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Translation, cultures and the mediaElena Di Giovanni aa Department of Linguistic and Literary Research , University ofMacerata E-mail:Published online: 24 Jul 2008.
To cite this article: Elena Di Giovanni (2008) Translation, cultures and the media, European Journalof English Studies, 12:2, 123-131, DOI: 10.1080/13825570802151330
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13825570802151330
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Elena Di Giovanni
TRANSLATION, CULTURES AND THE
MEDIA
Translation is not just ‘a window opened on another world’, or some suchpious platitude. Rather, translation is a channel opened, often not without acertain reluctance, through which foreign influences can penetrate the nativeculture.
(Lefevere, 1990: 2)
Transculturation refers to a process whereby cultural forms literally movethrough time and space where they interact with other cultural forms andsettings, influence each other, produce new forms. . . . Many cultural crossingsare made possible by the mass media.
(Lull, 2000: 242)
The media have long been a focus amongst those working with language andcommunication. Firstly, media are a rich source of readily accessible data forresearch. Secondly, media usage influences and represents people’s use of andattitudes towards language. Thirdly, media can tell us a great deal about socialmeanings and stereotypes projected through language and communication.Fourthly, the media reflect and influence the formation and expression ofculture, politics and social life.
(Bell and Garrett, 1998: 4)
The above quotations, taken from three of the countless volumes which offer jointreflections on translation, cultures and the media, are meant to provide evidence ofthe growing interdependence of such fields. They also point to the ever-increasingamount of academic and non-academic discussion they fuel, the neologisms theygenerate (transculturation), the expressions they highlight and make popular (culturalforms, cultural crossings) and, last but not least, the innumerable, often inextricable,research paths they open up. While new labels and definitions are created to try andaccount for an ever-widening range of phenomena related to these three issues, newterritories and boundaries are established among all the disciplines which are involvedin these multidimensional, multidirectional flows. And if the overall amount ofdiscussion about the role of cultures in the media, the function of the media ininfluencing cultures and the impact of translation on both cultures and the media is onthe increase (as can be attested, for instance, by the publications devoted to issues ofglobalization, an umbrella word which inevitably brings together translation, culturesand the media), this sometimes leads to overlaps and confusion.
European Journal of English Studies Vol. 12, No. 2, August 2008, pp. 123–131
ISSN 1382-5577 print/ISSN 1744-4243 online ª 2008 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/13825570802151330
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The title of the present volume may appear rather trivial, using as it doesbuzzwords such as translation, cultures and the media. And yet, besides evoking over-exploited concepts, Translation, Cultures and the Media points to a huge and dynamicdomain which calls for more systematic approaches where (in)compatibility betweenthe three elements becomes an issue. Therefore, by way of introduction to thiscollection of extremely diverse and yet homogeneous essays on translation, culturesand the media, we shall briefly dwell on these three terms, reflect upon their changingmeaning and try to explore their common ground, their specificity and compatibility.
Let us start by focusing on the study of ‘translation’ and its most recent evolutionsin connection with ‘cultures’ and ‘the media’. The observation of translationphenomena goes back to the dawn of Western civilization, although the formalacknowledgement of a discipline called ‘translation studies’ is relatively recent.Notwithstanding its having recently acquired international recognition (towards theend of the 1970s), over the past two decades or so research on translation has beenincredibly boosted by scholars all over the world, who have come from all sorts ofdisciplinary backgrounds and have – sometimes even unconsciously – joined forces tohave a say on the kinds of activities which can be brought to the domain of‘translation’. By way of example, reference can be made to the proliferatingcontributions by non-Western scholars (such as Eva Hung, Tejaswini Niranjana,Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, Rita Kothari,1 etc.) and their role in expandingcurrent debates as well as diluting the very concept of translation. With these andother thrusts it seems that, to the present date, translation studies have overgrownand almost lost some of their specificity, having been pushed in multiple, sometimeseven denaturalizing directions.
