Introduction: thematic approaches to translation

This special issue of The Translator brings together key work from several of the innovative projects supported over the past decade by ‘Translating Cultures’ (see http://translatingcultures.org.uk, and Kamali, Forsdick, and Dutton 2019). A theme launched in 2012 by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), ‘Translating Cultures’ formed part of a range of strategic initiatives that the AHRC has led in recent years. It was linked closely to research in other thematic areas, including most notably ‘Care for the Future’ (focused on heritage and the ‘useable past’), ‘Digital Transformations’ and ‘Science and Culture’. Much of the work of ‘Translating Cultures’ has encouraged exploration of what it means to operate, by translating between disciplines and sectors, at the intersections of these various themes, all of which provided an opportunity for researchers to work in new ways: venturing beyond their disciplinary comfort zones; identifying new partners within and beyond academia; and exploring cross-cutting challenges as a means of reorienting their work.

‘Translating Cultures’ recognised that, in a world increasingly characterised by transnational and globalised connections, the need for research that reaches across, and negotiates the gaps between, diverse cultures is more urgent than ever. It afforded researchers an opportunity to address the role of ‘translation’, in the broadest understandings of the term, in the transmission, interpretation, transformation and sharing of languages, values, beliefs, histories and narratives as well as of a range of other phenomena, both tangible and intangible. It is important to stress that ‘Translating Cultures’ was a theme not a programme, and as such operated as a direct challenge to the UK academic community, who were invited to respond with proposals for research projects. These emerged from across the multiple domains represented by the AHRC, often suggesting new ways of working across areas that have not traditionally interacted. At the same time, despite the fact that the theme was a national, UK-based initiative, its reach was a genuinely global one, amplified through collaborations, partnerships, research events and other forms of dissemination that extended across six continents. Finally, despite the hyper-contemporary nature of the issues to which ‘Translating Cultures’ might appear to respond, the theme sought to eschew the risks of presentism and – as several of the articles that follow illustrate – rooted these concerns in earlier periods, historicising current debates whilst suggesting clear continuities between past and present.

The theme developed organically, growing from an initial batch of small research development awards to encompass a wider portfolio of research fellowships and networks. Key to the development of ‘Translating Cultures’ was the award of three large grants. The researchers involved in these did much to define and disseminate the intellectual parameters of the theme. The ‘In conversation’ contribution with which the special issue concludes captures the innovative nature of their work in the areas of multilingualism, translanguaging and transnationalism, and gives a flavour of the interconnections they forged between these areas. ‘Translating Cultures’ continued to grow beyond these large projects, however, not least with the development of the Global Challenge Research Fund, a major UK Government initiative to support research aligned with the United Nations Strategic Development Goals. ‘Translating Cultures’ projects brought to this strand of work a much-needed awareness of the linguistic dimensions of partnerships between the Global North and Global South. In addition, the theme attracted a constellation of other projects, not formally associated with ‘Translating Cultures’ and awarded through the AHRC’s open call mechanisms, creating eventually a portfolio of over 100 projects of varying scope and scale addressing a range of issues including cultural exchange and diplomacy, multiculturalism and multilingualism, identity and migration. This special issue on ‘Thematic Approaches to Translation’ offers a representative overview of these projects and their findings.

