Translation is everywhere in our lives, and certainly everywhere in the courses of study offered at this university: no matter what courses you take as an undergraduate or graduate student, what your major or your field of research is, you will be encountering texts in translation, work undertaken in translingual conditions, intellectual and scholarly collaborations and conversations being built over time, across geographies, and between multiple languages.

PTIC was founded in 2007 with the goal of encouraging nuanced thinking about translation in all corners of our intellectual and scholarly community, and in our lives more generally. Translation is—and always has been—a foundational activity of a multilingual, connected world, affecting daily encounters and interactions, human movement, local and global economic activity, cultural and intellectual production, and so much more. As such, translation touches all our lives, every day, in multiple ways.

And yet translation is almost uniformly underrecognized and undervalued, in both economic and cultural terms. Indeed, if our era is arguably one of increased movement and interconnectivity, it is also one in which movement and interconnectivity are often treated as suspect, even dangerous—and translation along with them. By recognizing the ubiquity of translation, PTIC seeks to counteract these suspicions, and to celebrate rather than sideline the study and the practice of translation. We are committed to encouraging translation practice in all academic fields represented at the university, as a means of increasing language justice and facilitating exposure for other traditions of knowledge production.

Please come and join our community—as a student, as a participant in our talk series, or by applying to be one of our Translators in Residence.