Lecture 4.

Discourse and register analysis approaches. Cultural translation

INTRODUCTION

In translation studies, discourse analysis came to prominence in the 1990s. There is a

link with the text analysis model of Christiane Nord examined in the last chapter in
that the organization of the text above sentence level is investigated. However, while
text analysis normally concentrates on describing the way in which texts are
organized (sentence structure, cohesion, etc.), discourse analysis looks at the way
language communicates meaning and social and power relations. The model of
discourse analysis that has had the greatest influence is Halliday’s systemic
functional model, which is described in section 6.1.

In the following sections we look at several key works on translation that have
employed his model: Juliane House’s (1997) Hatim and Mason go beyond register
analysis to consider the pragmatic and semiotic dimensions of translation and the
sociolinguistic and semiotic implications of discourses and discourse communities.

(Reconstructed from Jeremy Munday)

THE HALLIDAYAN MODEL OF LANGUAGE AND DISCOURSE

Halliday’s model of discourse analysis, based on what he terms systemic functional

grammar, is geared to the study of language as communication, seeing meaning in
the writer’s linguistic choices and systematically relating these choices to a wider
sociocultural framework. In Halliday’s model, there is a strong interrelation between
the surface-level realizations of the linguistic functions and the sociocultural
framework (for a clear explanation of these, see Eggins 2004). This can be seen in
The arrows in the figure indicate the direction of influence.

The genre (the conventional text type that is associated with a specific
communicative function, for example a business letter) is conditioned by the
sociocultural environment and itself determines other elements in the systemic
framework. The first of these is register, which comprises three variable elements: (1)
field: what is being written about, e.g. a delivery of goods; (2) tenor: who is
communicating and to whom, e.g. a sales representative to a customer; (3) mode: the
form of communication, e.g. written.Each of the variables of register is associated
with a strand of meaning. These strands, which together form the discourse semantics
of a text, are the three metafunctions: ideational, interpersonal and textual. The
metafunctions are constructed or realized by the lexicogrammar, that is the choices of
wording and syntactic structure. The links are broadly as follows (see Eggins 2004:
78):

The field of a text is associated with ideational meaning, which is realized through
transitivity patterns (verb types, active/passive structures, participants in the process,
etc.).

The tenor of a text is associated with interpersonal meaning, which is realized

through the patterns of modality (modal verbs and adverbs such as hopefully, should,
possibly, and any evaluative lexis such as beautiful, dreadful).

The mode of a text is associated with textual meaning, which is realized through the
thematic and information structures (mainly the order and structuring of elements
in a clause) and cohesion (the way the text hangs together lexically, including the use
of pronouns, ellipsis, collocation, repetition, etc.).

HOUSE'S MODEL OF TRANSLATION QUALITY ASSESSMENT

House herself rejects the ‘more target-audience oriented notion of translation

appropriateness’ as ‘fundamentally misguided’ and for this reason bases her model on
comparative ST–TT analysis leading tothe assessment of the quality of the
translation, highlighting ‘mismatches’ or ‘errors’. House’s original model (1977)
attracted criticisms that she tackles in her later revision (1997: 101–4). Some of these
criticisms echo discussions from the previous two chapters; these concern the nature,
complexity and terminology of the analytical categories used, and the absence of
poetic–aesthetic texts in House’s case studies. In this section, we concentrate on
House’s later, ‘revisited’ model (1997), which incorporates some of her earlier
categories into an openly Hallidayan register analysis of field, tenor and mode. The
model involves a systematic comparison of the textual ‘profile’ of the ST and TT
(1997: 43). The comparative model draws on various and sometimes complex
taxonomies, but this can be reduced to a register analysis of both ST and TT
according to their realization through lexical, syntactic and textual means. Textual
means refers (1997: 44–5) to:

(1) theme-dynamics: thematic structure and cohesion; (2) clausal linkage:

additive (and, in addition), adversative (but, however), etc.; (3) iconic linkage:
parallelism of structures.

