CC BY
7
Michael Steppat
Prof. Dr.phil., Prof. H.C. Faculty IV, University of Bayreuth Germany
RETHINKING TRANSLATION: CHALLENGES OF INTERCULTURALITY"
Abstract. When we think about experiences with interlingual translation, we often assume that a binary pairing of source and target text culture is especially useful, and that the latter of these should take priority. This article examines the implications, and argues for overcoming dualistic concepts. In order to do so, ideas of translation based on the interrelation of languages as such are discussed, with possible adaptations for practical purposes. Yet these ideas are inadequate for the needs of intercultural communication, which places great importance on translation. To meet these needs, sociocultural conditions and specific historical experiences are usually foregrounded, to do justice to translation's "cultural rules" and cultural stories as highlighted by Umberto Eco. In this perception, there is a frequent and functional emphasis on the recipient culture. Yet postmodernism has exposed the vacuity of a pervasive focus on culture, and it should reorientate our thinking about translation. We should take note that, for interculturality, both translation and hybridity concepts have become central, and it appears logical and even imperative to explore their common ground. Translation's "liberating" purpose, as postulated by Walter Benjamin, can now be pursued in the shaping of a new cultural space.
Keywords: Translation concepts, interculturality, functional theories, receiving culture, hybridity
ntroduction
When we think about experiences with translation, what often comes to mind first is how people have said strange things about translation, and about translators. This is not just the funny experiences that we can have with weird translations. We sometimes encounter signs reading "Dead slow children playing" or, at an airport, "Eating carpet strictly prohibited" [Korolkovaite 2017]. Obviously efforts of this kind are untroubled by any sense of what we call target text culture — they pay no attention to any such culture and its semantic requirements. We can thus assume that a more or less binary pairing of source and target text culture is especially useful, and that the latter of these should take priority. It might even become all-important.
1 Translation Stories
In order to tackle the question adequately, we should first call to mind that even stranger stories have been offered about translation as a process. It's worth looking at a few very unusual ideas, which might sound pretty extreme, but which can nonetheless help our own re-thinking about translation. We will be discussing translation processes in a larger sense, not particular languages or directions of transmission. Maybe you have at some point come across any tales by Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges. We ought to be aware that the world's writings usually have a strong impact on each other, and indeed around the globe. One of Borges' haunting tales is about something like time travel through translation. We need to be aware that there's a famous work of Spanish literature, from the 17th century, it's Don Quixote. Its original author is Miguel de Cervantes. The modern story by Borges (in 1939) now tells us something startling. It introduces a 20th-century French writer named Pierre Menard, and it tells us that it's this modern Pierre Menard who actually composes the famous Spanish classic - writing it exactly as it was in the 17th century, but doing it in his own time, in the 20th century. That sounds (and is) confusing, and prompts the puzzled question, how can someone write the17th-century work in the 20th century?
This paradox is the whole point. As Borges tells us, Menard "did not want to compose another Quixote - which is easy - but the Quixote itself' [1964: 39].It took Menard years of hard labor, of many drafts, placing himself in the
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mind of the earlier author. He first set about being Cervantes, not copying him. But then, significantly, Menard decided to continue being himself, being Menard, so that he composes the 17th-century Quixote through the experiences of himself, the 20th-century personality - going beyond the 17th-century author. You might notice how the Argentinean writer is having fun, running rings around translation enterprises—while the interpretation of his story could actually go beyond that. We hear that, in this way, Menard aims to reconstruct, "word for word," the 17th-century novel [39], and the result is the precise text of some chapters of the novel Quixote, word for word indeed, but created in the 20th century. And when readers now open Menard's new Quixote, they find a text whose effect is "astounding" [43]; the 17th-century text, as we hear, now seems just rhetorical and not so sincere or real, but the text is electrifying when it is composed, word for word, in the 20th century. We hear that the modern text is a "renovation" of the original work [44], like the way we renovate an old house that's falling to pieces. And thus one can make new, renovate a text from its source version.
