AMES Colloquium/SEA Studies Series: Traversing Unsettling Borders: Antipodean Encounters in Southeast Asia’s Translationscapes

Southeast Asia presents striking contrasts in its landscape, characterized by a "solid" mainland peninsula and "fragmented" archipelagos. Similarly, the translation landscape in Southeast Asia follows an unlikely geographical grouping of seemingly disparate spaces. The region was named before its member countries formed a formal union, highlighting a semantic belatedness that reflects the complexity of translation. Translation, in this context, cannot be reduced to a mere act of "transferring" or "containing" across borders in a conventional sense. This lecture explores translation within this problematic landscape, where notions of borders and adjacency are constantly challenged. Drawing on Vicente L. Rafael’s concept of “translationscapes,” translation is reimagined as an act of "traversing" landscapes without fixed borders—such as antipodes and archipelagos. Reaching the antipodean other requires navigating a disorienting passage into the uncanny, where the border itself becomes the site of translation. Meanwhile, the archipelagic approach reshapes our understanding of hierarchy and order in translation. Building on this notion of translation as traversal, I propose the concept of “antipodean translation,” which reframes translation as a space of irreducible yet generative difference, inviting new ways of engagement and interpretation.

Phrae Chittiphalangsri is an Associate Professor at the Chalermprakiat Center for Translation and Interpretation (CCTI), Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand, where she also serves as chair of the MA program. She was co-editor of New Voices in Translation Studies (2008–2012) and currently sits on the journal’s advisory board. Her current projects explore Thai postcolonial literature and Thai Anglophone fiction. She is also the principal editor of the forthcoming three-volume Anthology of Modern Thai Literature, funded by Thailand's Ministry of Higher Education. In addition to her academic work, she is an active literary translator working with English, French, and Thai.

This event is in-person.

The AMES Colloquium is a forum for academic research on Asia and/or the Middle East. The Colloquium is free and open to everyone. Sincere thanks for the sponsorship from Pat Hui Fellowship.