cultural translation programme

8/14/2019 Cultural Translation Programme

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Cultural Translation 11th

December 2009 Programme

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Cultural Translation: An Interdisciplinary Conference

Bute Building, Room 1.50, Cardiff University

10.00-11.15 Mieke Bal Keynote Presentation

11.15-11.30 15 min break

11.30-13.00

Sharif Gemie The Veil: A Bridge Between Cultures?

Rebecca Beirne Diasporic and Local Representations of Same-

Sex Female Desires in Indian, Indian-Canadian,

Indian-Scottish and Indian-American cinema

Floriana Bernardi Fatema Mernissi and cultural translation

13.00-14.00 1 hour lunch

14.00-15.00 Veronica ONeil

Kinship in Walter Benjamins Task of the

Translator

Ruth J. Owen Death by Cultural Translation

15.00-15.10 10 min break

15.10-16.10 Ariela Grosz-Rophe Intellectuals as Culture Transmitters

Caterina Sinibaldi Dangerous comic strips

16.10-16.20 10 min break

16.20-17.20 Paul Bowman

Fists of confusion: Bruce Lee and Monolingual

Cultural Translation

David Huddart Emblems of cultural translation

17.20-17.20 10 min break

17.30-18.30

Sarah Maitland First do no harm: Power, agency and cultural

translation in the post-colonial context

Alexis Nuselovici, Glenn

Davidson, Wyn Mason

The moir effect

School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies,

Race Representation and Cultural Identity Research Group;

School of European Studies,

Representing Migration and Mobility in European Cultures Network


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Pullappally: 2004), released in 2004, while directed by a filmmaker who had lived in the U.S. for

her adult life, was based upon a series of same-sex desiring youth suicides in the Kerala district,

and was shot on location in the local language, with efforts made within the film to emphasise a

sense of localism. The films Chutney Popcorn and Ninas Heavenly Delights represent a differentcontext, set within Indian communities in diaspora in the United States and Scotland

respectively. What representational impact does this diasporic context have upon the narrative

and the ways in which both lesbian desire and Indian culture are articulated? Each of these films

share a more classically Westernised narrative structure than films set in India, such as Fire,Girlfriendor The Journey, following the clear generic conventions of romantic comedy and thecoming out story. The World Unseen takes on yet another context that situates the Indiancommunity and its female protagonists in a liminal space in 1950s South Africa. Cultural

translations take place in each of these films to reflect the contexts of their directors, cast and

crew, and intended audiences.

Floriana Bernardi

Fatema Mernissi and cultural translation. Women and cyber-Islam.My paper is intended to survey and describe the role of the Moroccan sociologist and

writer Fatema Mernissi as a cultural translator between the East and the West. Focusing on

Moroccan cultural specificities and deconstructing the several stereotypical representation of

her community as far as gender, media and education concerns, Fatema Mernissi has been

translating the actual system of values and cultural practices of the Moroccan society (and, more

generally Eastern societies) destroying those betrayed senses and common places which both

media and the different forms of art have engendered and transmitted throughout time.

Particularly, the paper will focus on the crucial role of IT, satellite televisions and the Internet to

deconstruct the stereotype of Arab women, mainly represented in the western imagery as

downtrodden, subdued to the patriarchal power and as sex symbols in tv commercials and

video clips. On the contrary, according to Fatema Mernissi, a mind-blowing civilizational shift is

happening in the Arab world and internet cafs are the places and means to foster it. In Internet

cafs people can access IT, socialize and discuss about political issues and ruya, that is a clear

vision of the future where [the youth] have a role to play as defenders of an ethical planet

(Mernissi 2005: http://www.mernissi.net/books/articles/digital_scheherazade.html). There,

besides, young bloggers and social networkers meet to assure the circulation of internationally

relevant news often protecting them from dictatorial censorship and promote participation

to civic initiatives, which inevitably influence mainstream public discourse.