‘Translation’ and ‘culture’ make up an incredibly popular pair, almost a trope. Itis undoubtedly the most common pair which has been evoked by researchers oftranslation since the acknowledgement of the cultural turn (Bassnett and Lefevere,1990) and the systematic development of culture-oriented translation studies.However, if ‘translation’ and ‘culture’ seem nowadays to enter into an increasingnumber of theoretical and practical relations, they are also the object of controversies,if not conflicts. As some scholars have pointed out; (Trivedi, 2004: 35–45), or onlyhinted at (Apter, 2006), the coming together of these two issues has brought aboutnew interpretations of the concept of translation, some of them leading far from whattranslation most commonly implies, in theory as well as in practice. The debate overcultural translation, for instance, has given rise to a host of studies on the processes ofhybridization which diasporas and multiculturalism have fuelled, where the role ofinterlingual transfer seems to be almost irrelevant and is often lost in the mist of timeand space. As a matter of fact, in this and other culture-oriented reflections ontranslation, the observation of processes of interlingual transformation becomesincreasingly less prominent, leaving the stage for more complex, interdisciplinary andless specific studies of translation as a generic form of transfer, passage and dynamism.Just like the above-mentioned ‘cultural translation’, a host of new expressions havebeen coined, many of them opening up new research avenues and often implying anexcessive expansion of the concept of translation, a spreading of its meaning andessence over (too) many paths.
Thus, it seems plausible to argue that the union between ‘translation’ and‘culture’ has had the merit of broadening the spectrum of translation studies and
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intensifying the overall research activity connected with them but, on the other hand,it has led to a loss of specificity which has only been partially recovered through small-scale, often limited studies.
As for ‘translation’ and the ‘media’, these two terms have most commonly cometogether within a sub-discipline known as multimedia translation. This field, like theresearch areas mentioned above, has been growing constantly over the past 15 years;it has rapidly come to the fore at international level and has claimed recognition aswell as closer attention by the academic community. Now that recognition has finallycome, as is proved by the impressive amount of publications and conferencespromoted over the past 10 years, the very nature of multimedia translation hasbecome the bone of contention for scholars within and outside this field. As a matterof fact, those very scholars who had first promoted the systematic union of ‘media’and ‘translation’ have been making use of the space and visibility acquired by thediscipline to highlight the great difficulty of tracing its boundaries and defining whatmultimedia can possibly mean in relation to the study and practice of translation.Traces of these practical and conceptual difficulties can be found, for instance, in the(written and oral) debates over the terminology to be employed when exploring theunion of translation and the media: expressions such as (multi)media translation,screen translation and audiovisual translation have been used alternatively andsimultaneously, while the fuzzy boundaries of whatever ought to be called multimediatranslation have also come to clash with localization, a practice – and a theory – whichoften seems to struggle along the borders of media translation.
From what has been claimed so far, we can easily infer that whenever ‘translation’enters into relationships with ‘cultures’ and ‘the media’, the movement which theirrelationships generates is alternatively (or perhaps sequentially) expansive orrestricting, positive or negative, constructive or disruptive. From its own side, theacademic community in the West and beyond seems to have at first supportedand boosted these unions, bestowing upon them the status of indissoluble marriagesand tolerating, even encouraging, the increasingly polygamous nature of translation.And then, after one or two decades devoted to exploring the possibilities offered bythe polygamous marriages contracted by translation, it seems that the maturity ofthese relationships has generally brought about a certain confusion, a fuzziness ofboundaries and objectives. It has also unveiled an increasingly large, multifarious spacewhere nothing and everything about ‘translation’, ‘cultures’ and ‘the media’ ispossible.
Incidentally, something similar seems to have occurred to the equally popular andover-discussed union between ‘culture’ and ‘the media’. Engaged as they have been inthe search for a clear-cut definition of the mass media and their role in contemporary,globalized society, media theorists and critics have felt the need to always encompasscultural issues, difficult though they are to grasp and account for. And just liketranslation studies, media studies have witnessed an enormous expansion of theirboundaries, they have somehow lost their specificity while striving to cater for allaspects related to the production and perception of the media worldwide. This, inturn, has led to unavoidable fragmentation, to repeated attempts to recover specificitywithin sub-domains and small-scale investigation areas, with a consequent loss of awide enough viewpoint and a significant time investment in the search for analyticalparameters and clear-cut divisions. Among the many differentiations set forth by
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media studies scholars over the past decade or so, one great divide has been identifiedbetween rigorous, experiment-led approaches on one side and more discursive,critical studies on the other. These two areas are, in turn, permeated by the principlesof statistics or by cultural and social studies (Rantanen, 2005). Within culture-oriented media studies, the claim made by James Lull (2000: 12) that ‘the mediapromote the social construction of diverse cultures’ seems to be of particularrelevance here, focusing as it does on what is often a taken-for-granted fact: culturestravel through texts, across different languages, and the media are responsible for themost conspicuous transmigration of texts worldwide.
