News

We are excited to introduce a new publication—a result of a four-year project contributed to by colleagues from the Department of Translation and Interpreting Studies. This comprehensive book, Translation and Censorship in the Context of Soviet Ideology: Lithuania, 1940–1990, delves into the intersection of translation and ideological control during the Soviet era.

As stated in the introduction, this book is not only for researchers and translation specialists. The authors hope it will also interest anyone who cares about the literature and authors whose translated works reached us during Soviet times— and those that did not. It explores how selections were made, how and why certain works were presented to readers, and what additional (educational or explanatory) functions these publications served. Moreover, it reveals insights that cannot be gathered solely from books themselves — such as how censorship functions were delegated and how omissions were made within texts.

The book presents a wealth of intriguing data and statistical analysis, shedding light on the dynamics of fiction publishing over 50 years while challenging certain long-held assumptions. Readers will also find captivating, almost detective-like stories of translation, censorship, and book publishing. These accounts illustrate not only how Soviet censorship influenced the texts that reached us but also how it shaped works that remain outside our cultural sphere.

Together with the book’s editors and authors, we hope this publication will help bridge gaps in translation criticism, offer a fresh perspective on the Soviet era, and encourage those interested in translation, censorship, and ideology to reflect on these concepts—their motivations, applications, and our own relationship with them.

CALL FOR PAPERS

International Conference

TRANSLATION AT THE CROSSROADS OF IDEOLOGIES AND CULTURES

Department of Translation and Interpretation Studies, Faculty of Philology, Vilnius University

18–20 June 2026

The Department of Translation and Interpretation Studies at the Faculty of Philology of Vilnius University cordially invites you to the international conference Translation at the Crossroads of Ideologies and Cultures to discuss a multilevel role and complex positionality of translation and translators in changing historical, social, political, and communicational settings.

Throughout the course of history, translation has been seen as both, dangerous and necessary. Like two-faced Janus, it has been marking the very threshold between cultures, serving for opening up to and blocking the Other (Tatolytė 2024; Lefevere 1995 (1990); Wolf 2002). It has been used and manipulated for various ends, from going through genuine societal transformations to creating an illusion of multicultural communication (Bassnett, Lefevere 1998; Maskaliūnienė, Tatolytė 2024). This multifaceted role of translation comes into prominence in times of change and formation, with the call for balancing between novelty and preservation and the need of introducing, appeasing or estranging the encountered ideologies and cultures. Translation as bearing witness is instrumental in times of catastrophe, and is used as a tool of empowerment by the oppressed, and of subjugation by the dominant powers (Boase-Beier 2021; van Wyke 2010). Furthermore, Crises and precarious communicational circumstances highlight an ethically charged role and embodiment of a translator as mediator; carrying a certain level of responsibility for a successful resolution due to holding a competence of bridging participating parties (Cronin 2005; O'Brien, Federici 2022). Even in minor communicational day-to-day situations, the role of translation and translator’s positionality can shed light on larger underlying processes and underpin socio-political, ecological, and cultural stands. Therefore, a more detailed study into what part translation plays in history and in our daily encounters with the Other is invited.

How does translation as a global activity shape the values we communicate and what is the “specificity of its impacts in different locations over time” (Cronin 2017)? Does it help to break the stereotypes or does it enforce them? Is it paving the paths to understanding or does it facilitate ostracising? What is the role of translation in the formation of nations? How much does translation influence our policies and legal practises? What is its impact on our perception of the Other and the world at large? Is a translator always a willing participant of these processes? How is this role of translation and translator changing with the growing technology-driven shift in cultures and societies, if at all?

