2019 Baker-Nord Distinguished Faculty Lecture – Brooding Over the Face of the Deep: Language, Otherness, and Technologies of Translation

Timothy Beal
February 6th, 2019

Location: Tinkham Veale University Center Ballroom A, 10038 Bellflower Road, Cleveland, OH 4410

New and emerging media technologies are transforming our understandings and practices of translation. We are more aware than ever of the impossibility of separating message from medium. For biblical translators, this means and that our subject of research is not the Bible in media but Bible as media. What possibilities are emerging for altering translation in ways that not only make us more aware of the ambiguities inherent in any process of translation but also of the irreducibility of the text in translation as a kind of face of the other? How might new technologies and interfaces provide users access to the indeterminate processes of translation? How might we use them to create spaces that host protracted encounters with translation — broodings over the face of the deep, to borrow a biblical phrase — that open up creative, indeterminate, meaning-making possibilities? These questions fly in the face of the dominant orientation of projects such as Google Translate, which aim to make translation immediate and invisible. This lecture is presented by Timothy Beal, Florence Harkness Professor Religion and recipient of the 2019 Baker-Nord Center Award for Distinguished Scholarship in the Humanities, which recognizes the outstanding scholarship of Case Western Reserve University faculty in the Humanities and their contribution to the University’s reputation.

This event is free and open to the public.  Registration requested.


Professor Beal’s Faculty Page