Special Issue CFP – Living in Languages
“Becoming Translator: Ontological Shifts and Translational Praxis”
Abstracts due: August 30, 2025
Preliminary drafts due: November 30, 2025
Expected publication: Summer 2026

What happens to the translator in the act of translation?
This special edition of Living in Languages explores translation not only as the movement of
meaning across languages, but as a transformative ontological practice—one that acts upon the
translator, unsettling their assumptions, reconfiguring their relation to the world, and altering
their very being.

Rather than treating the translator as a neutral conduit, we ask: How does the labor of translation
change the translator? What forms of disorientation, recognition, resistance, or becoming emerge
in the act of translating across difference? What kinds of self are made—and unmade—through
translation?

We welcome contributions that combine essayistic, autobiographical, or creative-critical
approaches with theoretical rigor. This issue is especially interested in work that explores
translation as an embodied, affective, and relational praxis—one capable of reorganizing
perception, dissolving inherited forms of knowing, and generating new political-ethical
commitments.

Possible themes include:

• Autotheoretical or autobiographical accounts of ontological shifts through translation
• Translation as a site of becoming: relational, ethical, or political
• Haptic, sensory, and affective dimensions of translation
• Translating through whiteness, racial capitalism, queerness, or diaspora
• The translator’s confrontation with structural antagonism
• Essayistic, retranslation, or fragmentary forms that perform transformation
• The limits of empathy and the labor of thick solidarity
• Translation as a practice of disavowal, unlearning, or reorientation
• The translator as subject and object: agency, complicity, and resistance

We seek writing that is critical and reflective, rigorous and experimental. Submissions may
include hybrid forms—memoir-theory, annotated retranslation, critical commentary, or
meditative essays that blur genre boundaries.

Timeline:

• Abstracts (150–250 words) due August 30, 2025
• Preliminary drafts (3600–5000 words) due November 30, 2025
• Peer review and revisions will follow in early 2026
• Publication target: Summer 2026

Please send abstracts or inquiries to: AZBrooks@Umass.edu; LiLJournal@Albany.edu
Subject line: Special Issue Submission – Translator Becoming