We invite papers from Translation Studies and Multidisciplinary research addressing, but not limited to, the following axes of discussion on the role of translation:

• Translation in nation formations and cultural transformations (legal, literary and other modes of translation): Translation in literary polysystem and canon formation; Translation and legal practices and policies; Translation in diaspora; Micro historical perspective on translation;
• Translation in day-to-day social settings: public discourse and performativity (periodicals, media, social media); Translation and (self)censorship; Translation ideology and postcolonial approaches;
• Eco-translation, translation of the queer and feminist space—the shift from periphery to the centre of attention;
• Cultural and other representation in Audiovisual translation;
• Translation in cultural milieu: visual and stage arts, cinema, music, pop and sub culture;
• Translation and Memory studies: translating memory and memory in translation;
• Translation/interpreting in borderline situations (translation in crises and conflicts, translation of catastrophes);
• Translation/interpretation for refugees, migrants, and ethnic minorities: Community interpreting and interpreting in situations of controlled communication; Education for mediation;
• Translator’s embodiment, agency and actors’ network;
• MA and AI translation: Biases, shortcomings, responsibilities and perception of translation.

Following the conference, we will invite submissions for the Special Issue of the journal Vertimo Studijos / Studies in Translation.

 REFERENCES

Bassnett, Susan, André Lefevere. 1998. Constructing Cultures. Essays on Literary Translation. Multilingual Matters.

Boase-Beier, Jean. 2021. Retelling Catastrophe through Translation. Narrative Retellings: Stylistic Approaches, ed. by Marina Lambrou. Bloomsbury Publishing, 129–142.

Cronin, Michael. 2005. Burning the House Down: Translation in a Global Setting. Language and Intercultural Communication 5(2), 108–119.

Cronin, Michael. 2017. Eco-translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of Anthropocene. Routledge.

Maskaliūnienė, Nijolė, Ingrida Tatolytė (eds.). 2024. Translation And Censorship Under Soviet Ideology. Lithuania, 1940–1990. Summary, transl. by Daina Valentinavičienė. Vertimas ir cenzūra sovietinės ideologijos sąlygomis. Lietuva, 1940–1990, sud. Nijolė Maskaliūnienė, Ingrida Tatolytė. Vilnius University Press, 478–497.

Lefevere, André. 1995 (1990). Translation: Its Genealogy in the West. Translation, History and Culture, ed. by Susan Bassnett, André Lefevere. Cassell, 14–28.

O’Brien, Sharon, Federico M. Federici (eds.). 2022. Translating Crises. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Tatolytė, Ingrida. 2024. Dviveidis Janas: vertimas tarp atverties ir užkardymo. Vertimas ir cenzūra sovietinės ideologijos sąlygomis. Lietuva, 1940–1990, sud. Nijolė Maskaliūnienė, Ingrida Tatolytė. Vilnius University Press, 107–162.

van Wyke, Ben. 2010. Ethics and Translation. Handbook of Translation Studies Vol. 1, ed. by Yves Gambier, Luc van Doorslaer. John Benjamins, 111–115.

Wolf, Michaela. 2002. Censorship as Cultural Blockage: Banned Literature in the Late Habsburg Monarchy. TTR 15 (2), 45–61.

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Queering the Cold War Canon, or Translation and the Making of a Queer World Literature

Prof. dr. Brian James Baer, Kent State University (USA)

Translation, Minority and AI

Prof. dr. Michael Cronin, Trinity College Dublin, the University of Dublin (Ireland)

Crisis of Trust: Reaching Translation Consensus When Communicating Health Risks

Prof. dr. Federico M. Federici, University College London (United Kingdom)

Ideological Shifts and the Politics of Retranslation in Ukraine

Assoc. prof. / Researcher dr. Oleksandr Kalnychenko, V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University / Matej Bel University in Banská Bystrica (Ukraine / Slovakia)

Public Service Interpreting and Technology: Challenges, Opportunities, and Controverses

Prof. dr. Raquel Lázaro Gutiérrez, FITISPos-UAH Group, University of Alcalá (Spain)

SPECIAL SESSION & DISCUSSION

Beyond Trust and Necessity: Translation and Interpreting Technologies in Conflict and Crisis Situations

Convener: Dr. Khetam Al Sharou, Dublin City University (Ireland)

ABSTRACT SUBMISSION

Conference languages are English and Lithuanian. Simultaneous interpreting to English and Lithuanian will be provided for keynote speakers’ presentations. The conference will be held on-site.

