British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship: Individual and Cultural Memory in Translation: Mediating French post-WWII accounts of deportation and occupation

This project explores and evaluates the role of translation in the mediation of both individual and cultural memory. It undertakes a comparative study between French accounts of deportation and occupation and their English translations, placing analytical focus on understanding how translation recasts lived experiences and ideologies, as originally encoded in personal testimonies which recount life in the Nazi camps, and in museum audioguides which circulate cultural discourses of occupation. The research further considers the epistemological and ethical implications of memory translation. The findings supplement and broaden a small but emerging body of work within Translation Studies on translating the Holocaust, while the intersections drawn between cultural memory, translation and audio-guides are without precedent. Overall, the proposed project offers new empirical and theoretical insights into the complex dynamics of memory in translation.