Cultural Translation

"Other Moments" / Moments with Others: Acts of Cultural Translation by an Oberlin Rep in Taiwan, 1958-1959

by Jonathan Benda

Published in the proceedings of the Globalization and Cultural Identity/Translation International Conference, 19 to 20 December 2008, Fo Guang University, Taiwan. Jiaoxi, Taiwan: Fo Guang University, 2008.

While, according to Talal Asad, "the phrase 'the translation of cultures'... since the 1950s has become an almost... more While, according to Talal Asad, "the phrase 'the translation of cultures'... since the 1950s has become an almost banal description of the distinctive task of social anthropology" (141), cultural translation has not been the domain of only anthropologists and professional ethnographers. As documented by Christina Klein, in the postwar years ordinary Americans were encouraged to take up the task of traveling abroad, both to learn about others and to share U.S. culture with others. Between 1955 and 1979, for instance, the Oberlin Shansi Memorial Association (OSMA) sent dozens of selected Oberlin College graduates to Taiwan to teach English at Tunghai University. As part of their assignments as "Representatives," or "Reps," they acted as intermediaries between the cultures of Taiwan and the United States. In addition to embodying American culture for Taiwanese students, Reps were expected to observe and experience life in Taiwan and write back to the Oberlin community about those observations and experiences.

In this paper, I will focus on three texts by one of the Reps that portray encounters between the Rep and her "others", considering the questions of how these encounters are shaped in these texts, and how they are mediated by the multiple contexts in which her narratives are framed. While the Reps' writings are in part reflective of larger discourses about the other that were prevalent during the Cold War era, they also need to be understood as attempts to represent and respond to specific, local (and 'trans-local'), embodied encounters with other people.

Film Culture Crossover: Cultural Translation and Post- Bruce Lee Film Fight Choreography

by Paul Bowman

Keynote given at East Winds conference, Coventry University, 3rd March 2012

This paper reads the emergence of ‘Oriental style’ in Hollywood (Park 2010) as an exemplary case of what Rey Chow... more This paper reads the emergence of ‘Oriental style’ in Hollywood (Park 2010) as an exemplary case of what Rey Chow calls ‘cultural translation (Chow 1995). The paper explores the intimate yet paradoxical relationship between ‘Oriental’ martial arts and the drive for ‘authenticity’ in both film choreography and martial arts practices; plotting the trajectories of key martial arts crossovers since Bruce Lee. It argues that, post-Bruce Lee, Western film fight choreography first moved into and then moved away from overtly Chinese, Japanese, Hong Kong or indeed obviously ‘Oriental style’; a move that many have regarded as a deracination or westernisation of fight choreography. However, a closer look reveals that this apparent deracination is actually the unacknowledged rise of Filipino martial arts within Hollywood. The significance of making this point, and the point of making this kind argument overall boils down to the insight it can give us into how ‘cultures’ and texts are constructed, and also into our own reading practices and the roles they play, sometimes in perpetuating certain problematic ethno-nationalist discourses.

"Translating the Island Mother. Jean Rhys and Linguistic Obeah"

by Manuela Coppola

in Translating Gender,  edited by Eleonora Federici in collaboration with Manuela Coppola, Michael Cronin, Renata Oggero, Bern, Peter Lang, 2011

As a performative process entangled with issues of cultural authority, translation has always played a crucial role in... more As a performative process entangled with issues of cultural authority, translation has always played a crucial role in the Caribbean context. In particular, the establishment of an organized colonial system in the Anglophone Caribbean defined the English mother country as a powerful cultural and linguistic matrix, a space reproducing – or rather cloning – itself in its colonies. However, the very history of the Caribbean challenges and complicates possible notions of authenticity and originality, as the case of the white creole writer Jean Rhys illustrates. Considered a ‘corrupted’ copy of the original white English, Rhys perceives English as mirroring the ambivalent relation with the island mother, Dominica, a stratified cultural and linguistic microcosm whose colonial history has produced a continuum ranging from French-based Creole to Standard English.
The essay explores the ways in which, in the attempt to gain control over her own writing and self- representation, Rhys re-appropriates the ambiguities of her Caribbean matrix and reworks it for her predominantly European readers. The island mother as mother-text, repository of a complex cultural and linguistic memory, is thus performed in her writing through an opaque and indirect translation, a “linguistic maroonage” which resists Western domestication. In this light, by repeating and dislocating the dominant discourse, Rhys finally moves beyond the sterile dichotomy of copy/original and thrives, on the contrary, on the interstices, on the borders of difference.