In House’s model register covers a variety of elements, some of which are

additional to those expressly stated by Halliday. Field refers to the subject matter and
social action and covers the specificity of lexical items. Tenor includes ‘the
addresser’s temporal, geographical and social provenance as well as his [or her]
intellectual, emotional or affective stance (his [or her] “personal viewpoint”)’ (p.
109). ‘Social attitude’ refers to formal, consultative or informal style. There is an
element of individuality to this, as there is to stance. Finally, mode relates to
‘channel’ (spoken/ written, etc.) and the degree of participation between addresser
and addressee (monologue, dialogue, etc.; p. 109). House’s model operates as
follows:

An overt translation is a TT that does not purport to be an original. In House’s

rather confusing definition (1997: 66), ‘an overt translation is one in which the
addressees of the translation text are quite “overtly” not being directly addressed’.
Such is the case with the translation after the event of a Second World War political
speech by Winston Churchill, which is tied to a particular source culture, time and
historical context, and with the translation of works of literature, which are tied to
their source culture. With such translations, House believes (p. 112) that equivalence
has to be sought at the level of language/text, register and genre. The individual text
function cannot, however, be the same for TT and ST since the discourse worlds in
which they operate are different. For this reason, House suggests a ‘second-level
functional equivalence’ should be sought, with the TT enabling access to the function
of the ST, allowing the TT receivers to ‘eavesdrop’ on the ST. For example, British
readers of Thomas Mann can use an English TT of The Magic Mountain to gain
access to the ST Die Zauberberg, but they know they are reading a translation and the
individual function of the two texts cannot be the same.

A covert translation ‘is a translation which enjoys the status of an original

source text in the target culture’ (p. 69). The ST is not linked particularly to the ST
culture or audience; both ST and TT address their respective receivers directly.
Examples given by House are a tourist information booklet, a letter from a company
chairman to the shareholders and an article in the Unesco Courier. The function of a
covert translation is ‘to recreate, reproduce or represent in the translated text the
function the original has in its linguacultural framework and discourse world’ (p.
114). It does this without taking the TT reader into the discourse world of the ST.
Hence, equivalence is necessary at the level of genre and the individual text function,
but what House (p. 114) calls a ‘cultural filter’ needs to be applied by the translator,
modifying cultural elements and thus giving the impression that the TT is an original.
This may involve changes at the levels of language/text and register. House (pp. 115–
17) discusses the meaning of cultural filter in the context of German–English
comparative pragmatic studies which she has conducted and gives examples of
different practices in the two cultures that need to be reflected in translation. For
instance, she finds that German tends to prefer a more direct content focus, whereas
English is more interpersonal. This would need to be reflected in covert translation,
the letter from the company chairman being more interpersonal in English, for
instance. House is at pains to point out the fact that the ‘overt’–‘covert’ translation
distinction is a cline rather than a pair of binary opposites. Furthermore, in cases
where covertly functional equivalence is desired but where the ST genre does not
exist in the target culture, the aim should be to produce a covert version rather than a
covert translation. Version is also the term used to describe apparently unforced
changes in genre (p. 161).

House applies the model to a number of texts, including (pp. 147–57) an

extract from a polemical history text about civilian Germans’ involvement in the
holocaust (ST English, TT German). A pattern of differences is identified in the
dimensions of field and tenor. In field, the repetition of the word German in the ST,
which serves to highlight German civilian responsibility in the events, is less frequent
in the TT. In tenor, there is a reduction in intensifiers, superlatives and other emotive
lexis. This makes the author’s stance less obvious in the TT, and House even suggests
(p. 155) that it has an effect on the realization of genre. Whereas the ST is a
controversial popular history book (albeit based on the author’s doctoral thesis), the
TT is a more formal academic treatise. House goes on to posit possible reasons for
these changes, notably pressure from the German publishers for political and
marketing reasons. The linking of the linguistic analysis to real-world translation
conditions is a move that owes something to the theory of translatorial action which
was discussed in Chapter 5.

BAKER'S TEXT AND PRAGMATIC LEVEL ANALYSIS: A COURSEBOOK

FOR TRANSLATORS

House’s 1977 book was perhaps the first major translation studies work to use
Halliday’s now popular model. Another that later had considerable influence on
translation training and consequently on translation studies is Mona Baker’s In Other
Words: A Coursebook on Translation (1992). Baker looks at equivalence at a series
of levels: at word, above-word, grammar, thematic structure, cohesion and pragmatic
levels. Of particular interest in the present chapter is her application of the systemic
approach to thematic structure and cohesion and the incorporation of the pragmatic
level, ‘the way utterances are used in communicative situations’ (Baker 1992: 217).

