This year’s Heim Colloquium begins on Thursday of this week. The faculty organizing committee turned things over to a dynamic group of graduate students headed by Ph.D. candidate Cynthia Shin to select this year’s theme and brainstorm an invitation list, and we ended up with a great group of five (Esther Allen, Stine An, Rachel Cordasco, Soleil David, and Mordecai Martin) addressing an extremely important, timely, and difficult topic: “Who Owns Translation? On Literary Rights and Cultural Ownership.”
Here’s the full description:
The Heim Colloquium is made possible by a generous donation to Indiana University by the family of Michael Henry Heim (1943 – 2012), one of the most eminent literary translators of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first century in the US. The Heim bequest allows Indiana University to organize events on themes relevant to the many facets of Michael Henry Heim’s work. For our inaugural colloquia, we chose to focus on the imagined reader of literary translations (in 2024) and translator paratexts, the introductions and afterwords translators have written about their work (in 2025). For this year’s event, we invited a core group of translation-focused graduate students at IU Bloomington to take the lead in forming the questions to be addressed and inviting a panel of experts to help us address them.
This year’s colloquium is “Who Owns Translation? On Literary Rights and Cultural Ownership”
Who owns translations? Is it the translator? The author of the source text? The publisher? The “foundation” and other estates that control the rights? Our colloquium explores the question of ownership from theoretical, practical, and speculative perspectives. First, what are some ways that the translator conceptually “owns” the translation? At issue are questions of how translators make choices that redistribute narrative authority, how they develop a responsibility for the work of another, and whether certain texts “invite” co-ownership while others do not.
We would also like to explore how the literary market shapes questions of ownership. How does the contemporary culture of self-promotion and social media play a role in this ownership? What are some cultural imbalances that exist when translating from minor languages and/or niche subcultures into the dominant language and/or literary market? Additionally, what practical considerations do translators have when obtaining rights of the source text and negotiating control over their translations? What institutional and legal barriers must one navigate? Are there creative loopholes to work around copyright and other regulations regarding translation?
Finally, we want to offer a space for imagination. What would an ideal version of literary copyright look like?
Click on the link above to see the bios of the invitees and their short statements on the topic.
This is an in-person event, but I promise to convey the verdict afterward.
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