Şebnem Susam-Saraeva
Professor of Translation Studies
- Translation Studies
- School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures
Contact details
Background
Şebnem Susam-Saraeva holds a Personal Chair of Translation Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Before joining Edinburgh in 2003, she held posts at the universities of Helsinki, Jyväskylä and Boğaziçi (Bosphorus).
Prof. Susam-Saraeva's past research has covered a range of areas: translation of literary theories, retranslations, research methodology in translation studies, internationalisation of the discipline, non-professionals translating/interpreting, translation and gender, translation and popular music, and ethical & representational issues in translation.
She is the author of Theories on the Move. Translation’s Role in the Travels of Literary Theories (2006) and Translation and Popular Music. Transcultural Intimacy in Turkish-Greek Relations (2015), and editor of Translation and Music (2008), Non-Professionals Translating and Interpreting. Participatory and Engaged Perspectives (2012, with Luis Pérez-González) and the Routledge Handbook of Translation and Health (2021, with Eva Spišiaková).
Her more recent work focuses on translation/interpreting in (maternal) health and on eco-translation.
On the former, she led the RSE-funded project Translating Informed Consent in Scottish Maternity Services in 2022, bringing together the expertise of midwifery and translation & interpreting studies. She is currently running a new RSE-funded project 'The beginnings: Factoring in interpreting at antenatal care and midwifery education' (March 2024-Nov 2025), which will examine the best ways of flagging up interpreting needs at early stages of antenatal care and of firmly incorporating linguistic and cultural awareness into Scottish midwifery curricula.
Prof Susam-Saraeva has published on translation and ecofeminism, as well as (knowledge) translation in climate crisis discourse. She is the co-founder of the Eco-translation Network (with Michael Cronin) and has held a visiting fellowship at Trinity Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin, with her work on the translation and representation of cetacean communication in arts and music. She is currently taking part at the Edinburgh Climate Research Leaders Programme (Jan-May 2024) and will be a Leverhulme International Fellow for her project 'Translation and cetacean communication systems: interactions and synergies' (August-November 2024), during which she will be working with ecologists specializing on marine ecosystems. She is also co-editing a journal special issue on feminism, gender and eco-translation (with Carolyn Shread).
Prof Susam-Saraeva’s literary translations include the 2017 Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day into Turkish (1993, 21 reprints by 2024). She is also the winner of PEN Wales Translation Challenge 2017 with her poetry translation from Küçük İskender. Her own poems appeared in Ambit 234, October 2018; The Scores, Issue 3, Winter 2017; and Doulaing, issues 31 (Summer 2017) and 28 (Autumn 2016).
Responsibilities & affiliations
Beyond the University of Edinburgh, Prof. Susam-Saraeva has been:
- 2023 onwards – Member of the editorial board of Feminist Translation Studies, Routledge
- 2021 onwards – Member of the editorial board of STRIDON: Studies in Translation and Interpreting, University of Ljubljana Press
- 2017 onwards – Member of the advisory board of Chronotopos - International Journal for Translation History, University of Vienna
- 2013 onwards – Member of the international advisory board of Translation Studies, Routledge
- 2018 – 2020 Member of the editorial board of the Approaches to Translation Studies series, Brill
- 2016 – 2020 Chair of ARTIS (Advancing Research in Translation and Interpreting Studies); member of the ARTIS Steering Committee between 2014-2020
- 2010–2015 – Co-vice president of the International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies (IATIS)
- 2006-2017 – Member of the Board of Advisors for Cunda International Workshop for Translators of Turkish Literature
- 2004-2006 – Member of the advisory panel for the journal New Voices in Translation Studies
Areas of interest for supervision
Prof Susam-Saraeva is available to supervise PhD projects in several areas within translation studies, but especially on translation and music, translation and health, non-professionals translating and interpreting, translation and gender, and translation and environment.
