Translation on its own terms? Toward education for global culture

Abstract

Roger Ames’ keynote provides a powerful orientation for thinking about translation. Against the background of his outstanding research career as a mediator between East and West, he offers a clear vision of global cultivation through what he calls ‘cultural translation.’ Encouraging and insightful as Ames’ account of translation is, and although I am sympathetic to his attempt to do justice to the excluded, peripheral voice of philosophy in the canon of global culture, I would like to address some further philosophical questions that such an approach might raise. In view of deep tensions between different cultures, we may perhaps encounter real occasions where the very viability of a culture ‘on its own terms’ is in question. I shall conclude that for the sake of realizing a better global culture, the aim that Ames encourages us to pursue, and his approach of justice to minority and to peripheral cultures, may require a dimension of thinking that goes beyond justice as conventionally understood.

Keywords:

• Borders
• common ground
• cultural translation
• East and West
• global culture
• translation as transformative experience