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SPA Estudios culturales |
contents
Introduction | Parallel fields, parallel evolution | Some key concepts and approaches | Research potential
Traditionally, translation theory and practice have revolved around two basic dimensions: language and culture; that is, linguistically-oriented approaches and culture-oriented approaches. Yet these two dimensions are imbricated. The emergence of the notion of discourse as a wider frame of reference has reinforced both the role played by social and cultural aspects in the creation and functioning of texts, as well as the role of language in the creation of social meaning and its enaction through stories and narratives (Popova 2015).
It this sense, it comes as no surprise that translation studies has converged into perspectives shared by other disciplines, such as discourse analysis, narratology, or cultural studies, a generic label that, as a matter of fact, applies to a variety of approaches and methodologies rather than to a single, well-defined object of study. In fact, in recent decades, translation studies has witnessed the development of what we could term contexts in cultural translation, where specific approaches from various fields in cultural studies have been applied to analyse the role of translation in the political dynamics of culture, both historically and contemporarily.
This has provided a major epistemological expanse in the discipline. Often referred to as ‘the cultural turn’, since the late eighties TS gradually adopted cross-disciplinary theoretical perspectives that had the notion of culture and cultural practices at their core. Some had been developed in anthropology and ethnic studies; some others in sociology, literary studies, history of the ideas or colonial and postcolonial studies. Yet many others were developed in TS themselves, since the intrinsically cross-cultural concern of translation and interpreting research made it into a unique vantage point and contributed to the wide array of subject fields that characterise TS today.
Cultural studies approaches to translation or interpreting are concerned with the politics of translation practices and debates, translation as an agent of power or resistance, and the role of translation in shaping communities and identities. The sheer width of cultural studies implies that almost any approach to translation from a cultural-social perspective might be considered to quite an extent coincident with a cultural-studies approach. As with critical discourse analysis applied to translation or, in a narrower focus, TS-oriented ideology studies, we are dealing with closely related fields that often overlap. General issues that are at the core of cultural studies, such as ideology, positioning, representation of social actors, power relations, dominance and subalternity, are also a matter of inquiry in TS. But this has not been always the case. There is a parallel evolution in both disciplines that may be traced back to the general paradigm shift that took place in the early nineties and that traversed a number of different disciplines.
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Parallel fields, parallel evolution
At the root of that shift perhaps we may situate the tenets of social constructionism and Michel Foucault’s insights on the nature of power, knowledge, and discourse, which were amply debated in many fields in the social sciences. Edward W. Said’s critique of orientalism (1977) and the subsequent development of post-colonial theory and criticism from various sources (especially the writings of Frantz Fanon, Stuart Hall, Gayatri Ch. Spivak, etc.) cemented what would in the end shape a new academic discipline whose object of study was culture from a critical perspective. Eventually, this discipline was to become a transdisciplinary body of research uniting perspectives from various fields (among others, sociology, political science, gender studies, ethics, media studies, colonial and postcolonial studies, cultural history, intercultural communication, and also Translation Studies) more as a convergence of perspectives on social spaces, identities and their interaction with power and representation, than a distinct field with well-defined boundaries. It may be argued that it is precisely this critical approach and the use of certain methodologies (critical discourse analysis or qualitative methods of social analysis) what defines cultural studies, and not a specific subject; accordingly, Toby Miller has argued that “cultural studies is a tendency across disciplines, not a discipline itself” (2001: 1). It may be defined as a critical, transdisciplinary approach to cultural manifestations and their interactions in a multicultural world.
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| Two milestones in cultural studies, Orientalism (Said 1977) and In Theory (Ahmad 1992). |
The establishment of cultural studies as an academic field of research and education took place to a large extent within the departments of comparative literature in Anglophone universities, but soon developed a distinct, yet diffuse epistemological field that has been variously termed as cultural studies, critical studies, critical theory, cultural criticism, among other denominations. While a critical focus is a relevant feature in most studies in this field (see ideology), some of these denominations betray the Marxist, social-criticism background of the earliest approaches, and cultural studies is also preferred as more ‘neutral’ --yet the prevalence of Western philosophy and theory in most essays may question the alleged lack of culturocentrism in any term of choice. Among the most relevant theoreticians who have contributed to this field we may mention Edward W. Said, who from the domain of comparative literature imprinted into his essays, esp. Orientalism (1977) and Culture and Imperialism (1993), a tone of ideological analysis that has been influential in many other areas; Aijaz Ahmad, whose In Theory (1992) contributed, from a Marxist point of view, to the systematization of previous theoretical approaches; Stuart Hall, head of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University who, from a sociological perspective, has had a major impact in all fields in the Humanities concerned with intercultural communication; Robert Young, author of the essay White Mythologies (1990), where he reviews the condition of knowledge in a so-called ‘West’ under an ever-increasing transformation arising from its contact with an internal and external plurality.