The Answer is in Translation

by Tomislav Longinovic

conversation with Boris Buden about "Fearful Asymetries: A Manifesto of Cultural Translation"

The process of cultural translation “lays bare” the mechanisms that naturalize existing asymmetries and inequalities,... more The process of cultural translation “lays bare” the mechanisms that naturalize existing asymmetries and inequalities, since most of the agents of cultural translation perceive the shortcomings of monolingual fantasies due to their in-between position on the border between different national discourses. It is true that I find myself speaking “in the name of” those who may not choose to speak themselves, hoping to manifest the very possibility of a new type of transnational/translational political horizon beyond the binaries of global/local, capitalist/communist, cosmopolitan/provincial etc. This kind of political motivation is also the starting point of my research project The Secret of Translation: A Manifesto of Border Cultures, which has taken up most of my thinking in the past decade. Using the tools of translation theory, I try to extend its reach into the realm of the politics of representation and de-naturalize hierarchies offered to the contemporary consumer of news, images and sounds. So, hopefully, my writing “in the name of” will neither turn into the hypocrisy of the latter-day commissars nor into the apathy of the latter-day yogis, to use Arthur Koestler’s metaphor. The passage to politics based on a common ecological platform would therefore be a very desirable outcome of cultural translation, since humanist-based thought needs to confront the limits of its planetary survival and move away from the myths promoted by both the nationalists and the globalists in the current simulation of politics without a proper subject.

Balkan In Translation

by Tomislav Longinovic

Tomislav Longinovic extends the concept of translation of texts to the translation of political contexts: The politics... more Tomislav Longinovic extends the concept of translation of texts to the translation of political contexts: The politics and history of the Balkans, he argues, represent the "untranslatable" and "foreign" that can not be compared under any circumstances to the politics of the "western world". And yet, as Longinovic argues, similarities between American and Serbian behaviour against the perceived Islamic threat after September 11 and during the Kosovo war respectively, exist. These unacknowledged and "untranslated" similarities between politically unequal partners demonstrate the need for the translation of cultures and political contexts that open up spaces between cultures whilst keeping in mind the alterity of the foreign in translation.

Medieval Philology and Nationalism: The British and German Editors of Thomas of Erceldoune

by Richard Utz

Florilegium, Volume 23, Number 2 (2006)

The reception of the late fourteenth-century romance/lay/ballad Thomas of Erceldoune by romantic enthusiasts,... more The reception of the late fourteenth-century romance/lay/ballad Thomas of Erceldoune by romantic enthusiasts, antiquarians, modernist philologists, and twentieth-century medievalists reveals the dangerous indebtedness of a quasi-sciencific medieval philology to competing national paradigmatic constructions (German, English, Scottish) on the one hand and the ongoing foundational value of philological work for current medieval textual scholarship on the other. Thus, while debunking the disinterestedness claimed by modernist philology, the essay attests to the enduring success of philological editorial practice regarding this specific late medieval poem.

Cultural Translation, Global Television Studies, and the Circulation of Telenovelas in the United States

by Kyle Conway

Online First version available upon request.

‘Cultural translation’ is a metaphor whose currency is increasing in the broad field of cultural studies, but it has... more ‘Cultural translation’ is a metaphor whose currency is increasing in the broad field of cultural studies, but it has largely been neglected in narrower field of television studies. This article brings cultural translation to television studies by proposing an approach to describe how the industrial logics that govern the global circulation of programs also shape them as texts. It then uses this approach to explain the circulation of telenovelas in the English-language market in the United States, paying special attention to Ugly Betty, adapted from the Colombian program Yo soy Betty, la fea.

News Translation and Cultural Resistance

by Kyle Conway

News translation, which takes many forms, encounters two types of cultural resistance that hinder intercultural... more News translation, which takes many forms, encounters two types of cultural resistance that hinder intercultural understanding. The first is apparent in the need to transform a text in order to make it meaningful in a new context, while the second results from the irreducibility of culture as a way of life to the form of a text. This article illustrates both forms of resistance by analyzing a story originally broadcast on The National in Canada in 1992, and it concludes by considering the implications of the power relations between journalists and the people they describe in acts of news translation.

Fearful Asymmetries: a Manifesto of Cultural Translation

by Tomislav Longinovic

The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association. Vol. 35, 2 (2002), 5-12.

The practice of cultural translation is an experience set by the exchange between subjects caught up in the flow of... more The practice of cultural translation is an experience set by the exchange between subjects caught up in the flow of global identifications. This aim may be theorized a posteriori as an attempt to appropriate social power by the practice of cultural translation, which is a position they seek within the adoptive culture and are denied by the monocultural biases of the homelands they seek to make their own. The oxymoronic turn of the phrase contained in the concept of the “adopted homeland” is symptomatic of this predicament of cultural translators caught up in the perpetual in-between. The resolution of the assimilation/resistance binary within the host culture determines the success or failure of identity produced in the process of translation, which is the philosophical category that will become dominant in the globalizing universe we are increasingly facing.