Thematic and information structures

Baker is typical of many translation scholars who make detailed use of the
terminology of functional grammar and discourse analysis in that she devotes by far
the most attention to the textual function. Explicit analyses of the ideational and
interpersonal functions are fewer (though see section 6.4 below). Baker focuses more
on thematic considerations, comparing nominalization and verbal forms in theme
position in a scientific report in Brazilian Portuguese and English (Baker 1992: 169–
71).

Using Hallidayan analysis, the inflected verb form discuti is thematic rather than a
subject pronoun, whereas in the English the verb discussed is part of the rheme. The
fact that the Hallidayan model of thematic analysis is English-oriented must cast
some doubt on its validity for translation. Baker (pp. 160–7) accepts this, and also
outlines the alternative functional sentence perspective model of thematic structure.
Despite this, Baker (p. 140) concludes that an important advantage of the systemic
functional approach is that it is much more straightforward to implement: theme is in
first position, come what may. The most important point for ST thematic analysis is
that the translator should be aware of the relative markedness of the thematic and
information structures. Baker points out (p. 129) that this ‘can help to heighten our
awareness of meaningful choices made by speakers and writers in the course of
communication’ and, therefore, help decide whether it is appropriate to translate
using a marked form. Again, what is marked varies across languages. Problems in
copying the ST pattern into the TT are given by Vázquez-Ayora (1977: 217) and
Gerzymisch-Arbogast (1986), amongst others. The former emphasizes that calquing a
rigid English word order when translating into a VS language such as Spanish would
produce a monotonous translation. The latter, in her detailed study of German and
English (Gerzymisch-Arbogast 1986), considers the German calquing of English cleft
sentences (e.g. What pleases the public is . . ., What I meant to say was . . . ) to be
clumsy. This illustrates the dilemma, pointed out by Enkvist (1978), of balancing
concern for information dynamics with the sometimes incompatible concern for other
areas such as basic syntactic patterns. That it is the textual function, and most
especially the thematic structure, which has most frequently been discussed in works
on translation theory is perhaps because of the attention paid to this function by
influential monolingual works in text linguistics, notably Enkvist (1978) and
Beaugrande and Dressler (1981), who have exerted considerable influence on
translation theorists. Cohesion, the other element of the textual metafunction, has also
been the subject of a number of studies.

Cohesion

Blum-Kulka’s well-known study ‘Shifts of cohesion and coherence in translation’

hypothesizes that increased explicitation of cohesive ties may be a general strategy
adopted by all translators. She shows how changes in cohesion in translation may
bring about functional shifts in texts, giving the example of a Hebrew translation of a
scene from Pinter’s Old Times (Blum-Kulka 1986/2004: 294–5). Inevitably, because
of the inflection of the adjectives, the Hebrew TT has to make explicit the gender
referent of the enigmatic opening ST statement, ‘Fat or thin?’ Hebrew and other
languages would need to state whether the character referred to was a man or woman.
Similarly, literary translations from verb-inflected languages into English need to
make explicit what are sometimes deliberately ambiguous grammatical subjects. The
first line of Julio Cortázar’s classic novel Rayuela begins with the question
‘¿Encontraría a la Maga?’ In English this could be ‘Would I/he/she/you find the
(female) Magus?’ As with the thematic structure, it is in many ways the density and
progression of cohesive ties throughout a text that are important. This web of
relationships may have to differ between ST and TT, since the networks of lexical
cohesion will not be identical across languages (Baker 1992: 206). As an illustration,
Baker (pp. 185–6) puts forward the idea, backed by short extracts and their
translations, that Portuguese prefers lexical repetition to pronoun use and (p. 207) that
Arabic prefers lexical repetition to variation. The TT must also be coherent; in other
words it must hang together logically in the mind of the TT receiver. This has to do
with pragmatics, the subject of the last of Baker’s chapters.