Closely related with cultural studies, and in some ways coincident with it, the field of Postcolonial Studies constitutes a critical approach to the dominance of some peoples over others, and the development of critical means to analyse, deconstruct and even offset those relations of dominance, discrimination, control and exploitation.
The move towards translation from within the general study of culture was first established by Talal Asad’s seminal papers “Translating Europe's others” (1985, with John Dixon) and “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology” (1986). In this paper, the British anthropologist reviews the European philosophical tradition on the etic contact between cultures and started to raise questions about the interpretation of cultures, or cultural translation, especially about the processes of representation and stereotyping associated to it: any pieces of discourse produced in a given society must be constructed (translated) as a cultural text by the analyst, inserted in the cultural and textual practices of the receiving academic culture, where anthropologists ultimately select, assign meaning and authority. Asad and other anthropologists interested in cultural relativism (Clifford, Geertz and others) started to give theoretical form to cultural reception and transmission, particularly since the organization of the Essex 1984 conference Europe and its others (Barker, Hulme, Iversen, et al. 1984). In a parallel fashion, the use of translation as a means for colonial dominance had also been the subject of cultural historiography and criticism such as Rafael 1988 on the Spanish colonial rule in the Philippines, Clendinnen 1987 in the Yucatán, or Cheyfitz 1991 in the imaginary of imperialist literature.
As a convenient metaphor, cultural translation was starting to take shape in essays dealing with cultural interpretation or intercultural communication, and most especially in studies dealing with colonialism. Some influential postcolonial thinkers such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Tejaswini Niranjana or Homi Bhabha, touched upon the subject of translation and inaugurated a common field of inquiry both in postcolonial studies and in translation studies. Contrary to a negative appraisal of cultural contact as loss of purity or contamination, the postcolonial approach to cultural translation celebrates and encourages the trace of the subaltern, the foreign, the other, as a means to exert communicative displacement in the target language and culture. Niranjana (1992:120) goes back to Walter Benjamin’s urging the translator to allow their language “to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue” instead of preserving its original state, an idea that she also relates to Derrida’s later use of quotation to “interrupt” his text. Similar ideas of re-framing and subversion through [cultural] translation, often articulated through spatial metaphors such as dislocation, instability or displacement, are developed by Spivak (1993) and Bhabha (1994a, 1994b). In his essay “The postcolonial and the postmodern” (1994a), Bhabha suggests that “Culture is translational because such spatial histories of displacement – now accompanied by the territorial ambitions of ‘global’ media technologies – make the question of how culture signifies, or what is signified by culture, a rather complex issue”.
Postcolonial TS were established, then, by Niranjana’s pioneering essay and also by a corpus of research in translation studies that dealt with the theory and practice of translating hybrid texts in a colonial or postcolonial context. Carbonell’s Traducir al Otro (1997), Douglas Robinson’s Translation and Empire (1997), or Bassnett and Trivedi’s edited volume Post-colonial Translation: theory and practice (1999) were the starting point for many essays, especially in the Anglophone sphere, focused on the processes of translation that challenged the tenets, models, received representations or poetic conventions of their readers.
