macht.sprache. & Artificially Correct: Discussion with Amy Zayed and Khairani Barokka
We warmly invite you to join us for a discussion that addresses possible ways of dealing with politically sensitive terminology in translation.
Speakers: Amy Zayed and Khairani Barokka
Moderator: Lisa Nechutnys
Discrimination works in and through language, and to tackle the many problems this presents, it is necessary to develop a sensitivity for how it happens. Drawing on the expertise of the invited speakers, this event will focus on terminology around different axes of power, e.g. (dis)ability, race and gender in different geographic and professional contexts.
Amy Zayed was born in Paderborn in 1974. At the age of 14, she made her first radio experiences at the British soldier station BFBS, where she also worked as a freelancer until 2008. After graduating from high school Amy Zayed studied English, French and Philosophy at the University of Bielefeld. During that time she worked at the Bielefeld University Radio, co-founded the Germany-wide campus radio music network and freelanced at WDR 1Live. Then, in 2004, she completed her traineeship at WDR. Currently she works as a freelance journalist primarily for the radio, but she also enjoys doing print and online formats with a foucs on culture and music in Germany and Britain. For example, she wrote about being disabled and a woman of color for Die Neue Norm. Since September 2020 Amy Zayed hosts the John Sinclair podcast for the publisher Bastei Luebbe.
Dr. Khairani Barokka is a disabled Minang-Javanese writer and artist from Jakarta, whose work has been presented widely internationally. Okka’s work centres disability justice as anticolonial praxis. She is currently Research Fellow at University of the Arts London, UK Associate Artist at Delfina Foundation, and Associate Artist at the National Centre for Writing (UK). Among her honours, she has been Modern Poetry in Translation‘s Inaugural Poet-in-Residence, a UNFPA Indonesian Young Leader Driving Social Change for arts practice and research, an Artforum Must-See, and an NYU Tisch Departmental Fellow. Her books are Indigenous Species (Tilted Axis) and Rope (Nine Arches), and she is co-editor of Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (Nine Arches). She has just published the book Ultimatum Orangutan (Nine Arches).
We invite you to join the discussion on Zoom on Tuesday, October 12 at 7 pm (CET). You can register here. It’s free and the language of the event is English. Interpretation into German and into English sign language.
The event is organised by poco.lit. and the Goethe-Institutes in North-Western Europe.
With the project Artificially Correct, the Goethe-Institute is working with experts to develop a tool that minimises the bias in translations. The goal is to strengthen the position of translators and encourage a conscious approach to machine translation, and include the experiences of as many people as possible.
poco.lit.’s macht.sprache. project is developing an app to foster politically sensitive translation between German and English. A year-long collaborative process will lead to the development of a final translation tool. poco.lit. invites you to be a part of this process by attending public events and joining the discussion on machtsprache.de.