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My Soul Language
Bonaventure Balla (Norfolk State University)
Bonaventure Balla’s favorite word in any language is “cornucopia.” And that’s saying something, because Balla is a translator who speaks seven languages.
The Universal Language
Sophia Serghi (William & Mary)
As a composer, Sophia Serghi sees her work as translation. She says music is the universal language that can translate our most painful, vulnerable experiences.
Cross-cultural Translation
Kyoko Mori (George Mason University)
On some level, every book is an act of translation. Kyoko Mori has spent her career as a writer looking back at her Japanese upbringing through the lens of her American life. And she understands that writers have very little control over how a reader will translate a story into their own context.
Translating Colonialism
Rebecca Hightower-Weaver (Virginia Tech)
Over the centuries, the same images and themes occur again and again in settler colonial literature. Rebecca Hightower-Weaver explores how these themes were used to translate unknown lands to colonies–and ultimately sell a harmful myth to would-be settlers.
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