Dr Sarah Maitland

Staff details

Position

Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies

Department

English and Creative Writing

Email

english (@gold.ac.uk)

Website

http://www.sarahmaitland.co.uk

Twitter

@sarahimaitland

Dr Sarah Maitland is Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she leads the MA in Translation. She is an elected member of the Executive Council of the International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies and Managing Editor of the Journal of Specialised Translation. Sarah is co-investigator on the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project Translation and Interpretation Work in Multilingual Business Communities: Roles, Perspectives, Agency, and is author of What is Cultural Translation? published by Bloomsbury Academic. She is also author of various articles on cultural translation, translation philosophy, theatre translation, and hermeneutics.

Sarah is a Memsource Certified Trainer and leads project TransCast: Making Translating and Interpreting Research Public, which hosts free podcasts of cutting-edge translation research for students, scholars and practitioners of translation worldwide.

As a professional theatre translator, Sarah has translated for the CASA Latin American Theatre Festival, Words without Borders magazine, the Martin E. Segal Theatre New York, the Theatre Royal Bath, the Unicorn and New Diorama theatres in London and the Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance. Her most recent work includes translating for surtitles at the 2017 CASA Latin American Theatre Festival and guest editing the December 2016 edition of Words without Borders entitled, ‘The World on Stage: Micro-Plays in Translation’. She is currently translating and developing surtitles for Los amos del mundo, by Almudena Ramírez-Pantanella, awarded the 2015 Calderón de la Barca prize by the Ministry of Culture through the National Institute of Performing Arts and Music (INAEM) in recognition of merit and to encourage the work of young dramatists.

Sarah is also an active member of Out of the Wings, hosted by King’s College London, a collective of theatre-makers, researchers, translators and academics united by a shared love of theatre and the possibilities of cross-border collaboration and exchange that are released when works for the stage are translated for new audiences.

Academic qualifications

BA (Joint Honours) French and Spanish, Queen’s University Belfast, 2003
MSc in Translation and Technology (French and Spanish), Heriot-Watt University, 2004
PhD in Translation, Queen’s University Belfast, 2011

Professional certifications

Memsource Certified Trainer, June 2017-present

Teaching

Sarah was appointed Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies in December 2015. Before this she held positions at University of Hull, Swansea University and Queen’s University Belfast, where she was also engaged in Translation Studies and Spanish language teaching.

Areas of supervision

In addition to her interest in theatre translation, Sarah's research focuses on cultural translation and translation as a form of cultural production, a metaphor for cultural encounter and a means for understanding the world. She is interested in questioning how translation can be thematised along philosophical and political lines, enabling exchange and debate across rival positions and addressing problems that go beyond interlingual conceptualisations. As a practice located at the nexus of cultures, ideas, history and politics, requiring multiple negotiations with and across difference, translation offers a powerful lens through which to examine the creation and representation of knowledge.

Sarah has supervised PhD projects in the areas of translation ethics and translation history and welcomes project proposals exploring cultural translation, theatre translation, or any topic exploring the territory between translation and a range of cognate frameworks drawn from literary and cultural theory, political philosophy and philosophical hermeneutics, or rooted in translational understandings of issues of ethics, justice, identity development, community relations or political recognition at the heart of intercultural practice.

Featured work

Sarah's most recent book is What is Cultural Translation? published by Bloomsbury Academic. The concept of ‘cultural translation’ is one of the most alluring yet elusive concepts in the contemporary humanities. Since its introduction in cultural anthropology, the concept has been deployed across the social disciplines to challenge binary views of cultural identity, to reinforce ideas of communication based on the principle of exchange between the peoples of the world and to theorize the ethical, political and cultural challenges posed by the increasingly interconnected nature of our communities.

But despite its de rigueur status and promise of a new paradigm for understanding the problematics of cultural difference, the presence of cultural translation is often taken as a self-evident and accounts have tended towards the diffuse. By providing the first book-length study of cultural translation based on an in-depth engagement with both the dominant theoretical dialogues on the subject and their realization in a real-world context, the book advances the first critically grounded definition and is shaped as an extended critical response to the dizzying array of contributions on the subject from translation studies and beyond.

More information

About.me: https://about.me/sarahmaitland
Academia.edu: https://goldsmiths.academia.edu/SarahMaitland
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=QkTwVnQAAAAJ&hl=en
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahimaitland/
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2024-8359

Publications and research outputs

Book

Maitland, Sarah. 2022. Untitled Screenplay Translation and Adaptation Commission for Genomedia. Dubai, UAE: Genomedia.

Maitland, Sarah. 2021. Coup de Grâce, by Almudena Ramírez-Pantanella, full-length revision of play translation by Sarah Maitland. Commissioned by the Royal Court Theatre.

Maitland, Sarah. 2021. Masters of the Universe (2021), by Almudena Ramírez-Pantanella, translated by Sarah Maitland. London: Inti Press. ISBN 9781838324445

Edited Book

Boyle, Catherine and Maitland, Sarah, eds. 2024. Translation as Advocacy: Perspectives on Practice, Performance and Publishing. London: John Murray Learning.

Book Section

Maitland, Sarah. 2024. Advocacy as legal argument: The judicial interpretive task of the translator. In: Catherine Boyle and Sarah Maitland, eds. Translation as Advocacy: Perspectives on Practice, Performance and Publishing. London: John Murray Learning, pp. 1-26. ISBN 9781399816144

Maitland, Sarah. 2024. Foreword. In: Catherine Boyle and Sarah Maitland, eds. Translation as Advocacy: Perspectives on Practice, Performance and Publishing. London: John Murray Learning.

Maitland, Sarah. 2023. Afterword. A reader's response. In: Catherine Boyle and Renata Brandão, eds. Multilingual Narratives of a Pandemic: Covid-19 and Worldmaking. London: John Murray Learning. ISBN 9781399812504

Maitland, Sarah. 2019. The Reality (2019), by Denise Despeyroux, translated by Sarah Maitland. Performance of translation, directed by Raymi Renee. In: "The Reality, by Denise Despeyroux, translated by Sarah Maitland. Performance of translation, directed by Raymi Renee", Cervantes Theatre, London, United Kingdom, 1-18 May 2019.

Maitland, Sarah. 2018. Masters of the Universe, by Almudena Ramírez-Pantanella, translated by Sarah Maitland. Performance of translation, directed by Almudena Ramírez-Pantanella, Cervantes Theatre. In: "Masters of the Universe, by Almudena Ramírez-Pantanella, translated by Sarah Maitland. Performance of translation, directed by Almudena Ramírez-Pantanella, Cervantes Theatre", Cervantes Theatre, United Kingdom, 5 July 2018.

Report

Blankenburg, Sula; Chapman, Tim and Maitland, Sarah. 2023. Good Practice When Working with English as an Additional Language Speakers: A Guide for Restorative Justice Practitioners Working Across Cultural Difference. Project Report. Why me?, London.