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| How the ‘other’ is represented and/or subdued through language is a recurrent topic in postcolonial translation approaches. |
Fuelled by Lefevere’s understanding of translation as a rewriting embedded in the conceptual conventions --the “grid”-- of a cultural context, the “cultural turn” had been under way for some years in translation studies. However, in the early nineties, TS were still restricted to the actual practice of translation and interpreting of professional and literary texts; translation as a cross-cultural activity, as an instrument for social intervention, and as a critical tool had not yet been developed. This progress may be traced back to two closely related seminal articles which would branch off into two of today’s most relevant areas of research in TS, eventually, one towards ideology analysis applied to translation and the other towards translation as cross-cultural criticism. The former was Ian Mason’s 1994 essay “Discourse, Ideology, and Translation”, a pioneer article which inaugurated the application of critical discourse analysis perspectives --a most important and complementary area which falls beyond the scope of this entry. The latter was Dingwaney & Maier’s 1992 article “Translation as a Method for Cross-Cultural Teaching”. Focusing on the translation into English of a text by activist and Nobel prize winner Rigoberta Menchú, their analysis revealed far-reaching issues of displacement, suppression, intervention, agency and hegemonic authority. Following the wake of that pioneering article, one of the first essays that situated translation in a wider, cross-cultural framework was Carol Maier’s “Toward a Theoretical Practice for Cross-Cultural Translation” included in Dingwaney & Maier 1995. The whole volume, which included articles by Edward Said, Talal Asad or bell hooks, among others, was clearly a milestone in the intersection between cultural studies and TS.
Some key concepts and approaches
If it was telling that there was no single mention of translation studies, or, for that matter, not even translation in most introductory volumes on cultural studies at the turn of the century, the panorama has changed dramatically in the last years. The politics and theory of translation were already recognised as “important sites of cross-cultural studies” after Niranjana, Spivak and Dingwaney & Maier. Given the vast array of research fields where trans-cultural and interlinguistic practices are explored, it would be a daunting task to provide a comprehensive catalogue of cultural contexts that are researched from a [cross-]cultural studies / critical translation studies perspective. However, it is possible to provide a general panorama focusing on some aspects that can be identified through key concepts or theoretical orientations.
Agency
Agency is one recurrent concept in cross-cultural critical TS. The idea of agency stems from social sciences. For some authors it implies the capacity of establishing a difference; for others, the visibility or presence of the individual author, either as authorial agency or the translator’s agency; yet for others, it stands as the capacity of involvement in political activism (political agendas) either as an individual or as a community. The issue of agency is closely related to language: agency is enacted through an individual or collective voice which, for example in colonial contexts, may or may not make use of the colonizer’s language. It is, therefore, akin to empowerment, or the exercise of power, but has a distinct dimension related to the linguistic performance of an actor that conforms a strategic response to structures of power and domination. Such a response implies a reciprocal change in those structures. Translation, therefore, is a prime instrument of agency inasmuch as it allows the translator to exert social action either resisting or affirming domination structures.
For agency to be performed, a subject and a subject position is needed. A subject is the subject of enunciation: the narrator of an experience that may also be representative of the experience of many others. Individual speakers or authors become meaningful through the positions allowed to them by discourse: a subject-position assumes a subjectivity, an ideological identity. Subject positions are interlinguistically (but not only) enacted through translation. Translators and interpreters, as mediators, on the one hand provide the means to allow the original authors’ experience to become widespread; however, on the other hand, the translation may convey positionings and even intentionalities that are divergent from those in the original. Translatorial authority often becomes akin to ethnographic authority.
In fact, an exotic voice through translation takes on its subjectivity as an identifiable other through translation. Othering practices such as foreignizing etc. can be understood of as subject positioning; the fact that often it is the translator who controls, assigns, restrains or enhances a particular subjectivity tells of the importance of translatorial mediation in this process.
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| The position of interpreters in war situations is ideologically very complex. |
Translators and interpreters, then, also act as subjects. Most characteristically, the interpreter appears to share the same subject position as the speaker in the delivery, yet recent research has shown that this is far from being the case. Interpreters and mediators in situations such as war, diplomacy, conquest or court may acquire conflictive subject-positioning (Inghilleri 2005, Tipton 2017, Cáceres-Würsig 2017).
Translation and cultural representation
Probably the most relevant of all discoursal perspectives in translatorial cultural studies, the idea of translation as representation stems both from cultural semiotics and studies on ideology. It is closely related to the idea of identity and of subject positioning, but it takes another dimension. Representation implies a subject that is represented and an agent who activates the representation. Appiah’s (1993) concept of thick translation was soon recognised as a revealing feature for translators’ agency. Hermans’s 2003 article “'Cross-cultural Translation Studies as Thick Translation” examines how translation is essential “as the companion and instrument of cross-temporal, cross-lingual and crosscultural interpretation”, because translation explains, in contemporary, domestic terms, concepts that cannot be inferred from a direct, literal reading. That is, translation re-places the original, yet it illuminates and obscures at the same time. A “thick translation”, one in which the translator explains and guides the reader through glosses, glossaries and footnotes, is a multi-layered text, a palimpsest that reveals multiple authorial positions and authorial intentions.