Surely enough, this is a logical game. But if you like strange tales, you might like to compare it with a second famous tale by Borges: The Library of Babel (1941).We hear that this library is a very odd one. It has no beginning and it has no end, it's actually the universe. It contains "the translation of every book in all languages," the "interpolations of every book in all books" - and the commentaries on the books: "In all the library, there are no two identical books"[1964: 54]. And thus the "chance volumes are constantly in danger of changing into others" [57].Translation thus keeps the universe moving. We could spend quite a bit more time on these tales by Borges, but we have to ask more practical questions about translation too. These weird stories may be a bit too weird for some of us. But once you grasp the stories, you have a problem: they will never let you go. They tell us a lot about how a text turns into another text... then into another... until the texts begin to record not just the past but the future and to impact all time levels. Does any of this tell us anything about translation? If you think about it, you will suspect that there's a hidden meaning beneath the fantastic surface.
2 Liberating the Language
Let's now ask whether we can find any theory concepts of translation that can help us make better sense of the strange stories. Prominent among these concepts is the thought of the leading cultural critic Walter Benjamin, as in
his essay "The Translator's Task" (1923).Benjamin first tells us: "To set free in his own language the pure language spellbound in the foreign language, to liberate the language imprisoned in the work by rewriting it, is the translator's task" [1997: 163]. Benjamin is talking about the language aspect of translation. Language becomes liberated from its original framework, when the translator enables it to gain new life and new meaning. If you think about it, it's exactly what happens in the tale about the modern French writer who re-creates the Spanish classic: The translator "liberates" the imprisoned language. And yet we should watch out: some ideas that we find in Benjamin's influential essay may seem even stranger to us than the Borges tales. Still, they give us a striking idea of languages-in-contact. When we think of simple and technical forms of text, Benjamin tells us that these may be designed to communicate messages to users, ones that are easy to decode. But such communications actually reveal something else too: They reveal how different languages form a unity of meaning. Languages relate to each other, no language can be isolated... so we're thinking right now about language, and nothing else. That is important. When it comes to more complex forms of text it's rather different, because Benjamin claims that these complex forms do not want to communicate anything; no poetic work is intended for the reader, so that such a text does not exist mainly for the sake of readers (that is, for people like you and me). And because of this, it's the same with translation—translation too does not exist simply for the sake of the reader.
Benjamin tells us that translation cannot fill the gap between the foreign reader and the original text. Trying to communicate the original is unimportant, a waste of time. A translator doesn't have to concern themselves with what the original text means. Rather, translation does something else: it explores "the most intimate relationships among languages" [1997: 154]; these relationships between languages are all-important, translation passes from one language into another through "transformation and renewal," with "constant transformations of sense" [155] - and this can go on and on, to embrace all the world's languages ultimately, leaving none out. Remember Borges' "renovation"? Now all this seems very abstract, but how does it work in practice? Benjamin speaks about translating word-for-word, not obscuring the original but following its thought sequence; when we do that, we can reveal the foreignness of foreign syntax, the words give insight into the hidden kernel of language [162]. That is all the more so when we have translation in more than one target language. As we will see, this can become more meaningful than it might sound at first. Indeed, all this is more practical
than it looks initially: As researchers have read Benjamin's concept, modern computing comes into the picture - computer memory stores linguistic information about each language, and online translation tools can show how the languages work, side by side, as all text production becomes translatable, showing how the structure of language works for everyone [see Nabugodi 2014]. There can be an infinite universe of translating - very like the Library of Babel in Borges' weird story. The computer can help us to grasp just how languages operate in order to create meaning. So we've heard about the infinite universe of language relations, about word-for-word rendering. Computer translation tools and online tools come amazingly close to this kind of understanding.
