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Translation and the Construction of Identity: Abstracts
Date: 12-14 August 2004
Venue: Sookmyung Women's University, Seoul, Korea
Juliane House
Globalized communication in many areas of contemporary life has resulted in an
increasing demand for texts which are meant simultaneously for members of
different linguistic and cultural communities. Such texts are either produced
independently in different languages as functionally equivalent comparable
texts, or they are texts first produced in one language –most often English –
and later translated covertly into other languages. In the past, both types of
texts regularly involved a certain pragmatic shift as a result of
linguistic-cultural filtering with which language-specific discourse conventions
were taken into account. Linguistic-cultural diversity was thus maintained.
Given the omnipresence and dominance of the English language in many influential
discourse domains, language-specific norms may now be superimposed by
Anglo-Saxon norms. Such a process may ultimately lead to the destruction of
national, regional, local and individual identity as it is expressed in
discourse.
Plenary Session
Global English and the Destruction of Identity
Hamburg University, Germany
The paper will report on empirical research into this situation. It will present
results from a project funded by the German Research Council, in which both
qualitative and quantitative diachronic analyses of translations and comparable
texts involving English and other European languages are conducted. While there
is evidence of adaptations of discourse norms to Anglo-Saxon ones in the areas
of subjectivity and orality, it is difficult to pinpoint the path of the
influence. Several explanatory hypotheses will be put forward.
© IATIS 2003