The connections between ‘cultures’ and ‘the media’ are so numerous and sopowerful that, although they could certainly – as they actually do – fuel very diverseresearch paths, they are also impossible to overlook even when dealing with statistics-based or experiment-led studies (see Orero and Caffrey’s papers in this volume).Also, quite importantly, the mutual influence between media and cultures is so deepand pervasive that it does not seem to leave any chance of tackling the two issuesseparately: if the media shape the very perception of cultures and the making ofidentities, cultures themselves are highly responsible for the way the media evolve andhave an impact on societies. Thus, as has been observed when considering together‘translation’ and ‘culture’ or ‘translation’ and ‘the media’, the union between‘cultures’ and ‘the media’ is nowadays indissoluble, but it has been exposed anddebated so much that its very nature and its main tenets seem to be increasinglydifficult to grasp.
The role of translation and interlingual communication in general in determiningthe interaction between cultures and the media, although often neglected, is essential,manifold and ever-changing. Within media studies, such a role has been often takenfor granted, or overlooked, as part of broader cultural interactions (‘language is aboutdifferences in the way people live’; Agar, 1994: 128). Alternatively, it has beenassociated with the very translation of cultures, more than the transposition oflinguistic signs, as emerges, for instance, from the words of Stuart Hall when, inRepresentation. Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, he attempts to definecultural representation through the media:
one important idea about representation is the acceptance of a degree of culturalrelativism between one culture and another, a certain lack of equivalence, andhence the need for translation as we move from the mind-set or conceptualuniverse of one culture to another.
(Hall, 1997: 61)
As stands out from this and other writings by media and cultural studies scholars,but also from the works of so many translation scholars nowadays (see thosementioned above), translation can never be considered merely – or even mainly – as alinguistic operation. It is deeply imbued with cultural values, just as it is more andmore interwoven with the media through which languages and cultures travel. Aswell-known translation scholar Theo Hermans (2006: 9) recently stated, ‘translationnegotiates difference’. Being constantly called to do so amidst unstable, ever-changingcircumstances, translation is subject to the constant re-negotiation of its very essence;it is required to reshape its relations with cultural issues as well as with the media
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which make interlingual, intercultural communication possible. And if this is whathappens to the very practice of translation, an activity which is steeped in dynamismand difference, the same can be said about the study of translation. Referring to TheoHermans (2006: 9) again, we can say that ‘the academic field of study known inEnglish as translation studies is only beginning to realize the implications of radicaldifference’, and it is also for this reason that the study of translation, after opening upto all sorts of approaches and legitimating all perspectives, is now finding it difficult tocope with such an uncontrollable proliferation.
Once again, what seems to be implied in all these changes, these centripetal andcentrifugal movements, is the blurring of clear-cut divisions between fields of studyand also, quite meaningfully, a certain levelling out of disciplinary hegemonies. This,in turn, implies a rejection of prevailing ‘marriages’ between disciplines, an increasingurge to give enough space and visibility to each and every theoretical and practicalunion, so as to try and fully account for diversity in terms of languages, cultures andmedia communication at the same time. Therefore, it seems that the two marriagesdiscussed here between ‘translation’ and ‘culture’ and ‘translation’ and ‘the media’ought to be reconsidered and thought of as a single, broader union which caters forcross-cultural communication in all its forms and encompasses translation, culturesand the media.
This is also what can be evinced by taking a closer look at the issues raised in thecontributions gathered in this volume, which display in very different fashions thecomplex relations between the three buzzwords which appear in the title. Althoughthey focus on diverse practices related to the universe of multimedia translation, theessays presented here seem to mark a continuum, a crescendo of distancing from amore traditional concept of translation and its interlingual implications towards moredynamic, fluid practices which transcend issues of space and touch upon virtuality.Diverse though they may be, the reflections proposed by the authors of the essaysshare a wide common ground, shaped by the idea that the coming together of issues oftranslation, cultures and the media is nowadays essential for any study of media andtranslation-related phenomena, and that such a threefold union can yield great resultsin terms of research but also, quite significantly, in terms of practice. By looking atthe great opportunities opened up by translation in the media world, all contributionshighlight the impossibility of neglecting cultural issues, as it is only by perceiving andrelaying cultural specificities that multimedia texts can be fully appreciated by localcommunities which still exist and flourish in the era of globalization.
The concept of translation travels through the six essays and follows an intricatepath, whose structure changes along with the translation practices which are takeninto consideration. From a departure point marked by a more ‘familiar’ view oflinguistic-oriented media translation in the first paper, the voyage of translation leadsthe reader through diverse cultural settings and different analytical perspectives,touching upon ancient Asian traditions and also extremely modern forms ofaudiovisual expressions, involving various degrees of linguistic and culturaltranslation. Towards the end of its voyage through the six papers, translation losesits linguistic contours and becomes more and more inextricably bound to cultures,but also to the very nature of the media it calls into play. The very idea of translationis dissolved, distorted, reinterpreted. It becomes synonymous with transformation,transmigration, translocation (Chiaro) and it turns towards the cyberspace (Shah) as a
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new territory to conquer, perhaps to look for new associations or to enter into newmarriages.
