Translation and Ethnography
Translation and Ethnography

Author: Tullio Maranh‹o

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2003-10

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 9780816523030

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To most people, translation means making the words of one language understandable in another; but translation in a broader sense-seeing strangeness and incorporating it into one's understanding-is perhaps the earliest task of the human brain. This book illustrates the translation process in less-common contexts: cultural, religious, even the translation of pain. Its original contributions seek to trace human understanding of the self, of the other, and of the stranger by discovering how we bridge gaps within or between semiotic systems. Translation and Ethnography focuses on issues that arise when we attempt to make significant thematic or symbolic elements of one culture meaningful in terms of another. Its chapters cover a wide range of topics, all stressing the interpretive practices that enable the approximation of meaning: the role of differential power, of language and so-called world view, and of translation itself as a metaphor of many contemporary cross-cultural processes. The topics covered here represent a global sample of translation, ranging from Papua New Guinea to South America to Europe. Some of the issues addressed include postcolonial translation/transculturation from the perspective of colonized languages, as in the Mexican Zapatista movement; mis-translations of Amerindian conceptions and practices in the Amazon, illustrating the subversive potential of anthropology as a science of translation; Ethiopian oracles translating divine messages for the interpretation of believers; and dreams and clowns as translation media among the Gamk of Sudan. Anthropologists have long been accustomed to handling translation chains; in this book they open their diaries and show the steps they take toward knowledge. Translation and Ethnography raises issues that will shake up the most obdurate, objectivist translators and stimulate scholars in sociolinguistics, communication, ethnography, and other fields who face the challenges of conveying meaning across human boundaries.

Representing Others
Representing Others

Author: Kate Sturge

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-06-03

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 1317642120

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Cultural anthropology has always been dependent on translation as a textual practice, and it has often used 'translation' as a metaphor to describe ethnography's processes of interpretation and cross-cultural comparison. Questions of intelligibility and representation are central to both translation studies and ethnographic writing - as are the dilemmas of cultural distance or proximity, exoticism or appropriation. Similarly, recent work in museum studies discusses problems of representation that are raised by ethnographic museums as multimedia 'translations'. However, as yet there has been remarkably little interdisciplinary exchange: neither has translation studies kept up with the sophistication of anthropology's investigations of meaning, representation and 'culture' itself, nor have anthropology and museum studies often looked to translation studies for analyses of language difference or concrete methods of tracing translation practices. This book opens up an exciting field of study to translation scholars and suggests possible avenues of cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Translating Worlds
Translating Worlds

Author: William F. Hanks

Publisher: Special Issues in Ethnographic Theory

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780986132513

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As the discipline of anthropology continues to chart a course along various turns (ontological, ethical, and otherwise), in this pathbreaking volume Carlo Severi and William Hanks return to the question of knowledge and translation as a theoretical and ethnographic guide for twenty-first century anthropology. Translation has played an important but equivocal role in the history of anthropology and linguistics. At least since Ferdinand de Saussure and Franz Boas, languages have been seen as systems whose differences make precise translation exceedingly difficult, if not impossible. Others have argued that, in purely abstract terms, translation between languages is in principle indeterminate. This collected volume suggests that the challenge posed by the constant confrontation of incommensurable paradigms, or worlds, may be the most""fertile ground for state-of-the-art ethnographic theory and practice. With contributions on topics that range from the philosophical to the ethnographic (with refelctions on themes as diverse as tourism in New Guinea, shamanism in the Amazon, the globally ubiquitous restaurant menu, and oral traditions in the Himalayas), this volume provides a new anthropological way to define translation, not only as a key technique for understanding ethnography, but also as a general epistemological principle. "

