Cultus is a Journal dedicated to Intercultural communication, and this will be the theme of Cultus 17. Yet, ‘culture’, as understood in anthropological rather than ideological terms has had rather a bad press. The concept has been widely criticized for being essentialist, for pigeonholing people and peoples into straitjacketed ways of being or doing and of meaning. The late great Michael Agar, anthropologist and member of the Cultus scientific committee, openly asked: “Culture: Can you take it anywhere?”; while another anthropologist lamented “”Everyone is into culture now” (Kuper 1999), meaning that the concept has been appropriated, as well as distorted, so that now “cultural translation” is more often understood as a site of tension, of power struggles between different discursive practices than the sort of translation that practicing translators and interpreters have to deal with. Yet, as Kyle Conway mentioned (2018) in his spirited ‘Putting Translation back in Cultural Translation’: “Translators are among the most culturally aware people I know, and the way they rewrite texts is anything but mechanical”.
So, in this cultural (re)turn we would like to focus on the “cultural” and the “translation” from a cross-linguistic perspective; highlighting cutting edge research, findings and even theoretical argumentation validating the importance in practice of translating and interpreting with culture in mind.
We particularly welcome proposals focusing on new insights regarding intercultural communication and Translation Studies. For example:
- Practical research into the costs of not accounting for culture
- (The real benefits of) teaching intercultural communication in Translation and Interpreting courses
- Intercultural competences for translators/interpreters
- Contrastive grammars of culture
- How business and premium translation sectors perceive ‘culture’
- The issue of essentialism in anthropological culture
- Public service or community interpreting and the real impact of ‘culture’
- New, evolving ways of dealing with culture-bound language, discourse, such as hypertext, creative titling and the use of second screen
- Points of contact between cultural studies and language
Deadline for abstracts: 1 December 2023
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