“Brooding Over the Face of the Deep: Language, Otherness and Technologies of Translation”

The Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities will host a lecture by Timothy Beal, the Florence Harkness Professor of Religion and interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. Beal was the recipient of the 2019 Baker-Nord Center Award for Distinguished Scholarship in the Humanities, which recognizes the outstanding scholarship of Case Western Reserve University faculty in the humanities and their contribution to the university’s reputation. The lecture, titled “Brooding Over the Face of the Deep: Language, Otherness and Technologies of Translation,” will be held Wednesday, Feb. 6, from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m. in Tinkham Veale University Center, Ballroom A.

About the lecture

New and emerging media technologies have transformed understandings and practices of translation, making the impossibility of separating message from medium more obvious than ever. For biblical translators, this means that the subject of research is not the Bible in media but the Bible as media. What new technology has altered translation in ways that reinforce the ambiguities inherent in and irreducibility of any translated text? How might new technologies and interfaces provide users access to the indeterminate processes of translation? How might they be used to create spaces that host extended encounters with translation that open up creative, indeterminate, meaning-making possibilities? Beal argues these questions fly in the face of the dominant orientation of projects such as Google Translate, which aim to make translation immediate and invisible. This event will be free and open to the public. Register through the Baker-Nord Center events page.