Response by Coldiron to “Translation and the materialities of communication”

I am grateful for the opportunity to respond to Karin Littau's call for the integration of media studies (hereafter MS) with translation studies (hereafter TS). I agree so much with her analyses, and her proposals are so important to both TS and MS – as well as to literary studies and to the humanities in general – that what follows risks the appearance of either blind assent or trivial quibbling. What I intend instead are supportive questions and extensions, a few caveats and disagreements, and some further proposals.

“How can we know the dancer from the dance?”

The question with which Yeats closed his meditation on matter, form and transformation, “Among School Children”, has become a cliché, but it is apposite to Littau's sections on immateriality, mediality and technicity. The old division that Littau discusses between the supposedly immaterial work and the supposedly incidental material text that conveys it has, I hope, been thoroughly collapsed among book historians following D. F. McKenzie (1999), in addition to McLuhan, Mumford, Innis and others whom Littau engages. Matter does matter, and media are not mere tools: on this we agree. Scholars in both fields, TS and MS, understand that physical forms (including digital forms) not only make possible the uptake of meaning, but also shape and construct that meaning, and mean in themselves. I would add that any serious attention to aesthetics confirms the meaning inhering in media: such meaning derives from the affordances of human-created material forms, the features of which are not haphazard or incidental but rather are conceived, planned, executed and signifying inside cultural matrices.

Digressing a bit, I would stress further that digital media cannot be dismissed as immaterial, and digital texts, too, perform a dance with the tangible-physical at every level (obviously, a screen is a physical object, as are lithium batteries and silicon chips). Digital texts can be considered along with quipus, stelae, codices or films, on a spectrum of materiality. But what counts is not the degree of materiality of a given textual technology, but rather its function and effects – its signifying powers. That is, digitization, like other textual technologies (e.g. manuscript, print, engraving and inscription, lithography, textile embroidery), makes works available in specific (yet mutable) substrates, forms and formats. Nor should the digital be excluded from the long history of textual technologies, and certainly not on grounds of immateriality; I part company with some book historians and media scholars who seem to de-historicize the digital. Regardless, the future of an integrated TS and MS depends on the understanding that media are both material and non-material, as are translations, which rely on such physical things as sound waves, ink or keyboards for their production, transmission and reception.

Digital materiality included, the mutability of texts is for me, perhaps more than for Littau, their most interesting property, and I shall propose below that the processes of change, rather than either materiality or Geist, are the best objects of study if we wish to integrate TS and MS. A glance at common translation praxis immediately reveals how necessary transmediation processes are to translation, and how they involve both immaterial and material elements. The translator takes up meaning from a text in some medium or other (say, a printed book); she creates new meaning in her translation also using some medium, likely not the same one (perhaps first on pencil and paper, or with keyboard and screen). Already her re-languaging cooperates with her re-mediation, every moment one of mutual influence. If she's successful with a publisher, readers then take up her meaning in yet another medium (perhaps the codex again, where lineation, paratext and typography will come into play; but perhaps an e-book, where page space redefinitions and pop-ups will count, or an audio book, where vocal inflection and pacing will co-signify; or perhaps a complex-format codex that is particularly meaningful for translations, such as a facing-page bilingual edition). At each phase of creation, transmission, distribution and reception, new mediation and translation are direct co-factors.¹ Media make and remake the kind and quality of meaning that is taken up, laid down, taken up again whenever translation occurs. This is so whether or not the translators deliberately attempt to manipulate media, and whether or not the media producers deliberately attend to translation as a co-product. (Meanwhile, the dance between material and immaterial goes on in every interaction between medium and language that results in a translated text.) The mobility and mutability at the heart of translations make it essential for TS and MS scholars alike to take seriously both re-languaging and re-mediation as processes.

