When Black Stories Go Global: Analyzing the Translation of African-American Literature and Film

When Black Stories Go Global: Analyzing the Translation of African-American Literature and Film

Eva Michelle Wheeler, Mark Anthony Neal

2019

Type: Visiting Fellow

A team of students led by Humanities Unbounded Fellow Eva Michelle Wheeler will explore how culturally-bound language in African-American literature and film is rendered for international audiences and will map where and into which languages these translations are occurring. Students will use a reference dataset to build and annotate a translation corpus, explore the lexical choices and translation strategies employed by translators, and conduct a macro-level analysis of the geographic and linguistic spread of these types of translations. The results of this project will bring a quantitative dimension to what has largely been a qualitative analysis and will contribute to ongoing academic conversations about language, race, and globalization.