39 participants attended
The event speaker was Dr Emily Finer, Senior Lecturer in the School of Modern Languages at the University of St Andrews. She joined us to talk about her interdisciplinary research project, the Multilingual Science Fiction Translation Project.
Emily is co-director of the Centre for Exoplanet Science together with an exoplanet scientist from the physics and astronomy department. She observed that scientists are often inspired to pursue their careers by science fiction and the scientific community is extremely international and multilingual, yet most science fiction we consume is English language and US-centric. Since fiction is a driver of the scientific imagination, this is very limiting and can cause us to miss out on other cultural imaginations. In the imagination “space race”, whose ideas dominate? One way to explore these cultural imaginations is to bring more science fiction from less socially dominant languages into the mainstream.
Emily obtained funding to pay students at St Andrews to translate passages from science fiction that describe exploration of exoplanets into and out of English. She recruited both students taking degrees in languages and students from international backgrounds who speak non-English languages as their native language. The goal was to look at how different cultures have depicted exoplanets and human encounters with them, and then compare these depictions with current exoplanet science. To do this, student-translators were matched with exoplanet scientists to discuss the translations and how they compare to state-of-the-art knowledge.
In her talk, Emily considered translation in several senses: translation of technical/specialist scientific knowledge into fiction and art, translation of a text through language and culture and what meanings the text “gains” and “loses”, and interdisciplinarity itself as a translation between different schools of thought in academia.
During the Q&A, Emily discussed how cultures differ in depicting exoplanets: while the initial process of discovering and landing on an exoplanet is very similar across literary cultures, what happens to the human explorers afterwards varies widely, depending especially on cultural experiences of colonialism and views of human nature. She also answered questions about the boundaries between science fiction and fantasy and recommended several books as good introductions to translating science fiction.
Project website: https://exoplanetsproject.wixsite.com/exoplanets
Maureen Cohen, PhD MCIL CL
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