Hosted by Encounters in Translation Journal and Bodies in Translation Project
Time and place: Oct. 21, 2025 2:00 PM – 6:00 PM, HF-12 - 12th floor of Niels Treschow's Building
Time in CET. Online participants: 13:00-17:00 BST / 12:00-16:00 UTC.
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https://uio.zoom.us/j/64824765531
Meeting ID: 648 2476 5531
Registration is FREE for both in person and virtual attendance. The language of the event is English. Please register here.
Translational epistemologies, the theme at the heart of the Bodies in Translation project and the Encounters in Translation journal, engages with the use of translation by scholars in a range of scholarly domains ‘as a trope through which the local concerns of the appropriating discipline may be addressed’ (Baker and Saldanha 2011: xxi).
Translation has emerged in recent decades as a keyword in disciplines such as cultural history, anthropology and science and technology studies (STS). Moreover, since around the turn of this century it has become an institutionalized concept in medicine – as evident in the increasing ubiquity of knowledge translation and translational research activities that attempt to put research-based knowledge into practice (Ødemark and Engebretsen 2018).
Such expansions of the concept of translation have underscored the fact that translation is never simply a discursive process: it is a complex material and cultural process, even when the objects transported are words. The emergence of translational epistemologies further illustrates how taken for granted values of scientific endeavour – such as objectivity and universality – may be productively “replaced by problematization, agonism, and contradiction in the genealogical method” (Rimke 2010:251), in part by problematizing the concept of translation itself in scientific and scholarly practices, and between different forms of knowledge and epistemic cultures.
This event will provide a forum for engaging with epistemologies and scholarly initiatives that seek to open up spaces for equitable and ethically responsible reflection on translation within various ecosystems of knowledge and society at large. It will further report on recent attempts to create new, more sustainable spaces within which scholars with the requisite expertise can contribute actively to the debate on the politics and practice of translation in the context of knowledge production and circulation, irrespective of geographical location, race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, or migratory status.
Programme
14.00-14.10: John Ødemark and Mona Baker: Welcome and Introduction to Event
14.10-14.30: John Ødemark: Translational Epistemologies in the Bodies in Translation Project
Eivind Engebretsen: KT as a Form of Translation
14.30-14.50 Open Discussion: Led by Mona Baker and Rasmus Tore Slaattelid
14.50-15.10: Julie Boéri: Translation as a Productive Force in Open Science Publishing: The Encounters in translation experiment
Following a brief overview of the status of translation in the corporate structures of scientific publishing that offer no translation or gisting, this presentation will delve into the translation model developed by Encounters in translation, a transdisciplinary, diamond open access and independent journal. The strategic decisions taken by the team of editors are guided by inclusive, sustainable, qualitative principles of publishing that will be explained and exemplified.
The presentation will end with a reflection on the risk of using translation as a mere instrument for the uncritical diffusion of knowledge in corporate structures and open science, rather than as a productive force in the process of renarrating and renegotiating knowledge in the global arena. The Encounters model acknowledges that translating is not just about accessing scholarship in multiple languages but also about actively producing and where relevant renegotiating knowledge across and within paradigms, cultures and locales.
15.10-15.30: Open Discussion: Led by Jan Buts and Abdel Wahab Khalifa
15.30-15.45: Short Break
15.45-17.25: Less is More: Translational and Narrative Epistemologies beyond Corporate Publishing Structures
Chair: Mona Baker
Speakers: Jan Buts, Abdel Wahab Khalifa, Luis Pérez-González, Rasmus Tore Slaattelid
This panel will address the impact of rising publication expectations on the quality of scholarly output, including the implications of using measures such as citation metrics and journal impact factors on perpetuating inequalities between and within the Global North and Global South. It is hoped that speaker contributions and the open discussion that follows will assist in articulating an alternative, independent, more equitable and more sustainable model of academic publishing.