The media which are accounted for in the six essays encompass television, thecinema, newspapers, the internet and a number of other channels, while thecommunication and translation practices analysed reveal an incredible variety andcater for the very latest developments in the field. As for cultures, those which arebrought to the fore and discussed in the six papers span the world, touching uponmost European countries (see Orero alone) and opening up to the USA, Japan, Chinaand India.
In ‘Coherence in Translated Television Commercials’, Valdes and Fuentes set outto explore the transfer of culture-specific items and expressions in the increasinglyfrequent practice of translation of television commercials, making special reference tothe Spanish context. In order to evaluate the ‘degree of cultural acceptability’ whichthese translations can achieve, having to comply with the specific constraints ofadvertising as well as of television broadcasting, they apply the linguistic concepts ofcohesion and coherence to the analysis of extremely complex, condensed andpersuasive audiovisual texts. At the theoretical level, the paper by Valdes and Fuentesestablishes new connections between translation studies and linguistics, all of themstrictly bound to the role of cultures and the media in the making and perceiving ofcohesion and coherence through translated television commercials.
Jun Tang’s paper ‘A Cross-cultural Perspective on Production and Reception ofDisney’s Mulan through its Chinese Subtitles’ offers an interesting reversal of focus inhis non-Western analysis of the reception of a typical Western audiovisual text likethis one. Based on a series of experiments carried out with Chinese viewers, as well ason a detailed comparison between Chinese traditions and ‘The Disney Version’(Schickel, 1997), the paper unveils narrative strategies which are characteristic ofmany American audiovisual texts and which are often neglected by Western scholars.Tang also explores the dynamics of their impact on Chinese and international viewers,questioning the often unquestioned levelling out of perception through globalizedmedia products.
Cross-cultural encounters in animated audiovisual texts also come under scrutinyin Colm Caffrey’s paper, devoted to the analysis of ‘Viewer Perception of VisualNonverbal Clues in Subtitled TV Anime’. Being a specific product of Japan, deeplyimbued with cultural values on the verbal as well as visual level, TV anime offerCaffrey a range of possibilities to explore the mechanisms of perception of iconic clueswhich travel the world although they always remain strongly anchored to a veryspecific, complex and not too well-known culture. Caffrey’s paper has the great meritof going beyond heuristic comments and grounding analysis in strong and well-documented empirical research. Moreover, this paper analyses and explains the verynature and structure of Japanese anime, so popular and yet so rarely taken intoaccount within scholarly debates.
Orero’s paper makes a leap into the (hopefully) not-too-distant future of researchin audiovisual translation and its cultural effects, by taking into account the needs ofless able audiences and by exploring the practice of writing and translating for audiodescription. In ‘Three Different Receptions of the Same Film. The Pear StoriesProject Applied to Audio Description’, Orero reports on an international projectcarried out to test the reception of the narrative strategies and structures of
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audiovisual texts, with a view to applying findings to the definition of guidelines forculturally appropriate translation of audio description scripts. The paper focusesspecifically on the reception of culture-specific items and the possibilities of relayingthem across languages without possibly relying on the support of visual elements.With this analysis, Orero’s essay takes cultural reception beyond visual and verbalboundaries, and audiovisual translation theory well beyond common thinking.
With Chiaro’s paper ‘A Taste of Otherness: Eating and Thinking Globally’, theexploration of media, translation and cultures becomes wide-ranging, pervasive anddefinitely innovative, discussing as the author does our daily habits in terms of eating,reading, viewing and apprehending otherness. In her exploration of the translation ofcultures through food magazines, cookbooks and cookery programmes in the UK,Chiaro highlights the great socio-cultural relevance of translation processes whichoccur through the merging of culinary habits, especially in Western countries. Thevery concept of translation is reinterpreted by Chiaro to be associated with thetranslocation of foods and peoples, the transadaptation of tastes, habits and wholecultures.
Nishant Shah’s essay ‘Material Cyborgs, Asserted Boundaries. Formulating theCyborg as a Translator’ leads us away from the common – and even not so common –paths taken by translation scholars worldwide, to place translation processes in thenon-space of the increasingly important and pervasive cyberspace. Shah looks at thecreation of cyborg identities as processes of translation, as digital transactions whichimply multiple instances of transfer where the cyborg itself acts as a translator. In thispaper, the world wide web is observed as being a huge, almost boundless mediumwhich, in itself, generates new communication channels and new media; it is alsodiscussed in relation to its power to reinforce or weaken cultural identities and toforge new cultures, or rather cybercultures.