I disagree that “culture is normally indifferent to technology”; on the contrary, culture and technology seem to me to be in their own macro-level dance, each responding to the other, each catalyzing changes in the other. That interaction may have gone unacknowledged during certain phases of history, but no longer. The “discursivization of culture” that Littau points out in fact depends on “questions about its material, physical, or physiological substrata”. The big mistake – and on this Littau and I surely agree – would be to identify translation with the nonmaterial and media with the material. Littau is right that “indifference to materiality” makes no sense, and that “intellectual history is unthinkable without technological innovation”, but I would push back a bit to say also that technological innovations are equally unthinkable without intellectual history, and that media technologies themselves are also born of ideation and made manifest in forms. I mean this not as a retro-Platonic separation of the ideational and material, privileging the former, but rather as a pragmatic point, viewing the ideational and material as inextricable and mutually constitutive. In other words, reversing the old Geist-fetish Littau notes so as to privilege the material doesn't get us very far, for that reversal still reifies media technologies and separates them from other cultural products (as if media technologies weren't also results of human imagination and labor). To me, the material and non-material aspects of both translation and media seem to stand not in a binary and competitive relation, and not only in a partly dialectical one, as I think Littau's article has posed it, but, rather, as fully interpenetrative and mutually animating. Littau is certainly right that we must “take seriously the entanglement of the material and ideational”. I would propose a disentangling integration of MS and TS. Although “disentangling integration” sounds like an oxymoron, what I mean is that (1) we should assume the interpenetration of material and non-material, and attend to each in translations and in the media through which we receive them; (2) we should regard translation and transmediation as allied processes of change; and (3) a practical way – practical in the way Pym (forthcoming) means it – to study these two processes together is to compare versions of the same text (i.e. re-languaged/re-mediated versions) for salient variations in both language and medium, and to analyze the cultural force of those variations.

Process analysis: Metamorphoses, salience and specificity

So how exactly might we integrate TS and MS, disentangling the material and ideational components of what we study while nevertheless honoring both in each realm? One way is to look not at media in general (as I think Littau, having a magisterial view of that field, tends to do), or even at all text-technologies as such, but rather, to study together the analogous processes of transmediation and of translation. First, some caveats and definitions:

• oBy “transmediation”, I mean the act of putting a work into another medium (what some scholars call re-mediation; e.g. Bolter and Grusin 1999). That can seem as straightforward as recording an oral utterance, as complex as adapting a novel for film, or as deceptively simple as putting a manuscript into print or a printed work into digital form. (In fact, all transmediation is more complex than it seems; recording an oral utterance is not actually straightforward at all).

• o By “translation”, I mean the act of putting a work into a new language. This is a deliberately narrow definition intended only for this local discussion. “Translation” has been recently used to mean adaptation, imitation, reformation, representation, change of status, change of venue, and so on. For example, it has become a truism that every edition is a “translation”. Certainly. Scholars have used such a phrase as “translating China” when speaking of the general reception of Chinese cultural products. Fine. But not all transformational activity is “translation”. I may feel a reservation here about Littau's proposal that translation become the glue for comparative media studies or that transmediation is translation rather than an analogous process. TS has a lot to offer MS, and MS should be more comparative than it is. However, despite my happiness that the word “translation” has enjoyed such broad applications across the humanities, and despite my mischievous delight at the very idea of such TS-empire-building – imagine swallowing up newbie-MS into our grand 3000+-year history – I know that we probably ought to resist the temptation, and clarify the distinctiveness of each process, the better to point out what they share and how they interact.

• o By “processes”, I simply mean the “how” of translated/transmediated texts: the strategies, tactics, techniques, choices and methods used in making the change from one language to another or one medium to another. To stabilize any one object for study is to miss the fun of transformation. To look instead at processes, at how changes occur between versions, lets us read textual variations, whether linguistic or medial, not as problems to be edited out, but, rather, as salient signals of important changes, as creative acts of textual producers and translators. Vivent les différences (et que nous en étudions)!

Both transmediation and translation involve, at a minimum, individual actors, social “habitus” and institutions, economics, aesthetics, and human labor, skill and creativity. Both processes demand the choice of apparatus, substrate, techniques and presentational tactics, as well as crucial inferences and imaginings about a new audience. Some parallel sub-processes to consider on both sides of the pair: amplification; compression or condensation; strategic omissions; ornamentations; appositive or explanatory structures; paratexts; self-referentiality; quotation or allusion. Translation and transmediation also share post-production issues (marketing, distribution, preservation and access) and issues in reception (critical commentary, editorial interventions, reader responses, and canonicity).

In the immaterial vein, because transmediation and translation make one kind of textual object into another kind, they entail a metamorphosis of identities, a mirroring, a cleaving (in both senses) of self and Other. They paradoxically also involve desires for likeness and continuity, and they may at the same time involve the fear of death and difference and the will to persuade. They often leave traces of a longing for beauty. To look at translation and transmediation as allied processes is to open up every phase in the life of a text so as to consider such things, and, in all phases, to consider material and immaterial arts together, as they cooperate.

Suggestions

TS scholars are quite good at examining processes at the level of lexicon and syntax, genre and form, and, lately, they have become skilled at studying the transfer and alteration of cultural materials (even at the small scale, as in how to re-language cultural bits such as place names or allusions). But TS scholars overall don't always pay enough attention to the concomitant re-mediations of the translations they study. Notable exceptions, beyond those Littau names, include a phalanx of new translation scholars who do pay particular attention to media in their analyses of translation.² Littau herself is the rare example of a scholar with strengths in both fields. However, not as many other MS scholars seem so attentive to and expert in the cross-lingual and cross-cultural processes that inflect mediality. Traditional book historians may have advanced further in this regard; recent work from Andrew Pettegree is strongly transnational, as are the 55 remarkable essays from book historians edited by Suarez and Woudhuysen (2014), The Book: A Global History. Also promising is SHARP's emphasis on transnationalism and translation, and on the long history of textuality, which is inherently transnational. I think a great deal can be gained on both sides.

