TranscUlturAl (Journal)
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From one colonial language to another: Translating Natasha Kanapé Fontaine’s “Mes lames de tannage”
No full textSigned and posted to the internet on July 6, 2012 in the months following the “Printemps érable” and leading up to Idle No More, “Mes lames de tannage” is one of Natasha Kanapé Fontaine’s most important slams. In analysing my English translation of this slam, published in Canadian Literature in 2016, this essay speaks to the relationship between Indigenous literatures and European languages. It participates in a conversation about what it means to translate French-language Indigenous literature from Quebec into English. Such translation enables Indigenous writers across North America to make links with each other and foster a broader interpretive community for their writing. Given the flow of Indigenous literature and critical thought from English into French over the past decades, thanks to publishing houses in France, the recent wave of translations from French into English and the sharing of French-language work mark a significant shift in the field. At the same time, the gesture of translating into English a writer who works primarily in French but is in the process of relearning her maternal language, Innu-aimun, brings to the fore all the pitfalls of moving from one colonial language to another. The challenge for translation is not to lose sight of Kanapé Fontaine’s relationship to French and especially, the way she lends it her voice. In the slam, French is a language of contestation but also of collaboration. Drawing on what she calls a “poetics of relation to the land,” Kanapé Fontaine works toward a respectful cohabitation of the territory. In this context, my strategies of including the French alongside the English and leaving words un-translated aim to disrupt the English version, expose the mediating work of the settler-translator and turn attention to Kanapé Fontaine’s mobilization of French for a writing of decolonization
L’inuktitut et le corps-vocal dans le cinéma inuk : la décolonisation par le poème cinématographique
No full textDepuis les cinquante dernières années, les peuples inuits ont développé de nombreuses stratégies de décolonisation et de réappropriation culturelle, entre autres en utilisant leur propre langage ainsi qu’en « autochtonisant » le langage du colonisateur afin d’explorer les possibilités de renégociations de la langue. Au cinéma, cette décolonisation du langage se veut un acte politique de réclamation et d’affirmation identitaire, qui se manifeste entre autres par le refus d’ajouter des sous-titres à des films où la langue autochtone prédomine, ou en apposant un nouveau discours sur des images coloniales. Dans cette veine, la remédiation des langues inuites se manifeste bien souvent à travers une oralité ainsi qu’une vocalité des mots et des images (tradition orale) qui rappellent le lien au territoire de même que la connexion au monde des ancêtres. En nous inspirant des travaux de Philippe Le Goff sur le corps-vocal inuit et de Michelle Raheja sur la souveraineté visuelle, nous proposons de montrer comment se déploient les caractéristiques du corps-vocal dans la poésie et le cinéma inuits
Rhizomizing the Translation Zone: Xiaolu Guo and A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers
No full textIn a world marked by increasing linguistic and cultural mobility, translation has gone way beyond the idea of mechanical/cultural transmission of meaning and saturated our everyday life. Translation zone, as one of the many spatial metaphors for translation, is proposed by Emily Apter and meant to debunk the myth of monolingual complacency as a norm and to highlight translation as a significant medium of subject re-formation. Although her transcoding model is path-breaking, Apter seems to insist on the intersubjective limits that resist translation, arguing about the issue of border trouble arising from occasions “where the lines dividing discrete languages are muddy and disputatious” (129).
