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Translation and the Construction of Identity: Abstracts
Date: 12-14 August 2004
Venue: Sookmyung Women's University, Seoul, Korea
Yifeng SUN Lingnan University, Hong Kong Translation inevitably results in contextual change
and shifting perspectives for prioritizing cultural and political values. A
change in the linguistic and cultural context of understanding further
compounds the complexity and instability of meaning. In the light of the
ever changing circumstances of understanding and reception, translation
studies resets priorities for examining the actual process of translation
informed by competing cultural and political horizons and perspectives. The
experience of cultural translation, either direct or indirect, raises the
awareness of its defining or subversive political potential. Translation
entails a process involving cultural politics and ideological
incommensurability, characterized by destabilizing effects that both confirm
and disrupt cultural identities. Perceived cultural superiority or
inferiority, together with varying degrees of openness, determines how
normative translation strategies are shaped and reshaped. In spite of
various possible interpretations, translation is susceptible to the dominant
cultural authority, and renders both literal and metaphorical meanings
subject to reinterpretation[s]. In addition, it functions as a cultural and
political filter for translating into and out of a given language, and
consequently a somewhat or even radically different meaning can be
formulated and imposed.
Panel 2: The Politics of Interdisciplinary Research
Shifting Identity: the Continuing Metamorphosis of Translation Studies
Since the practice of translation is constantly being reconfigured as part
of the politics of renegotiating cultural identities, it is imperative that
translation studies crosses disciplinary borders in order to discuss and
illustrate the shifting paradigms and priorities of translation. Thus,
translation studies stresses diversity, hybridity, flow and flux in relation
to performance, indeterminacy, intertextuality, subjectivity, agency and
canon formation. Through complex acculturation and assimilation, translation
experiments with ways to reconcile or manipulate cross-cultural differences
and further, in terms of cross-cultural parameters, it necessitates constant
adjustment and displacement. As a result, the identity of translation
studies is itself also a shifting one, largely due to growing recognition of
the importance – or rather, inevitability of cross-cultural and
cross-disciplinary perspectives.
© IATIS 2003