The Heim Colloquium is made possible by a generous donation to Indiana University by the family of Michael Henry Heim (1943 – 2012), one of the most eminent literary translators of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first century in the US.The Heim bequest allows Indiana University to organize events on themes relevant to the many facets of Michael Henry Heim’s work. For this year’s event, we invited a core group of translation-focused graduate students at IU Bloomington to take the lead in forming the questions to be addressed and inviting a panel of experts to help us address them.

The title of this year’s colloquium is “Who Owns Translation?”

Who owns translations? Is it the translator? The author of the source text? The publisher? The “foundation” and other estates that control the rights? Our colloquium explores the question of ownership from theoretical, practical, and speculative perspectives. First, what are some ways that the translator conceptually “owns” the translation? At issue are questions of how translators make choices that redistribute narrative authority, how they develop a responsibility for the work of another, and whether certain texts “invite” co-ownership while others do not.