Tanya Bonnin

About

Tanya is a French translator and PhD researcher in Translation and Transcultural studies at the University of Warwick. She takes special academic and professional interest in creative poetry and prose translation as well as in intersectional feminism. Her thesis, entitled “Kinopoetics of feminist migrant literature: a creative experiential translation of Angie Cruz’s Dominicana,” is supervised by Dr. Caroline Summers and Professor Fabienne Viala and is funded by the SMLC Doctoral Scholarship.

Research

Tanya’s practice-based translation project brings Angie Cruz’s coming-of age novel Dominicana (2019) to French readers for the first time and offers a powerful exploration of the complexities of immigrant identity and the affective dimension attached to it. Her project’s overarching research question explores the possibilities of the role of the subjectivity, emotional response and interpretation of the translator in literary translation from an embodied cognitive perspective and how this might be expressed in the French translation of Dominicana, and addresses as well as extends Boase-Beier’s question: to what extent is the understanding of literary texts dependent upon a particular cultural background or the identity of the translator when it comes to translating intersectional narratives (2006)? Her translational approach uses a creative experiential translation practice involving both intersemioticity (the interdependence of diverse semiotic systems) and a cognitive stylistics framework by interweaving both a textual and a photographical translation of the source text. Her translation aims at mirroring her accompanying critical translation studies commentary supporting the current arguments that the act of translating is one that reaffirms the visibility of the translator as an empowered writer, creator, and artist through a more visible act of interpretation enabling them to activate their own previous experiences and the experience of their reading of the source text, thus also threatening the established concept of the original textual work (Boase-Beier, 2006; Loffredo & Perteghella, 2006 & 2009; Scott, 2006-2018; Wright, 2013 & 2016; Lee, 2015 & 2022; Bennett, 2019 & 2023; Campbell & Vidal, 2019 & 2024; Lukes, 2023). Making a significant contribution to the engagement with Boase-Beier’s cognitive poetics theory and cognitive stylistics approaches to translation (2006 & 2023), her research endeavours to enrich translation theory by extending Potter’s kinopoetics and kinopolitics literary approaches (the philosophy and politics of movement and a counter-sociopolitical history of migration creating a theory and method for analysing migrant literature) by directly addressing the translation of migrant literature (2023). Her research also reflects on the importance of experiential knowledge in translation and in the publishing and translation industry while exploring the potential of kinopoetics/kinopolitics of experiential translation as socio-political transformative learning and self-development, thus acting as “an agential, intervening force” (Potter, 2023) helping to activate both a poetics and politics of collective power.

Research Interests

Literary translation; creative translation; experimental and experiential translation studies; intersectional feminism; gender and feminist translation studies; women's writing; migrant studies; Latin American, Caribbean, Francophone and Anglophone literatures and studies; Postcolonial studies; Afrofuturism; memory

Conferences

"Representation and Intersectionality in Janelle Monáe and Alaya Dawn Johnson’s The Memory Librarian: The Postcolonial as Queer/Queering the Postcolonial in Translation,” 18th International Postgraduate Conference in Translation and Interpreting Link opens in a new windowLink opens in a new window(IPCITI), 13-14 November 2025, University of Warwick

Scholarships and Awards

SMLC Doctoral Scholarship, University of Warwick (2025-2029)
Susan Bassnett Prize, University of Warwick (2023)
Departmental MA scholarship, University of Warwick (2022-2023)
Erasmus+ scholarship, Université d'Aix-Marseille: 1-year Erasmus exchange at the University of Warwick (2021-2022)

Qualifications

MA in Translation and Cultures, University of Warwick (2022-2023)
BA in Foreign languages, literatures and histories (English, Mandarin, Spanish), Université d'Aix-Marseille (2018-2022)