The AHRC did not, of course, coin the term ‘Translating Cultures’. Although always already implicit in the study of translation, this explicit yoking together of translating with the concept of culture emerged initially in the 1980s, not surprisingly in the field of anthropology, where the complex relationship between the two had long been a subject of discussion (Ingold 1993). By the turn of the millennium, the term ‘Translating Cultures’ was appearing in the titles of books across a range of disciplinary fields, including translation studies (Carrera, Fernández and Lafuente 1999; Katan 2004) and (again) anthropology (Rubel and Rosman 2003), but also literary studies (Mueller-Vollmer and Irmscher 1999), classical studies (Hardwick 2004), mediaeval studies (Kabir and Williams 2010) and religious studies (Flüchter and Wirbser 2017). The coupling of terms is clearly a suggestive one, enabling reflection not only on the role of translation in cultural formations but also on the potential for culture to open up discussions of translation itself. Inviting researchers to engage with ‘Translating Cultures’ as part of a thematic programme allowed them to reflect on translation from a variety of perspectives and in a wide range of contexts. In assessing proposals to the theme, there was always clear caution to avoid any over-metaphorical use of the term whereby translation might be associated with any form of representation, cognition or information transfer. As criticism of the concept of ‘cultural translation’ (of which more below) makes clear, if translation encompasses everything, then it risks signifying nothing. ‘Translation’ was nevertheless conceived in its broadest possible sense and related not exclusively to processes that are interlingual but also, for example, to intermediality or interculturality. Central to the theme were also issues such as the ‘untranslatable’ as well the impact of what is (or is not) variously transformed, gained or lost in the process of translation. These definitions aimed to reflect a broad range of cultural issues, understandings and interactions. Neither were we prescriptive in our conception of ‘culture’ or ‘cultures’ or in our understanding of the research methodologies – be these, for example, thematic, theoretical or practice-led – applied to their exploration, provided they fitted broadly within the traditions and remit of the arts and humanities.

The relationship of ‘Translating Cultures’ to translation studies, as well as to wider questions of cultural translation, was central to the initial scoping and subsequent evolution of the theme. As the contributions to this special issue make clear, some of the leading scholars in translation studies contributed to the work of ‘Translating Cultures’ (see, for example, Boase-Beier 2015; Baker 2016). Moreover, key concepts in this area of translation studies shaped the theme whilst several projects (represented in the forthcoming online glossary of keywords relating to the theme) have contributed reciprocally to broadening the disciplinary boundaries of the field (see, for example, Campbell and Mills 2012). ‘Translating Cultures’ always sought, however, to extend beyond the limits (no matter how porous those limits might be) of any single discipline, with its usual institutional apparatus of journals, associations, conferences and pedagogical publications. As such, the theme responded to Susan Bassnett’s claim that the translation studies field needs to be ‘provoked, challenged, contested’ (2012, 22). Noting that ‘so much thinking about translation seems to be coming from scholars working outside it’ (21) and that ‘translation studies has become too closed a circle’, Bassnett argued for a cross-disciplinary prizing open of the field:

We need new circuits, that encompass more disciplines, more ways of reading the ever-more intercultural writing that is being produced today. I believe we inside translation studies need to look outwards, to promote some of the excellent research in translation studies more effectively to our colleagues, to engage more in interdisciplinary, collaborative projects. Perhaps we have concentrated so hard on becoming respectable, on claiming to be a discipline, that we have lost our cutting edge. Nothing leads to complacency faster than success; the time has come for those of us who would like to think of ourselves as translation studies scholars to rethink not only how we have come to be here, but where and with whom we want to go next. (23-24)

These comments – in a journal special issue entitled ‘The Known Unknowns of Translation Studies’ – are part of a wider set of debates, evident now for four decades, relating to the intersections of culture and translation that have served as the theoretical and conceptual backcloth for the ‘Translating Cultures’ theme. They have been developed more recently in a special issue of the current journal devoted to the ‘outward’ turn, the editors of which encourage an intensification of this process of broadening out: ‘the field needs to expand outwards, to improve communication with other disciplines, to move beyond binaries, to engage with the idea of translation as a global activity and to configure the planetary into all our thinking’ (Bassnett and Johnston 2019, 187).

