PERSPECTIVES IN TRANSLATING POLITICAL CONCEPTS (original) (raw)

Politics as Translation & Translation as Politics. A lesson

Venice International University, 2024

First of all I am very grateful for the invita6on to this course. Conduc6ng a lecture with you, assuming it is one, is an opportunity for me to try for the first 6me to propose some hypotheses and some reflec6ons on the theme of transla6on and its poli6cal implica6ons. I start with the 6tle, perhaps a li?le thoughtlessly chosen, for this lecture: Poli%cs as Transla%on & Transla%on as Poli%cs. It is, first of all, necessary for me to disambiguate its effect and try to clarify its premises. That poli;cs is transla;on can, in fact, be understood in different ways. I first want to premise what is to be excluded. That poli;cs is in fact a process of transla;on does not mean for me that poli;cs should be understood as the third field of media;on or recogni;on between iden;;es or, worse, between cultures that are somehow en;fied by the gaze that is directed at them. In the debate on mul;culturalism in vogue a few decades ago, this assump;on acted as a surrogate for liberal-democra;c prac;ce and theory in countries of more or less recent immigra;on. What was not ques;oned, however, was the inevitably white and western point of view, which allowed the differences expressed by the different 'cultures' to be related, making things of them and recording them with a police eye. Poli;cs was intended to translate these 'cultures' into the democra;c universal that recognised them and in which they should recognise themselves. It goes without saying that this posi;on, intended to implement the procedural theories of liberalism, is not mine. It is not mine because of at least two further issues that seem to me to be at work in it. The first (i) concerns the status of poli;cal philosophy, the discipline (but even this separa;on of philosophy into disciplinary fields should be discussed) to which I academically belong. The second (ii) concerns the pre-edipal phantasm of an available, maternal and welcoming universal in which to compensate for the trauma of separa;on and difference.

Moving Political Meaning across Linguistic Frontiersp ost_965 1..19 Talking across Cultures

Diplomacy, international commerce and the academic study of international relations are all based on the assumption that we can cross linguistic borders with very complicated words and concepts in our cognitive luggage. This article studies the complexities of communicating political words and concepts from one language/culture to another, noting that traditional political science has shown little interest in this process or its dangers. From linguistics, however, come two opposing theories: the effability principle defends universal translatability, while the linguistic relativity/Sapir-Whorf hypothesis holds that meaning (particularly abstract conceptual thinking) is locked within the grammatical and semantic structure of individual languages and can be transmitted with difficulty or not at all. After considering these rival positions, we conclude that the translation of political ideas from culture to culture can be more problematic than we have commonly believed.

Translating a Political Discourse: Power of Words

2021

The present study sheds light on one aspect of literary and nonliterary discourse, i.e. a political discourse, written and/or spoken. It argues that the selection of right and proper words for translating a political discourse poses a serious challenge for translators, especially when translating/ interpreting international political events. It uses the translation approach in qualitative research with a view to discussing and analyzing the best way for selecting accurate equivalents in the target language. The study questions are posed to explore difficulties, mistakes and errors occurring in translations/ interpretations so as to be realized, learnt and avoided by translation students and translators in general. Several historical, embarrassing, and humorous examples of deliberate and inadvertent translations and interpretations have been provided to show some of the translation errors and mistakes at the level of articles, demonstratives, terminologies, phrases, etc. The study findings demonstrate that any single task of translation may not be accomplished to perfection. In addition, translation should not be deemed as an entirely mechanical act of reproduction of equivalent words in the target language, but rather as a complex activity carried out with careful selection of meaningful words. The study recommends that translators pay much more attention to the nuances of the selected word meanings to avoid any mistranslation.

'Lost in Translation' Meets Political Thought

From the Tower of Babel to the European Union, political discourse has been mistranslated, misperceived and misunderstood. This paper analyzes some aspect of present-day and historical cases of misperception in the particular contexts of political discourse.

DOES TRANSLATION (EX)CHANGE EVERYTHING? A FRAMEWORK FOR POLITICAL TRANSLATION

Linguaculture, 2018

The paper focuses on the translation of the political discourse, embedding linguistic and cross-cultural perspectives. The choice is motivated by the fact that in the first decades of the new millenium we have witnessed an exponential increase in the quantity, quality and urgency of this discourse within the international political sphere. The political discourse can be said to unearthen the hidden agenda of the contemporary large-scale crises: the financial crisis, shifts of power, terrorist attacks, etc. In this light, the question arises: Does translation objectively and accurately reflect the strategies in the discourse of political leaders, and the problematisation of supranational identities such as the European one (more specifically, referring to membership to the European Union)? Answers to such questions are attempted starting from the premise that the translation of the political discourse or political translation (Trosborg, 1997; Biel, 2017) is an emerging sub-type of institutional translation struggling to assert its own identity.

Cultural Rhetoric and Translation

Cultural Rhetoric. Rhetorical Perspectives, Transferential Insights, 2023

Cultural Rhetoric and translation theory, used together as a method of analysis of literary works, can result in a very appropriate theoretical framework to reveal the radical interculturality of the literary text, particularly present and challenging in ectopic texts and translated texts. By means of theoretical tools such as the partes artis, it is possible to analyse different aspects of the production process of these literary texts, to isolate some of their specific features and, therefore, to challenge their historically non-predominant role in literary systems, from the perspective of a change to come that revalues what literary systems have of translated or hybridized.

Introduction: The politics of translation and the translation of politics

The International Journal of Translation and Interpreting Research, 2020

In their introduction to the much-quoted edited collection Translation, Power, Subversion, Álvarez and Vidal (1996, p. 2) posit that translation is one the most representative paradigms of the clash between cultures. In their view, it is important to examine the relationship between the production of "knowledge in a given culture and its transmission, relocation and reinterpretation in the target culture". Álvarez and Vidal underscore the influence of the translator as well as the power relationship that the source and target cultures may have upon the translation practice. Although twenty-five years have passed since the publication of their book, Álvarez and Vidal's work keeps resonating in a world that has become increasingly globalized and where power can be exerted in myriad ways. For Álvarez and Vidal, translation is a political act. And, it may be added, non-translation also is. The influence of politics on translation practice can be observed in the translation of political texts but, as Gagnon claims (2010, p. 252), also in the use of translation as a political statement. The former can be exemplified by the translation of political speeches, such as that of President Donald Trump's inaugural address (discussed by Caimotto's article in this special issue); the translation of news articles, such as those rendered into English and Portuguese by El País or into Spanish and Chinese by The New York Times; and the translation of political texts, such as the works of Karl Marx and his followers that were rendered into Chinese at the beginning of twentieth century. As for translation as a political statement, it refers to the underlying policies that lead to those translations. If we peruse the Spanish versions of The New York Times, for instance, we realize that the texts are only a small fraction of what is published in the English version. The same applies to the English articles that appeared in El País. This is, of course, related to the limited resources apportioned to the translation services of these media, but the very selection of news items to be translated is also a political act. An excellent example to study the way in which ideologies influence translation practices was the simultaneous appointments of Spain's new Prime Minister and El País's new editor back in 2018. These events provide us with an excellent example of how translation can be reflective of the ideological affinity between a government and a specific news corporation (for a discussion, see Valdeón, 2020).