A conceptual and empirical approach to cultural translation

Abstract

This article synthesizes debates about cultural translation that have taken place in a recent Translation Studies forum and in other venues. It offers a conceptual map by examining the matrix formed by pairing meanings of “culture” (in an anthropological sense, in a symbolic sense, and in the sense of a community) with meanings of “translation” (as rewriting and as transposition). This map shows how different notions of cultural translation contradict and complement each other, and it provides concepts that can be tested empirically. The article concludes by using these concepts to describe a bill in the legislature of the Canadian province of Quebec (Bill 94) and by calling for further empirical investigation as a way to refine theories of cultural translation.

Keywords:

• cultural translation
• definitions of culture
• translation as rewriting
• translation as transposition
• Quebec Bill 94
• veiling

Notes

1. The breadth of this article comes at the price of depth. “Culture” is a term with a rich and complicated history, of which I offer only a sketch here. In English, its meaning evolved, describing the cultivation of crops or animals in the fifteenth century, civilized society in the eighteenth century (like its German equivalent Kultur), and the superstition characteristic of non-Western societies in the mid-twentieth century. By the late twentieth century, this sense had fallen out of favor as anthropologists became more reflexive in their work. It was at that point that it took on the valences I employ here (Williams 1976; Clifford and Marcus 1986; Ingold 1993).

2. Again, this is to abbreviate. Andrew Chesterman (2010, 104) reminds us: “The corresponding terms [of ‘translation’] in some other languages (such as Finnish, Turkish, Japanese, Chinese, Tibetan, Vietnamese, Tamil) do not foreground the notion of carrying something across, but rather notions of difference or mediation”. Even in languages where words meaning “translation” do derive from notions of “carrying across”, notions about language (whether it is a mere “container” for ideas or represents a culturally specific mode of dividing the world into identifiable units) or about the effects of “carrying across” (whether or not the receiving culture is transformed in the process) have varied through time (Berman 1988).

3. The bill was approved in principle on 15 February 2011 and referred to Quebec's Committee on Institutions.

4. All translations from French are my own.