We invite paper contributions of 30 min in total, 20 min for presenting and 10 min for discussion.

Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words and biographical notes of no more than 150 words  in English or Lithuanian by 16 February 2026 using the online abstract submission form: <Abstract Submission>   

Notification of acceptance will be given by 16 March 2026.

'Early Bird' notification of acceptance will be given by 7 November 2025.

Please note there will be a fee of 150 EUR (PhD students` concession 80 EUR) for those who present a paper, and 80 EUR (students’ concession 40 EUR) for those who wish to attend without presenting a paper.

Should you have any questions related to this call, please feel free to contact dr. Dalia Mankauskienė on behalf of our organizing committee: <>;.

For more information, please visit our conference website.

Translation at the Crossroads of Ideologies and Cultures

https://www.flf.vu.lt/en/vsk

Last week we published a new, fresh, sixteenth special issue of the journal Translation Studies, continuing the debate on the interplay between translation, ideology and ethics, which was launched at last year's conference Translation, Ideology, Ethics: Response and Credibility, and which is highly topical in today's geopolitical context.

This issue is edited by Prof. Nijolė Maskaliūnienė and Ingrida Tatolytė.

The authors of the articles delve into how ideologies affect the field of translation (Seyhan Bozkurt Jobanputra and Mehmet Zeki Giritli, Nataliia Rudnytska, Paulius V. Subačius, Karolina Butkuviene and Lolita Petrulionė); how translation influences our attitudes and values, and how it shapes the way we perceive ourselves and others (Ayman S. Elbarbary, Sabrina Solange Ferrero); how translation studies are enriched by multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches (Anna Sverediuk, Mathilde Kamal-Girard); how we understand the history of translation and how it influences our collective and individual memory (Antony Hoyte-West, Karin Sibul, Gaëtan Regniers, Andrejs Veisbergs, Gunta Ločmele); what skills translators and interpreters should acquire in order to be able to work in situations where they are expected to play a more active role as communication facilitators, rather than just passively 'transmitting' a message, and how they should be trained for this role (Carmen Torrella Gutiérrez and Francisco J. Vigier-Moreno).

We hope you will also be interested in two conversations with renowned translation studies scholars, Professors Jorge Díaz-Cintas (University College London) and Outi Paloposki (University of Turku), who discuss the changing field of translation studies, the growing emphasis on the power and impact of translation, the contexts in which translation takes place, and the responsibility and self-reflection of translators. Although these scholars address seemingly disparate sub-fields of translation studies - audiovisual translation, which is forward-looking and technology-oriented, and the history of translation, which looks to the past and the archives - the issues they raise are very similar. Both also stress the need for closer collaboration between practitioners and theorists.

We invite you to read this special issue online and join the debate.

Follow us on Facebook ir and Twitter.

We are pleased to announce that our department has been granted free access to the Phrase Academic Edition, an academic program designed for universities with translation courses.

You are kindly invited to the Translating Europe Workshop 2023 in Vilnius or online. This year the focus is on research into the language of EU documents.

The agenda of the event may be found here.

Please register here: https://ec.europa.eu/eusurvey/runner/TEW_Vilnius

Only registered users will be sent the link to the event via Teams.

International conference

Translation, Ideology, Ethics: Response and Credibility

with the International Translating Europe Workshop

Ethics in the Era of Machine Translation

Department of Translation and Interpretation Studies, Faculty of Philology, Vilnius University, Lithuania

22–24 September 2022

Department of Translation and Interpretation Studies at the Faculty of Philology of Vilnius University cordially invites you to celebrate its 25^th anniversary by revisiting the place, role and impact of translation in the broad, dynamic social and multicultural communicational context, and to take part at the international conference on Translation, Ideology, Ethics: Response and Credibility which will include the international workshop on Ethics in the Era of Machine Translation.

