Hacks & ChopsAssistant Professor of Religion, Spirituality, and Society Sam Kigar and Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies Rokiatou Soumaré will present at the University of Washington's Translation Studies Hub Colloquium on May 16. Kigar's talk, "Against Translation as Metaphor: Sultanic Languages of Sovereignty in Late-19th Century Morocco," challenges a longstanding scholarly tradition of describing religions as languages that can be translated into one another. Soumaré's talk, "Decentering French to Re-center Wolof: Translation as a Nationalist Performance in Boubacar Boris Diop’s Work," proposes that the novelist Boris Diop's choice to write in the West African language Wolof rather than French, the official language of Senegal, is an act of nationalist linguistic activism.