Cultural Translation An Introduction To The Problem
Cultural Translation An Introduction To The Problem
Cultural Translation An Introduction To The Problem
In view of all this, we find it less than convincing to consider the notion of
dimension has always already been included in concepts of translation that emerged
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Michael Cronin
Centre for Translation and Textual Studies, Dublin City University, Ireland
To cite this article: Boris Buden , Stefan Nowotny , Sherry Simon , Ashok Bery & Michael Cronin
(2009) Cultural translation: An introduction to the problem, and Responses, Translation Studies,
2:2, 196-219, DOI: 10.1080/14781700902937730
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14781700902937730
So what does “ cultural translation ” mean? By the time Bhabha gets to this chapter
of The Location of Culture (1994/2004), he has accumulated quite a few uses of the term
in a vague metaphorical way. He has talked about “a sense of the new as an insurgent act
of cultural translation” (10), “the borderline condition of cultural translation” (11), the
“process of cultural translation, showing up the hybridity of any genealogical or systematic
fi liation” (83), “cultural translation, hybrid sites of meaning” (234), The sense of “translation” here is far
wider than the texts we call translations. This
theoretical approach is quite different You can perhaps now understand why the American journal bravely
declared that “the
language of the Americas is translation.” In fact, such claims might now be rather tame. In
a world where major demographic movements have undermined categories like “a society,”
“a language,” “a culture,” or “a nation,” any serious study requires new terms to describe its
objects. “Translation” is one of those convenient terms, but so too is “emergence” (things
are emerging and submerging in history), “hybridity” (extending Bhabha, every cultural
object is a hybrid), “complexity” (there is no one- to-one causation), and “minoritization”
(which would recuperate the role of elements excluded by the supposition or imposition of
a linguistic or cultural “system”). Translation is only one of a number of terms, but it has
become a popular one. And Bhabha is only one of a number of theorists working in this
fi eld, but he is perhaps the most infl uential.the descriptive studies that look at the way
translations have been carried out in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Bhabha is not
talking about a particular set of translations, but about a different sense of translation.
You can perhaps now understand why the American journal bravely declared that
This view of translation is from the perspective of a (fi gurative) translator , not
translations. No other paradigm, except perhaps parts of Skopos theory, has talked
about the position of someone who produces language from the “between space” of
languages and cultures (one could also talk about “overlaps”).
■ The focus on hybridity has something to say about the general position of translators,
who by defi nition know two languages and probably at least two cultures, and it might
say something basic about the effects that translation has on cultures, opening them
to other cultures. Bhabha does not say that translations are hybrid; he locates a translatory
discourse that enacts hybridity.
Rather than a
hermeneutics of texts, “cultural translation” has become a way of talking about the world.
This is generalized
in the formula: “Translation is the performative nature of cultural communication”