Universalized Orientation
Or have these impulses been leading us down a kind of dead-end road? Where is all this heading, you may be asking yourself - only toward mechanical translation? We might find ourselves growing a bit impatient with these ideas and their focus on language. So we should ask now, are these leaving something out, something vital? Translation has been called central to intercultural communication [e.g., Koksal 2020], and accordingly I announced that we would talk about interculturality. How does that come into it? The ideas outlined above give us a universalized identity orientation, which means that they do not tie us up within particular cultural boxes. I would submit that this can have a powerful appeal: The universal orientation takes us out of any conventional social bracket or partition in which we are bound, like an ethnic or a regionally or nationally bound grouping. Then a person appears (which means that each of us can appear) as a singular individual with unique individual qualities, each of us being a little different from the people on your right and your left - and at the same time there's a common humanity which we all share, in which we all have a part, among each of the different ethnicities which claim us, which claim our allegiance. Because of this common humanity (which may be good news) we do not have to be locked in a provincial interest of our own group membership, our psychocultural status quo, our compartment or division. This overcoming of compartments has been called a "transcendental ego"—going back to a concept developed by Edmund Husserl [see Riukas 1999; this is also discussed by Paul Ricoeur, see Josgrilberg 2019]. We then identify with humanity's universal dimension, not with any partition or division. This raises the question how far each of us can regard ourselves as belonging to a common humanity, or as belonging mainly to ethnic and national groups 134 Вестник ММА №1-2022
which are different from others. If and when we reach out in this universal way, we can identify with people around the world. Such a gesture is very like the idea of a universal textual or linguistic realm in which individual words and books can all come together and share their meanings, interpolate themselves in each other.
3 Cultural Particularity
And yet, we should again pick up the question whether this is exactly what we need? Does it correspond to our experience of the world we live in? Or do we rather have social conditions and specific historical experiences, and do these strengthen a sense of belonging to a culture, based on a local particularity? This will mean that people from different cultures meet, like an academic addressing colleagues in another country, without leaving their own unique cultural characteristics behind them. If we look at what happens between and among cultures, when they meet each other, we will usually find that it's not any culture in the abstract but rather their members who have work to do in order to "negotiate" agreements between them [Dai 2012: 107]. That's not without effort, it can mean hard work. As a result, we get an interactive space in which people from different cultures come together in order to have extended contacts; this interactive space becomes apparent as a contact zone, interface, or intersection, and it requires dialogue [Dai 2012: 109]. If we think in this way, we will place emphasis in our minds on cultures meeting (not only languages and texts meeting), we will emphasize communication, which is not exempt from the stress and pressure which may happen when they meet. The stories by Borges, and the theory concept of Benjamin, do not talk about any of this.
So we have an alternative way of thinking, with a focus on cultures, especially on the meeting of cultures. Does it reveal anything important about translation? We have another intellectual giant of the 20th century who can help us here, it's Umberto Eco, the Italian philosopher and semiotician and media expert. Eco tells us that "translation is always a shift, not between two languages, but between two cultures" - and perhaps even between the encyclopedias of each of the cultures: "A translator must take into account rules that are not strictly linguistic but, broadly speaking, cultural" [2001: 17]. This means that when we translate we are translating more than any language, we are transferring cultures and cultural knowledge.
A Few Cases
So here's where we get some practical examples. There is the case of a famous American political slogan coined in 1951 for the election of Dwight Eisenhower as president [Roman Jakobson, cited in Eco 2001: 11]. The slogan is "I like Ike." It was successful in that he was indeed elected in 1952. But how can one translate that into any other language? Eco offers a French and an Italian effort, which both fail miserably. This is a rather exotic example, but Eco also points to some everyday and commonplace examples that appear to show cultural particularity. There is the word coffee, which in itself is easy to translate into many languages. And yet what about phrases that include coffee? An English speaker in a café might say "Give me a coffee please," and that seems easy enough to understand. But when one actually translates that into French and Italian, or certainly into Mandarin, the expressions "are not culturally equivalent. Uttered in different countries, they [...] refer to different habits. They produce different stories'' [2001: 18, emphasis added]. The person ordering or asking for the coffee may expect a small espresso cup, she may be in a hurry. An American may sometimes expect to receive a larger mug, sitting down and reading a newspaper or studying her tablet or watching people go in and out. And then we have Russia... These scenarios mean that it may indeed be plausible to assume that we're composing different cultural stories. Or you might think of how to speak to a taxi driver: In France polite people will address a taxi driver as Monsieur, but you cannot simply translate that as Sir because an American customer will just about never address a taxi driver in this way.