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14.00-15.00 Veronica ONeil

Kinship in Walter Benjamins Task of the

Translator

Ruth J. Owen Death by Cultural Translation

15.00-15.10 10 min break

Veronica ONeil

Kinship in Walter Benjamins Task of the Translator.Translation theory assumes difference: whether it is to obliterate it through

domestication or to emphasise it through foreignisation. Benjamin, with his emphasis on

kinship, shifts this focus, potentially reflecting a similar emphasis on cultural kinship and

placing the translator in the role of mediator.

Translation theory is characterised by opposing polarities. The literal/free debate often

takes centre stage, focusing on techniques used in the process of translation. Closely linked to

this is the debate about the relationship between source text (ST) and target text (TT), by

extension source language (SL) and target language (TL), and by further extension source

culture (SC) and target culture (TC). ST/L/C typically loses out, becoming swallowed and

regurgitated unrecognisable by domesticating techniques such as paraphrase and imitation. In

practical translation, this favouring of a domesticating approach to translation often goes

unquestioned. Schleiermacher opens the debate with On the Different Methods of Translating

(1813), and most theorists respond to him in some way, advocating either a foreignising

approach that favours the ST/L/C or a domesticating approach that favours the TT/L/C.

The importance of this debate cannot be overstated, however, whether the SL or TL is

favoured, the focus is still on the difference between languages. Such a focus assumes difference,

takes difference as its foundation. Benjamin, with his emphasis on kinship of languages,

removes this focus, and potentially reflects a similar emphasis on cultural kinship. Emphasis on

kinship does not strive to find (or create) likeness, as in ethnocentric translation, instead, the

fundamental relationship of the SL to the TL is central: the fact that they are both language.

With this kinship as fundamental, the need to find (or create) likeness is not so urgent, and

while difference between SL and TL is not removed, it is no longer perceived to be a problem. If

the translator is no longer starting from the point of trying to obliterate the difference of the SL

in the ST, and by extension the SC, they move into the role of mediator.

Ruth J. Owen

Death by Cultural Translation: Ophelia in GermanOphelia can be considered an instance of cultural translation across time, across media and

across languages. Shakespeares Hamletconstitutes the point of origin for centuries of Opheliatexts and images. In Hamlet, Ophelia is the young girl in love, who loses her mind and dies in anoverhung brook. This figure, whose origin is English, theatrical and seventeenth-century, is

prolifically re-written in a tradition which is German, lyric and twentieth-century. Interrogating

the transmission reveals the translatability of Ophelia, with the concomitant loss of meanings


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and gain of meanings. This interrogation of the German Ophelia pursues the question of what

has facilitated her intercultural mobility. Part of the story of German cultures local use of

Ophelia seems to be linked to the intense political force-fields in which German writers were

being read. Her afterlife in cultural translation coincides with the sustained politicization of

culture in the Weimar Republic, through Nazism, to postwar division. Whilst Ophelias non-

German status may be essential, Shakespeare had been claimed uniquely German in spirit.

Ophelia not only comes loose from his Hamlet in English, but is continually incorporated intonew sets of meaning as she comes up against the discontinuities of German cultural history.

Later appropriations enter into dialogue with one another; they form clusters of connection to

each other; in the end, there is an Ophelia myth so embedded within German literature that it

goes on generating new texts and images, updating her, adapting her to different lyric modes.

My analysis shows that, above all, Ophelia survives in cultural translation as a drowned girl. To

open the channel between cultures seems to require female death and a body in, or at least near,

the water. This paper suggests that the textuality of her dying, and the gaps in Shakespeares

account, are crucial to her intercultural mobility.