Pragmatics and translation

Baker considers various aspects of pragmatic equivalence in translation, applying

relevant linguistic concepts to interlinguistic transfer. Baker’s definition of
pragmatics is as follows: Pragmatics is the study of language in use. It is the study of
meaning, not as generated by the linguistics system but as conveyed and manipulated
by participants in a communicative situation. (Baker 1992: 217). In this section, we
briefly consider three major pragmatic concepts: coherence, presupposition and
implicature.

The coherence of a text, related to cohesion, ‘depends on the hearer’s or

receiver’s expectations and experience of the world’ (Baker 1992: 219). Clearly this
may not be the same for the ST and TT reader. Baker gives the example (p. 220) of a
passage about the London department store Harrods. In order to make sense of the
passage, the reader needs to know that the flagship Harrods and the description the
splendid Knightsbridge store are synonyms. TT readers in other cultures may not
know this. The Arabic translation therefore makes the link explicit with the addition
to the name of a gloss incorporating the repetition of the word store (the main store
Harrods).

The area of presupposition is closely related to coherence. It is defined by

Baker (p. 259) as ‘pragmatic inference’, although, perhaps surprisingly, she only
discusses it briefly. Presupposition relates to the linguistic and extra-linguistic
knowledge the sender assumes the receiver to have or which are necessary in order to
retrieve the sender’s message. Thus, in the European Parliament in 1999,
Commissioner Sir Leon Brittan’s phrase let me now turn to bananas would
presuppose that the receiver knows about the trade dispute between the European
Union and the United States over banana imports, or at least can access this
information from the linguistic and extralinguistic contexts. This is not unlikely for
the immediate receivers, since they are Members of the European Parliament and are
aware of the issue. Similarly, the phrase I discussed this issue in Washington
presupposes knowledge that Washington in this context refers to the seat of
government of the United States and the venue for Brittan’s talks. The problem for
the translator occurs, of course, when the TT receivers cannot be assumed to possess
the same background knowledge as the ST receivers, either because of cultural
differences and/or because the text is being translated after a time gap when the
original information is no longer activated by the reference.

More emphasis is placed on presupposition by Fawcett (1997: 123–34), whose

chapter on the subject contains many perceptive and interesting examples; typical (p.
124) is the metaphorical use of the place name Mohács in a Hungarian text. The
name would mean little to most receivers in other cultures, so a translator would need
to replace it with an explicitation such as crushing defeat.

Baker gives more attention to implicature, another form of pragmatic

inference, which she defines (p. 223) as ‘what the speaker means or implies rather
than what s/he says’. The concept of implicature was developed by Paul Grice
(1975), who described a set of ‘rules’ or ‘maxims’ that operate in normal co-
operative conversation; these are:

(1) Quantity: Give the amount of information that is necessary; do not give too
much or too little. (2) Quality: Say only what you know to be true or what you can
support. (3) Relevance: What you say should be relevant to the conversation. (4)
Manner: Say what you need to say in a way that is appropriate to the message you
wish to convey and which (normally) will be understood by the receiver.

In addition, some theorists add the maxim of politeness: Be polite in your comments
(see Brown and Levinson 1987). Participants in conversations assume the person to
whom they are speaking is (subconsciously) following these maxims and they
themselves co-operate by trying to make sense of what is being said. In turn, they
also tend to be co-operative in what they say and the way they say it. Clearly, the
linguistic and cultural contexts are also crucial in limiting the range of implicatures.
The maxims may also be deliberately flouted, sometimes for a humorous effect. Such
a flouting of the relevance maxim might have occurred, for instance, had Sir Leon
Brittan, above, begun to discuss the value of eating bananas for breakfast. Particular
problems are posed for the translator when the TL works by different maxims. An
example given by Baker (p. 235) is the translation from English to Arabic of a book
on Arab political humour, where a vulgar joke about God is omitted in the Arabic TT
so as not to upset local sensibilities. This shows a difference in the operation of the
maxims of manner and politeness in the two cultures. This is also the case in an
example (Gibney and Loveday, quoted in Baker 1992: 233–4) that occurred during
negotiations between the USA and Japan in 1970. The Japanese Premier replies to
American concerns on textile exports by saying zensho shimasu (‘I’ll handle it as
well as I can’). This is understood by the US President as a literal promise to sort out
a problem (i.e. it obeys the US-cultural quality and relevance maxims), whereas the
Japanese phrase is really a polite formula for ending the conversation (i.e. it obeys the
Japanese-cultural maxim of politeness). As Baker notes (p. 236), this clearly shows
that translators need to be fully aware of the different co-operative principles in
operation in the respective languages and cultures (see also House 2002).