Whilst a number of ‘Translating Cultures’ projects engaged with literary translation (Kathryn Batchelor’s work in this volume on China and Africa is exemplary in that regard), the majority used translation as a stimulus to think beyond the text in the ways to which Bassnett alludes in the quotation above. Mary Snell-Hornby (2006) has described the multiple ‘turns’ to which translation studies has been subject as it has evolved as a field. Central to these has been what Bassnett and Lefevere (1990) dubbed the ‘cultural turn’ (of which ‘Translating Cultures’ arguably forms a firm consolidation), a development of the engagement with polysystems from the 1970s that had transcended predominantly linguistic, textual and formalist emphases in the study of translation to factor in the contextual and extratextual. The implications of such a shift signalled the possibility of an inclusivity within a translation studies seen as an interdiscipline, aspiring either to the multidisciplinary (House 2014) or even the a-disciplinary, interrelated developments that are reflected in the field’s growing acceptance as its foundation of an understanding of translation as ‘a process of negotiation between texts and between cultures’ (Bassnett 2002, 6). Such a ‘cultural turn’ was visible more widely, however, across the Humanities, as was evident in the emergence in the final two decades of the twentieth century of other new areas of enquiry such as postmodernism and postcolonialism. In the wake of this more general shift, there were also signs of an associated and in some ways symmetrical ‘translation turn’ (Bassnett 1998) across a wide range of disciplinary fields, linked to the broader concept of ‘cultural translation’ (for a detailed study, see Maitland 2017) popular in particular in the study of globalised and transnational formations.

Studying this ‘turn’ in a special issue of Translation Studies, Doris Bachmann-Medick (2009) identifies three stages which resonate clearly with the progressive development of ‘Translating Cultures’: expansion of the thematic field; metaphorization of translation; and finally a methodological leap and search for transdisciplinary applications. This generalisation of translation, often deployed in these metaphorical ways, was nevertheless criticised by some translation studies scholars for the ways in which ‘the concept itself becomes so broad that its original sense risks being diluted into nothing’ (Chesterman 2010, 104); and others such as Harish Trivedi (2007), speaking from an actively postcolonial perspective, saw in such a manoeuvre an added risk of linguistic insensitivity and even anglonormativity, as the study of cultural translation often occurs monolingually, often in English. Notwithstanding such legitimate concerns, the extension of translation to other fields has been largely welcomed, not least because of the way that it serves as a confirmation of the importance of translation studies and an indication of translation’s ‘appeal to contemporary thought and social action’ (Simon 2009, 210), at the intersection of epistemology and praxis. ‘Translating Cultures’ itself contributed to this broadening of the intellectual and disciplinary reach of translation and the associated recognition of its ‘ubiquitous’ nature, i.e. the understanding that ‘translational phenomena underpin key notions in other areas of the humanities, which is why the humanities should care about translation and translation studies’ (Blumczynski 2016, 1). With this is associated a process of enhancing public understanding of the phenomenon, evident in many of the projects associated with ‘Translating Cultures’ and reflected also in popular interventions contemporary with the theme’s launch, underlining ‘why translation matters’ (Grossman 2010) and suggesting how its study can contribute to the ‘meaning of everything’ (Bellos 2011).

Across the full range of the disciplines represented by the AHRC (including those that have not traditionally engaged extensively with translation studies), ‘Translating Cultures’ invited researchers to imagine how reflection on its core topics might encourage fresh ways of engaging with traditional (and new) objects of study, of reformulating methodological and theoretical assumptions, and of sharing the findings of research with different audiences. Such an approach has proved to have multiple benefits: it encouraged engagement with the ways in which translation may be seen to be constitutive of cultures in their formation, projection and transformation; it extended analysis of the ways in which translation serves as a form of transmission and circulation of ideas, ideologies and forms of knowledge between geographical locations, historical moments and cultural contexts; it contributed to understanding of the role of translation both in processes of artistic and literary creation, and as an active contributor in the development of new knowledge and understanding; it nurtured awareness of the importance of the spaces, contexts, practices, materials, actors and technologies of translation; it encouraged researchers to develop an enhanced understanding of the ethics of translation (and associated concepts such as epistemicide), in the light of a range of phenomena including globalisation and digital communication; and it permitted a closer interrogation of the politics and understanding of translation in a variety of public, private and voluntary bodies and their wider contexts. These developments depended in many cases on cross-disciplinary as well as interdisciplinary working, meaning that ‘Translating Cultures’ permitted a sustained reflection on the translation of ideas, methods and concepts between academic fields – and also between academic fields and other sectors. The articles that follow exemplify such approaches across a range of periods, disciplines and geographical locales.

