The Translation Studies Initiative at Rutger, New Brunswick fosters intellectual and creative exchange among students and faculty engaged in making, analyzing, and conceptualizing translation across the Humanities at Rutgers University. The initiative serves as a dynamic and collaborative home for the diverse interdisciplinary work happening across campus and hosts new dialogues, projects, and conversations about, in, and on translation.
The RTSI offers two degrees. The Graduate Certificate in Critical Translation offers students three options: 1) to produce new scholarship that engages Translation Studies; 2) to craft a literary translation with an accompanying critical translator’s introduction; and 3) to undertake a work of translation activism that attends to questions of language justice, community engagement, or how we imagine literature and other media to serve as fulcrums of social or political action. This diverse platform offers our graduate students a solid and varied training in Translation Studies as a critical lens in literary and cultural studies, a millennia-old art form, and a tool for urgent new forms of engagement with communities in and beyond the academy.
Learn more - Graduate Certificate.
Undergraduate students from across all Rutgers schools can earn a Minor in Translation Studies. This 18-credit minor introduces students to the major concerns of the field in Introduction to Translation Studies; asks for a year of dedicated language study or practicum; and then allows students to select from a diverse slate of electives to round out the minor.
Rutgers, New Brunswick is alive with translation! Our internationally esteemed and award winning faculty from across all of Rutgers’ language and literature departments regularly offer a diverse slate of undergraduate classes and graduate seminars on translation. The campus will host a diverse array of events, including this year's annual seminar in the Center of Cultural Analysis, dedicated to Translation; Rutgers' ninth annual Translate-a-Thon; the many events in the Spanish Translation & Interpreting Program; the next installments of the RTSI’s Series on Translation Activism; a graduate student reading of translations-in-progress; this year’s gatherings of our Translation Studio; and lectures, roundtables, and exchanges that bring together students, faculty, and our wider community to engage the robust state of translation today.
Please take a moment to look around the site for more information about our classes, projects, and upcoming events. You can also follow the RTSI on Instagram @rutgerstranslation and subscribe to our newsletter or ask any questions about the Initiative by reaching out to Karen Bishop at
website photo credits: Christiane Ingenthron