Sick Man of Asia Crosses The River: Bruce Lee and Queer Cultural Translation

by Paul Bowman

First Draft of a Chapter for a book on Queer Europe

Singing 'Che Gelida Manina'In Welsh: Internal and External Cultural Translation In the Future Wales of Islwyn Ffowc Elis

by Johan Schimanski

Johan Schimanski. “Singing ‘Che Gelida Manina’ in Welsh: Internal and External Cultural Translation in the Future Wales of Islwyn Ffowc Elis”, Interlitteraria 5 (2000): 365-74.

ELEMENTOS PARA UMA CRÍTICA DE TRADUÇÃO E PARATRADUÇÃO TEORIA E PRÁTICA NO CASO DAS TRADUÇÕES CULTURAIS MODERNISTAS

by Burghard Baltrusch

in TradTerm 14, ISSN 0104-639X, http://www.fflch.usp.br/citrat/publica/trad/trad14.htm#ELEMENTOSPARAUMACR%CDTICADETRADU%C7%C3OEPARATRADU%C7%C3O

RESUMO: Este artigo expõe um modelo de tradução e paratradução em termos hermenêuticos para descrever e analisar... more RESUMO: Este artigo expõe um modelo de tradução e paratradução em termos hermenêuticos para descrever e analisar traduções culturais, nomeadamente aquelas de carácter estético e ideológico. Desenvolve-se de forma teórica e prática uma noção holística da tradução, proposta inicialmente por Alexis Nouss e o núcleo de investigação Tradução & Paratradução da Universidade de Vigo, que aqui aplicamos às traduções estéticas e ideológicas modernistas. Foram escolhidos três fenómenos estético-literários provenientes dos modernismos alemão, brasileiro e português (C. Einstein, O. de Andrade e F. Pessoa) para exemplificar esta proposta de uma crítica de para/tradução.

RESUMEN: Este artículo expone un modelo de traducción y paratraducción en términos hermenéuticos para describir y analizar traducciones culturales, en concreto aquellas de carácter estético y ideológico. Se desarolla de forma teórica y práctica una noción holística de la traducción, que ha sido propuesta inicialmente por Alexis Nouss y el grupo de investigación Traducción & Paratraducción de la Universidade de Vigo, la cual aplicamos aquí a las traducciones estéticas y ideológicas modernistas. Se seleccionaron tres fenómenos estético-literarios provenientes de los modernismos alemán, brasileño y portugués (C. Einstein, O. de Andrade y F. Pessoa) para ejemplificar esta propuesta de una crítica de para/traducción.

A para/tradución cultural: Galiza e a Lusofonía

by Burghard Baltrusch

in Burghard Baltrusch & Gabriel Pérez Durán (eds.): Soldando Sal Galician Studies in Translation & Paratranslation, Munich: Martin Meidenbauer 2010, ISBN 978-3-89975-211-3, pp. 53-72

In this paper I try to develop a pragmatic argument that looks into the strategic advantages and disadvantages of... more In this paper I try to develop a pragmatic argument that looks into the strategic advantages and disadvantages of associating Galicia to the Lusophone world wherein I affirm that Galicia would benefit from the same because of the innate talent of Galicians to translate and be translated. The issue as to whether Galicia should or should not be part of the Lusophone world has aroused a lot of controversies and has been used by several types of ideological discourses, which further hinder a pragmatic and future reconciliation. A comparative inventory of the several ideological discourses on the subject is outlined, including a critical and postcolonial appreciation of the very Lusop-hone phenomenon. From the perspective of cultural translation (Bhabha), it is argued that a potential association of Galician to the Lusophone world would mean an appropriation, for the very first time, of its own history, in order to create its own contemporariness and with a view to projecting it abroad in a planned manner. However, there would be no room for foundational essentialism within a global, trans-cultural and trans-discourse panorama where people, ideas and values undergo constant migration and crossbreeding. The illusions of orthographic and linguistic unity and that of the lost cultural unity paradise must be abandoned in favor of a postcolonial and transnational model of identifying hybrid cultures. The transnational social fields of Portuguese-Galician are diffuse in nature but are linked to networks that represent an important social capital, of which Galician emigration was one of the precursors. In our era, which is characterized by the continuous migration of people and ideas, such cultural mobile identities (Rivas) represent one of the most powerful cultural translations that have been able to update the nineteenth-century national identity towards an increasingly transnational and cosmopolitan model.