Nowadays global processes invite ever-increasing multicultural interaction, exchange of ideas and multinational coordination, therefore the demand for translation and its significance are growing, respectively raising visibility of translation as mediation, and of its participants. As translation never takes place in the vacuum and the need for it emanates in the contexts that are saturated with various ideologies, cultures and stands, the very process of translation, its product, and participants are affected by these contexts and make an impact on them. Recent geopolitical changes, fast-growing communication technology, media intervention into the spheres that used to belong exclusively to home affairs, global quest for information and its deliberation in social networks highlighted the questions of reliability of translation and trust in it, and emphasised responsibility of translators and translation technologies. The collisions of ideologies, combined with the ethical stances that translators have to assume in response have drawn attention to the risks associated with translation situations that extend beyond the text and directly affect the participants of those situations. These developments consequently touch the field of Translation Studies which, as it is rightly noted by Susan Bassnett and David Johnston, is necessarily situated in the context of the ‘issues alive in the perceptions and relationships of our world today.’

We hope to expand the discussion on interrelation between translation, ideology and ethics, by inviting papers addressing, but not limited to the following questions:

* How do ideologies affect the field of translation?

* What is characteristic of the process of translation in crisis situations?

* What are translator’s ethical choices in crisis situations?

* What are the ideological assumptions and implications of translation from/into major and minor languages?

* How does translation influence our positions and values, and form our images and perception of ourselves and others?

* How do we perceive history of translation? How does the history of translation function in the collective and individual memory?

* What is a rendition quality of ideological and ethical contents in human and machine translation? Who is to be held responsible for reliability of translation?

* How is the notion of translation ethics changing?

* What skills are to be acquired by translators in the developing situation when they cease being perceived as merely a passive channel of transmission and assume a more active role of a communication moderator?  How do these changes affect translator training?

* How do Translation Studies respond to the changing milieu? What problems and ethical challenges do researchers in TS face? How is the inquiry into translation enriched by the multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary and supradisciplinary research approach? Is the translation research trusted in the view of ideological and ethical differences? What are the most relevant perspectives in nowadays translation research?

We are inviting papers touching upon these topics in different subfields of TS, including history (of) translation, (N)MT, audiovisual, literary, political, parliamentary, news, media and debates translation, and conference and community interpreting. Papers given by researches working in the field of ethics, political ideologies, intercultural relations, semiotics, socio- and psycholinguistics, psychoanalysis, memory studies, discourse analysis, imagology, textual criticism, and literary and classical studies with the focus on translation are also very welcome.

The workshop will cover a wide range of current trends in translation research, as well as its application to translation industry and public sector.

REFERENCES

Bassnett, S., Johnston, D. 2019. The Outward Turn in Translation Studies, The Translator, 25:3, 181–188.

Hatim, B., Mason, I. 1997. The Translator as Communicator. Routledge.

Lefevere, A. 1992. Translation/History/Culture. London, New York: Routledge.

Venuti, L. 1995. The Translator's Invisibility. London, New York: Routledge.

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Prof. dr. Jorge Díaz-Cintas, University College London, United Kingdom

Prof. dr. Nike Kocijančič Pokorn, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

Prof. dr. Sharon O'Brien, Dublin City University, Ireland

Assoc. prof. dr. Elisabet Tiselius, Stockholm University, Sweden

ABSTRACT SUBMISSION

Conference and Workshop languages are English and Lithuanian. Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words, in English or Lithuanian by 20 June 2022 using the online abstract submission form: Abstract submission   

Notification of acceptance will be given by 1 July 2022.

Due to COVID 19 situation, in order to mitigate possible risks, we are planning our conference to be held in two formats: Live at Vilnius University (Vilnius, Lithuania), and online via ZOOM platform. Should the pandemic situation require, the whole conference will be held online.