Translation, then, appears as a primary tool in the representation, but also misrepresentation, of cultural others, and therefore in the construction of the foreign, the alien. Similar, more sociologically-oriented translatorial approaches may be found in critical discourse analyses which approach ‘cross-cultural’ representations of otherness in media reports in the wake of the 11-September attacks. Such media reports imply a representation of social actors and a recontextualization, which are the subject of close scrutinization by TS-oriented critical discourse analysis perspectives (Caldas-Coulthard 2003).
Hybridity
The question of hybridity has been recurrent in cultural studies, postcolonial studies and other fields such as gender studies or ethnic studies. It is also of interest to translationsStudies; in a widely quoted text from his remarkable novel Shame (1983), Salman Rushdie makes the narrator claim,
“I, too, am a translated man. I have been borne across. It is generally believed that something is always lost in translation; I cling to the notion - and use, in evidence, the success of Fitzgerald-Khayyam — that something can also be gained”.
This is similar to Bhabha’s (1994) approach in “How Newness Enters the World”: translation challenges the idea of an original as a stable totality and introduces the idea of hybridisation as inherent to displacement (as in the migrant experience) or the complex identities that result from various experiences, various subject-positions, various ways to model how cultures are defined. The resistance to a stable definition is a translatorial process. Already Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin (1989: 61-2), in their pioneering book, which helped establish postcolonial literature as a subdiscipline in cultural studies, included glossing, the insertion of “parenthetic translation of individual words”, such as Igbo “obi (hut)” as the foremost strategy of appropriation in post-colonial writing -yet the impossibility of achieving total equivalence (an obi is not exactly a hut, and its cultural meaning is different) implies an absence, the existence of a referential gap that “is not negative but positive in its effect”. By creating a new difference between familiar and foreign referents, a new, hybrid and “metonymic” referent is created through translation. The gap may be further reinforced through other means such as non-translation, interlanguage or syntactic calques, in a way that will be later fully explored by TS scholars.
Translation, cultural heritage and cultural change
Many of the perspectives shared by cultural studies and TS deal with situations of cultural conflict, cultural resistance and the negotiation of power. However, the role of translation as a shaper of knowledge and the establishment of culture, perhaps more explored in other fields such as cultural history or history of the ideas, cannot be overlooked if we consider cultural translation studies in a broad sense. The historical role of “schools of translation” in the transmission and creation of new knowledge has been a recognised subfield in history-oriented TS. Some fields are huge: the transmission of Greek thought into Arabic and then Latin in the Middle Ages; the transmission of Buddhist texts across Asia; the dissemination of scientific thought, philosophy or political thought, including revolutionary texts; the development of the modern concepts of nation across cultures; the genesis and establishment of literary and narrative discourses or national literatures; or the erasure of cultural-specific epistemic identities when translating science into English as a global language, etc. All these studies are permeated by the idea of cultural identities constructed, legitimated or modified through translation (see also Literary Translation). Cultural memory studies often also include TS perspectives, and Fernández Gil’s Traducir el horror ['Translating Horror'] (2017) adopts a critical translation approach to explore the relationship between memory and translation, describing how the narrative of the Holocaust has been variously rewritten to suit ideological positionings. Too wide to be explained here in detail, these contextual researches highlight the crucial role of translation in the shaping of cultures.
Cultural resistance
Perhaps one of the most interesting convergences between cultural studies and translation studies is the role of translation as a means for cultural resistance. This being one of the main purposes of postcolonial writings and one of the main topics of critical discourse studies, it comes as no surprise that culturally-oriented TS have explored the possibilities of translation as a site of resistance to authority and control. This was a core concern in Tymoczko’s several works as regards the role of Irish literature in translation as resistance to colonialism, but antecedents may be found in studies about translation strategies in the dissemination of colonial texts, especially Catholic doctrinal texts in missionary and colonial settings. Since then, there are innumerable authors who have dealt with literary and non-literary translation as a means of cultural resistance.
