Translating Memory: Museums as Sites of Cultural Mediation

Title: Translating Memory: Museums as Sites of Cultural Mediation

By Özlem Berk Albachten (Reading, Translation Studies) 

Date: Tuesday, March 2, 2026

Time: 1330-1500

Room: Humanities Seminar Room (H-232)

Abstract: This seminar approaches the museum as a space of translation, understood not only as interlingual transfer but also as a broader form of cultural mediation. Drawing on debates in ethnography, translation studies, and more recent work in Museum Studies, it explores how museums “translate” cultures through processes of selection, framing, and textual interpretation. Museums are also spaces of memory. Much like translation, they play a vital role in preserving and transmitting knowledge of past experiences. Engaging key concepts from Memory Studies, the seminar concludes with a case study of the Istanbul Gender Museum and its 2021 exhibition Time to Speak. It examines how the museum operates as an institution of active memory through multiple translational practices: the cultural translation of local and transnational feminist movements through the exhibition’s slogans; the interlingual translation of these slogans into different local languages and into English; and the intersemiotic translation of slogans into visual artworks..

About the speaker: Özlem Berk Albachten is currently a Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Languages and Cultures at the University of Reading. She earned her PhD in Translation Studies from the University of Warwick. Her research centers on translation history, with particular emphasis on intralingual translation, retranslation, and the role of translation in processes of modernization, identity formation, and cultural policy-making. Her publications include the co-edited volumes Handbook of Intralingual Translation (Routledge, 2024), Perspectives on Retranslation (Routledge, 2019), and Studies from a Retranslation Culture (Springer, 2019). Her work has also appeared in journals such as Translation Studies, Studies in Travel Writing, Classical Receptions Journal, and Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice.

Organized by the Department of Translation and Interpretation