Key texts

Baker, M. (1992) In Other Words: A Coursebook on Translation, London and New

York: Routledge. Beaugrande, R. de and W. Dressler (1981/2002) Introduction to
Text Linguistics, London and New York: Longman, available online at
http://www.beaugrande.com/ introduction_to_text_linguistics.htm Blum-Kulka, S.
(1986/2004) ‘Shifts of cohesion and coherence in translation’, in L. Venuti (ed.)
(2004), pp. 290–305. Fawcett, P. (1997) Translation and Language: Linguistic
Approaches Explained, Manchester: St Jerome, Chapters 7–11. Hatim, B. and I.
Mason (1990) Discourse and the Translator, London and New York: Longman.
Hatim, B. and I. Mason (1997) The Translator as Communicator, London and New
York: Routledge. House, J. (1997) Translation Quality Assessment: A Model
Revisited, Tübingen: Niemeyer.

CULTURAL TRANSLATION

Related terminology: culture; ethics; globalization; ideology; literary translation;

mobility; postcolonial approaches; strategies; translatability.

1. Cultural translation. Inrtoduction

The term ‘cultural translation’ is used in many different contexts and senses. In some
of these it is a metaphor that radically questions transla-tion’s traditional parameters,
but a somewhat narrower use of the term refers to those practices of literary
translation that mediate cultural difference, or try to convey extensive cultural
background, or set out to represent another culture via translation. In this sense,
‘cultural translation’ is counterposed to a ‘linguistic’ or ‘grammatical’ translation that
is limited in scope to the sentences on the page. It raises complex technical issues:
how to deal with features like dialect and heteroglossia, literary allusions, culturally
specific items such as food or archi-tecture, or further-reaching differences in the
assumed contextual knowledge that surrounds the text and gives it meaning (see
strategies).

Questions like these feed long-standing disputes on the most effective – and most
ethical – ways to render the cultural difference of the text (see ethics), leaning more
towards naturali-zation or more towards exoticization, with the attendant dangers of
ideologically appropriating the source culture or creating a spurious sense of absolute
distance from it (Carbonell 1996). In this context, ‘cultural translation’ does not
usually denote a particular kind of translation strategy, but rather a perspective on
translations that focuses on their emergence and impact as components in the
ideological traffic between language groups (see ideology).

2. Anthropological ‘translation of cultures’

More elaborated uses of the term ‘cultural translation’ have been developed in the
discipline of cultural anthropology, which is faced with questions of translation on a
variety of levels. In the most practical sense, anthropological fieldwork usually
involves extensive inter-lingual translation, whether by anthropologists themselves or
by their interpreters (Rubel and Rosman 2003: 4). As linguistically challenged
outsiders trying to understand what is going on, fieldworkers may encounter cultural
difference in a very immediate and even painful way: ‘participant observation obliges
its practitioners to experience, at a bodily as well as intellectual level, the vicissitudes
of translation’ (Clifford 1983: 119).

Secondly, when the fieldworker’s multidimensional, orally mediated experiences are

reworked into linear written text, this is not simply a matter of interlingual, or even
intersem-iotic, translation, but also a translation between cultural contexts. Since
anthropologists assume that language and culture filter our experiences of the world
to a very great extent, evidently it will be difficult to grasp and convey experiences
that take place within a different system of filters, outside our own frames of
reference. The degree to which speakers of different languages can share a common
ground of understanding, and communication can proceed in the face of potential
incommensurability or untranslata-bility between viewpoints, has been explored by
Feleppa (1988), Needham (1972) and Tambiah (1990); see translatability.

Alongside these epistemological worries, ethnography involves writing down the

complex worlds of other people’s meaning in a way that is intelligible in the
receiving language. How much use of transferred source-language terms is required
in that process, how much contextualization, how much approximation to target-
culture genres and narrative forms are questions that are hotly debated in the liter-
ature. Like the literary ‘cultural translator’, the ethnographer has to reconcile respect
for the specificity of the ‘native point of view’ with the desire to create a text
comprehensible to the target readership. As Crapanzano puts it, the ethnographer like
the translator ‘must render the foreign familiar and preserve its very foreignness at
one and the same time’ (1986: 52).

