History and its artefacts are continually mediated; they are interpreted and packaged for contemporary audiences by appointed experts who are themselves embedded in sub-cultures of professional and institutional practices as well as broader cultural and political contexts. This is particularly evident in the cultural and heritage sectors – museums, galleries, archives, libraries, etc. – where curators, cataloguers and archivists are routinely entrusted with making sense of objects of material heritage and framing them for audiences ranging from the school student to the academic researcher.  

However, history is fraught: Western heritage in particular is entangled in a colonial legacy which has deposited into the care of today’s museum curator artefacts whose very existence there is testament to material or symbolic violence inflicted against other peoples. Likewise, it has passed down into the hands of the library archivist supremacist narratives which unashamedly document these acts of violence. The curator or archivist are then left with the huge ethical responsibility to interpret and frame these objects and materials sensitively.  

But they are not alone: as front-facing cultural institutions in a globalised world, museums, galleries and archives cater increasingly to multilingual audiences. There is a translator behind every multilingual museum sign we see; every audio description in another language; every bilingual library catalogue. But are these translators aware of the ethical responsibility they carry? If they are, it is unlikely that they have received any professional training to deal with the unique ethical challenges of being a translator of heritage and culture. 

This course will introduce students to the role of mediators in the cultural and heritage sectors, with a particular focus on translators. It aims to combine a degree of theoretical teaching with industry exposure and training in practical skills designed to heighten the translator’s sensitivity to problematic language – which are valuable skills even beyond the cultural and heritage sectors. 

The first part of the course will  


	introduce key concepts and debates in relation to heritage and the archive 
	
	
	explore mediating roles within the cultural and heritage sectors, highlighting how translation can routinely form an invisible task undertaken by people in different roles  
	
	
	explore topics in translation studies that are particularly relevant to the task of translation in these sectors, notably the influence of ideology and patronage on translation practice, and the connections between translation, politics and activism  
	
	
	introduce the theoretical underpinnings of decolonisation and its practical implications for Western heritage institutions 
	
	
	survey the recent history of political events and campaigning which have given impetus to efforts to interrogate long-accepted historical narratives and framings of cultural heritage, and explore the effects that this has had on the internal workings of cultural institutions in the UK. 
	
The second part of the module will consist of hands-on translation and research workshops using material from library and museum catalogues. These workshops will build on the themes covered in the first part of the course by exploring their practical implications for translators and for those carrying out translation-related research. This part of the module will include a site visit to the British Library where students will be able to witness efforts to address problematic terms in a bilingual digitisation project. 