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Translation and the Construction of Identity: Abstracts
Date: 12-14 August 2004
Venue: Sookmyung Women's University, Seoul, Korea
Jan Blommaert
Globalization results in intensified transnational flows of goods and people, as
we know, and consequently also of communicative practices, resources and
patterns. Though at first sight much of these flows appear to be chaotic and
unpredictable, we can see structure as soon as we look closer. We then see how
such intensified flows generate new problems for studies of
language-and-culture, problems we need to address if we want our work to be
relevant and applicable.
Plenary Session
THE UNTRANSLATABLES: Diasporic Language, National Origin and Intercultural
Misunderstandings in Asylum Seekers’ Bureaucratic Encounters
Ghent University, Belgium
A case in point are asylum seekers: subjects captured in typical globalization
patterns of mobility and transfer across spaces marked by inequality. Asylum
seekers usually move from the peripheries of the world system to its centers,
and they bring along communicative resources and customs embedded in peripheral
symbolic economies. Their discourses, consequently, are deterritorialized - “out
of place” - and transidiomatic - produced in someone else’s codes. In
bureaucratic encounters, such
discourses are in an overwhelming majority of cases disqualified as incoherent,
contradictory, or just false and inaccurate, and this kind of qualification is
embedded in ‘central’ symbolic economies.
This paper will address such phenomena both empirically and theoretically,
highlighting the need for macro-perspectives in the actual analysis and
manipulation of asylum seekers’ encounters.
© IATIS 2003