Tag: translation

Culture and news translation

Call for papers

Culture and News Translation
special issue of Perspectives: Studies in Translatology

to be edited by Kyle Conway (University of North Dakota, USA)

This special issue will examine the role of culture in news translation.

Interest in news translation, for the most part, is a relatively recent phenomenon. It benefited from the sustained attention it received during the Translation in Global News initiative at the University of Warwick from 2004-2007, although occasional articles on the topic have appeared since the 1970s. In those early articles, scholars were concerned with how political relations between countries affected which stories traveled where. Scholars writing more recently have been more interested in how journalists’ institutional roles within a news organization shape how they construct their stories. In both cases, however, the analysis has been largely structural, concerned with newsroom organization and the political economy of news.

More recent research has raised questions about the role of culture in news translation. For example, in “Bringing the News Back Home” (Language and Intercultural Communication vol. 5, 2005), Susan Bassnett argues that journalists’ approach to translating, as they piece stories together from multiple sources, is inherently acculturating: “However and wherever a text originates, the objective is to represent that text to a specific audience, on their terms.” In Translation in Global News (2009), Esperanca Bielsa, along with Bassnett, expands on that argument by examining power in relation to culture.

In such cases, however, the nature of culture — what exactly it is — has gone largely unexamined, and many questions remain unasked. When journalists factor culture into their reporting, what is it exactly that they are taking into account? To what degree is culture a function of national, ethnic, religious, or linguistic identity? What happens when those categories come into contradiction with each other (for example, in situations where secularized national identities are challenged by the ostentatious display of religious symbols)? In such cases, what do notions of culture, as employed by journalists or by the academics studying them, bring to light or obscure from view? Is a more nuanced notion of culture possible, one that allows us to account for the effects of such contradictions?

The purpose of this issue will be to pose such questions and thereby to develop a more sophisticated understanding of culture and its role in news translation. Articles will explore what the term culture reveals and what it hides. The end goal will be to expand not only our understanding of culture as a theoretical concept but also our understanding of its role in journalists’ day-to-day practice (and the implications of that practice for news consumers’ conceptions of people they see as foreign or “other”). In this way, questions of practice will inform meta-theoretical questions related to the study of news translation, and vice versa.

Potential questions to address:

Related to journalists’ practice:
* How does culture help account for when news translation takes place and, more interestingly, when it does not?
* How do journalists operate in situations of cultural conflict? How do they orient themselves and their texts toward their readers (or listeners or viewers) when their readers are implicated in that conflict?
* How do cultural norms related to translation develop within the newsroom, and how do they shape the work of the journalist-translator?
* How do journalists account for the different culturally inflected, connotative meanings evoked by emotionally or politically charged words?

Related to scholarly study of news translation:
* How do notions of cultural translation supplement notions of linguistic translation? Is the distinction useful, or even tenable?
* What insight does the field of cultural studies, with its emphasis on culture and power, offer with respect to news translation?
* What is the relationship between news translation and ethnography, whose practitioners make similar claims about their ability to represent people belonging to foreign cultures?

Proposals addressing any aspects of culture and news translation (not just the suggestions listed above) are welcome.

Submissions:
Please send an abstract of 400-500 words to the guest editor, Kyle Conway (kyle.conway AT und.edu), as a pdf, odt, rtf, doc, or docx file by Sept. 1, 2013. Full articles (max. 7000 words) will be due in Aug. 2014. See full style guidelines.

Editor contact information:
Dr. Kyle Conway, University of North Dakota, USA, kyle.conway AT und.edu

Timeline:
Deadline for proposals: Sept. 2013
Decision on proposals: Jan. 2014
Deadline for full submissions: Aug. 2014 Distribution of reviewers’ comments: Jan. 2015 Deadline for final versions: Apr. 2015

Using Poetry to Build Intercultural Dialogue

“Peter Zsoldos, ambassador of the Slovak Republic to Egypt, discussed poetry, translation and its role in the future of intercultural dialogue at the third In Translation lecture this semester, calling for greater intercultural dialogue through creative means. At his lecture titled “Translation, Poetry and Diplomacy: New Horizons for Intercultural Dialogue,” Zsoldos, a diplomat, poet and translator, championed the idea that cultural diplomacy, dialogue and interaction can be used as proactive instruments to develop better and more nuanced relationships with countries in Europe, Asia and Africa. “To understand is to share an interest,” he said. “The aim is to find out what makes others tick.”

Zsoldos has a diplomatic career that spans more than 20 years, the last 10 of which have been spent in the Middle East serving the Slovak Republic’s foreign service in various capacities. In 2000, Zsoldos became the ambassador of the Slovak Republic to the Gulf Cooperation Countries. For the past three years, he has lived in Cairo. As a student, he was interested in literature and religion, and wrote his doctoral thesis about Afro-Cuban religious systems, colloquial Spanish spoken in Cuba and Cuban literature in the 20th century. In the diplomatic corps, Zsoldos asserts that cultural diplomacy should be a tool to counter stereotypes, bias and prejudice.

“There is a saying: take two opposites and connect the dots and you have a line,” Zsoldos noted. “Intercultural dialogue can change long-held positions and attitudes. While changing attitudes is always a work in progress, it is diplomacy and artists that are the first to see and connect these dots.”

Zsoldos is the author of five books that have been translated into different languages, two of which are trilingual books (Arabic, English and Slovak) that he co-authored with renowned Emirati poet and translator Shihab Ghanem. Their first book Pearls and Dates: Poems from the United Arab Emirates won the Best Book of the Year prize at the 2003 International Book Fair in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. Their second book, Contemporary Poems from the Arabian Peninsula, was published in June 2010. The books are a translation of Slovakian poetry into Arabic and vice versa. For Zsoldos, the idea stemmed from a desire to better publicize the great works of Arab poets and authors in the Slovak Republic. “I was looking for something that will bring a new viewpoint to Europe,” he said. “By expanding the body of literature, we are hoping to also expand the greater dialogue.”

Zsoldos has observed that in the post-September 11 era, many works that had not yet been translated from Arabic are now available in Slovak. “Recently, many major Arabic works have been translated into Slovak such as the Quran, the complete One Thousand and One Nights and some of the works of Naguib Mahfouz,” he noted. In the future, Zsoldos wants to continue to build cultural and diplomatic bridges as well as translate the works of Slovak and Arab authors and poets, a pastime he greatly enjoys. “It is a wonderful feeling,” he said. “There is a process of creation that takes hold. I feel as though I am taking off the clothes of the poem, until there is nothingness, and then redressing it in the words of another language.”

Originally published by the American University in Cairo.