What both TS and MS need in addition to a turn towards each other is a sustained attention to history. A monoglot, media-free historicism is seriously lacking (I have railed against it elsewhere, to little effect; Coldiron [2001]). But so is an amnesiac, monoglot media studies, and so too an amnesiac, media-free translation studies. I'm overstating, of course, but here I think TS is in less danger than the other two areas of study; we need all three focal points brought together. Littau suggests this: “[The slide from mediation to medium to mediality] is invariably accompanied by a turn to history: the archive of dead media, archaeology of media, even the forensics of the computer hard drive.” Yes, but are there any “dead” media? The book is not dead, manuscript is not dead, and replacement models of media – just like displacement models of translation – don't work except in very crude examples, such as VHS vs. Beta machine types. Additions, accretions and adaptations in media occur as a rule, with replacements as an exception. Media overlap and coexist over time,³ making historical questions vivid and urgent, not dead archaeologies. Littau states that “[t]he translator is part of a material, medial, and technologized ecology that shapes every aspect of mind”. This is not only true now, but was so in the past; I would advocate a much stronger historical focus when trying to integrate TS and MS. A presentism or lack of historical imagination and precision leads us to underestimate the effects of technological change in past eras. It should be no surprise that times of media change and technological innovation are also phases of increased translation activity; the two transformational activities cooperate to fill the content vacuum created by new technologies. If we take translations and transmediations as allied transformative processes, and ask how they work, in what contexts, and then analyze salient variations between versions, we're performing rich synchronic analysis of texts: great. But as good as it can be, synchronic historicism is just not enough. (It's insufficient in any period – I know because I've been guilty of wearing old-book blinders myself – but in studies of the present, such amnesia can be truly counterproductive.) If we take a long view of the history of both allied processes – that is, the history of media and the history of translation – we will then have a very rich and informative set of factors to consider.

I realize that this radically inductive, process-based, tripartite method is strange, but it is full of possibility and commonsensical at heart: we compare versions of a text in different languages and media; we select salient variations, considering register, tone, lexicon, grammar in translation, and, just as much, the register of media, the tone of media, the lexicon and grammar of media; we compare those variations as endpoints of allied, transformative processes; we contextualize the processes in terms of the inferred audiences’ differing cultures; we locate what we find in its historical moment, and then we look outward to place our findings in the long historical record.

Who said it would be easy?

Note on contributor

A. E. B. Coldiron is professor of English and affiliated faculty in French at Florida State University and currently serves as director of the History of Text Technologies Program there. In 2014–15 she directed the Folger Shakespeare Library's Year-Long Colloquium on Renaissance/Early Modern Translation. She is author of Printers without Borders: Translation and Textuality in the Renaissance (2015) and other books and essays. An overview of her work in medieval and Renaissance literature, translation, textuality and poetics is at http://english.fsu.edu/faculty/acoldiron.htm.

Notes

1. But is translation just as necessary to mediality? Pragmatically, yes; interpreters and translators transmit new text technologies across cultures. But if translation is rather less thoroughly integral to mediality, MS scholars nevertheless shouldn't ignore translation. In my field-integrative utopia, the co-processes would receive equal attention from both MS and TS scholars, albeit in different ways and examining different aspects of the translation-transmediation process.

2. Guyda Armstrong, Marie-Alice Belle, Belén Bistué, Joyce Boro, Warren Boutcher, Line Cottegnies, Emily Francomano, Brenda Hosington, David Macey, Joshua Reid, among others; I feel honored to include myself among them.

3. The corresponding principle in TS might be that translations may coexist with originals, and multi-versions may coexist, often in the same homes or libraries, on the same desks, inside multilingual books and sometimes in macaronic poetry. TS scholars largely now understand that the same work in one language is definitely not the same when culturally deracinated and repositioned in translation. Likewise, when a work is transmediated, it is necessarily culturally deracinated and repositioned. Audiences always bring a culture of expectations, and the very same people constitute a different receiving culture when encountering even the same work in a new medium. (This idea applies Hans Jauss’ [1982] “horizons of expectation” to media.) Both temporal disjunctions and overlaps in transmediations and translations, in short, intensify rather than diminish the need to historicize.