Since the cultural 'turn' in translation studies, the concept of 'cultural translation' has received considerable attention. Conceptualised in a range of diverse ways, it has given rise to a proliferation of often conflicting accounts. Scholars have noted the limitations of such accounts and signalled the lack of significant analysis to provide a fuller understanding of cultural translation, its limits, assumptions and opportunities. This thesis responds to this need by providing a study of cultural translation in its diverse emanations and discerns four broad themes around which its myriad configurations coalesce: as an ethnographic 'encounter' with cultural difference; as a mobile practice that displays a 'migrant' doubleness of identity as a form of textual production that refuses to 'belong' securely in its place of reception; as a mode that constructs a 'hybrid' text that, in its refusal to be placed firmly within one 'side' or the other, occupies a space 'in-between' original and reproduction; and, in recognition of the appropriative forms of interpretation upon which translation is predicated, as a resistant practice that seeks ways to rectify translation's limited appraisal of cultural difference. The thesis examines these themes in order to test their theoretical possibilities within a practical context and argues for a view of cultural translation, above all, as a locus of intercultural encounter: between translator, original foreign text and all that the translator reads into it. Cultural translation thus emerges as an encounter between the cultural world of the foreign text and the subjective world of a translator, in which the relationship between translator and text is never dissociated from broader matters of power, imperialism, representation and positionality. In such a view, cultural translation insists that matters of inter lingual difference in translation are inseparable from the negotiations of cultural difference and 'anxieties' of otherness that take place behind it.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:557955 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Maitland, Sarah |
| Publisher | Queen's University Belfast |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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