15.10-16.10 Ariela Grosz-Rophe Intellectuals as Culture Transmitters

Caterina Sinibaldi Dangerous comic strips

16.10-16.20 10 min break

Ariela Grosz-Rophe

Intellectuals as Culture TransmittersCultures immigrate, or are translated in many ways. This paper focuses on the role of

intellectuals as culture transmitters. I will examine cultural translation as an import of cultural

elements from abroad, from the French cultural field, and their plantation in the local field of

Hebrew culture during the second quarter of the twentieth century. The Jewish settlement in

Palestine was an immigrants' society, in the process of nation building and creation of a

national culture so these intellectuals undertook a difficult task. The intellectuals I would like

to present here were poets who studied in Paris and returned to Palestine carrying a load of

components of French culture. They struggled for the distribution and impregnation of these

foreign elements in the emerging Hebrew culture in the literary field as well as in the political

field against the local hegemonic imperatives. As intellectuals they were poets, but they also

published essays and articles in major daily Hebrew newspapers, spreading their ideas widely.From the variety of cultural elements imported by these poets, I choose to concentrate on

poetical modernism; on some modernist ideas as universalism, and the rejection of nationalism

and of war; and on some behavioral patterns.

The analysis of their endeavor enables a detailed inspection of such a transference of

cultural components (their reception by conscious and unconscious processes, the strategies of

their dissemination) and some insights regarding the successes and the failures of efforts to

challenge the hegemonic cultural imperatives.


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Caterina Sinibaldi

Dangerous Strips. The reception of American comics under the Italian Fascistregime.

The present paper aims to investigate the widespread success of American comics underItalian Fascism and their subversive position within the Italian polysystem. Comic strips are a

relatively understudied phenomenon, which is nonetheless significant in relation to the role

played by translation in Fascisms production of culture. As a narrative form which didnt find

an equivalent in the target context, they introduced a new genre into the Italian literary system,

while also stimulating a national production. Moreover, since they addressed a particularly

vulnerable and valuable sector of Fascist society, comics are revealing of the norms of writing

and translating for children dominant at the time.

American comics were imported into Italy around 1910, and appeared for the first time

in the Corriere dei Piccoli, a popular journal for middle-class children. Officially despised and

yet privately enjoyed by most Italians, comics opened up the possibility of a different world, a

daunting perspective for a dictatorial regime. However, they were for long tolerated by Fascistcensors, who issued a first ban against them only in 1938, in occasion of the Bolognas

Conference for Childrens and Youth Literature.

Drawing on the theoretical framework of Translation Studies, it is my intention to look

at the primary and operational norms that regulated the reception of comics, focusing on the

modes of selection and manipulation of the original products. Specifically, I will look at comics

as an interesting space where alternative discourses took place, within a highly controlled and

politicised cultural system such as that of Fascist Italy. My analysis will follow the different

phases of their reception, and will especially focus on their interaction with Italian comics, as

highly significant in revealing the process of identity negotiation involved in translation.

Moreover, it is my intention to examine the economic and ideological aspects which

contributed to the regimes tolerance towards comics, as well as the reasons behind theirprogressive rejection. Being comic strips a traditionally popular, low genre, the relationship

between the status of a text type and its strategies of translation will be also investigated. This

will lead to broader considerations about translating for children, as an activity which is subject

to special constraints, while also allowing for creativity and innovation.

Selected examples of both American and Italian comic strips will be shown, in order to

illustrate the different phases in the reception of foreign comics, and the dynamics of cultural

negotiation at stake.

16.20-17.20 Paul Bowman

Fists of confusion: Bruce Lee and Monolingual

Cultural Translation

David Huddart Emblems of cultural translation

17.20-17.20 10 min break


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Paul Bowman (Cardiff)

Fist of (Con)Fusion: Bruce Lee and monolingual cultural translationThe opening of Bruce Lees Fist of Fury(1972) depicts the funeral of a Chinese martial

arts master, in a Chinese school in the Japanese-dominated area of the Shanghai International

Settlement, circa 1908. This is already a fraught moment of cultural transmission: indeed the

eulogists expend most of their energy emphasizing to the assembled martial art students that

they know the correct way to preserve their masters lineage and their tradition. But the funeral

is rudely interrupted by the arrival of belligerent representatives of a Japanese martial arts

school, who contemptuously present the Chinese with a large framed piece of calligraphic

writing, which reads Sick Man of Asia. The Japanese issue a challenge, via their translator, the

creepy and culturally and sexually ambiguous Hu En. The senior Chinese elders prevent any of

the Chinese students from answering the challenge, in order to preserve decorum.

