, or are not able to secure funding from other sources.

Organising Committee
 
The conference is organised by three second year PhD students in Translation at Queen’s – Audrey Kelly, Cian Dunne, and Joy McClean – with full backing from the Centre for Translation and Interpreting at Queen’s.

Contact

If you have any question, please do not hesitate to contact us by email. We use both  qubcti.pgconference2026@qub.ac.uk and qubcti2026@gmail.com.

Dr Sophie Collins, PhD

'we must always locate a fantasy': fantasy as strategy in intersemiotic translation (ekphrasis)

In his notes for an introductory lecture at the Collège de France, Roland Barthes restated a pedagogical principle that he considered essential: ‘I sincerely believe that at the origin of teaching … we must always locate a fantasy …’. With his generation having ‘suffered too much from the censorship of the subject’, Barthes advocated ‘the illusions of subjectivity’ and the imaginary over ‘the impostures of objectivity’.
 
Barthes’ challenge to fixed meaning and insistence on textual plurality and the reader’s active role coincided with the consolidation of the still-emerging field of translation studies in the 1970s and ’80s. Post-structuralist ideas likes Barthes’ remain productive when applied to interlingual translations that foreground the translator and the inherent frictions in linguistic crossings. In this talk, however, I want to focus on the term fantasy as it applies to ekphrasis as a form of intersemiotic translation, and on what Kris Pint has termed Barthes’ ‘active semiology’. For Barthes, fantasy functions as an epistemological tool for developing reading strategies. Accordingly, I will consider how fantasy operates within the affective texture of the ekphrastic encounter – that charged moment of looking or listening that gives rise to the poet-translator’s fantasies. Examples from poets including Elizabeth Bishop and Ruth Ellen Kocher demonstrate how contemporary practitioners both extend and unsettle the ekphrastic form, using imaginative projection, formal estrangement and speculative drift to reveal the mode’s ongoing capacity not only to represent works of art but to reimagine the conditions of perception itself.

*Sophie Collins is a poet, translator, and academic based in Glasgow, UK. She is the author of the essay small white monkeys (2017) and the poetry collection Who Is Mary Sue? (2018).

Dr Sharon Deane-Cox, PhD

The entangled workings of translation and trauma: towards an attentive approach

This paper starts from the premise that translation and trauma can be framed as entangled entities that, when explored together, offer a unique perspective on human efforts to tell and to listen. Drawing on the Memory Studies model of “entangled memory” (Feindt et al. 2014), the dynamics of re-presenting trauma will be aligned with the dynamics of translation as a way of underscoring the wide range of selective, temporal, interpersonal, and ethical variables that can inflect the transmission of difficult pasts. At the same time, this approach provides an opportunity to reflect on the value of interdisciplinarity for Translation Studies, while also sounding a warning bell about the associated risks of borrowing from other fields without full oversight.
These conceptual discussions will be complemented by empirical insights from Holocaust-related case studies, both written and multimodal, that illustrate how trauma and translation can open up a shared horizon of speakability, working through, and resilience – if and when underpinned by empathy on the part of the translator and the receiver. The final part of the paper will then consider the future direction of trauma translation in light of the potential of GenAI tools to facilitate much wider access to the lived experience of others. Here, emphasis will be placed on unlocking the capabilities of human-AI collaboration as a bulwark against forgetting and misappropriation. Ultimately, the paper will argue that the high stakes nature of the entanglements between translation and trauma necessitate attentiveness when it comes to both research and praxis; and that paying heed is, in turn, a high reward activity in terms of enhancing how translation is studied and carried out.

*Sharon Deane-Cox is a Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Strathclyde, Programme Director for the MSc Applied Translation & Interpreting and MSc Applied Translation (at MEU) programmes, and Director of Knowledge Exchange for the Department of Humanities. She is Associate Editor of the journal Translation Studies, a member of the Young Academy of Scotland, and a member of the IATIS Regional Workshops Committee.