Or another instance: In France, when two people enter an elevator together they may greet each other with Bonjour monsieur; in Italian a translation of this greeting will be excessively formal and strange [2001: 18]. Or imagine a male person in America who knows a woman named Jane, and he likes her. At some point the American might say "Jane, I find you very attractive!" When you try to translate that into Italian, as Eco tells us, you will have a problem. You cannot use the equivalent word for "attractive" because that would sound unusual and strange and not fitting—and maybe ironical. The Italian speaker would choose a word meaning beautiful or fascinating, and that would sound appropriate to Italian ears but it would seem rather beside the point in America [2001: 23].
In these ways, translations appear to convey subtle cultural stories. Eco tells us that translation is a process of "negotiation" which takes place at
several levels, between author and text as well as author and readers, then between the structure of two languages, and significantly between "the encyclopedias of two cultures" [2003: 34]. In this process of negotiation, each party seeks to gain something for which it will have to renounce something in compensation [2001: 6]. The original text comes into the negotiation with its "cultural framework," then the target text with "the cultural milieu in which it is expected to be read"—and the publisher, who is often especially important [2001: 6]. In such a scenario, a translator is the negotiator between all these parties. In the negotiation process, there is no fixed rule about what is a good translation and what is not so good. Yet surely it is clear that the cultural frameworks and milieus on both sides are decisive players. Just think of what happens when you learn your own native language, as a toddler. When you learn your own language, is it true that you are also absorbing and learning a culture? That first language which we learn influences our cognitive or mental categories, the way we perceive things around us and ourselves, the way we see the world. These people around us see the world in a certain way, and we grow into that way of seeing (as Jacques Lacan also hypothesizes in the concept of the Symbolic Order). It's not quite the same in other cultural communities. Just think of the way we understand colors: These are not always the same between two different linguistic systems. There is a Japanese word ffl (kurenai), and this is neither what English calls crimson nor amaranth red, but it's actually rather something in-between. And that in-between color conveys an idea to Japanese speakers, for whom it is not in-between anything at all.
From Cognition to Communication
In this context we might point to the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: According to this principle, in generalizing terms, language can be understood to determine or coerce thought, so that the limits of an individual's language are at the same time the limits of that individual's world perception, and what people think or experience is determined largely by the categories which their language makes accessible to them. So this tells us that the structure of a particular language affects the speakers' worldview or cognition, meaning that people's perceptions relate to the language they speak [see for instance Cibelli et al. 2016].This has been disputed, in its strong form, but it can make good sense when we consider that it's actually not just about language. Our perception of reality is not due to language in itself, instead it's rather due to our cultural experience which finds expression in language. Language enables us to express events and processes, and these are entities to which a
given culture has assigned meanings. When people perceive the same objects in two different cultures, these cultural discourses assign different meanings to these objects. That's why the color called kurenai gets a term in Japanese because it's important to have a term for it.
Perhaps, then, from all this we may gather that there are good reasons why we should not follow Benjamin. Remember, Benjamin told us that translation is not communication. And yet, for the practical world we live in, we can hardly do without communicative exchange of thoughts and information, with inference and context. So can we think of translation as communication? Does translation communicate a text and its ideas to another cultural reception context, based on equivalence? Or is communication beside the point, as Benjamin would propose? The linguist Juliane House discusses translation as being characteristically "the replacement of something else," taking the place of something that existed first, and this means that ideas and expressions are represented "at second hand"[2016: 5], while we may harbor the illusion that we are getting access to an event that really existed. This suggests a somewhat negative idea of translation - as a less authentic, second-hand rendering of reality. Many of us may indeed have experience with translation efforts that give us only a second-hand version, so that we lose some of the original meanings - as in the funny or strange translation instances cited at the beginning. So Juliane House tells us that translation is likely to result in losses and distortions: This is the opposite of Benjamin.
