On being a foreign body in the field, or how reflexivity around translation can take us beyond language (original) (raw)
Related papers
Words and Worlds: Ethnography and Translation Theory
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4:193-220., 2014
If different languages orient the speaker toward different aspects of experience, then translation can be seen as a passage between lived worlds. This paper traces out some key moments in the history of translation theory in the modern West and argues that translation and ethnography require each other. Free of the constraint that professional translators produce easily digestible texts for the target audience, anthropologists are particularly well placed to carry out translations that take context seriously into account, as well as ethnographies centered on texts. Such "ugly" translations (Ortega y Gasset) can force the reader to work to reorient him-or herself, to cross a boundary into what is potentially another world, initially another language-world. Through the history, we seek to distinguish the translation of referential content, something that is always possible, and translating stylistic and indexical (contextual) elements, something that has often been declared impossible. The paper draws some of the implications of these arguments on the basis of text-artifacts constructed from Central Himalayan oral traditions.
Reflexivity and Translation in Cross-Cultural Ethnographic Research
International Journal of Linguistics, 2021
The main aim of this article is to examine the role of translation in cross-cultural ethnographic research dealing with environmental texts. The main focus is on the analysis of linguistic issues that arise during field work when different languages and cultures that the ethnographer may not be familiar with come together. The study follows a qualitative methodology based on the analyses of ethnographer-researchers’ reflections and the translation of their notes as well as well as certain issues that arise when writing research between two languages and cultures when the ethnographer may or may not be familiar with.
Reflections on Translation in Literary, Everyday, and Anthropological Practice
(This is the talk at the seminar of linguistic anthropology devoted to the questions of translation) Whenever we think about translation, it is about (mis)translation inasmuch. Vladimir Nabokov famously required another Vladimir Nabokov to translate his own work (the list of qualities of his ideal translator that he named narcissistically centered Nabokov himself, who, at least in his own assessment, of course, possessed all these qualities). Some writers refused to translate themselves. Others, translating, transformed their own work to the degree it became an independent new work. The funny stories of mistranslations abound. In a sense, the situation when a speaker ventures into the unfamiliar territory of the new language brings risks. These risks are not unlike the risks that anthropologist experiences stepping onto the land where she did not live before—or even if she lived, in her new capacity of the researcher that defamiliarizes the familiar to her. The speaker of a language not mastered fully is in a similar situation. They are definitely outside of their comfort zone and up to surprises. In my own practice, I used translation for the literary impossible purposes of recreating “the violet in the crucible,” by Percy Shelley’s expression, in my daily experience of living abroad from the country of my native language—Russia—for more than seven years, and in my anthropological practice. All these versions of translating things from one language into the other, from one culture into the other, were closely intertwined. I will begin with literary translation, talk about everyday translation, and finish with the translation in anthropological practice. The different ways to translate things lead to the Babylon point of bifurcation of the languages that might be not a curse but a blessing. All these instantiations are called into existence in order to be considered in the light of the main idea of this writing: there are no different languages; “language” is a social construct. Before you frown at the triteness of the expression “social construct” or say “so, is everything social construct nowadays?”, allow me to elucidate my thesis. When I first heard myself to profess this conviction, which happened at a lecture of Expressive Culture at UT, Spring 2019, I was probably more surprised to hear it than anyone else in the audience. Yet,
2016
Three authors, from different cultural contexts and research fields, engage in a trialogue, interrogating three stages of research—formulation of research protocol, field work, and data analysis—in order to explore some of the complexities of translating meaning across cultures. The voices merge into three conclusions regarding narratives in/of translation. First, narratives as translations are always in a process of being translated and re-constructed. Second, researchers have to be aware of power issues through the whole research process. Third, reflexivity needs to be incorporated in all stages of the research practice.
Narrative Works, 2013
This paper draws on two points about the difficulties of conducting research between two languages and cultures which are scant in social science research: one is reflecting on the notion of "making sense" and how prevalent it has become to make sense for a western audience. This process is complicated and leads to more meanings lost in translation, so it is important to unpack it specifically during the research process. The second point I discuss in this paper is the notion of "situated auto/biography" that is not specific to an author or a researcher, but deals with all parties involved in the process of knowledge production. I argue that translation acts as a creative space for thinking and not just conveying meanings, but that through a dialogical and transversal act, it can help in creating new meanings.
Qualitative Sociology, 2005
[PDF available upon request.] Sociologists and anthropologists often struggle over how to accurately convey ethnographic data from the field setting to a final report. This paper examines ethnography as a form of translation in order to clarify what occurs between the acquisition of data and the formulation of a thesis about the data. The paper argues that the ethnographer’s mind should be seen as a transitional space which in the act of translating field data into an analytic report (1) poses unique challenges to ethnography’s claims for providing an accurate account of field situations while (2) simultaneously offering paths to insight which quantitative and survey research can not.
2015 - Anthropological Translation: A Semiotic Definition
After proposing a theory of language inspired by the Danish linguist Louis T. Hjelmslev, the essay articulates a typology of translation tasks, divided according to the conceptual difficulty that they entail. The hardest but also the most revealing kind of translation, the article argues, is anthropological translation, which consists in finding adequate verbalization of unexpressed semantic lines in one’s culture before being able to convey them into another language and culture. Such definition is applied to a case study: a series of intercultural accidents resulting from Dante’s depiction of the prophet Mohammad in the Divine Comedy. Anthropological translation allows one to reframe such conflicts and to subsume them at a superior level of understanding, it is argued.