Periodicals and translation, Webinar 2026
This webinar aims to trigger a conversion between researchers working in two fields: periodical studies and translation. It intends to explore translations published in European periodicals between 1860 and 1940 from a broad, multidisciplinary quantitative, and/or qualitative perspective.
Session 1, 30 January 2026, 3 pm (French Time)
Convenor: Bénédicte Coste, CPTC, Université Bourgogne Europe
To join us on Teams, please email : benedicte.coste@ube.fr
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Marius Haugen (NTNU, Norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelige universitet)
‘Periodical Travel Reviews as Places of Translation (18th-19th Century)
The travel review was an important genre in the eighteenth and nineteenth-century French periodical press, not only by critiquing travelbooks, but also in retransmitting experiences of the foreign to its readers.
By extension, the travel review was deeply entangled with translation, both as a practice and a metadiscourse.
As a practice, reviews frequently contained excerpts from existing translations, but often also shorter translations done by the reviewers themselves. The latter situate translation as a part of a larger practice of appropriation, remediation, and rewriting, through which the review transmitted a modified version of the travel book and its (already mediated) experiences of the world.
As a metadiscourse, reviews evaluated specific translations, but more importantly engaged with the discussion of what a translation should be and do. Travel reviews were, for instance, privileged places for discussing the potentially instrumental role that translations could play in the cultural and geopolitical rivalry between France and Great Britain.
This seminar will explore the complexity and diversify of the relationship between translation and the travel review, as it developed in the French periodical press at the turn of the eighteenth- and nineteenth century.
Marius Warholm Haugen is Professor of French Literature at the NTNU, Norwegian University of Science and Technology. His primary research interests lie within eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies, in particular literature and gambling, travel writing and periodical studies, literary appropriation, translation, and rewriting.
For a full profile and list of publications, see: https://www.ntnu.edu/employees/marius.haugen