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Translation and the Construction of Identity: Abstracts
Date: 12-14 August 2004
Venue: Sookmyung Women's University, Seoul, Korea
Robert Neather Dept of Chinese, Translation and
Linguistics, City University of Hong Kong, People’s Republic of China
This paper examines the role of
translation in the public presentation of culture, taking as its focus
Chinese museums. Museums, art galleries and other such institutions play a
crucial role in cultural presentation, since they constitute an important
channel through which a given society may narrate its cultural heritage,
both to its own citizens and to those of differing cultures. As such, a
museum represents not merely an articulation of the past, but also a
commentary or reflection on the present state of that society. The
presentation of cultural information in this context involves a variety of
factors, including the choice of the artifacts themselves, their spatial
arrangement, and the way in which explanatory materials are used to shape
interpretation. A given museum installation may thus be interpreted as a
“text” whose meaning is signified by the interaction of several differing
semiotic systems – among them linguistic, visual and spatial. Clearly, if a
museum is to fulfill its role of cross-cultural mediation, then translation
is crucial. Yet the way in which translation operates within this
semiotically complex environment has been hitherto little studied. The paper will explore the way in
which foreign museum visitors experience and reconstruct cultural identities
through the museum text. It examines in particular the way in which
translations at one semiotic level – the linguistic – influence
interpretation of the broader museum text system as a whole, and draws on
examples of Chinese/English museum exhibit captions and exhibition
text-panels as a basis for discussion. It focuses on the contemporary
museums sector in the People’s Republic of China as an example in which a
range of issues are particularly acutely focused. These include the presence
of curatorial or ideological manipulation and the way in which this is
either reproduced or re-manipulated in translation; the way that bilingual
materials are used differently by Source and Target Culture users in
relation to the visual and spatial dimensions of meaning; and the extent to
which partial or inadequate translation may lead to cultural
misinterpretation and misreading.
Panel 7: The Verbal, The Visual, The Translator
Translating the Museum: On Translation and
(Cross-)cultural Presentation in Contemporary China
© IATIS 2003