At one key point a senior Chinese teacher addresses the translator, Hu. In the dubbed

English version, the Chinese senior asks Hu, Look here, just what going on here? In the English

subtitles, however, this exchange is rendered as, Look here, are you Chinese? These are

significantly different renderings. Hus answer in the subtitled version is that whilst he is

Chinese he shares a different destiny to them. In the dubbed version, however, Hu shortly

proceeds to speak of the superiority of we Japanese.

Deliberately without having sought to establish whether the different combinations of

Dutch and Mandarin subtitles and dubbing replicate this disjunction or introduce others, this

paper assumes the likelihood of these and other possibilities. It does so in order to explore

several interconnected issues of translation. Firstly, various theories of translation and their

imbrication in various models of culture and tradition; and secondly, Benjaminian arguments

about the text as construct Fist of Fury is clearly a complex (and internally contradictory)construct, with all sound added post-production and hence lacking any original as such and

the complexity of such putatively simple popular cultural texts as Fist of Furywhen approachedas the arcades of cultural translation.

In order to explore such a massive set of problematics in such limited time and space,

the paper will focus specifically on the two key dimensions of this opening scene: first, the fact

that the funeral of the founder is already a fraught scene of rupture/tradition, transfer/loss,

continuity/disjunction indeed, of cultural translation here supplemented secondly by the

double, duplicitous (cultural) status of the (literal/linguistic) translator, Mr Hu. The reading ofthis scene will be organised by Rey Chows contribution to theories of translation in her essay,

Film as Ethnography; or, Translation Between Cultures in the Postcolonial World (1995),

which itself begins from a consideration of the Italian expression Traduttore, traditore Translator, traitor.

David Huddart, Chinese University of Hong Kong

and

: emblems of cultural translation

This paper interprets Peter Careys Wrong About Japan (2005) as a text that foregroundscultural translation while simultaneously blocking it. Careys book fictionalizes a journey

undertaken to understand the international significance of anime and manga (or komikku): it


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stages an intercultural encounter explicitly in order to understand an intercultural encounter.

Carey, in desiring to explain cultural translation operating in one direction, occludes its

operation the other way, and implicitly assumes a kind of barrier to translation. He assumes this

barrier through a specific attitude to English in Japan, the presence of which is elided. Carey is

licensed to make his assumption by artists like Miyazaki Hayao, interviewed by Carey. With

other artists, Carey tests his theories aboutanime and manga, always to be made to feel wrongabout Japan. Miyazaki and Carey communicate without language more effectively than Carey

communicates with the others. Miyazaki is scornful about comparisons with Disney (despite

Disneys international distribution of Studio Ghibli movies), and insists upon an inviolable

cultural specificity: he functions to confirm Careys understanding of the uniqueness of the

culture being translated.

One example seems to back this assumption. While the translated title of Spirited Away(2001) is useful, it cannot capture Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi, which takes some of itsmeaning from a literal removal of language: strokes removed from kanji. English cannot captureJapanese culture, and part of the attraction of manga for Carey is that English has beenvaporized. However, this is only apparently the case, and the book pursues a strategy that

downplays the significance of English. Indeed, a notable treatment of the language comes in the

form of a fictional friend for Careys son, who confirms many stereotypes regarding Japanese

English. The book misses the cultural translation that is everywhere evident in the production

of Japanese English, which can be compared to other World Englishes. Rather than seeing

English as a form of cultural imperialism, it is increasingly recognized that English in Japan has

been acculturated: adapted for local requirements, only some of which involve translating othercultural values for Japanese people. Careys work is elsewhere notable for its celebration of

adapted Englishes, most obviously Australian but also, for example, Malaysian; in eliding

Japanese adaptation, this specific book assumes a fixity of cultures, between which there is

movement, but only of the kind we expect and can account for in advance.

