Giuseppe Sofo
Biography
Giuseppe Sofo is a professor and researcher in French language and translation at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice. He holds a PhD with a European label awarded by Avignon University and La Sapienza University in Rome. He was a scholarship student at the Franco-Italian University and the DAAD, and has taught at various universities in Italy, France and the United States (Urbino, L’Aquila, Parma, Avignon, Dickinson College). He has written the following monographs: I sensi del testo: Scrittura, riscrittura e traduzione (Novalogos, 2018) and Les éclats de la traduction: Langue, réécriture et traduction dans le théâtre d’Aimé Césaire (Éditions Universitaires d’Avignon, 2020). Alongside Giuliano Rossi, he co-directed a collection of essays on translation (Sulla traduzione, Solfanelli, 2015), and with Anne Emmanuelle Berger, a journal issue dedicated to the “translation genre” (de genere, n° 5, 2019). He has translated theatre, prose and poetry from French, English and German into Italian.
Abstract – Talk
Using augmented reality to serve the cause of translation, and to discover the city around us and its heterolingualism, thus creating an “augmented translation of the city”, could help us to find “good applications for crummy translations”, as Kenneth Church and Eduard Hovy wrote. The large-scale spread and popularity of automatic translation tools makes it necessary to rethink our relationship with translation, and in particular its material presence in contemporary reality. My talk will focus on an experience of reading the city through Google Translate’s image reading and translation function. This virtual visualization of translation, which creates a material presence of translation in space, may improve our perception of the city’s texts, and help create alternative, multilingual readings of spaces. By focusing mainly on discrepancies, that is to say translation mistakes, this process can also be a source of revealing metaphors about translation.
Abstract – Workshop
This workshop comes in the form of a reading of Montpellier through automatic translation. The participants are invited to read the city’s texts through Google Translate’s image reading and translation function, following an introduction to this tool and a presentation of previous experiences with it. The workshop will involve feedback from the participants, which will be studied either at a later date or on the day of the workshop itself. The plurality of points of view and of target languages, chosen by the participants, will allow for a plural and multilingual reading of the city, revealing the materiality of linguistic presence in defining the space. Duration: 2-3h. Location: Conference space and/or city centre.