A Political Crisis: (Counter) Intelligence and Translation

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A webinar with Dr Sergey Tyulenev (Durham University) run by the Transnational Cultural and Visual Studies research theme under the School-wide Crisis and Culture research theme at the School of Modern Languages.

Find out more about the School of Modern Language’s research themes.

Abstract
James Angleton, a CIA counterintelligence chief, described counterintelligence work as wanderings ‘in a wilderness of mirrors’. Using an image from T.S. Eliot’s poem ‘Gerontion’, Angleton here sought to express the challenges of operating in a world where secretiveness, deception and double-crossing reigned, and where one was never sure which truth to believe. This is especially true when international relations experience crises as the beginning of the Cold War in the twentieth century.

Translation is an active participant of counterintelligence activities, given that these are more often than not carried out across linguistic and cultural boundaries. The speaker will consider translation in a critical moment of the world history – the beginning of the Cold War era. They will look into translation as used in counterintelligence, with specific reference to the so-called Venona project (1943–80) – the US programme of decrypting Soviet espionage correspondence from WWII onwards. They will consider the specificity of translational operations within the framework of (counter)espionage both as a practice of dealing with a kind of documents that would be deemed ‘unusual’, to say the least, as compared to the type of documents dealt with by translators ‘in the open’. They will also touch upon ethical repercussions of acting as a translator contributing not to the international cooperation but to the international rivalry.

Biography
Dr Sergey Tyulenev is Associate Professor in Translation Studies and the Director of the MA in TS in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Durham University, a guest professor at Nankai University, Tianjin, and Guangdong Foreign Studies University, Guangzhou, China, a member of the consultative TS committee at the Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia. He conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Cambridge (UK) and at the University of the Free State (Bloemfontein, South Africa).

He has taught in a number of universities around the world, among them: the University of Moscow, the University of Cambridge, McGill University. His scholarly interests include translation theory, the history of translation in Russia, the sociology of translation as well as the epistemology of translation research. He is the Editor of the Routledge series Introductions to Translation and Interpreting. His major publications include the following monographs: Theory of Translation (Moscow: Gardariki, 2004; currently being translated into Chinese for the Wuhan University Press); Applying Luhmann to Translation Studies (New York and London: Routledge, 2011); Translation and the Westernization of Eighteenth-Century Russia (Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2012); Translation and Society: An Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 2014); Translation in the Public Sphere (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). See more information on Dr Sergey Tyulenev’s website.

Simultaneous Translation
The event will be delivered in the medium of English. You are welcome to ask questions in the medium of Welsh during the Q&A session. If you intend to do this, please contact mlang-events@cardiff.ac.uk by Thursday 11 February to request simultaneous translation. Please note that 10% or more of those planning to attend will need to request this provision in order for it to be sourced and will be subject to resource availability.

Registration
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Recording of Event
Please note this event will be recorded.