The Receiving Culture
Yet that, too, doesn't have to be the last word for us. We should realize that translation can mediate: this is a process between different languages (a concept expounded in the "Leipzig school") and between their cultural encyclopedias, in order to overcome artificial linguistic and cultural barriers. Mediation, we can thus assume, operates by negotiation, as we heard a few minutes ago [Eco 2003]. Thus we're no longer talking about just translating languages, we're talking about a "shift" between two cultures [Eco 2001: 17]. Let's hold on to that idea. If translation negotiates and mediates between cultures, if it creates a bridge, it's conceivably more than second-hand. Will that prove to be the best way to think about translation? We should talk about the receiving culture. It should not be difficult to see that the recipient culture has appeared especially important for the intercultural perspective, rather than the source culture and its text, for conceptual and for practical purposes. The source/target relationship can easily become (though it does 138 Вестник ММА №1-2022
not have to be) orthogonally distinct, often being employed for its pragmatic utility. Indeed, in functionalist and communicative translation concepts, the purpose of a translation and hence the function of a text in the target culture are decisive. When you translate a cookery book, for instance, what is your purpose? Possibly the recipient customers will be especially interested in the source culture's culinary tradition. Or that may not be at all dominant, so that it may not be the original cooking conditions and culinary heritage that need preserving, when the purpose is rather to teach the cooking of particular dishes to consumers in another country with other baking ovens, other utensils, even some other ingredients [cf. Munday 2016:137].This kind of approach wants to transmit a message with intercultural transfer, to cooperate over cultural barriers.
Functional Value
As translation agencies know, there are numerous translation needs that require a degree of cultural sensitivity and response, wholly outside any aesthetic domain; several researchers present instances of this kind [e.g., Obeidat & Abu-Melhim 2017, Zhang 2019, and Ruvalcaba et al. 2019]. The agents who are involved and who are responsible are
• the company or individual that needs the translation;
• then the commissioning agency which contacts the translator;
• also we shouldn't forget the source text producer, the author who has actually written the source text;
• then the target text producer, which means mainly the translator;
• next we have the target text user, i.e. the person who uses the target text, whether this is a sales representative or a teacher or a business client;
• and finally there is the target text receiver, who may be students using the translated textbook or business customers reading a translated sales brochure.
[E.g., Milton & Bandia 2009]
Each of these has a specific role, and surely has expectations, with a specific interest in the process, and the translator will need to be aware of what the purpose is. The aim in all such cases is to produce a target text which is functionally communicative for the receivers. This means that the purpose of communication is decisive, in light of the receiver and the recipient culture. The profile of the source text is then not quite so important, can even be negligible, so that one doesn't aim to copy or imitate that. Accordingly, the translator needs a strong sense of what is functionally suitable for the
receiving culture. A decisive question is then, who are the receiving agents or groups, and what is their level of preparation? Is it the same as in the source culture? Concerning terminology, for instance, there may be technical terms in a source text which need better clarification for a target text user who does not have exactly the same level of expertise—thus for instance a medical term such as Thrombocytopenia might be rephrased as "a reduced number of platelets in the blood" [Munday 2016: 125].
Equivalence?
But then, what does this mean for the idea of equivalence, which was the chief principle of a classic translation concept since Roman Jakobson? Equivalence can be formal, and it can be dynamic. In Eugene Nida's well-known concept, it means that "the relationship between receptor and message should be substantially the same as that which existed between the original receptors and the message" [Nida 1964: 159]. But how realistic is that, in practice? It would imply that source text and target text have the same functions and roles in their respective sociocultural environments, that the agencies interested in producing or commissioning each of these texts have the same concerns and motivations in each of the language cultures, and that the users of the target text are almost exactly the same kind of people, meaning that they must be supposed to have the same level of knowledge or cultural awareness as the readers of the source text in the source culture. That is a large set of assumptions, but actually a fairly narrow one too.
