IASIL 2026
Pázmány Péter Catholic University (PPCU)
Budapest
6-10 July, 2026
Translating Ireland
Call for Papers
Mo ghrá is mo rún tú!
Eibhlín Dhubh Ní Chonaill, ‘Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire’/ ‘Lament for Art Ó Laoghaire’
“Ainsi soit-il” – there it was again – a very bright sound, like a bugle in a street.
Kate O’Brien, The Land of Spices
I’m going to Rome next week, she said. Because the Italian translation of my book is coming out.
Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You
Translation is a central feature of Irish writing. The matter concerns not only the transition from one language or dialect to another, but also acts of cultural interpretation. Works such as Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, the Oriental pseudo-translations of James Clarence Mangan or Brian Friel’s Translations make explicit the political, hermeneutic and aesthetic vulnerabilities of translation processes. Acts of translation or interpretation disclose the contested history and politics of language and culture in Ireland from medieval times to the present. One way of reading translation-as-transformation in James Joyce, for example, is an apotheosis of Irish linguistic or cultural doubling, apparent in such works as Edmund Spenser’s A View of Ireland and Douglas Hyde’s Love Songs of Connacht. Poets like Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Medbh McGuckian and Sinéad Morrissey further globalize Irish translation in the light of modern and contemporary female experience. Melata Uche Okorie’s stories highlight the struggles with cultural and political miscommunication in contemporary African-Irish migrant experience.
The cultural and linguistic translation of Irish stories, legends, poems, plays, novels and films appears across a global spectrum. The languages include British-English, American-English, Canadian English and French, Latin, Italian, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Hungarian, Scandinavian languages, Central/East-European languages, Balkan languages, Russian, Turkish, ancient and modern Greek, Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Urdu, Yoruba and Swahili. The matter is not exclusively one of language, but also of cultural positioning and political identification. In such instances, cultural and political agents transform Ireland through languages, environments or histories removed from the island of Ireland itself. Certain impressions of Ireland sometimes shape these engagements: a country that was subject historically to the power of a politically stronger neighbour; a land with a vibrant spiritual sense of topographical supernaturalism or trans-dimensionality; a society transformed into one of technological advancement and ethnic diversity in the twenty-first century; a country of distinctive literary, vocal and thespian talent.
Ireland translating is of equal significance to translating Ireland. The vast panoply of words, phrases and passages in Irish literature taken from continental European, Hispanic, Asian and African languages, raise literary-aesthetic, performative, and politico-ideological questions of contextual significance, internal translation, assimilation, appropriation, domestication and distancing. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver – dreamed up in County Tyrone - learning Lilliputian, Oscar Wilde’s Salomé in French, Yeats transforming pagan Irish mythology through medieval Japanese and Elizabethan English styles, Samuel Beckett translating himself from French back to English; Ciaran Carson’s Dante and Rimbaud: each instance involves imaginative Irish acts of translation with a global reach. Irish writing is famed for regional dialect translation. Examples abound, from Lady Gregory’s Galway Kiltartanese to Marina Carr’s Midlands guttural. What is happening – hermeneutically, syntactically, stylistically and politically – in these and other renderings of speech or behavioural patterns associated with different Irish regions and contexts?
This conference will address these issues, developing discussion of Ireland translated/translating beyond a legitimate but limiting concern with translational linguistic accuracy or error. Peter Sloterdijk’s theory of the spherical offers one way of conceptualizing the blend of Irish and non-Irish spheres, Irish writing a process of forming and bursting linguistic, topographic and cultural bubbles. This perpetual dialectic arises through writing and visual culture that moves between different languages, dialects and constellations. The conference also offers the opportunity to explore the Irish Revival movement of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century as a collective exercise in the mass cultural translation of a vast body of antique or medieval Irish texts and oral tales.
Is féidir chun roinnt painéil a chur i láthair tríd teanga na Gaeilge ma tá suim ag ollaimh nó ag iníonacha/mic léinn achoimreanna a bhailiú le chéile mar panél de trí ceann, agus iad a sheoladh isteach.
We invite abstracts for 20-minute conference paper presentations relating to questions of translating or interpreting Ireland under any of the following thematic headings:
- The politics and aesthetics of Irish translation and interpretation
- Translation and Irish multicultural/multi-ethnic experience
- Translating Irish literature and culture into British, continental European, Asian, African, Australasian, South American, North American languages and/or cultural contexts
- Irish translation/interpretation of British, continental European, Asian, North or South American, African literatures, languages and/or cultures
- Translation and antiquarianism
- Translating/interpreting Irish spaces and localities
- Irish translation/interpretation of non-Irish spaces and localities
- Anti-translation
- Translating/interpreting Ireland in the digital world
- Irish-language translation
- Dialect in Irish literature, drama, film, television
- Translation in Irish modernism and postmodernism
- Translation/interpretation in Irish Revival writing
- Translation/interpretation of Irish myth, legend and folklore in modern English
- Translating Greek mythology in Irish poetry, drama, film
- Translation and Orientalism
- Medieval Irish and Hiberno-Latin translation
- Translation and the nonsensical
We are also open to receiving abstracts on Irish topics not directly related to the conference theme.
Keynote Speakers
- Prof. Brian Ó Conchubhair, University of Notre Dame
- Dr. Sonja Lawrenson, Manchester Metropolitan University
- Dr. Eglantina Remport, ELTE, Budapest
- Dr. Sorcha De Brún, University of Limerick
- Dr. Aidan O’Malley, University of Rijeka
Please submit your abstract to the following email address, using the description ‘Budapest IASIL 2026’ followed by your family name:
We welcome proposals for three-paper panels. Please indicate the panel title when submitting your abstract as part of a panel.
The deadline for receipt of abstracts is Friday, November 28, 2025.
We will circulate details of conference registration fees, procedures and additional optional costs in January 2026. If you intend to register as a student, we would appreciate if you can submit, together with your abstract, a scanned copy of letter of confirmation of your status at your academic institution, signed by your Head of Department or your Thesis Supervisor.
Finally, we are curious if some of you might be interested in paying for a daylong cruise along the River Danube from Budapest to Esztergom on the day after the conference, Saturday July 11, 2026. See the following links for details of some of the cruises currently available. Please let us know if you would like to book either of these cruises:
- Budapest to Esztergom: From Budapest: Danube Bend Day Trip in English | GetYourGuide (current price - 78 euros)
- Budapest to Visegrád: Full-Day Visegrád Cruise From Budapest | GetYourGuide (current price – 22 euros)
We look forward to hearing from you.
Best wishes
Michael McAteer, Márta Pellérdi, László Takács