Abdel-Wahab Khalifa: Beyond the Numbers Game: Metrics, Equity and the Paths Toward Humane Publishing
Academic publishing runs on a currency many recognize as counterfeit. Journal impact factors, citation counts and indexing status continue to shape careers despite widespread recognition of their inadequacies. Yet even as declarations rejecting these metrics proliferate and alternative models quietly flourish, institutional incentives keep the system firmly in place, compelling even the sceptical to play along. In this intervention, I interrogate this paradox, asking what gets eclipsed when we chase ever-higher numbers and what is lost—humanly, ethically and intellectually—when only indexed journals confer legitimacy and quantity trumps calibre. Drawing on cases where metric requirements become barriers to equity and inclusion, I explore frameworks like DORA and diamond open-access journals such as Encounters in Translation, not as technical fixes, but as portals to a more sustainable, equitable and humane scholarly world where research quality cannot be algorithmically determined. The question is not simply whether we can escape the numbers game, but what we stand to reclaim once we stop playing it.
Luis Pérez-González: ‘Low Cost’ Publishing. The Epistemic Price of Knowledge for Global South Scholars
Our academic publisher ecosystem reveals a profound paradox: publicly funded research is harvested and commodified by an ever shrinking number of commercial publishers with over $19 billion in annual revenue. This corporate oligopoly controls the flow of global scholarship, effectively turning a public resource into massive private profit. Importantly, much like the pharmaceutical industry’s use of tiered pricing for essential medicines, academic publishing has institutionalized a two-speed system to manage global economic disparities. This system provides discounted, limited access to high-impact content for Global South libraries while simultaneously acquiring or promoting lower-prestige journals to ‘capture’ and ‘centralize’ local research output. This strategy secures market share and intellectual property but fundamentally reinforces dependency. The double-tier structure imposes a debilitating epistemic price on Global South scholars. As economic necessity becomes more inextricably linked to intellectual exclusion, embracing this profit-driven model affects the very nature of Global South knowledge production. The core implications of this epistemic exclusion include methodological conformity (devaluing local, qualitative research in favour of generalized Western models), linguistic marginalization (forcing publication in English at the expense of local languages), and the overall systemic suppression of diverse, locally relevant epistemologies.
Rasmus Tore Slaattelid: Blindness or Transparency in Peer Review
There are good reasons to assume that processes of blind or ‘double blind’ peer review reduce the chances of bias influencing the judgement of the reviewer, and thereby lead to a more just (i.e. more bias-free) assessment of academic work. Knowledge of the name, gender, age, race, class, scientific authority, institutional affiliation etc. can influence the judgement of scientific merit. Justice works best blindfolded, at least in principle. In practice however, new technologies, as well as new ways of governing research, metrics of evaluation, and the resource environment of science may all contribute to new ways of gaming the peer review process as well as other aspects of the research process. Given these new developments, are transparent review processes a remedy for bias or just a new way of generating fresh problems?
Jan Buts: Fully automated luxury publishing: A post-scarcity perspective
Most academic publications are never attentively read by anyone. Increasingly, academic publications are not written by anyone in particular either. Rather, some scattered notes and data traces are bundled together by a willing engine for synthetic text generation, then slightly edited for accuracy. The automation of academic publishing has contributed to the sector’s exponential growth and impressive profit margins. It has also increased pressures on scholars and institutions to both produce and consume a massive, indigestible amount of slop. The more text we make, the less we know what to do with it. This is not a secret, and many academics are unhappy with the situation. Yet, we are tempted to uphold this unsustainable system for two simple reasons: the desire for personal recognition and the need for group identification: if not the writers of unread chapters and articles, what are we? In this contribution I argue that, since we know the faults of the system, and the ties that bind us to it, change is in fact simple. The proposal: let academic publishing be automated and anonymized to the fullest extent. The role of the human: perhaps to discard, trim, adapt, and, nudge, but only in exceptional circumstances to truly read and write. I thus argue not to resist the tide, but to accelerate current tendencies.
17.25-17.45: Open Discussion: Led by Julie Boéri and John Ødemark
17.45-18.00: Mona Baker: Concluding Remarks
The language of the event is English.
References
Baker, Mona and Gabriela Saldanha (2011) ‘Introduction to the Second Edition’, in Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha (eds) Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, London & New York: Routledge, xx-xxii.
Ødemark, John and Eivind, Engebretsen (2022) ‘Challenging Medical Knowledge Translation: Convergence and divergence of translation across epistemic and cultural boundaries’, Humanities & Social Sciencse Communincations 9, 71. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-022-01088-6
Rimke, Heidi (2010) ‘Remembering the Sociological Imagination: Transdisciplinarity, the Genealogical Method, and Epistemological Politics’, International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences 5(1): 239-254.