In this paper, I argue that the translation zone shall be reconceptualized as a rhizomatic zone, where both translation and mis-/non-translation constitute an adventitious mode of transformation that highlights processuality. In order to add this Deleuzian layer to the translation zone, I examine how translational literature, which “straddle[s] two languages, at once foregrounding, performing, and problematizing the act of translation” (Hassan 754), reflects a perpetual state of in-translation and encompasses the process of flight and movement. Specific examples are drawn from Xiaolu Guo’s novel A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, which features a narrative characterized by malapropism, mis-hearings, mis-interpretations, and interlanguage. Incorporating translation as a constitutive element into her story, Guo highlights the interplay between linguistic creativity and (un-)translatability, complicates the process of cultural transfer, and underlines the centrality of migration and porosity which Apter fails to attribute to her framework. The novel, therefore, mimics a rhizomatic translation zone, where migration, transformation, and linguistic heterogeneity are enmeshed
Challenges and Strategies in Translating Chinese and English Prepositions into Standard Shona
No full textThe present study focuses on the challenges and strategies in translating Chinese or English prepositions into Shona. These two languages were chosen mainly because Chinese is becoming one of the most influential foreign language in Zimbabwe while, English is also one of the widely spoken foreign language in many countries. As already observed in some previous research, English and Chinese prepositions are captured in Shona phrases as morphemes. Words are the smallest elements that may be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content. This differs from morphemes which are defined as smallest units of meaning which cannot necessarily stand on their own. Research shows that Chinese and English prepositions do not have direct equivalent prepositions in Shona. We observed that Shona employs substitutes for Chinese and English prepositions, making translation of prepositions from other languages into Shona challenging.
Keywords: Prepositions; Shona; cross language comparison; Chinese and English, translatio
Diesel® Plays the Fool: Translating Performance in Fashion Ads
No full textThis paper discusses the controversial “Be Stupid” advertising campaign by Diesel, recipient of the Grand Prix Lion at the Cannes International Advertising Festival (2010). Banned in some countries for its potentially negative impact on children, this campaign employs theatrical staging combined with provocative slogans, such as “Stupid Might Fail. Smart Doesn’t Even Try.” Illustrated with orginal images inspired by Diesel, the paper refers to prominent theorists and artists (from Derrida to Warhol) to consider the complex (and productive) relationship between translation and performance
Necessary borders for negotiation: the role of translation
No full textTranslation is usually deemed to help bridge gaps but seldom thought of as a means of strengthening or, at least, highlighting borders. The present article uses the example of translations involving the Breton language in order to show that translation may favour negotiation by both helping negotiators to understand each other and having them recognise the social border that makes them different. The article explains firstly the author’s understanding of borders and negotiation. Secondly, the case of translation from and into Breton is examined. And finally, the discussion is extended to the European institutions, where European language policy also illustrates the dual function of translation in negotiation. The example of Breton evidences that translation fosters social distinction, language development and cooperation. At the EU level, the same roles are assumed by translation services and they contribute moreover to the legitimacy of the institutions and to the exercise of democracy. Such a conclusion invites to consider translation as an adequate means to manage language and cultural differences, even compared to language learning. It may be used, then, to deal with pressing issues such as the current migration flows to Europe
Dirty pretty language: translation and the borders of English
No full textThis article analyses the politics of English, and translation into Englishness, in the film Dirty Pretty Things (Frears). With a celebrated multilingual cast, some of whom did not speak much English, the film nevertheless unfolds in English as it follows migrant characters living illegally and on the margins in London. We take up the filmic representation of migrants in the “compromised, impure and internally divided” border spaces of Britain (Gibson 694) as one of translation into the imagined nation (Anderson). Dirty Pretty Things might seem in its style to be a kind of multicultural “foreignized translation” which reflects a heteropoetics of difference (Venuti); instead, we argue that Dirty Pretty Things, through its performance of the labour of learning and speaking English, strong accents, and cultural allusions, is a kind of domesticated translation (Venuti) that homogenises cultural difference into a literary, mythological English and Englishness. Prompted by new moral panics over immigration and recent UK policies that heap further requirements on migrants to speak English in order to belong to “One Nation Britain” (Cameron), we argue that the film offers insights into how the politics of British national belonging continue to be defined by conformity to a type of deserving subject, one who labours to learn English and to translate herself into narrow, recognizably English cultural forms. By attending to the subtleties of language in the film, we trace the pressure on migrants to translate themselves into the linguistic and mythological moulds of their new host society