Culture in translation: the case of British Pathé News

At the risk of serving and betraying two masters, the intellectual and practical work of the translator is best characterized as an ethical problem: to navigate our anxieties of otherness by making difference accessible while also protecting the ‘other’ from appropriation. This article locates these concerns within the context of international motion picture news production, during which the need to make far-off people, events, and cultural practices accessible to audiences at home suggests a similar translation process. Using Paul Ricoeur's notion of ‘linguistic hospitality’ as its point of entry, it maintains that as cultural translations engaged in the description and explanation of frames of reference different to those of the spectator, newsreels took their audiences on an intercultural journey of discovery, bridging both the physical and the metaphorical gulf that separated them from the images projected on their cinema screens and the experience of life elsewhere. By placing this discussion within the concrete practice of British Pathé News, this article advances a powerful example of not only the complex intercultural negotiations that exist at the heart of newsreel production as a form of cultural translation but also the ways in which these negotiations echo across our relationship to otherness more generally

Performing recognition : El castigo sin venganza and the politics of the ‘literal’ translation

In Lope’s Ferrara, honour is a function of public perception. The Duke has been betrayed but cannot seek justice without making his betrayal public, destroying his reputation and shattering his legitimacy to rule. Only by seeking revenge in private can he keep his honour intact. In this ‘politics of recognition’, personal identity and public perception are so intertwined that the Duke’s every action is mediated by the critical regime to which he is subject. When translating the play for performance in English, translators enact a similar politics: each perceives different phenomena worthy of a fresh approach and each imputes different meanings to what they perceive; this critical gaze directs the course a translation takes. Through the illuminating discourse of the politics of recognition, and using the author’s experience of providing a ‘literal’ translation for the Theatre Royal Bath, it argues for a renewed understanding of the critical dimension of literal translation, as a series of tactical moves and strategic decisions, taken on a private level in the service of public performance

Performing Difference : bodas de sangre and the philosophical hermeneutics of the translated stage

Postcolonial and translation scholarship draws attention to the role of translation in extending asymmetries of power and knowledge between aspects of culture and identity represented and involved in translation, focusing debate on the agency of the translator as the representing subject and calling for recognition of the cultural distinctiveness of the objects of translation. Yet in the context of translation for the theatre, where its object is the fleeting moment of performance that passes between a play and its original audience, the twin task of translating and protecting difference is challenged by the placelessness that surrounds it. This article seeks to examine how the placelessness of performance creates a challenge for translation and considers the extent to which philosophical hermeneutics offers scope for both the explanation and recognition of difference in translation.Els estudis postcolonials i sobre traducció fan ressaltar el paper de la traducció en l'expansió de les asimetries de poder i de coneixement entre aspectes de la cultura i de la identitat representats i involucrats en la traducció, i centren el debat en el rol del traductor com a agent representant que reivindica el reconeixement de la diferència cultural de l'objecte de traducció. Tanmateix, en el context de la traducció per al teatre, en què l'objecte és el moment efímer de la representació que té lloc entre una obra i el públic original, l'absència d'emplaçament que caracteritza aquesta modalitat dificulta les indissociables tasques de traduir i protegir la diferència. L'objectiu d'aquest article és analitzar si aquesta absència d'emplaçament de la representació teatral crea un repte per a la traducció i si hi ha lloc en el marc de l'hermenèutica filosòfica per a l'explicació i el reconeixement de la diferència en traducció

Imagining otherness: on translation, harm and border logic

Using theoretical frameworks drawn from the fields of cultural anthropology and political philosophy, this article pursues connections between disparate discussions of representation and identity politics to consider the determining role that translation plays in constructing relations of power between the translating ‘self’ and the translated ‘other’. With reference to a theatre translation case study, it argues that the act of translation subordinates the position of the other to the biographical journey of the translator. By transforming the status of a living author from one of writing subject to representational object, translation is conceptualised as a form of so-called ‘status misrecognition’ that threatens to displace the author’s agency in translation, preventing them from participating as a peer in the passage from imagination to realisation in the target language. By emphasising greater author engagement in the translation process, this article calls for the first steps in a translational ‘politics of recognition’ by which the shape of translations would be informed by an increased valorisation of the status of authors as active participants in, rather than objects of, the imaginative acts that lead to translations

The Cartographer. Warszawa, 1:400.000, Juan Mayorga, translated by Sarah Maitland

During the Second World War, Warsaw’s Jewish citizens were forcibly detained by occupying German forces within a large dividing wall, separating the Jewish ghetto from the rest of the city. Out of this oppressive geography emerges the story of a boy and his grandfather, a master cartographer and mentor to the boy as he reveals to him a geography of resistance that re-imagines the walls that separate one person’s reality from another. By viewing the past as a map that delimits the present, the play highlights the invisible borders of exclusion and oppression that operate as its contours, cartographies to which we are all prone to adopting. Look out for the forthcoming Spanish revision by Juan Mayorga of his original play

A new modality of audiovisual translation? Covert translation of presenter scripts in Japan's globally aired English-language TV music show

This article sheds light on an unresearched translation modality that forms a pillar of program production for Japan’s publicly funded, globally aired, round-the-clock English-language television channel, NHK World-Japan TV. The modality in question is the translation of presenter scripts written in one language (Japanese) and delivered to camera exclusively in another (English). Through a critical self-reflexion on the lead author’s construction and application of translation guidelines aimed largely at optimizing comprehensibility for viewers of the NHK World-Japan TV music show J-MELO, new lines of Translation Studies research into this underrepresented modality and its significance in the wider context of international TV broadcasting are suggested