Past PhD students supervised
- Helena Miguélez-Carballeira (2005): Reneweing Old Acquaintances: The Conflation Between Critical and Translation paths in the Anglo-American Reception of Merce Rodoreda, Esther Tusquets and Rosa Montero
- Ya-mei Chen (2006): Reconstruction of Ideology-related Norms in News Trans-editing
- Fuzi El Mallah (2007): Cross-cultural/Linguistic translation of the figurative language of Quran
- Iraklis Pantopoulos (2009): The stylistic identity of the metapoet: A corpus-based comparative analysis using translations of Modern Greek Poetry
- Anne-Lise Feral (2009): Genre and Gender in Translation: The Poetological and Ideological Rewriting of Heroine-Centred and Women-oriented Fiction
- Kate November (2009): Translation and national identity - A case study based on the multilingual situation of Mauritius and its Reception of Mauritian Creole Translations of Shakespeare and Molière
- Pei Meng (2011): The politics and practice of trans-culturation: importing and translating autobiographical writings
- Chung-Yan Kong (2011): Translating destination images as a re-presentation of multiple identities: comparing the Chinese-to-English translations of four tourism websites
- Varvara Alexandrovna Christie (2012): Socio-cultural aspects of substandard language in film translation
- Charlotte Berry (2013): Publishing, translation, archives: Nordic children's literature in the United Kingdom, 1950-2000
- Elisabeth Mockli (2013): Reporting Goebbels in Translation: A Study of Text and Context
- James Kelly (2015): Toward a Deleuzean Theory of Translation: A Translation of & Commentary on A fuego eterno condenados
- Lingli Xie (2016): Blurred Boundaries between Translation and Rewriting Lyrics
- Bibiana Kan (2016): Translation of Novels by English Female Writers in China, 1935-1949
- Eva Spisiakova (2018): Shakespeare's Young Man behind the Iron Curtain: Censorship of Same-sex Affection in Czech and Slovak Sonnet Translations
-
Yijia Dong (2023): Rewriting Female Discourse across Cultures: Translating Chinese Feminist Literature into English
-
Grey Micah (2023): Translation of Gender-Nonconforming Characters from Japanese into English
-
Hanyu Wang (2023): Queer in the fansubbed The L Word: Representation and Reception of American Queer Experiences in Chinese Translation
Research summary
Prof. Susam-Saraeva is currently working on:
- Translation/interpreting in (maternal) health
- Eco-translation (with a specific focus on climate crisis and interspecies communication)
Research activities
- Public lecture at the School of Translation and Interpretation. University of Ottawa. Title: The Three Faces of Translation in Climate Crisis Discourse
- Workshop with student midwives at the University of the West of Scotland, Lanarkshire Campus, as part of the International Day of the Midwife
- Childbirth in multilingual and multicultural settings - workshop with student midwives at the University of Leipzig
- Translating informed consent in maternity care - workshop with student obstetricians and student interpreters at the University of Leipzig
- The Translation Studies Network of Ireland Workshop for PhDs and Early Career Researchers. Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation, Trinity College Dublin. Title: Navigating the World of Academic Publishing and Impact.
- Steering Committee member of joint project by Edinburgh Pregnancy Research Team and the Lothian Maternity Voices Partnership (External organisation)
- Public lecture - Dolphin and Whale Communication in Arts and Music. Towards a New Ethics of Translation and Representation. Trinity Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin.
- Translation in Climate Crisis Discourse, SALIS, Dublin City University
- Trinity College Dublin to
- 6th e-Expert Seminar in Translation & Language Teaching: Feminism and Gender Awareness in Modern Foreign Languages and Translation. University of Córdoba - Translation and interpreting in maternal healthcare: Implications for training
- Invited talk at CenTraS Online Lecture Series 2021-22: Translation and Health, University College London
- Guest Professor at DOTTSS (Doctoral and Teacher-Training Translation Studies Summer School), University of Boğaziçi, Istanbul to
- Keynote at New Voices in Portuguese Translation Studies IV NOVA/FCSH - Translation and interpreting in maternal healthcare contexts: ethical and feminist issues
- Member of the editorial board for STRIDON: Studies in Translation and Interpreting, University of Ljubljana Press (External organisation)
- Invited talk at the Department of Translation and Interpreting, University of Bogazici, Istanbul: Translation in Maternal Health
-
Roundtable: Feminist interpreting (studies) – the story so far
In:
Translation Studies, vol. 16, pp. 134-159
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14781700.2022.2147989
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Comment/debate (Published) -
Retranslating ‘Kara Toprak’: Ecofeminism revisited through a canonical folk song
(14 pages)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003134633-16
Research output: › Chapter (peer-reviewed) (Published) -
The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Health
(428 pages)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003167983
Research output: › Book (Published) -
Beyond translation and medicine: Initiating exchanges between translation studies and health humanities
(10 pages)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003167983
Research output: › Chapter (Published) -
Translation in maternal and neonatal health
(21 pages)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003167983
Research output: › Chapter (Published) -
Performance and socio-cultural context in interlingual cover songs: Translation as inspiration
Research output: › Chapter (peer-reviewed) (Published) -
Response by Susam-Saraeva to the responses to “Representing experiential knowledge”
In:
Translation Studies, vol. 14, pp. 358-363
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14781700.2021.1973552
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Comment/debate (Published) -
Representing experiential knowledge: Who may translate whom?
In:
Translation Studies, vol. 14, pp. 84-95
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14781700.2020.1846606
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Comment/debate (Published) -
Translating birth stories as counter-narratives
In:
Mutatis Mutandis: Latin American Translation Journal, vol. 13, pp. 45-63
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17533/udea.mut.v13n1a03
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published) -
Diversity of translational data in contemporary social knowledge making
Research output: › Chapter (peer-reviewed) (Published) -
Interlingual cover versions: How popular songs travel round the world
In:
The Translator, vol. 25, pp. 42-59
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13556509.2018.1549710
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published) -
Translation and music
Research output: › Entry for encyclopedia/dictionary (Published) -
In search of an 'international translation studies': Tracing terceme and tercume in the blogosphere
In:
Translation Studies, vol. 10, pp. 69-86
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14781700.2016.1219273
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published) -
Günden Kalanlar (Turkish translation of Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro)
Research output: › Book (Published) -
Translation and Popular Music: Transcultural Intimacy in Turkish-Greek Relations
(180 pages)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3726/978-3-0353-0769-6
Research output: › Book (Published)