In ethnographic practice the balance between these goals varies. Much debate has
focused on the twin dangers of, on the one hand, an ‘orientalizing’ translation style
associated with hierarchical representations of other cultures as primitive and inferior
to a normative ‘western’ civilization, and, on the other, an ‘appropriative’ style that
downplays the distinctiveness of other world views and claims universal validity for
what may in fact be domestic categories of thought (see Pálsson 1993 for an
interesting discussion of these points).

3. Some objections to ‘translation of cultures’

These debates are not always formulated explicitly in terms of translation, but as
Asad explains in an influential 1986 essay, the phrase ‘translation of cultures’ is a
conventional metaphor in anthropological theory. Gaining ground from the 1950s,
especially in British functionalist anthropology, the ‘translation of cultures’ approach
saw its task as searching for the internal coherence that other people’s thinking and
practices have in their own context, then re-creating that coherence in the terms of
Western academia.

Asad’s critical discussion of the metaphor shows that in the ‘translation of cultures’
perspective, the ethnographer-trans-lator assumes authority to extract the underlying
meanings of what the ‘natives’ say and do, as opposed to the sayers and doers
themselves determining what they mean. As a result, the ‘cultural translator’ takes on
authorship and the position of knowing better than the ‘cultural text’ itself, which is
relegated to the status of an unknowing provider of source material for interpretation.
This imbalance of power arises from political inequality between source and target
languages, and itself feeds into dominant ‘knowledge’ about colonized societies.

Thus ‘the process of “cultural translation” is inevitably enmeshed in conditions of

power – professional, national, international’ (1986: 162). Although Asad does not
reject the viability of cultural translation as a whole, he insists that it must always be
approached through awareness of the ‘asymmetrical tendencies and pressures in the
languages of dominated and dominant societies’ (ibid.: 164).

Asad thus challenges the model of cultural translation which assigns to a dominating
target language the authority to survey the source culture and detect intentions hidden
to its members. But the idea of cultures as being text-like, and thus susceptible to
‘translation’ in the first place, has also been questioned. The textualizing approach of
interpretive anthro-pology was set out by Clifford Geertz in The Interpretation of
Cultures (1973), which takes a hermeneutic view of cultures as complex webs of
meaning capable of being ‘read’. Much influenced by Geertz, the critics often
labelled as ‘Writing Culture’ (after the title of Clifford and Marcus’s ground-breaking
1986 collection) focus on ethnographic descriptions themselves as texts – ‘fictions’
that conventionally make use of particular tropes and genres and that have served to
reinforce hegemonic relationships between anthropologizers and anthropolo-gized.

The concept of translation is frequently employed by these critics, who are interested
in the power of texts to form and re-form dominant knowledge (see also Clifford
1997). However, their detractors argue that culture should not necessarily be viewed
as system or language, let alone as text, but perhaps rather as historically contingent
conversation and inter-action (Pálsson 1993). Additionally, Writing Culture’s focus
on textuality has been accused of sidestepping the concrete political practices which
far more powerfully determine the relationships between cultures (Abu-Lughod
1991).A more fundamental criticism of the concept of ‘cultural translation’ questions
the very existence of ‘cultures’. The many anthropological critiques of the notion of
cultures, usefully presented by Brightman (1995), show how it can falsely construct
human communities as being homogeneous, monolithic, essentially unchanging, and
clearly bounded by national or other borders. As the Writing Culture critics pointed
out, cultural descriptions based on this conception participated in constructing the
alleged ‘primitivism’ of non-western peoples by representing them as radically
separate and sealed off from the describing western societies. For example, the
history of contact, especially the violent contact of colonialism, was repressed in
classic ethnographies so as to present the quintessential ethnographic ‘culture’ as
pure, primordial and untouched by outside influ-ences. The notion of discrete
cultures, then, provided the dubious framework for the ethno-graphic description and
guided what could be seen and said about the people being ‘translated’.