Translating Institutions
Translating Institutions

Author: Kaisa Koskinen

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-06-03

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 1317640152

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Translating Institutions outlines a framework for research on translation in institutional settings, using the Finnish translation unit at the European Commission as a case study. Because of their foundational multilingualism, the institutions of the European Union could be described as both translating and translated institutions. The European Commission alone employs nearly two thousand translators, and it is translators who draft the vast majority of outgoing EU messages. Translating Institutions sets out to explore the organizational role and professional identity of this group of cultural mediators, a group that has remained relatively invisible despite its size and central institutional role, and to use the analysis of this data to elaborate broader methodological and theoretical issues. Translating Institutions adopts an ethnographic approach to explore the life and work of the translators at the centre of this study. In practice, this entails employing a number of different methods and interrogating various types of data. The three-level research design used covers the study of the institutional framework, the study of translators working in specific institutional settings, and the study of translated documents and their source texts. This is therefore a study of both texts and people in their institutional habitat. Given the methodological focus of the volume, the different methods and data are outlined in independent chapters: the institutional framework of translation (institutional ethnography), the physical location of the unit (observation), translators' own views of their role (focus group discussions), and a sociologically-oriented text analysis of a sample document (shifts analysis). Translating Institutions constitutes a valuable contribution to the sociology of translation. It opens up new avenues for research and offers a detailed framework for the study of institutional translation.

Development Brokers and Translators
Development Brokers and Translators

Author: David Lewis

Publisher: Kumarian Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 156549217X

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* Includes essays by some of today’s leading anthropologists working in development studies. * Furthers the goals of both poverty reduction and ethnographic research by detailing their contributions to and reliance on each another. * Provides a practical and theoretical resource for development agencies, policy makers, and students wishing to access a variety of case studies and new analytical approaches. The success of any international development agency depends on an understanding of the ways in which a community and individuals relate to ideas and resources. David Lewis and David Mosse have brought together a number of anthropologists engaged in development research to show how ethnography can be an indispensable tool for understanding these complex and dynamic relationships. The world that this ethnography of development reveals does not divide neatly into the developers and the developed, perpetrators and victims, domination and resistance, or the incompatible rationalities of scientific and indigenous knowledge. It is a world in which interests and practices are always hybrids, where the realms of reason and the real world are not neatly separate, and in which rational policy representations frequently conceal the messiness of practice that precedes the ideas and technologies of development. The wealth of new ideas offered in this collection will be especially valuable to graduate students in anthropology and development studies, but also to undergraduates and those working in development organizations who wish to run more effective operations on every level. Other contributors: Tim Bending, Bina Desai, Amity Doolittle, Pierre-Yves Le Meur, Peter Luetchford, Wiebe Nauta, Sergio Rosendo, Benedetta Rossi, Oscar Salemink, and Celayne Heaton Shrestha.

Linguistic Ethnography
Linguistic Ethnography

Author: Fiona Copland

Publisher: SAGE

Published: 2015-01-22

Total Pages: 307

ISBN-13: 147391115X

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This is an engaging interdisciplinary guide to the unique role of language within ethnography. The book provides a philosophical overview of the field alongside practical support for designing and developing your own ethnographic research. It demonstrates how to build and develop arguments and engages with practical issues such as ethics, transcription and impact. There are chapter-long case studies based on real research that will explain key themes and help you create and analyse your own linguistic data. Drawing on the authors’ experience they outline the practical, epistemological and theoretical decisions that researchers must take when planning and carrying out their studies. Other key features include: A clear introduction to discourse analytic traditions Tips on how to produce effective field notes Guidance on how to manage interview and conversational data Advice on writing linguistic ethnographies for different audiences Annotated suggestions for further reading Full glossary This book is a master class in understanding linguistic ethnography, it will of interest to anyone conducting field research across the social sciences.

Transpacific Displacement
Transpacific Displacement

Author: Yunte Huang

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2002-02-06

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 0520928148

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Yunte Huang takes a most original "ethnographic" approach to more and less well-known American texts as he traces what he calls the transpacific displacement of cultural meanings through twentieth-century America's imaging of Asia. Informed by the politics of linguistic appropriation and disappropriation, Transpacific Displacement opens with a radically new reading of Imagism through the work of Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell. Huang relates Imagism to earlier linguistic ethnographies of Asia and to racist representations of Asians in American pop culture, such as the book and movie character Charlie Chan, then shows that Asian American writers subject both literary Orientalism and racial stereotyping to double ventriloquism and countermockery. Going on to offer a provocative critique of some textually and culturally homogenizing tendencies exemplified in Maxine Hong Kingston's work and its reception, Huang ends with a study of American translations of contemporary Chinese poetry, which he views as new ethnographies that maintain linguistic and cultural boundaries.

