Migration and Translation: Some reflections on The Arrival by Shaun Tan

Migration and Translation: Some Reflections on The Arrival by Shaun Tan

Date: 11 Jun 2019

Time: 14:00-15:30

Speaker: Professor Sharon Tsu Yun Lai (National Taiwan Normal University)

Migration has become a recurring topic in translation studies. Both migrators and translators face language barriers, strange objects and customs, uncertainty and identity conflicts. In his award-winning graphic novel The Arrival, Shaun Tan narrates beautifully a story of migration without captions. Professor Lai will compare the similarity and difference between migration and translation through this wordless novel, and also address the following questions: Do we need translation all the time? Does translation help or hinder communication between cultures? What are the gain and loss of translation as well as migration?

----------------

Professor Sharon Tzu-yun Lai (賴慈芸) is a professor of Graduate Institute of Translation and Interpretation, National Taiwan Normal University. She has translated more than 50 titles, including Wuthering Heights and Exploring Translation Theories. Her recent research focuses on the translation history of Taiwan. Her recent publications include《翻譯偵探事務所》（A Detective Agency for Translations and Translators）: Azure (2017) and〈三城記：冷戰時期滬港台的譯者與譯本大遷徙〉（“A Tale of Three Cities: On the Migration of Chinese Translators and Translated Works in the Cold War Era”）in Reflexion 37 (2019).

​我城我書 / One City One Book Hong Kong is a community reading programme initiated by the Centre for Popular Culture in the Humanities at The Education University of Hong Kong, which aims to encourage as many people as possible, to read and discuss the same book at around the same time. The one book for 2019 is The Arrival, a wordless graphic novel by the Chinese Australian graphic novelist Shaun Tan.