Following successful conferences in Seoul (2004), Cape Town (2006), Melbourne (2009), Belfast (2012), Belo Horizonte (2015), Hong Kong (2018) and Barcelona, (2021), IATIS is pleased to announce its call for panel, paper, roundtable, workshop, and artistic initiative proposals for its eighth conference to be held at Sultan Qaboos University (SQU) in Muscat, Sultanate of Oman, 10 – 13 Dec 2025.
Against the backdrop of far-reaching and accelerated socio-technological changes in the 21st century, sustainability has emerged as one of the most critical issues to be addressed by scholars in a wide variety of disciplines, including those in translation studies, and faced by practitioners. At the same time, the meaning of sustainability in the context of translation and intercultural communication – and arguably in other disciplines (Engebretsen et al. 2016) – remains vague and inadequately conceptualized. A more critical and disciplined engagement with the idea of sustainable translation and knowledge practices, one that takes on board recent developments in fields as varied as computer science and artificial intelligence, and intersectionality studies, has become urgent.
Demand for more, better, and faster electronics to rapidly extract, store, and manipulate (vast amounts of) data in a variety of ways creates a corresponding demand for essential metals and has thus increased pressures on ecosystems. The Global North continues to off-load emissions to the Global South, perpetuating further forms of colonial-capitalist modes of extractivism.
Translators have increasingly been encouraged to use various computer-assisted translation tools, including machine translation, but the question of how sustainable these can be, has not been given serious consideration. Translators have been placed under increased pressure by constant surveillance of mechanical systems and dehumanised algorithmic decision-making (Moorkens 2023), while at the same time suffering financially from the growing volume of translations that is 'recycled'.
Within this context, the conference aims to provide a much-needed forum for scholars from the region and across the world, to discuss the pivotal and changing roles of translation in the construction and circulation of knowledge across languages, cultures, and epistemologies in the age of big data, big capital, and conflicting approaches to safeguarding the future of our planet. We invite scholars from all disciplines and areas of inquiry who are interested in translation in all its forms – including but not limited to oral, written, audiovisual, multimodal, inter-linguistic, inter-semiotic and inter-cultural translation, in both conventional and non-conventional contexts – to participate and engage in critical, interdisciplinary discussions that address the multifaceted challenges of sustainability and their implications for translation theory, research, teaching and practice.
The conference will feature panels, individual papers, roundtables, workshops, and artistic initiatives. Themes include but are not limited to the following:
- Translation and alternative discourses to sustainability – e.g., degrowth, ecosocialism, ecomodernism.
- Translation and ecofeminism.
- Eco-translation and the Anthropocene.
- The translation/non-translation of literature on alternatives to sustainability from First Nations, Indigenous Knowledges and the Global South.
- New frameworks, methodologies, and epistemologies: rethinking research agendas and field practices that engage with sustainability and/or degrowth and related agendas.
- Anti- and post-humanist thought and other philosophical engagements with translation, sustainability, and alternative approaches.
- Human-made disasters, crises, wars, and genocides: translating against mainstream discourses on sustainability.
- Translation in environmental NGOs.
- Heritage, archiving, and memory: sustainable and equitable documentation of the past and present through translation.
- New forms of production in the language industry: repositioning of key players, reconfiguration of translation labour.
- Volunteer translation, AI-assisted translation, and the sustainability of the profession, of the translation classroom and of translation studies.
- The ethics and politics of translation and intercultural studies research, education, and practice: shifting centres and peripheries of knowledge.