Trans in Translation: Multilingual practices and local/global gender and sexuality discourses in Polish transition narratives

ended

The project Trans in Translation (acronym: TRANSlation) focuses on Polish gender transition narratives published on selected social media in order to investigate their use of multilingual and cultural/linguistic translation practices in navigating local/global gender and sexuality discourses. TRANSlation will answer the question of how such creative language of transition stories works to individualize, localize and modernize the representation of transition, resisting the understanding of “transsexuality” – still prevalent in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) – as a concept imposed by powerful Western medical epistemologies and their textualities. In order to answer this question, a continuously updated corpus of blogs and YouTube channels will be created and investigated linking linguistic/cultural approaches to multilingualism/translation – including queer, feminist, postcolonial and ecological perspectives – with procedures from corpus linguistics, critical discourse analysis, narrative and multimodal analysis. With such a multidisciplinary methodology, while the focus on multilingualism and translation embeds it in language and translation studies, TRANSlation offers significant contributions to gender and sexuality studies and postcolonial studies as areas of the social sciences. TRANSlation offers an original, innovative and unprecedented study on the production of knowledge by Polish transgender social media users; operationalizing the explanatory potential of concepts, themes and connections applied in the project it will also significantly benefit modern linguistic and translation theory. TRANSlation will also contribute to a better social and scientific understanding of gender transition and greater visibility and social awarness of transgender issues through the investigation of transition narratives and active collaboration with transgender NGOs in Poland. This way, TRANSlation will aid the EU’s work towards more equal and inclusive European societies.