Translation and the contact zones of International Development

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the conceptual link between Translation Studies and International Development with, as its starting-point, the observation that development is a hermeneutic meaning-creating process which brings together Northern donors, and Southern partners and their communities in ‘contact zones’ of encounter. Using a case-study of Southern NGOs in Peru, the research explores the role of interlingual translation in creating development realities on the ground. It argues firstly that the absence of translation in donor/partner relations produces a development reality which is a technical decontextualised process, establishing relationships of inequity between anglophone donors and Spanish-speaking NGOs. Secondly, the article notes that, despite the officially recognised multilingualism of Peru, encounters of Southern partners and their communities can replicate attenuated forms of these donor/partner relations. Whilst there is an awareness of locally situated dialogic exchanges, the tendency is to support uni-directional translation in which the sharing of visions and the possibility of bi-directional learning are not generally prioritised. The article calls for a recognition of the key role of interlingual translation in producing the development realities in which the Global Goals for Sustainable Development are now operating.

KEYWORDS:

• Translation
• International Development
• NGOs
• global English
• Peru

Acknowledgments

I acknowledge with thanks the financial assistance of the AHRC, and the key contributions of my research colleagues in the project, Dr Angela Crack, and Dr Wine Tesseur.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. www.reading.ac.uk/listening-zones-ngos.

2. All translations of quotations by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [AH/M006808/1].

Notes on contributors

Hilary Footitt

Hilary Footitt is Hon. Research Fellow in the Department of Languages and Cultures, University of Reading. She has written widely on languages in war and conflict, and is the co-editor of the Palgrave series on 'Languages at War'.