[Linganth] CFP AAA2018: Power in Translation

[Michael Wroblewski]

Dear Melissa and Nicole,

I am very interested in participating in your AAA panel on Power in Translation. I have pasted in my abstract below, and attached it as a separate Word doc. I look forward to hearing from you.

Best,

Michael

--
Michael Wroblewski, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
Lake Michigan Hall 230
Grand Valley State University
Allendale, MI 49401
616-331-8931

Structures in Translation: Colono Hosts and Indigenous Guests in Ecuador’s Intercultural Media
Michael Wroblewski, Grand Valley State University

Over the last decade, Ecuador has reimagined itself as a constitutionally-defined “intercultural” nation. State rhetoric draws on indigenous theories of interculturality as an egalitarian exchange of distinct knowledges and practices between various cultural groups. Interculturality depends on continuous action through locally determined initiatives, in which culture brokers translate across distinct cultural and semiotic systems. For many indigenous leaders, interculturality opens the door for new forms of resistance to domination and promises a decolonization of knowledge and representation. Ethnographic study of localized bilingual and intercultural translation, however, reveals that translation here, as elsewhere, is a fundamentally structured and asymmetrical process. In an examination of broadcast Spanish-Kichwa television and radio media in the Amazonian city of Tena, I will show how the translation of indigenous Kichwa language, culture, and symbols for a mainstream audience reproduces domination by: (1) privileging non-indigenous ideologies of translation as a conveyance of one-to-one correlation between objectifiable forms, and (2) foregrounding interdiscursive public performance genres and their hyper-enregistered signs of indigeneity. In these intercultural media venues, Spanish-speaking colono (non-indigenous) hosts invite Kichwa-speaking indigenous guests to present linguistic and cultural material for an interethnic urban audience. Kichwa words and signs, though, are subject to the expectations and interpretative frames of non-indigenous translators. Intercultural translation projects allow indigenous agents to resist historical erasure and adapt urban modernity to their own visions. They also serve to marginalize indigenous ways of knowing and communicating while reifying the representational power of non-indigenous translators and their ideologies of translation.




From: Linganth <linganth-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Melissa Krug <melissa.krug at temple.edu>
Date: Saturday, March 24, 2018 at 12:07 PM
To: "linganth at listserv.linguistlist.org" <linganth at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: [Linganth] CFP AAA2018: Power in Translation


Dear all,

We are looking for panelists for the 2018 AAA Meetings for a session on translation practices and power asymmetries. Our working abstract is below. Please submit abstracts (250 words) to Nicole Nathan (nicole.nathan at temple.edu<mailto:nicole.nathan at temple.edu>) and me (melissa.krug at temple.edu<mailto:melissa.krug at temple.edu>) by April 6th.


Session title: Power in Translation: Resistance, Resilience, and Adaptation during Interlingual Interactions
Organizers: Nicole Nathan and Melissa Krug

The study of translation practices spans across anthropological subfields and disciplines. Translation references a “whole family of semiotic processes” (Gal 2015:225) and at a basic level  involves“the expression in one semiotic system of what has been said, written, or done in another” (227). Scholars have identified powerful linguistic ideologies, such as Reddy’s conduit metaphor (1979) that expect translators to reproduce the original without influence or change. Such a conceptualization of translation overlooks the inherent imperfection in linguistic transfer as well as the translators’ background, positionality, and agency. Further challenging notions of “fluency”, Heller (2007) and other scholars of bilingualism and multilingualism have demonstrated the ways that languages, dialects, and registers cannot be conceived as bounded entities. What’s more, translators, in addition to communicating across linguistic forms, must also act as a broker across cultural contexts (Reynolds and Orellana 2009). As such, translations “rely on ideological framings of comparison…[that] is always positioned, never politically neutral, never innocent” (Gal 2015:236).

These findings indicate the possibilities for research on translation practices to broaden our understandings of how translation mediates interactions that take place across asymmetrical power relations, related to interlocutors’ unequal social status and stakes in the interaction. As technological, business, tourist, and other processes of neoliberal globalization connect people with disparate linguistic and cultural backgrounds, it has become increasingly imperative to better understand how translation can be a form of adaptation, one that can create unifications or divisions. In this panel, we seek to understand how translation is a device “for creating material persistence and social connections” (Gal 2015:236). This panel critically examines the ways that translation, while (re)producing power asymmetries, can also provide opportunities to negotiate those imbalances and thus serve as a critical tool for everyday resistance, adaptation and resilience.

We welcome papers that take novel approaches to the study of translation as the intermediation of various linguistic and cultural processes that treats language as dynamic, changeable, and complex. We invite papers from a variety of ethnographic contexts including institutional, informal, and virtual settings. These papers could explore the translator’s paradoxical position--as both the object and the voice of the translation--shape the translation (García-Sánchez et al. 2011), or reflect on the anthropologist’s own partiality in mediating and recontextualizing the translation, thereby contributing another element of subjective interpretation. Papers in this panel address questions such as: What/whose messages are translated and which are left untranslated? What does a translation tell us about power asymmetries, social relations, and language ideologies? How can translation be a tool for everyday resistance? How has access to technology, such as Google translate, affected translation practices and the role of the translator as a mediator?

Keywords: translation, interpretation, mediation, cultural broker, translanguaging, bilingualism, cross-cultural encounter, tourism, healthcare, religion, development, NGOs

Thank you and see you in San Jose,

Melissa Krug
Temple University, Philadelphia, PA
Anthropology; Doctoral Candidate
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