Intersections, internal conflict, mixing and historical change had no place in such a
model of the ideal ‘cultural unit’; these features were attributed to target-language
societies alone. A similar argument is made by Niranjana (1992) for the case of India:
translation in both the textual and the more metaphorical senses helped to construct
an essentialized and ahistorical ‘Indian culture’ that could be conveniently inserted
into a position of inferiority vis-à-vis the British colonial power.

4. Cultural translation as processes of hybrid identification

In view of these thorough-going attacks on the model of cultures as distinct languages

that can be translated into other languages, ‘cultural translation’ too is undermined, at
least as a model of inter-‘cultural’ translation between boundaried, quasi-national
entities. Here a related but more figurative and far-reaching use of the term ‘cultural
translation’ comes to the fore: the notion, common in postcolonial studies, that
translation is less a procedure to which cultures can be subjected than itself the very
fabric of culture. In this case, ‘trans-lation’ is not meant as interlingual transfer but
metaphorically, as the alteration of colonizing discourses by the discourses of the
colonized and vice versa.

For Bhabha, the resulting ‘hybridity’ in language and cultural identity means culture
is both ‘transnational and translational’ (1994a: 5) – constituted via ‘translation’ as
exchange and adaptation, especially through the phenomenon of migration (see
mobility; globalization). In this view, translation is not an interchange between
discrete wholes but a process of mixing and mutual contamination, and not a
movement from ‘source’ to ‘target’ but located in a ‘third space’ beyond both, where
‘conflicts arising from cultural difference and the different social discourses involved
in those conflicts are negotiated’ (Wolf 2002: 190).

Cultural translation in this sense offers a dissolution of some key categories of trans-
lation studies: the notion of separate ‘source’ and ‘target’ language-cultures and
indeed binary or dualistic models in general. Rather than being clear-cut locations of
coherent identity, argues Doris Bachmann-Medick, cultures are processes of
translation, constantly shifting, multiplying and diversifying; the idea of cultural
translation can ‘act as an anti-essentialist and anti-holistic metaphor that aims to
uncover counter-discourses, discursive forms and resistant actions within a culture,
heterogeneous discursive spaces within a society’ and enable ‘a dynamic concept of
culture as a practice of negotiating cultural differences, and of cultural overlap,
syncretism and creolization’ (2006: 37).

Although this kind of approach does not specifically rule out the meaning of
‘translation’ as an interlingual practice, clearly it is interested in much wider senses
of translation than the movement from language one to language two. The danger
here, in Trivedi’s view (2005), is that the notion of ‘cultural translation’ might drasti-
cally undervalue the linguistic difference and co-existence upon which translation in
the more traditional sense relies. Trivedi accuses Bhabha of marginalizing
bilingualism and translation as specifically interlingual practices, the precon-dition
for polylingual cultural diversity. He calls for translation studies to insist on the
centrality of translation’s polylingual aspect and to refute the generalization of
‘cultural translation’ into an umbrella term for all aspects of mobility and diasporic
life.

Trivedi’s criticism might be extended to uses of the translation metaphor in

anthropological and cultural studies which exclude or do not address language
difference, thus potentially presenting a false sense of monolingualism to western
audiences. Metaphorical usage could at worst hollow out the word ‘translation’, not
just into something that need not neces-sarily include more than one language but
into something that primarily doesnot include more than one language – a factor,
instead, of shifts and layering within globally dominant English without the need for
bilingual translation to take place.

As Bachmann-Medick (2006) hints, in a nightmare scenario ‘cultural translation’

could mean the adaptation of everything to the dominant idiom of western capitalism,
thus destroying difference or relegating it to unheard margins of global society. For
critics such as Trivedi, the challenge to translation studies is thus to reassert the
crucial role of translation in all its senses within interdisciplinary debates on cultural
difference and globalization.

Further reading

Geertz 1973; Asad 1986; Clifford and Marcus 1986; Feleppa 1988; Niranjana 1992;
Pálsson 1993; Bhabha 1994b; Brightman 1995; Sturge 1997; Wolf 2002; Rubel and
Rosman 2003; Trivedi 2005; Bachmann-Medick 2006; Sturge 2007.

Reconstructed form:

Cultural Translation by Kate Sturge In Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation

Studies