Hence, for communication across cultures, it's easier to think in a different way: the function of a target text in the receiving culture does not have to be like the function of the source text; the functional theory tells us that a target text does not offer information in a reversible way, referring back to the source text [see Hu 2011: 141]. That means we need to think of source text and target text as having particular functions in their respective cultural and language context—that is what skopos theory tells us. So according to this set of assumptions, the source culture isn't necessarily all that relevant, from the perspective of intercultural orientation—which goes hand in hand with an utterly pragmatic perspective of quickly gaining an income, whether it's high or more likely not. We might ask where the place of this is, among the range of theories we have been considering? Here we get a priority at the opposite end from the concept of Benjamin: translation for Benjamin is good when it defamiliarizes the source culture and language, when it calls attention to that culture, when it doesn't hide the source language but makes it look new and 140 Вестник ММА №1-2022
worth comprehending, when it doesn't try to conceal but actually shows us the foreign culture's Otherness.
4 Beyond the Cultural Focus
Thus in the notion that we are translating cultures, maybe we've found the solution, how to go about our translation strategies. That would mean we can simply trust Umberto Eco, together with the functionalist and communicative concepts, and say we need to know about the cultures involved...and then make the source text with its culture sound (almost) like the target culture's unmarked prose. Yet one can have legitimate doubts, like Juliane House, about the prioritizing of the target-oriented focus. In conceptual terms, too, we might ask ourselves whether we are on safe ground when we embark in the direction of cultural knowledge. What if culture is just an illusion? Does culture have any kind of hold on us? Is it a tangible reality, or just a category that students of culture like to use? That has been disputed [see for instance Baumann 1996: 11]. We had a focus, a little earlier, on our common humanity so that we do not have to be locked in a provincial interest, in our own group membership. We had the example of asking for a cup of coffee. People using this utterance in different settings will have a variable idea of their preference: a very small cup, you don't stay long; or a larger cup because you want to sit down and open your tablet. We have said that these variables become, or are capable of launching, cultural mini-stories. Yet are they actually expressions of a fairly fixed cultural group expectation? Or are they rather just a difference between habits of a social class or organizational group or even gender in certain kinds of cities, rather than signifying culture?
We should realize, at this point, as Juliane House is likewise aware [2016: 35], that the whole idea of culture has been under attack [e.g., Holliday 1999]. In postmodernist thinking, the very idea of "culture" is an abstraction, there are never any "pure cultures" and there are no such things as stable social groups. We cannot think of closed spheres of cultural groupings, ones which explain the behavior or mentality of their inhabitants, groupings which can often extend to embracing a whole people; we cannot grasp these as providing the norms for the inhabitants to obey. That kind of closed cultural sphere only happens rarely, and probably not at all - at least in modern times [as argued in Welsch 1999]. Modern societies are differentiated within themselves to such a high degree that cultural uniformity just doesn't exist. Such societies are multi- or pluricultural in themselves, which means that they embrace a multitude of varying ways of life and lifestyles [see for instance Lomnitz
1982]. So when we look more closely, we will find vertical differences in society: we get the culture of a working quarter, as against the culture of a well-to-do residential district, and then that of the alternative subcultural scene, and all these do not have much in common. We also get horizontal demarcations: gender divisions between male and female, between straight and lesbian and gay and transgender, and these too can result in quite different cultural patterns and life forms. Surely your own experience will readily provide instances of vertical or horizontal sociocultural distinctions. Because of these demarcation lines, we ought now to think beyond culture; the sociocultural grouping cannot have the last word for us after all. Culture isn't everything.
Between Human Nature and Personality
We could, instead, think of the place of culture in the way proposed by Geert Hofstede [1994: 6], in a pyramid form: At the bottom of the notional pyramid we have the inherited and universal human nature, which we were talking about in the first part of our discussion. Then, in the middle, we get the realm of culture, which is not inherited but rather something we gradually learn or grow into, as discussed above, so that we get specific cultural groups that are not identical with each other. They can be ethnic or language groups or various other socially specific groups. And finally, at the tip, the smallest level, is personality, which is both inherited and learned and distinguishes each of us from others. How can we relate translation, then, to these three structurally connected and porous levels? Well, across all language cultures we surely have common perceptions as human beings, the kinds of experience and disposition that we all share. That's universal, what we might call human nature, so that we respond with joy or with fear or with anger to the same or to very similar triggers. Many of our language patterns can become recognizable across boundaries; when we say "it is raining" we can easily render the mental concept in various tongues. You will find it easy to think of any statements like this which appear universal, and which can mean evoke the same semantic content to everyone in almost any country.
