Registration does not begin until 02.10.2026 at 08:00. It ends on 12.10.2026 at 23:59.

In his The Task of the Translator, one of the most insightful and revolutionary reflections on translation produced in the Western tradition, Walter Benjamin defines translation as a form—or rather, as a process of metamorphosis—in which a text is transformed and takes on a different form. Following this line of thought, we might understand every text, and more generally every artefact, as the result of an interrupted creative process. Translation can thus be understood as a process of transformation that allows a text to live on by assuming different forms.
Starting from this idea, the seminar will explore the centrality of potentiality as a key to understanding form not as a static entity, but as something fundamentally open to change. Our aim will be to move beyond the textual dimension to which traditional theories of translation have typically confined themselves, and to explore different processes of translation as they unfold across media: from language to image, performance, and sound; from painting to photography; and from exhibition display to the artist’s book.
Part of the seminar will also be devoted to the rise of AI and its implications for the broader field of translation. We will examine how questions traditionally associated with aesthetics—concerning form, transformation, authorship, and materiality— often have epistemic, anthropological, ethical-political, media-philosophical, and social consequences. In this sense, translation will serve as a lens through which to reconsider not only how forms change, but also how knowledge is produced, how subjects are constituted, how technologies shape our ways of perceiving and thinking, and how political and social relations are transformed.

Further information on teaching evaluation: https://www.leuphana.de/en/teaching/quality-management/evaluation/course-evaluation.html