The concept of translation is a long-established one across many disciplines, with the distinctive anthropological contribution being an emphasis on the social nature of translation and on the many-layered nature of meaning.
First, a common metaphor for the anthropologist’s task has come to be that of a ‘translation’ from one culture to another. However it is also accepted that this is a problematic and controversial process, in philosophical, practical and ethical or political terms. Thus there have been as many explicit (and implicit) approaches to ‘cultural translation’ as there have been contrasting theoretical positions throughout the history of anthropology.
Second, there is the more literal sense of the translation of verbal texts from one language (or sometimes †dialect) to another—something most anthropologists in practice engage in. This is not straighforward either, and many anthropologists now explicitly recognize the complexities of translating, inspired particularly by the work of American and Scandinavian literary-linguistic anthropologists on verbal art, *oral literature, and so on (for a summary see Finnegan 1992, ch. 9). Many of the issues turn on the differing theories about the nature of *language and communication, and therefore about what it is that is being ‘translated’. There is also the issue of whose voice is being represented, and for what audience. Recent approaches challenge the notion of ‘literal’ translation and often focus on the expressive and †performative aspects, arguing, for example, that translation should not be just into a bare verbal text, but also try to recreate some of the performance and contextual features (see Tedlock 1971 for a classic statement). There is also now increasing awareness of the ethical and political dimensions of translation: the translators may be in a position of power or take a particular view-point on contested views of linguistic usage. Some translators in the past have given a very derogatory and ‘primitive’ impression of the original authors, particularly in cases where the multi-media channel of an oral performance is ‘translated’ into the single-channel medium of print.
Finally, the social process of translation can itself be the subject of anthropological study (for example Sherzer 1990:36ff): there is a need for more ethnographic work on this intriguing subject.
Feleppa, R. (1988) Convention, Translation, and Understanding: Philosophical Problems in the Comparative Study of Culture, Albany: State University of New York Press
Finnegan, R. (1992) Oral Traditions and the Verbal Arts. A Guide to Research Practices, ASA Research Methods Series, London: Routledge
Hymes, D.H. (1981) ‘In Vain I Tried to Tell You’: Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press
Pálsson, G. (ed.) (1993) Beyond Boundaries. Understanding, Translation and Anthropohgical Discourse, Oxford: Berg
Sherzer, J. (1990) Verbal Art in San Blas, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Swann, B. (ed.) (1992) On the Translation of Native American Literatures, Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press
Tedlock, D. (1971) ‘On the Translation of Style in Oral Narrative’, Journal of American Folklore 84:114–33
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