An interview with Professor Paul Bandia

Abstract

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in Postcolonial Translation Studies which has resulted in the emergence of different books and essays on the subject. In this regard, Professor Paul Bandia, from Concordia University (Canada), has argued on many occasions that African literatures and cultures constitute an interesting case for the study of the theory and practice of translation beyond Eurocentric and normative models. In one of his latest keynote speeches, ‘Translation, Postcolonialism and Beyond', presented at the Colloquium ‘Moving Bodies Across Transland’, held at the University of Lisbon (Portugal), he underlined the importance of rethinking traditional approaches to translation as well as the necessity of relooking and questioning everlasting dichotomies, such as original vs. copy, coloniser vs. colonised, us vs. them, Global North vs. Global South, etc. In the following interview, which took place during the celebration of the aforementioned Colloquium, Professor Paul Bandia discusses the main themes and ideas that characterise his work and underlines new and highly interesting perspectives for the future of Translation Studies.

Keywords:

• Postcolonial Translation Studies
• African literature
• translation
• multilingualism
• heteroglossia
• translocation

Acknowledgements

I would first of all like to express my deepest gratitude to Professor Paul Bandia for very kindly taking the time to answer my questions. I would also like to extend my appreciation to the Centre for Comparative Studies and the Department of English of the Faculty of Letters at the University of Lisbon. Special thanks to Professor Alexandra Assis Rosa (University of Lisbon) and Professor Mª Carmen África Vidal (University of Salamanca) for their assistance.

Biographical Notes

Paul F. Bandia is Professor of French and Translation Studies in the Department of French at Concordia, University, Montreal, Canada. He is an Associate Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is currently a member of the Executive Board of the International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies (IATIS) and a member of the Editorial Board of numerous international journals. Professor Bandia has published widely in the fields of translation studies and postcolonial literatures and cultures. He is the author of Translation as Reparation: Writing and Translation in Postcolonial Africa (2008), co-editor of Charting the Future of Translation History (2006), Agents of Translation (2009), and Rencontres Est-Ouest/East-West Encounters, TTR (Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction: Études sur le texte et ses transformations), vol. 1 (2010), as well as editor of Writing and Translating Francophone Discourse: Africa, The Caribbean, Diaspora (2014).

Elena Rodríguez Murphy holds a Ph.D. in Translation Studies from the University of Salamanca (Spain), where she has worked in the Department of Translation and Interpreting for the last few years. Her research interests are: African literatures, Translation Studies and Linguistics. She has published several articles and book chapters on these areas of study, including ‘An Interview with Sefi Atta’ (2012), published in the journal Research in African Literatures. She is the author of Traducción y literatura africana: multilingüismo y transculturación en la narrativa nigeriana de expresión inglesa [Translation and African Literature: Multilingualism and Transculturation in Anglophone Nigerian Writing] (2015).