MC: Doris Bachmann-Medick: Models of Cultural Translation (GCSC)

Master Class:

Models of Cultural Translation

1) Tuesday, April 17, 2018: 10 a.m. – 2 p.m. (MFR)

2) Output session: Tuesday, June 19, 2018: 11 a.m. – 1:30 p.m. (MFR)

Transcultural conditions provoke processes of translation, which go far beyond traditional linguistic and textual transfers. Translation, as a cultural and social practice, reaches into fields of cultural encounter: it emerges as a negotiation between social groups and religions; it shapes necessary but often problematic and conflicting shifts from one context into another (on the level of ideas, goods, practices, universalized norms); it helps actors deal with multiple forms of belonging caused by migration, etc. By investigating such challenges, the humanities and social sciences have come to develop a broad analytical concept of translation, which has been culminating in a wide-ranging, cross-disciplinary “translational turn.”

By introducing this new translational perspective, this class contributes to changing our views about our own research projects. Our leading question, thus, will be: Can we gain methodological impulses from this perspective for our own work?

Translation should be discussed as a “modus operandi of our times” (R. Young), a cultural technique, as well as a new mode of analysis, concerning:

• complex situations of communication and interaction,

• shifts and mediations between different systems, contexts and levels,

• a revaluation of hybrid “in-between-spaces” as productive zones of investigation and encounter,

• cultural transfers as processes of cultural adaptation and transformation,

• an acknowledgement of the productivity of cultural differences, frictions and misunderstandings, and an awareness of power relations in processes of negotiation,

• new attention for actors and cultural brokers,

• and a break-up of clustered and generalizing analytical categories into smaller translational units.

Different operative models of (cultural) translation will be discussed and further elaborated with regard to our projects.

The class begins in its first part with an introductory lecture on foundations, models and new horizons for the concept of translation. In a second part, our discussion will concentrate on selected texts. In a third part, the class will focus on methodological impulses for working with the concept of translation, eventually taking up previously submitted questions from the participants. Possible applications of the concept of translation will be further deepened in the final output-session.

Texts for discussion:

• Doris Bachmann-Medick. “Translation – A Concept and Model for the Study of Culture.” Travelling Concepts for the Study of Culture. Eds. Birgit Neumann and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin/Boston 2012. 23-43.

• Martin Fuchs. “Reaching Out; or, Nobody Exists in One Context Only: Society as Translation.” Translation Studies 2.1 (2009): 21-40, especially 21-23, 26-33.

// Dr. Doris Bachmann-Medick