How do we understand translation and screen media, in terms of history, form, technology, and practice? In a contemporary moment, this question is additionally informed by a plethora of digital media practices, from those involving small screens and social media platforms to those involving technologies of machine learning and natural language processing. Collaboratively organized by the Screen Arts and Cultures Forum and Translation Studies Forum, this panel explores new and emerging research that lies at the intersection of translation studies and studies of screen media. Collectively, the papers demonstrate the range of inquiries that emerge from attending to how and why particular media objects are lost or found in translation, as they circulate across languages, cultures, and media formats.

Scholars such as Mark Betz, Abe Mark Nornes, and more recently, Pooja Rangan and Tejaswini Ganti, have approached screen translation in terms of the how—and why—translated media are produced for multilingual distribution through various strategies, most prominently dubbing and subtitling. Building on this work, the papers on this panel approach translation and screen media with additional questions that focus on digital media platforms, modes of intermediality, and the role of untranslatability in histories and theories of both translation and screen media. The panel features two papers that focus on the global platform-based circulation of contemporary Korean cinema, and two papers that focus on experimental cinema and visual culture across Italian and Anglophone contexts. They demonstrate the importance of expertise in the languages and cultures of various areas, as argued by Anjali Arondekar and Geeta Patel in “Area Impossible: The Geopolitics of Queer Studies,” an editorial introduction to a 2016 special issue of Gay and Lesbian Quarterly. As Arondekar and Patel note, knowledge of specific areas and languages can dislodge and make visible the universalist assumptions that emerge from largely Anglophone and Western “non-areas”—in this case, in the fields of translation studies and screen media studies, rather than queer studies.

Through an analysis of Park Chan-wook’s film Decision to Leave (2022), Hiju Kim asks: What universalist assumptions are embedded in contemporary “foreign” films’ platform-based releases in several languages for global audiences? Through an analysis of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s experimental film Sicilia! (1998), Antonio D’Amico asks: How do media objects themselves reflexively thematize or represent their own processes of translation? Through an analysis of Peter Greenaway’s digital installation Wedding at Cana (2009), Juliette Bellacosa asks: When the lines between adaptation and translation seem to blur around the interpretative practices that are germane to both, what methodological approaches could enliven understandings of translation—and adaptation—across media? Returning to Decision to Leave, Brenda Wang asks: How do histories and discourses of race inflect the cultural translation—or the ostensible untranslatability—of contemporary screen media, particularly through entrenched assumptions about “foreign” contexts or people being inscrutable?

Each of the four speakers will speak for 15 minutes, including transition times and brief introductions. The organizer-presider will field questions following the presentations, and she will keep time during the presentations in order to ensure that 15 minutes of free discussion remain at the conclusion of the four presentations. This panel will find an enthusiastic audience among members of the Screen Arts and Cultures Forum and Translation Studies Forum, as well as others interested in studies of media, translation, adaptation, Korean studies, Italian studies, global digital-popular cultures, and experimental cinemas, among other fields.