Soldando Sal. Galician Studies in Translation and Paratranslation (original) (raw)

Have you ever wondered whether there are differences between the same soap opera broadcasted in South America and the dubbed version broadcasted in Galicia? Can we access Anglo-Saxon literature a lot more easily than classical authors from Indian literature? What do countries like France or the U.K. think of us when they listen to Galician music? Would Calígula by Camus be the same in Galician as its French version? Are we facing "parallel universes"? Do translated products have a shelf life just like the geopolitical bonds to which they are related? Does Galicia belong to the Portuguese speaking world? Is it possible for somebody like Albert Einstein to become a marketing agent to sell us a car? How did specialised terms like DNA and RNA, amongst others, become colloquial terms? In what way did Galician emigration contribute to Cuban cultural legacy? And what did returning emigrants bring back from there? And finally, how is the software that you use in your computer localised and furthermore, how is text transformed into voice? All these questions lead us directly to translation and its context, namely paratranslation. From everyday activities to new technologies, from televised products to literature and social imagery. Translation and paratranslation make up one of the key elements when describing and analysing cultural phenomena that are permeable, mixable, and crossbreed. However, such information traffic, which in a sizeable part escapes individual and group control, generates distortions, paradoxes and resistance to the constant transformation process that cultural systems are faced with. After all, culture and translation cannot be reduced to just language. We seem to carry a "portable culture" wherever we go and it is both within and on top of our heads. It is not closed, it gets impregnated by its own context, and it creates friction but also provides understanding. In short, translation events are immense networks of information that are difficult to shape. It therefore becomes essential to venture out of certainty and delve into an unexplored and fully transdisciplinary field. In this sense, Soldando sal presents a set of essays that try to interrogate and reveal the capacity of translation in its widest sense, within the privileged role it plays in cultural transformation, in areas that are completely unrelated (politics, TV, comparative literature, informatics, terminology, music, migration,...). The current volume initiates some of the cartographic intersections of future Galician translation studies.