Founded in 2018, Confluences: Lost and Found in Translation is an online multilingual magazine featuring essays written, edited, and translated by Amherst College students, staff, and faculty. The Confluences vision statement explains how it serves to “...navigates the complexities—and consequent difficulties—of embodied multilingualism and celebrates all the linguistic, cultural, personal, and communal insights that translation can inspire.”
As of 2019, Confluences is edited by Aqiil Gopee ’20, Hapshiba Kwon ’20, Lianbi Ji ‘21, Esther Song ‘21, and Emily Merriman of the Writing Center. It is a student-driven project, with the Writing Center providing facilitation and support.
Confluences currently features articles submitted by students, faculty and staff in the language of their choice. The Confluences editorial board then hires translators to make the articles available in other languages. This ongoing process means the website is ever-evolving with new articles and/or translations available each semester. Translators write a short reflective piece on their process and experience, which then appears in both English and language of their translation. Many are first-time translators.
The main navigation of the website can appear in a number of different languages, with a goal of decentering English as the normative language of power.
In April 2018 Confluences held a launch party to celebrate the website and the first round of articles. Faculty and students reflected on their experience writing and translating for the website, and on their shared experience of being multilingual at Amherst.
The online magazine is the central focus of the many students involved with Confluences, which also hosts multilingual readings, panels, speakers, and social events.
Amherst Student Article: Confluences Creates a Space for Celebration of Multilingualism
Campus Partners
- Academic Technology Services provides continued web support for this project.
- The original grant funding for the project came from the Center for Community Engagement, which continues to provide financial support.
- The library has also contributed to the project. For example, Manda Pizzollo, Bicentennial Project Metadata Librarian, submitted for publication and translation an article on previous multilingual publications at the College.
Conference Presentations
- Jaya Kannan and Asha Kinney of ATS presented about this project at the April 2019 conference “Cultivating Student Leadership in a More Inclusive Liberal Arts Classroom,” organized by the Liberal Arts Collaborative for Digital Innovation and hosted by Amherst College.
- Emily Merriman of the Writing Center included a presentation of this project in October 2018 in a workshop on “Creating Multilingual Writing and Learning Communities” as part of the Ivy Plus Writing Consortium conference hosted by Amherst College.
How to...
Published Spring 2020 by Academic Technology Services