Then, what about personality, individuality? Can we translate personality our individual life experiences and how they shape us? You might imagine a middle-aged woman whose husband dies after a severe illness, she loved her husband dearly and shared closely in his life while they owed intensive devotion to each other. That is a highly personal experience. Now the widow might write (or be asked to write) about what this means for her, 142 Вестник ММА №1-2022
and subsequently there could be a reason to translate that, for instance in a magazine. Because of the personal, as well as the universal, people in another language culture might find it easy to relate to that experience, to be touched and moved by it.
But then, what about the middle level of the pyramid, about culture? Many translation tasks revolve around this middle level, so isn't it truly central? It's this middle level where a translator is called upon to become a mediator, with a complex task of cultural and linguistic knowledge [see for instance Pym 2014: 8.3]. We could consider a couple of illustrations of this, now leading on from the instances we discussed earlier. For instance in Japanese, for cultural translation we would do well to draw impulses from what Eco has called the encyclopedia of the culture. So far as I am aware there is a phrase ЩЩ(сЖ" (nemiminimizu). This actually means something like "water in the sleeping ear"; but we should probably translate it as "a bolt from the blue." Subtle culturally grounded images become evoked in each rendering. And how can one translate the Japanese manga "Captain Tsubasa" That
does not resonate strongly in some other languages. In Italy, the title and the characters of the manga are replaced with "Holly e Benji," which speaks to a different cultural setting, and thus creates what Eco would think of as a different cultural story. Or there is the word play Щ^ (tsundoku). This means "reading in pile, which conveys nothing in English. In translation, probably one has to paraphrase it in a roundabout way, maybe as "new books that pile up on the shelves without being read." Quite likely we all have shelves like that, and books we haven't yet read. But we don't speak about it in the same ways.
If we use the sociological concept of Pierre Bourdieu, we might say (about the pyramid's middle level of culture) that the receiver's "habitus" (here signifying the receiver's schemes of perception) enter the language's cultural frame. In the story of Pierre Menard from our opening, who in the 20th century created a book that already existed in the 17th century, Menard's own modern "habitus" does indeed enter the original language's frame, bursting it open from within, supplanting it. If we can assume that mediation is focused on representing meanings [see Liddicoat 2016],what does the mediator, the translator then have to be like? In this communicative space one has to be a linguist, of course, someone who has good grounding in the sociolinguistic knowledge of both source and target text; but beyond that the mediator needs to be an ethnographer, someone who has studied the sociocultural context of the source text, what Eco calls the encyclopedia.
A /B?
You cannot fail to notice that, throughout, I've been using the dualistic-sounding concepts of source and target, referring to text and culture. Source and target are terms that are deceptively easy to grasp, and they're nicely clear to set off against each other. That's a big advantage, but should we all be using them? This will be our final consideration. As already foreshadowed further above, I want to go a bit beyond culture, or at least beyond a fixed or static notion of what culture is. While speaking of source and target is not without its justification, it means taking it for granted that we can easily distinguish between cultures, and between their corresponding languages and textual expressions: In this understanding we have culture A and then culture B, perhaps extending to a whole country, and there's a clear dividing line between them (maybe an ocean or at least a national border with passport control). Their languages are different, their people too. Can we really do this, and distinguish between A and B as separate entities?
I would suggest, instead, that we might think of adapting the concept of hybridity, for its relevance regarding intercultural and postcolonial and translation studies. If translation is central for intercultural communication, it is no coincidence that "affirming hybridity" is likewise, in the sense of embodying and hybridizing identities and cultures [Kulich & English 2017: 25-26; cf. Pym 2014: Chapter 8 "Cultural translation"]. Accordingly, it would be logical to relate these research and practice domains to each other. Instead of focusing chiefly on source and target, hybrid textuality goes a bit deeper. It reveals that elements of different cultures are not separate but are negotiated - Umberto Eco's category - and the elements become bound together during the translation. This can happen for instance in multimodal environments such as film or the music industry or advertising. At least wherever there is no pronounced commercial pressure in favor of target-culture fluency, for speedy consumption, adapting "foreignising strategies" serves to counteroverly smooth homogenization [Myska 2013: 22]. Yet foreignisation as such is easily detachable from cultural difference and becomes just a variant of aesthetic defamiliarisation, which is not intercultural [as in Venuti 1995: 290-292]. What's more, conceptual metaphors go beyond simple prose in the apparently informative text type, which actually assumes an expressive function and turns into an "operative" and culturally responsive text [Munday 2016: 120].
