Cultural translation: An introduction to the problem, and Responses

Abstract

Etymologically, translation evokes an act of moving or carrying across from one place or position to another, or of changing from one state of things to another. This does not apply only to the words of different languages, but also to human beings and their most important properties. They too can be moved across all sorts of differences and borders and so translated from one place to another, for instance from one cultural and political condition to another. Thus, one can culturally translate people – for a political purpose and with existential consequences. No discussion of the concept of cultural translation can easily dispense with an analysis of the very concrete devices of such translation if it strives to maintain contact with the political and existential issues at stake in the debate on cultural translation. The political meaning of cultural translation is not a quality external to the concept and capable of being discussed in a haphazard way. Precisely by becoming cultural, translation opens up the problem of its intrinsic political meaning.

Keywords:

• cultural translation
• heterolinguality
• homolingual address
• translation in Romanticism
• social contract
• structural linguistics

Notes

1. Some of the ideas developed in this article are presented in Buden and Nowotny (2008).

2. See Cheyfitz (1991), especially chapters 3 and 4.

3. Some examples of resistance are discussed in Cheyfitz (1991, 137–40).