Congratulations to Dr. Irem Ayan, Assistant Professor of French, for receiving funding from the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC) for Cross-Cutting and Working Groups—specifically for a research project titled The role of languages, translation and interpreting in decolonizing Arctic research.
Source: Fenn-O-maniC, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
“We hope to shed light on the ethical implications of translation and interpreting in the co-production of knowledge with Arctic Indigenous people.”
About the research project:
Our proposal is for a transdisciplinary research project aiming to make languages, translation and interpreting visible in Arctic research, with the aim of contributing to its decolonization.
Our project focuses on the 13 large collaborative Arctic research projects that comprise the Canada-Inuit Nunangat-UKRI (CINUK) Arctic research program, to find out:
- Who translates and interprets as part of these projects
- Which resources are available to them and how they carry out their work
- When and where translation/interpreting becomes part of Arctic research (e.g., initial stages/during/after completion for dissemination purposes) and how these different stages may impact upon the translation/interpreting work carried out
- Whether the current practices are the best and how they can be improved
With this project, we hope to shed light on the ethical implications of translation and interpreting in the co-production of knowledge with Arctic indigenous peoples, and whether the current practices of their linguistic and cultural representation are contributing to the decolonization of Arctic research.
I am one of the Co-Investigators in this project. Our team is composed of Prof. Şebnem Susam-Saraeva, PI, (Personal Chair of Translation Studies, School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, University of Edinburgh) and Dr. Nicholas Barrand, Co-I, Associate Professor of Glaciology, School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences University of Birmingham.
