“How can we move beyond a monolingual DH, and promote exchange of works among linguistic communities? And how can we ensure this exchange is ongoing and sustainable?”
dh+lib has long been interested in tackling these issues for our community of practice. The 2016 Digital Humanities conference will offer an opportunity to design and test an approach: attendees at a July 12 preconference workshop will join dh+lib editors and leaders from Global Outlook::Digital Humanities (GO::DH) and the Libraries and DH SIG (both Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations Special Interest Groups) in an attempt to take up these questions and hack a solution.[1. The full list of workshop organizers: Sarah Potvin (Texas A&M University), Élika Ortega (University of Kansas), Isabel Galina (National University of Mexico), Alex Gil (Columbia University), Daniel Paul O’Donnell (University of Lethbridge), Patrick Williams (Syracuse University), Zoe Borovsky (University of California Los Angeles), Roxanne Shirazi (City University of New York), Zach Coble (New York University), and Glen Worthey (Stanford University). Additional thanks to dh+lib editor Josh Honn (Northwestern University) for helping to forge a dh+lib approach to translation.]
The workshop will introduce translation work and practices, and move towards developing a pilot translation process for dh+lib with potentially broad applicability to other scholarly communication vehicles and venues. The group will think through existing infrastructure, address questions around translation, labor, and design, and perform hands-on translation. We will build on previous translation exercises put into practice by GO::DH and dh+lib, including DH Whisperers, the simultaneous bilingual publication of blog posts, and the newly-created GO::DH Translation Toolkit.
The weekly dh+lib Review is made possible by more than two hundred volunteer editors-at-large, four Review editors, a handful of dh+lib editors, PressForward developers, and American Library Association technical staff. We think a community translation effort will need to build upon and extend these generous contributions.
As a first step: we’d like the hands-on translation efforts undertaken at DH2016 to focus on works nominated by the DH and libraries community. Isabel Galina has pointed to “… a general perception of an Anglo-American dominance and English language as the main language” in DH, observing that, even when vibrant DH unfolds in, for example, German- and French-language communities “… a lack of publications and communications in English leads to invisibility on the mainstream channels.” While translation may ultimately proceed in multiple directions, we’d like to start with non-English language works that you want to see translated into English, to address the gap that Galina describes.
In the interest of visibility, transparency, and ease of participation, there are two ways you can nominate content:
- Tweet a link to the work, with the hashtag #GOdhlib
- Add information about the work to an open GoogleSheet
To make sure works are included in these initial translation efforts, tweet or add them by Friday, July 8.
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