17.30-18.30

Sarah Maitland First do no harm: Power, agency and cultural

translation in the post-colonial context

Alexis Nuselovici, Glenn

Davidson, Wyn Mason

The moir effect

Sarah Maitland

First, do no harm: Power, agency and cultural translation in the post-colonialcontext

Cultural translation interprets one culture to another, rewriting the foreign and carrying it

across from its original context towards the receiving culture. This process of intercultural

encounter reshapes thoughts, translating them between nations. Yet in a post-colonial context,

the extent to which this cultural translation symbolises cultural imperialism, or offers an


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opportunity for a new ethics of intercultural understanding, is a question that divides post-

colonial critics and translation theorists alike.

This paper considers how cultural translation has been theorised both as an exploitative

device in the toolkit of empire, and as a hermeneutical opportunity to recognise and engagewith otherness. For some, cultural translation operates as a technology of appropriation,

exoticising and ultimately assimilating the Other to the dominant norms of the translating

culture. The Derridean diffrance inherent in the Other is thus re-written in the transparent

discourse of the receiving culture, and the reductive familiarity that results is linked to

ideologies of reception that choose certain texts over others, freezing them into native

informants for their culture and therefore symbolising the asymmetrical power relations

between cultures. Yet others also view cultural translation as a process that interprets and

engages with the Other, rather than seeking to essentialise or appropriate it. By rewriting a

foreign experience in the receiving culture, translation from this perspective recognises and

respects the difference of the other, and it is this untranslatability that causes us to re-examine

how we understand our own culture in relationship with others. This recognition of cultural

irreducibility and the opaque rhetoricity of which Spivak writes effects a re-examining of

extant power relations and breaks down the barriers of essentialism that seek to fix one

perfect meaning within the original work.

This paper will therefore interrogate the politics of translation and the process behind the

carrying across of works from one cultural context to another, examining how contemporary

theories of cultural translation conceptualise the practice of intercultural encounter as an

activity that both exacerbates power differentials between nations and respects thefundamental irreducibility of cultural difference.

Alexis Nuselovici , Glenn Davidson, Wyn Mason,

The moireffect: a new paradigm for transcultural studiesThe description and understanding of the new cultural landscapes drawn by the

contemporary massive forced or voluntary migratory movements need a new conceptual and

rhetorical lexicon. Images of bridges or thresholds are weak metaphors to express the realities

of transnational/transcultural identities and prove to be useless with regard to the problems of

social integration within European countries.

We propose to use the moir effect as an analytical tool to approach this issue. The termmoir (or moire) has itself a transcultural history, crossing the Arabic, French and Englishlanguages and is used to designate a type of textile or pattern. It is also used in digital imaging

and computer graphics techniques to name a specific pattern formation (e.g., checkered surfaces

or multiple layering).


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Mieke Bal is Mieke Bal, a cultural theorist and critic, is Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and

Sciences Professor (KNAW). She is based at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA),

University of Amsterdam. Her areas of interest range from biblical and classical antiquity to

17th century and contemporary art and modern literature, feminism and migratory culture. Her

many books include A Mieke Bal Reader (2006), Travelling Concepts in the Humanities (2002)

and Narratology (3rd edition in press due for release in February 2009). Mieke Bal is also a

video-artist, her experimental documentaries on migration include A Thousand and One Days;

Colony and the installation Nothing is Missing. Her work is exhibited internationally.

Occasionally she acts as an independent curator.

Rebecca Beirne is the author of Lesbians in Television and Text after the Millennium (Palgrave

2008) and the editor ofTelevising Queer Women: A Reader(Palgrave 2008). She is a Lecturer in

Film, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Newcastle, Australia, and her current

research monograph is a comparative history of the representation of lesbianism in world

cinema.

Floriana Bernardi isPhD Student in Theory of Language and Sign Sciences, University of Bari.