The importance of translation as a means to establish a counternarrative to colonial accounts has been studied in a Latin American context at least since the seminal book by historians León & Garibay Visión de los vencidos. Relaciones indígenas de la conquista (1959), where Nahuatl texts are first studied and translated to provide a contrastive version of Spanish-speaking historiography. In the context of missionary linguistics, some studies offer insights about the struggle by Spanish translators to avoid ideological interference, and therefore syncretic moves (deemed heretical deviations). Payàs’ essay El revés del tapiz: Traducción y discurso de identidad en la Nueva España (1521-1821) focuses on translation as a key instrument of creation and negotiation of the Mexican identity since the very first moments of the Spanish conquest, and it stands as a remarkable example of how TS provides a most appropriate ground for cross-disciplinary inquiry about intercultural matters.
Transcultural practices: Travel and globalization
The encounter with the Other that is at the core of travel writing and the translational -yet often ethnocentric- experiences that it entails has been explored by several authors. Paradela’s challenging reverse study of Arab travellers to Spain (2005), or Di Biase’s collection of essays on diverse experiences of translation in travel accounts in the early Modern period (2006) provide insights on translation and transculturation in travel writing. In fact, how the Other is sought after and imposed onto culturally distant communities, or the representational processes linked to migrant experiences like economic migration, exile, diaspora or other forms of displacement, are increasingly a fruitful subject of inquiry that has gained ground in Translation Studies (Malena 2003, Polezzi 2008, Cronin 2006).
Albeit migrants are “translated beings in countless ways” (Malena 2003:9), the role of translation in acculturation processes, how translation is instrumental in assimilation, integration or separation within host and migrant communities has not been sufficiently studied. It is significant that acculturation psychology has not taken advantage of TS perspectives, nor does it seem to be many TS studies dealing specifically with this crucial aspect of cross-cultural contact in a globalised world. When the mother tongue has been displaced, the translation of literary or culturally significant works may be a means for immigrant communities to maintain their identity (Sapiro 2004:86). Studying the representation of Chinese migration in Maxine Hong Kingston’s autobiographical The Woman Warrior (2005), Martha Cutter deals with the issues of untranslatability, refusal of translation, opacity, insanity and the urge to give up one’s own language to achieve an otherwise disallowed empowerment in the host society, so that “the heritages of the first and the second generation are configured as disjunctive and inaccessible” (Cutter 2005: 51, 166).
Future studies may explore how translation practices tend to cater or not for ethnocentric acculturation expectations, reinforce the valuation or devaluation of migrant communities and individuals, or function alternatively as instruments for understanding or conflict.
Narratives of power and conflict
The anxieties of the migrant experience from a cross-cultural perspective highlight the increasing importance of the individual and collective experience as story, as an account that is transferred through translation means. A site of confluence between discourse, narrative theory and translation theory, our last culturally-relevant aspect is the adoption in TS of the notion of narrative and a narrativity approach to translated texts since Baker’s seminal Translation and Conflict (2006). The analysis of underlying narrative constructions in texts definitely bridges the only apparent divide between cross-cultural approaches and critical linguistic approaches to the way texts and specifically translations construct [cultural] representations. Thus, translation and interpreting are not only vehicles of power and shape the way in which conflict unfolds, but are also essential “for circulating and resisting the narratives that create the intellectual and moral environment for violent conflict in the first place” (Baker 2006:2). Narrative theory has provided a most useful tool for the ongoing development of this vast domain which we could term critical translation studies, now strongly equipped with common concepts, terms, methodologies and clear subjects of study. It could be argued that the interdependence and cross-fertilization with cultural studies, among other related fields, has contributed to provide the epistemological ground for TS to flourish as a mature scientific discipline in the Humanities.
As TS fans out into social contexts where meaning and/or representation is negotiated, there seem to be an endless potential for interdisciplinary research between cultural studies and TS at large. The latest explorations into other semiotic domains (ethnography, music, historiography, etc.) will undoubtedly provide (and are already providing) a fertile ground for research. Some areas have received little attention despite their research potential: intercultural translation processes at work in the dissemination of science (both historically and in contemporary settings), for example. Generally, with the exception of postcolonial approaches, cultural studies may reveal a bias towards present-day contexts; however, a TS perspective may shed light on historical situations where questions of power and representation implied translational and transactional processes.
Morisco studies, for example, are starting to apply research methodologies akin to those here described. Lexicography and the development and acquisition of scientific vocabulary through the ages need a revision in the light of TS from a cultural-studies perspective. As mentioned above, a close collaboration between acculturation psychology scholars and TS scholars may provide cues to enhance the welfare of migrant communities and individuals and tackle or prevent conflictive situations.