The special issue opens with art historian Genevieve Warwick’s article on ‘Crying Laocoon’, a compelling study of the visual arts of translation. This tracks the shifting representations of the sculpture Laocoon as an example of inter-medial translation across literature and art, from Pliny to Clement Greenberg. It draws on a rich history of the artistic translation, reproduction, and imitation of Laocoon across multiple media, from plaster casts to table-top porcelains. The article also analyses the changing uses of Laocoon within artistic education, from a Renaissance teaching model to its deployment as a trope of critical theory on the definition of ‘art’. Warwick uses the term ‘translation’ actively, to reflect on acts of artistic transmission revealing transfer not only between cultures, but across materials and media.

The study of Laocoon indicates not only the inclusive nature of ‘Translating Cultures’ and its commitment to working across disciplines in which the engagement with translation has been uneven, but also the theme’s rejection of any presentism. Another project exploring the problems raised by translation in an earlier period is described in Hephzibah Israel and Matthias Frenz’s ‘Translation traces in the archive: unfixing documents, destabilising evidence’, an article focused on the Protestant missionary archive. The study addresses a conundrum in the area of autobiographical conversion narrative accounts in a number of South Asian languages: while several of these documents claimed to be translations, the researchers were unable to trace both the source and target text. Israel and Frenz ask how (and indeed whether) we can compare texts in translation without complete versions of their source texts. Additionally, they contribute significantly to translation studies by asking how researchers can engage constructively with the implied presence of the source texts in the face of their material absence. The article posits a new set of questions on translation and its relationship with the archive. By drawing on Foucauldian critique and Foucault’s argument for new forms of ‘archaeological’ engagement, the authors explore what they dub ‘translation traces’ in the documents they have uncovered. They are able to interrogate as a result the role that invisibilized forms of translation play in the documentation of other lives. As such, the archive is read in the light of Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of ‘contact zone’, a site where languages, texts and memory intersect through translation. Key to the article is an argument that privileging and rethinking the role of translation indicates new ways of conceptualising and working with historical archives.

‘The translated deaf self, ontological (in)security and deaf culture’, by Alys Young, Jemina Napier and Rosemary Oram, positions translation as a fundamental axis in the social constitution of the self. The authors elaborate the concept of the ‘translated deaf self’, which they tentatively define as ‘the socio-cultural impact for deaf sign language users of multiple, regular, lifelong experiences of being encountered by others and inter-subjectively known in a translated form, i.e. through sign language interpreters’ (p. 4). Understanding translation inclusively as both linguistic and non-linguistic, they analyse the translated deaf self in terms of ontological (in)security in a wider context of phonocentrism, suggesting how the recursive dynamics within and through which the self is constituted are impacted by the contingent experience of being interpreted. The article reveals how such impacts on self, identity and agency are not equivalent to those experienced by the hearing, non-signing actors who also participate in relational encounters through sign language interpreters. What is highly original about the study is its exploration of the extent to which the shared experience of the translated deaf self may or may not be considered constitutive of (deaf) culture. The conclusion to the article reflects on how a final act of translation into the visual arts – through which the translated deaf self may be encountered, communicated and become critically conscious – affords an opportunity to break free of the written/signed signifier as the dominant discursive medium.

‘The translated deaf self’ draws heavily on observation of the practice and experience of sign language interpreters and those for whom they interpret. This rooting of research in practice was common to a number of ‘Translating Cultures’ projects, including the work of a team led by Hilary Footitt, whose article ‘Translation and the contact zones of International Development’ takes as its starting-point an observation that development is a hermeneutic, meaning-creating process that causes translational encounters in ‘contact zones’ (Pratt’s concept is deployed again, in a very different context), linking donors from the Global North with partners from the Global South and their wider communities. Drawing on a case-study of indigenous NGOs in Peru, the article focuses on the role of interlingual translation in permitting development interventions on the ground. It finds that the absence of translation in donor/partner relations produces systematically ignored relationships of inequality between anglophone donors and Spanish-speaking NGOs. The article calls for wider recognition of the instrumental role of interlingual translation in producing the development realities in which the UN’s Global Goals for Sustainable Development are now operating.