Paul Bowman is Director of the Race, Representation and Cultural Identity Research Group in

the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University. He is author of

Theorizing Bruce Lee (2010), Deconstructing Popular Culture (2008) and Post-Marxism versus

Cultural Studies (2007), editor of The Rey Chow Reader (2010), The Truth of iek (2006),

Interrogating Cultural Studies (2003), Reading Rancire (2010) and numerous journal issues,

including forthcoming issues ofSocial Semiotics, Postcolonial Studies, and Educational Philosophy

and Theory.

Glenn Davidson is a digital artist (Artstation,) and artist in residence, Chapter, Cardiff

University.

Sharif Gemie is Reader in History at the University of Glamorgan, who teaches on Nineteenth

and Twentieth Century Europe, principally France and Spain; Israel and Palestine; whose


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research interests include the histories of modern Brittany and modern Galicia (Spain) and the

experiences of refugees during the second world war. Sharif is author of Brittany 1750-1950: the

Invisible Nation (UWP, 2007), Galicia: A Concise History(UWP, 2006), French Revolutions, 1815-

1914: An Introduction (Edinburgh University Press, 1999), Women and Schooling: Gender,

Authority and Identity in the Female Schooling Sector, France, 1815-1914 (Keele University Press,

1995), and is currently completing a book on the experience of Arabs in Europe.

Ariela Grosz-Rophe is based in Tel-Aviv, and works across several disciplines: history, history of

intellectuals or cultural history, cultural sociology, and literature. Her PhD is entitled

Intellectuals Between Cultures: From French Modernism to the Field of Hebrew Culture (1920-

1948).

David Huddart is a lecturer in the Department of English at the Chinese University of Hong

Kong. He is author ofPostcolonial Theory and Autobiographyand Homi K. Bhabha.

Sarah Maitland was born in Belfast in 1980. She graduated with first class honours in French

from Queens University Belfast, specialising in the theory and practice of literary translation

and French linguistics. In 2004 she gained her Master of Science degree in translating and

interpreting, at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. Her recent work in 2005 includes

translations for the United Nations Development Programme in Cuba and the World Federation

of United Nations Associations, as well as interpreting services at the United Nations

headquarters in New York. She also takes part in a pro-bono translation partnership with the

Peruvian chapter of ngo Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. She has also worked

with the Ambassadors for Christ Organisation and BBC Northern Ireland. Her work as a literary

translator includes On the Rock, an English version of En la Roca (2005) by Ernesto Caballero

and the forthcoming English translation of Nina, by Jos Ramn Fernndez. Sarah has been

awarded the Javier Giralt Spanish prize for excellence in Spanish.

Wyn Mason issenior lecturer in the Department of Media and Communication, University of

Glamorgan.

Alexis Nuselovici is Professor of Modern Cultural Studies at Cardiff University. His research

interests focus on two main areas: European culture and Translation Studies.

His other areas of research include cultural expressions of exilic and diasporic experiences,

cultural hybridity and mtissage, convergence between Black memory and Jewish memory,

aesthetics of modernism and postmodernism, Holocaust literature.


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Veronica ONeil is a PhD student at NUI Galway. Her PhD focuses on Walter Benjamin on

translation.

Ruth J. Owen is Senior Lecturer in German at Cardiff University. Her research focuses on

German poetry. She has written about the relationship between political history and poetry,

with respect to the Wende of 1989 and the impact of unification. Further publications have

explored questions of national identity, as expressed in poetry about urban landscapes;

contemporary poetry about science; and the representation of the human body in poetry

through different eras of the twentieth century. More recently, she has been working on how the

Ophelia figure from Shakespeares Hamlethas been appropriated by German-language culture.

Caterina Sinibaldi is a PhD research student in the Department of Italian at Warwick

University, UK. Her PhD title is Translating for Children in Italy under the Fascist Regime.

Conference Organising Committee:

Dr Paul Bowman, Director of the Race, Representation and Cultural Identity ResearchGroup

Dr Rachael Langford is co-Director of the Representing Migration and Mobility inEuropean Cultures Network

Professor Alexis Nuselovici is Professor of European Cultural Studies Dr Margaret Topping is co-Director of Representing Migration and Mobility in European

Cultures Network

cultural translation programme

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