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Translation and the Construction of Identity: Abstracts
Date: 12-14 August 2004
Venue: Sookmyung Women's University, Seoul, Korea
Cristina
Alberts-Franco
Faculdades Integradas Rio Branco, São Paulo, Brazil In the early
20th century the German ethnographer Theodor Koch-Grünberg visited and
described the culture of some Brazilian and Venezuelan Indian groups and
their environment on the border area between Brazil and Venezuela. After
returning to Germany, he published a five-volume work on this ethnographic
expedition under the title Vom Roróima zum Orinoco. Eighty years
later, I, from Southeast Brazil, who have never been to the described region
nor had before any knowledge about ethnography, ethnology or Brazilian
Indian groups, translated into Portuguese the first volume – the travel
narrative – of Vom Roróima zum Orinoco. I was faced
with three main problems: How to translate cultures (and their environment)
that I don’t know, as well as specific ethnographic, botanical and
zoological vocabularies that I don’t master? How to translate into
Portuguese a travel narrative that had already “translated” foreign cultures
and their environment into German, in other words, how to translate the
translated? And how “faithful” to a foreign culture can a translation be? I tried to
solve the first problem by acting as an “ethnographer-translator” (in the
words of Georges Mounin), researching dictionaries, earlier translations of
works of other German ethnographers, iconographic material and works of
reference and requesting the advice of botanists and zoologists. As for the
second problem, I realized that while describing in his native language data
of a very different cultural world from his world, Koch-Grünberg translated
these data into German, presenting in his work, through a German point of
view, the physical and cultural environment of the Indian groups studied by
him. The German lexicon reflects the way German people see and categorize
the world. Koch-Grünberg and other German ethnographers adapted the German
lexicon to describe foreign cultures that had very few aspects in common
with the German culture. If I had based my text exclusively on the German
lexicon to translate data of the physical and social Indian environment,
this lexicon could have acted as a refractive medium upon the translation,
causing distortions in the translation of many specific terms used by
ethnographers to describe Brazilian Indian groups. Once again I tried to
solve the problem by acting as an “ethnographer-translator”, because if I
had not done any research about Brazilian Indian cultures and about the
Portuguese lexicon that refers to them I could not have translated
adequately many terms that refer to spiritual and material aspects of the
Indian cultures described by Koch-Grünberg. But what
about the third problem? How faithful to a foreign culture can a translation
be? In his work Koch-Grünberg shows the Indian cultures from outside, trying
to describe them through a foreign point of view and using a foreign
language; he doesn’t belong to these cultures, and he neither lived with nor
like the Indians; his point of view upon the Indian cultures is partial and
his text reflects this partiality. Because translations are always
incomplete and because I translated Koch-Grünberg’s partial vision of Indian
cultures, my text presents a double partiality, Koch-Grünberg’s and mine,
resulting in an uncompleted description of the Indian cultures and
frustrating my initial and naïve aim of presenting a faithful picture of
them.
Panel 6: Translation and Ethnography – Modes of Representation
Translating Koch-Grünberg into
Brazilian Portuguese: A Challenge
© IATIS 2003