Professor Haidee Kotze (University of Utrecht) visited UiA on 16 August to present her research to AFO members, who were able to engage in depth with her work during the Q&A sessions that followed her presentations.
The first session reported on one of Professor Kotze and colleagues’ latest publications, where they investigate readers’ reception of literary work and underline the extent to which fluency, assimilation and invisibility are still predominant normative constructs in the literary translation landscape.
In the second session, Professor Kotze provided insights on the controversy that erupted following the choice of translators for Amanda Gorman’s The Hill We Climb around the world. The debate, which was prompted virtually in the Netherlands, resonated globally for shedding light on pressing issues concerning the representation of personal and collective experiential knowledge of minoritized groups. As extensively discussed in Professor Kotze’s Medium piece, such controversies might be deeply interwoven with the lack of equitable and diverse representativeness that characterizes the ‘rooms’ of the translation industry.
