On Friday, April 5th, TransHum and the Translation Graduate Student Program hosted Kaleidoscopic Translation Studies Conference. The annual Gregory M. Shreve Lecture Series in Translation Studies presented Dr. Richard Watts (University of Washington), who gave the keynote address titled “Translators, Interpreters, and Other Fixers in Cultural Texts of the ‘Linguacene’”.
Throughout the weekend, the program was packed with engaging workshops and conversations. The weekend events also held a special presentation of Dr. Washbourne’s new book Translators on Translation (Routledge, 2025). The conference also gave graduate students from numerous universities an opportunity to present their research at the intersection between translation and multiple related fields in the humanities.
This year was especially significant: it marks the 30th anniversary of a landmark moment in the history of Western Translation Studies. In 1995, two foundational works were published: Gideon Toury’s Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond and Lawrence Venuti’s The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. That same year, the Kent Psychology Forum in Millersburg, Ohio, gave rise to Cognitive Translation Studies, and translation pedagogy emerged as a major field with the publication of Daniel Gile’s Basic Concepts and Models for Interpreter and Translator Training and Donald Kiraly’s Pathways to Translation: From Process to Pedagogy.
1995 exemplified the heterogeneity and interdisciplinarity that continue to define Translation Studies today. This conference is a celebration of that legacy—of the strength, curiosity, and humanity that have shaped our field and that continue to drive it forward. We were so excited to have hosted such a successful event and to collaborate with all of our colleagues. For more information on the event, you can view the and .