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ABSTRACT
This provocation piece discusses the difficulties of translating texts based on experiential and corporeal knowledge. Personal narratives often comprise such knowledge; therefore, their interpretation and rendering in other languages give rise to some controversial questions. For instance, do we need translators/interpreters with supposedly “analogous” life experiences to source authors/speakers? Who has “the right” to translate/interpret/represent whom? In this contribution, these questions are elaborated on by using the concepts ‘secondary-witness’ and ‘debriefing’, as well as examples from research on translation of childbirth narratives and recent debates in the film industry regarding representation.
Acknowledgements
This debate began at a conference organized at the School of Translation and Interpretation, University of Ottawa, on 15–16 November 2018, titled “Naming and Translating ‘The Marginal’”. I would like to extend my thanks to Luise von Flotow for organizing the event and to all the participants for the discussion and feedback. The research this piece is based on was made possible through the Bank of Montreal Visiting Scholarship in Women’s Studies, which I held at The Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies, University of Ottawa, in autumn 2018.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Note on contributor
Şebnem Susam-Saraeva is a Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Her research interests have included gender and translation, retranslations, translation of literary and cultural theories, research methodology in translation studies, internationalization of the discipline, translation and popular music, and translation and maternal health.
Notes
1 It is worth noting here that this difficulty of making sense of experiential and subjective knowledge of course applies to everyone, not just to translators and interpreters. Similar issues are faced by those who need to respond to this kind of knowledge in any way or are affected by it, including partners, students, judges, etc., raising some basic ethical, philosophical and epistemological issues. However, for the purposes of my argument, I will try and limit the discussion to translators and interpreters.
2 See e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/oct/20/cate-blanchett-defends-straight-actors-playing-gay-characters, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/27/anthony-horowitz-people-used-to-disagree-now-they-send-death-threats, https://nationalpost.com/entertainment/theatre/controversial-robert-lepage-show-kanata-cancelled-after-co-producers-withdraw-financial-support, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2019/jan/14/gay-roles-actors-assassination-gianni-versace-bohemian-rhapsody, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/13/movies/scarlett-johansson-rub-and-tug-transgender.html, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2020/mar/11/actor-felt-forced-quit-musical-man-cast-trans-woman.
3 All glosses into English are my own.
4 This is in line with the findings of my previous research on the topic, which indicate that translators have found it rather difficult to introduce the concept of home birth to Turkish audiences in a meaningful way (Susam-Saraeva Citation2010).
5 For more details on the translational choices in this project, see Susam-Saraeva Citation2020.
9 https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2020/mar/11/actor-felt-forced-quit-musical-man-cast-trans-woman.
11 http://jezebel.com/blue-is-the-warmest-color-and-the-lesbian-experience-1459688416, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/movies/the-trouble-with-blue-is-the-warmest-color.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&, http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/nov/21/blue-is-the-warmest-colour-review, https://www.bitchmedia.org/post/the-problems-with-blue-is-the-warmest-color.
12 Anonymous, personal correspondence.
14 I would like to thank Arianne Des Rochers for raising this question during her presentation at the “Naming and Translating ‘The Marginal’” conference, University of Ottawa, 15–16 November 2018.
15 Hensley Owens explains the possible reasons underlying this resistance as follows: “Some women in the conference audience seemed to expect, even to demand, personal, bodily experience as a warrant for my academic claims. I suspect those responses had to do with childbearing being so politically and ideologically charged; sometimes, when women hear another woman’s story, or even scholarship about women’s stories, they respond not so much to the stories or the experiences themselves so much as to the assumption that the other woman’s choices and stances imply and/or require judgement of their own choices and stances” (Citation2015, 140).