In addition to advocating the forms of linguistic sensitivity evident in Hilary Footitt’s research, the ‘Translating Cultures’ theme has also encouraged reflection on forms of research impact in the light of translation, suggesting that this attention to the ‘translational’ should not be limited to medicine. The article ‘Translating science for young people through metaphor’, by Alice Deignan and Elena Semino, develops this thinking in the area of science communication. The authors demonstrate what insights can be gained by considering the relationship between expert and non-expert texts about scientific topics through the prism of ‘translation’. They focus on metaphors used to discuss climate change in a variety of educational materials and in interviews with secondary school students. The article reveals the role of teachers as ‘translators’ of scientific knowledge and explores the place of metaphor (and the particular metaphors used) within these processes of intralingual translation. It concludes by suggesting that a translation perspective can usefully highlight the challenges and potential pitfalls involved in mediating scientific knowledge for the benefit of non-experts.

The final article in this special issue, by the translation studies scholar Kathryn Batchelor, focuses on literary translation and its relationship to soft power, taking the example of African literature in Chinese translation. The study is situated in the context of the intensification of relations between China and Africa in the contemporary period and suggests that insight can be gained into Sino-African relations through a detailed study of literary translation activities. The article explores the results of a survey of African literature translated into Chinese between 2000 and 2015. Whilst is it clear that the majority of these translations have conventional commercial motivations, there are a number of exceptions that are analysed here on a case by case basis. The study focuses on the political connections of the authors and argues that literary translation can often be connected, in a Sino-African context, with the development of political relations at the highest levels, as well as with the promotion of a positive view of China. The article asks whether such translation projects may be understood as tools of ‘soft power’ and then develops these conclusions to reflect more widely on the usefulness of this diplomatic concept for translation studies.

These six articles underline the contribution of ‘Translating Cultures’ to translation studies, suggesting the fruitful potential of extending conversations within the field to areas, such as art history and deaf studies, with which dialogue has previously been limited. They introduce new concepts, including ‘translation traces’, and suggest the potential of new engagement with concepts such as soft power. Additionally, they underline the transnational reach of ‘Translating Cultures’, showing the ways in which the theme has contributed substantially to the ‘outward turn’ (Bassnett and Johnston 2019) of Translation Studies and also indicated new areas of enquiry with global resonance for the contemporary world. As such, the projects reveal the importance of translation – both textual and extra-textual – for understanding key twenty-first-century challenges, such as science communication relating to climate change or the implementation of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

As the conversation in this special issue between leading researchers involved in ‘Translating Cultures’ and the reviews of some of the other major outputs that have emerged make clear, the theme has foregrounded research that considers languages, cultures and translation as a continuum of practices. The Principal Investigators from the theme’s three large grants discussed a range of questions that emerged from their ambitious projects, at the time the largest ever funded by the AHRC. They explore the ways in which translation functioned as an enabling concept across the multiple disciplines and sectors in which they operated, analyse the intersections of translation with key terms such as multilingualism and translanguaging, and reflect on what it means to think about culture in the light of translation, translation in the light of culture. ‘Translating Cultures’ has sought to produce new interpretations, to inspire fresh forms of creativity and to empower alternative types of research development, activating what Loredana Polezzi (Forthcoming) has dubbed ‘creative processes that are inherent both in the act of translation and in its reception on the part of multiple audiences’. Taken together, the articles, reviews and ‘in conversation’ piece that follow reveal the enabling possibilities of exploring the intersection of ‘translating’ and ‘cultures’, underlining again the two terms’ very real interdependency. Indeed, to borrow an idea from Sherry Simon (2009, 209), it might be argued that one of the main conclusions of the ‘Translating Cultures’ theme, encapsulated in his special issue, has been recognition of the tautological nature of this designation: there is no translating without cultures, there are no cultures without translating.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The research was supported by the AHRC (AH/K503381/1; AH/N504476/1).