Indeed, it has been shown that commercial translation can effectively resist target-culture fluency, ideally through a technique of literal rendering of denotative meaning though in some cases less so when employing techniques of transliteration and transference [Obeidat & Abu-Melhim 2017].Keeping the source culture's foreignness in the target text is also highlighted (for instance) in the context of culinary menu translation, with implications for translation teaching [Ghafarian et al. 2016], of tourism brochures for unfamiliar concepts in order to enable intercultural learning [Fuadi 2016], and of commercial advertising, where such a procedure is deemed "necessary" to achieve "the ideal effect" [Zhang 2019: 227].Obviously perhaps, in many translation tasks both adjusting to the target culture's comprehension needs, to some degree, and resisting such adjustment will be complementary strategies [see also Shi 2014]. Further studies would be desirable.
The act of translation is almost inevitably a process of creating culture, in itself, which indicates that it can be more than a merely secondary or secondhand copy of a communicative experience. It's rather a process in which the authorial culture's elements and those of the new recipient culture become mediated, so that together they bring forth a new form of text which does not simply merge or belong with what existed before and which may include a degree of metatextuality. The new form doesn't simply belong to either source or target culture, and interlingual translation should be able to find means to utilize this for generating enhanced cultural awareness.
In a multicultural context of meaning, especially, practices based on cultural expression and linguistic communication absorb new meanings that are not exhausted within and cannot be attributed only to a single culture [see Baker 2011].Hence in keeping with this, culture itself is not a fixed category, it's rather a dynamic and emerging identity construction system - not a static product but a fluid process with open borders that permeate each other [see for instance Baldwin et al. 2006: 70]. In order to make sense of this shifting scenario, building on the "shift" between cultures of which Eco speaks, anyone preparing translation work would be well advised to cultivate an awareness of where languages and their cultures intersect each other, where they cross each other's path, and that means becoming aware of the challenges of intercultural mediation. Any concern with translation, accordingly, has much to gain from being accompanied by some grounding of intercultural communication between hybrid formations.
Conclusion
What this can teach us is we should think of the cultural frames which those taking part in the translation process will share: the commissioning agent, the translator, the recipient company, the users in each case... each of these has a cultural frame guiding specific actions, one that does not in all instances have to be bound to any specific and narrowly understood culture. This potential can enable a freedom from any local bond. Translation then has the unique potential to create or strengthen a sense of Third Space, which means embracing and bringing together some interacting elements from the participating cultural formations—in order to form a new cultural space that had not existed.
The interaction means that we don't homologize the target text wholly with the target culture, but that we open the target text wherever possible to the source culture - we will then invest in two if not more textual levels to make visible some of the unfamiliar Otherness of the source text and its culture. We will point to the source's cultural environment and its semantic potential, which is by no means swallowed up within the receiving culture. Nothing has such a potential in quite the way that translation offers. Hints about how one might imagine such a procedure have been offered within a highly specific postcolonial context and a different genre [Tymoszko 1999: 25, also 13]. But the potential goes well beyond this, and we can postulate that it meets or at least comes very close to the "liberating" purpose of which Benjamin has spoken. Hence I would extend an invitation to think about ways to realize implementations of intercultural mediation, in creating a pathway to enter new contact zones. Multiethnic Russia with its high-growth translation market could be and perhaps has already become ideal ground for this, empowering new departures for the sake of breaking the dualistic deadlock between source and target, between cultural identity and diversity. This is an opportunity, which might open a discussion about new ways to explore such uncharted cultural trajectories.
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