The Translation Research Commons (TReCs) is an interdisciplinary humanities research initiative devoted to investigating translation as a mode of scholarly inquiry across languages, cultures, and technologies.

TReCs develops and disseminates research, supports collaborative projects, documents Indiana University's longstanding strengths in translation and interpreting, and fosters new work at the intersection of literary translation, translation studies, archival research, philosophy of translation, and artificial intelligence.

Translation research explores translation as both an object and a mode of inquiry, asking how acts of translation—between languages, cultures, media, and increasingly between humans and machines—generate new forms of knowledge.

Current and Ongoing Work

TReCs brings together existing strengths at Indiana University with new research, teaching, and collaborative projects. Current and ongoing work includes:

• Translation archives. The Lilly Library holds extensive translation-related manuscript collections, including the papers of translators, publishers, and organizations involved in literary translation. TReCs seeks to encourage research and teaching with these collections and to draw greater attention to their significance for the study of translation.
• Research and publication. TReCs supports individual and collaborative scholarship on translation across periods, languages, disciplines, and technologies, including current research on literary translation, translation history and theory, and translation and artificial intelligence.
• Graduate teaching. Translation-focused graduate courses provide opportunities to explore translation both critically and in practice. Courses during the 2026–27 academic year include a graduate translation workshop taught by Russell Scott Valentino and a spring course on the history and theory of translation taught by Elizabeth Geballe.
• Reading and discussion. During Fall 2026, faculty and graduate students are reading Damion Searls' The Philosophy of Translation (2024) together as a point of departure for conversations about translation theory and practice.
• Colloquia, visits, and visitors. TReCs provides a framework for lectures, conversations, workshops, and visits involving translators, writers, scholars, and others whose work engages translation. The Michael Henry Heim Colloquium is among the venues for these conversations. The 2026 Colloquium, “Who Owns Translation?” will take place November 6-7, 2026.
• Translation at Indiana University. TReCs documents and explores IU's long and diverse history of achievement in translation and interpreting, including the work of faculty, students, and alumni and their contributions to literature, scholarship, diplomacy, and public life.

Participate

TReCs brings together faculty and graduate students at Indiana University and other institutions, translators and translation scholars, researchers in the humanities and AI, librarians and archivists, and other collaborators interested in translation research and multilingual cultural exchange.

If you are interested in participating in TReCs activities or joining our mailing list, contact Russell Valentino at russellv@iu.edu.