Shah’s paper, distant though it may seem from Valdes and Fuentes, but also fromthe others, in spatial as well as in thematic terms, shares with all the othercontributions in this volume a deep, well-informed and very up-to-date concern forthe transformation of cultures through translation and through the media. And thiscommon concern, which points to the future of research on three issues, takes us backto the very starting point of this introduction: trivial though they may appear whenevoked together in a title, ‘translation’, ‘cultures’ and ‘the media’ are key words tointerpret the way our world is evolving around us and the way we evolve in it. Andonly when taken together can they be expected to help us understand the dynamics ofprocesses of transmigration, translocation, transadaptation or digital transaction.
If a future is to be envisaged for translation, not only in cyberspace but also in thismaterial world, the only certainty seems to be that its union with the study of culturesand the media will never be dissolved.
NOTE
1 Although these scholars have all contributed widely to the reshaping of the currentdebate on translation, over time and with numerous publications, the referencesection of this short essay only lists some of the most relevant ones and leaves it to thereader to discover the full range of their works.
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References
Agar, Michael (1994). Language Shock: the Culture of Conversation. New York: WillliamMorrow and Company.
Apter, Emily (2006). The Translation Zone. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Bassnett, Susan and Andre Lefevere, eds. (1990). Translation, History and Culture. London
and New York: Routledge.Bell, Allan and Peter Garrett (1998). Approaches to Media Discourse. Oxford: Blackwell.Belton, John, ed. (1996). Movies and Mass Culture. London: Athlone.Bermann, Sara and Michael Wood, eds. (1995). Nation, Language and the Ethics of
Translation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Cronin, Michael (2004). Translation and Globalization. London: Routledge.De Campos, Haroldo (1986). ‘The Rule of Anthropophagy: Europe under the sign of
Devoration.’ Latin American Literary Review 14.27: 42–60.Gal, Susan and Kathryn Woolard (2001). Languages and Publics. The Making of Authority.
Manchester: St Jerome.Hall, Stuart (1997). Representation. Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London:
Sage.Hallam, Elizabeth and Brian Street (2000). Cultural Encounters. Representing ‘Otherness’.
London: Routledge.Hermans, Theo (2006). ‘Introduction’ to Translating Others, Vol. 1. Manchester: St
Jerome.Hung, Eva (2005). ‘Collaborative Translation – or What Can we Learn from the Chinese
Translation Tradition?’ Translation and Contrastive Studies. Ed. Pan Wenguo.Shanghai: Waiyu Jiaoyu.
Katan, David (2001). Translating Cultures. Manchester: St. Jerome.Kothari, Rita (2003). Translating India. Manchester: St. Jerome.Lefevere, Andre (1990). Translation/History/Culture. London and New York: Routledge.Lull, James (2000). Media, Communication, Culture. New York: Columbia University Press.Niranjana, Tejaswini (1992). Siting Translation. History, Poststructuralism and the Colonial
Context. Berkeley, CA: U of California P.Niranjana, Tejaswini (2002). ‘Translation as Disruption.’ Translation, Text and Theory. The
Paradigm of India. Ed Rukmini Bhaya Nair. London: Sage. 55–76.Rantanen, Terhi (2005). The Media and Globalization. London: Sage.Schickel, Richard (1997). The Disney Version: the Life, Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney.
New York: Natl Book Network.Trivedi, Harish (2004). ‘Translating Culture vs Cultural Translation.’ JSL, Journal of the
School of Languages, Literature and Cultural Studies. Delhi: Pencraft International.Trivedi, Harish and Susan Bassnett, eds. (1999). Post-Colonial Translation. Theory and
Practice. London: Routledge.
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Elena Di Giovanni is lecturer in translation at the Department of Linguistic and
Literary Research of the University of Macerata, where she teaches specialized
translation as well as audiovisual translation (subtitling). She graduated as a translator
from the University of Bologna at Forlı (Advanced School of Modern Languages for
Interpreters and Translators), where she taught for several years at BA and MA level.
She holds a PhD in English language and translation, for which she worked on the
representation of cultural otherness in Disney films. Her research areas include
audiovisual translation (both dubbing and subtitling), translation for children and the
role of language and translation in intercultural communication. She has published
extensively on audiovisual translation and translation as intercultural communication.
She is currently co-editing an Italian anthology of translation studies to be published by
Bompiani and she also works as a professional translator for the media and publishing
industry. [email: [email protected]]
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