Friday, 23 September 2016

So why do we do cultural translation? Aren't textual and language translation enough?

The prime cause of cultural translation is the movement of people (subjects) rather than the movement of texts (objects).

The world is seeing a lot of people movement right now: economic migrants, refugees from far too many conflicts, to name but two. Think about how simply language translation fails to address the need for communication. If you don't understand the culture out of which people speak, you won't understand the words they do speak. It is a common (and in this case, wrong) assumption that most of us make to think that the 'other' is someone just like us, with the same culture, values and opinions as ourselves. Culturl translation is needed to understand how other people groups value such commoplaces as work, families, dress and cultural mores such as who can speak to whom about what?