Museum Translation and Accessibility - A Lecture Series

UNSW Translation and Interpreting with the School of Humanities and Languages invite you to attend this hybrid lecture series featuring Associate Professor Marina Manfredi from the University of Bologna, Italy.

To register your interest, click on the date for the Lecture/s that you'd like to attend. The Teams link and the location for in-person attendance in UNSW Kensington for each event can be found below.

MODULE 1 – Thursday 11 July 2024
Inclusive Museums and ‘Translation’: A Theoretical Overview and Applications
11:00 am – 4:00 pm (intermission from 1pm - 2pm)
Morven Brown, Level 2, room 209 and online via Teams
The First Module (2 lessons) deals with the concept of Museum Translation and ‘accessible’ language from a theoretical point of view, in ‘interlingual’ (addressing to a multilingual audience) and ‘intralingual’ (for a large, and diverse audience) terms.
The first lesson illustrates the state of the art, within Museum Studies – which has increasingly moved away from the concept of ‘elite museum’ to embrace that of participatory institution, ‘for all’ – and Translation Studies, with a focus on the sparse studies at a translational level (Liao, 2018; Neather, 2018, among others).
The second lesson focuses on applying a Systemic Functional Linguistics approach to the practice of museum translation, with the aim to show how its use from the perspective of ‘intralingual’ museum communication, as proposed by Ravelli (2006), may be fruitfully extended to the translational activity, and exploited in training museum translators (Manfredi 2021a, Manfredi 2021b).
MODULE 2 – Thursday 18 July 2024
‘Translating’ Museum Texts: From Theory to Practice
11:00 am – 4:00 pm (intermission from 1pm - 2pm)
Morven Brown, Level 3, room 310 and online via Teams
The Second Module (2 lessons) aims at illustrating a project on interlingual museum translation, conducted by the speaker at the University of Bologna, Italy, in agreement and collaboration with a city museum, i.e. the Archaeological Civic Museum. The project, at the intersection of teaching and civic engagement, consists of activities carried out in an MA Translation Studies course held at the University of Bologna, Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures, MA course in Language, Society and Communication, in the past three years.
The first lesson illustrates the project – from its experimental phase (a.y. 2021-22) to the following 2 out of 3 years of development (a.y. 2022-23 and 2023-24).
The project focuses on theory and practice of museum translation and encompasses students’ translation (from Italian into English) of introductory panels, descriptive labels and website texts provided by a city museum in the domain of archaeology, and specifically related to the Etruscans – ancient Italic people – and their civilization, with the goal of being offered to international tourists and visitors.
The second lesson offers a guided workshop on museum translation (involving the English language) of selected museum texts to show how the methodological and practical experience experimented in the project at a local level might be exploited in different contexts at an international level.
MODULE 3 – Thursday 25 July 2024
Accessibility in Museums: Museum Audio Description
11:00 am – 4:00 pm (intermission from 1pm - 2pm)
Morven Brown, Level 2, room 209 and online via Teams
The Third Module deals with Media Accessibility, and specifically with museum audio description (AD), principally addressed to blind or partially sighted visitors, as a practice of ‘intersemiotic’ translation (Jiménez Hurtado & Soler Gallego, 2015; Eardley et al., 2017).
The first lesson introduces the theoretical framework and the main issues involved in this type of ‘translation’, still scarcely employed in museums at an international level.
The second lesson is of an operational nature and aims at involving participants in practical activities of ‘intersemiotic’ translation of artworks and artefacts.

Host or Publisher Humanities & Languages