If you have any questions related to this call, please feel free to contact Žygimantas Pekūnas on behalf of our organizing committee:

Details of the scientific and organizing committees, as well as all other information pertaining to the conference and workshop, are available on the website: Translation, Ideology, Ethics: Response and Credibility – 22–24 September 2022

For more information on the conference please visit: http://www.vertimas2022.flf.vu.lt/

You are kindly invited to register to the Translating Europe Workshop (TEW) Ethics in the Era of Machine Translation. This workshop brings the concerns of ethics into the changing scenery of translator’s/interpreter’s workplace and into the translation industry and public domain. It covers the range of questions from interrelations of the participants in the translation process when that is affected by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the platform economy, to the very question of ethics of Machine Translation (MT).

How much does the mechanisation of the translator’s work affect relations between clients, agencies/institutions, and translators/revisors? How do changing working conditions affect translators’/interpreters’ job satisfaction? Who is responsible for the reliability of the output when MT is used? Is MT being designed empathetically? How do companies, institutions and people in the public domain use MT? Do translators and users of MT trust it? How does this growing engagement with MT by companies and translation users change the role and visibility of translator/interpreter? What is the future of Translator/Interpreter Education and human translation in this rapidly digitalising world?

New technologies raise new ethical challenges. The participants of TEW seek to investigate how translation professionals can help in solving those tasks, and when MT could be used or perhaps should not be used at all.

Translating Europe Workshop Ethics in the Era of Machine Translation is held as part of International Conference Translation, Ideology, Ethics: Response and Credibility. Participation in the workshop is free. You can find the programme here.

KEYNOTE SPEAKER AND CONVENER

Assoc. prof. dr. Joss Moorkens, Dublin City University, Ireland

Simultaneous interpreting to English and Lithuanian will be provided for the Workshop presentations.

The Workshop is sponsored by the Directorate-General for Translation, European Commission.

On 8 October 2021, we invite you to participate in a traditional conference organized as part of the Translating Europe Workshop. This year's theme is "At the Edge of Translation and Beyond". Keynote speaker: Professor Andrejs Veisbergs, University of Latvia. Translation, Paratexts, Translator Visibility.
 
Conference programme can be found here. To join the conference, please click on the following Zoom link: https://liedm.zoom.us/j/86981829561.
 
Organised by the Department of Translation and Interpreting Studies, Faculty of Philology, Vilnius University and the Department of the Lithuanian Language, Directorate General for Translation, European Commission
Social partners: the Lithuanian Translators Association and the Lithuanian Association of Conference Interpreters

Interpreting into English and Lithuanian will be provided

Initiated in 2013 by EUATC, the European Language Industry Survey (ELIS) is co-organized with ELIA, FIT Europe, GALA, the EMT university network, the European Commission’s LIND group, and Women in Localization. It's a perfect example of a collaboration that produces concrete results. GALA is pleased to play a role in the creation of the survey and the dissemination of the results. Special thanks are owed to Rudy Tirry (EUATC) for all his hard work analyzing and visualizing the data.  

The survey solicits input from language service companies (LSC), independent language professionals, training and language technology providers, language service buyers, and private and public translation departments. The survey covers market trends, expectations and concerns, challenges and obstacles, as well as changes in business practices.

This year the ELIS survey received 907 responses:

• 172 language service companies
• 575 independent language professionals
• 105 representatives of training institutions
• 44 language departments and language service buyers
• 11 language technology providers

What was most surprising about the data for 2020 was that there were no big surprises. Considering that the world was gripped by a pandemic and world economies were in flux, the global language industry emerged mostly unscathed, and in some cases, ahead of the curve. Throughout the data, we saw a "sweet spot" emerge in the 1-5 million Euro revenue range. This segment seemed most likely to thrive and reported increased profitability, more new hires, and operational changes and developments focused on growth rather than just efficiency. Many of the other data were aligned with previous survey results. Certainly some changes were accelerated, but for the most part, LSCs stayed on a familiar trajectory.

We welcome you to download the full slide deck and review comprehensive survey results. 

(article prepared by Globalization and Localization Association)