Translation Translation
Translation Translation

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-07-26

Total Pages: 629

ISBN-13: 9004490094

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Translation Translation contributes to current debate on the question of translation dealt with in an interdisciplinary perspective, with implications not only of a theoretical order but also of the didactic and the practical orders. In the context of globalization the question of translation is fundamental for education and responds to new community needs with reference to Europe and more extensively to the international world. In its most obvious sense translation concerns verbal texts and their relations among different languages. However, to remain within the sphere of verbal signs, languages consist of a plurality of different languages that also relate to each other through translation processes. Moreover, translation occurs between verbal languages and nonverbal languages and among nonverbal languages without necessarily involving verbal languages. Thus far the allusion is to translation processes within the sphere of anthroposemiosis. But translation occurs among signs and the signs implicated are those of the semiosic sphere in its totality, which are not exclusively signs of the linguistic-verbal order. Beyond anthroposemiosis, translation is a fact of life and invests the entire biosphere or biosemiosphere, as clearly evidenced by research in “biosemiotics”, for where there is life there are signs, and where there are signs or semiosic processes there is translation, indeed semiosic processes are translation processes. According to this approach reflection on translation obviously cannot be restricted to the domain of linguistics but must necessarily involve semiotics, the general science or theory of signs. In this theoretical framework essays have been included not only from major translation experts, but also from researchers working in different areas, in addition to semiotics and linguistics, also philosophy, literary criticism, cultural studies, gender studies, biology, and the medical sciences. All scholars work on problems of translation in the light of their own special competencies and interests.

Migrants in Translation
Migrants in Translation

Author: Cristiana Giordano

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2014-05-16

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 0520276655

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Migrants in Translation is an ethnographic reflection on foreign migration, mental health, and cultural translation in Italy. Its larger context is Europe and the rapid shifts in cultural and political identities that are negotiated between cultural affinity and a multicultural, multiracial Europe. The issue of migration and cultural difference figures as central in the process of forming diverse yet unified European identities. In this context, legal and illegal foreignersÑmostly from Eastern Europe and Northern and Sub-Saharan AfricaÑare often portrayed as a threat to national and supranational identities, security, cultural foundations, and religious values. This book addresses the legal, therapeutic, and moral techniques of recognition and cultural translation that emerge in response to these social uncertainties. In particular, Migrants in Translation focuses on Italian ethno-psychiatry as an emerging technique that provides culturally appropriate therapeutic services exclusively to migrants, political refugees, and victims of torture and trafficking. Cristiana Giordano argues that ethno-psychiatryÕs focus on cultural identifications as therapeuticÑinasmuch as it complies with current political desires for diversity and multiculturalismÑalso provides a radical critique of psychiatric, legal, and moral categories of inclusion, and allows for a rethinking of the politics of recognition.

Institutional Ethnography in the Nordic Region
Institutional Ethnography in the Nordic Region

Author: Rebecca W. B. Lund

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-11-06

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 0429670818

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Developed in response to the theoretically driven mainstream sociology, institutional ethnography starts from people’s everyday experiences, and works from there to discover how the social is organized. Starting from experience is a central step in challenging taken-for-granted assumptions and relations of power, whilst responding critically to the neoliberal cost-benefit ideology that has come to permeate welfare institutions and the research sector. This book explicates the Nordic response to institutional ethnography, showing how it has been adapted and interpreted within the theoretical and methodological landscape of social scientific research in the region, as well as the institutional particularities of the Nordic welfare state. Addressing the main topics of concern in the Nordic context, together with the way in which research is undertaken, the authors show how institutional ethnography is combined with different theories and methodologies in order to address particular problematics, as well as examining its standing in relation to contemporary research policy and university reforms. With both theoretical and empirical chapters, this book will appeal to scholars and students of sociology, professional studies and anthropology with interests in research methods and the Nordic region.