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What are called 'natural languages' are artificial, often politically instituted and regulated, phenomena; a more accurate picture of speech practices around the globe is of a multidimensional continuum. This essay asks what the implications of this understanding of language are for translation, and focuses on the variety of Afrikaans known as Kaaps, which has traditionally been treated as a dialect rather than a language in its own right. An analysis of a poem in Kaaps by Nathan Trantraal reveals the challenges such a use of language constitutes for translation. A revised understanding of translation is proposed, relying less on the notion of transfer of meaning from one language to another and more on an active engagement with the experience of the reader.
In her article, Karin Littau proposes a material or medial turn in the humanities and social sciences to end the neglect of the material basis to every act of communication, including translation. This proposal is warmly welcomed. As a comparatist who has for some time been trying to build bridges between literary studies and book history, I strongly support Littau's point of view – all the more since I am less optimistic regarding the general acceptance of such ideas in the humanities, and especially in literary and translation studies. I am not so sure that McLuhan and the other authorities for the importance of mediality and technicity whom Littau quotes (e.g. Kittler, Ong, and Gumbrecht) have really provoked a "crisis in the self-understanding of the human sciences". For brevity's sake, in my response below, I leave aside literary studies to focus on translation studies.
Throughout the humanities, greater attention is being paid at present to the category of translation. More than ever before, the tradition al understanding of translation as the (philological and linguistic) translation of text and language is being expanded upon. Increasingly, translation is being spoken about as cultural translation. Yet often the use of this term is merely metaphorical, or even downright inflationary.
It is no longer possible to ignore how crucial processes of cultural translation and their analysis have become, whether for cultural contact or interreligious relations and conflicts, for integration strategies in multicultural societies or for the exploration of productive interfaces between the humanities and the natural sciences. The globalisation of world society, in particular, demands increased attention to mediation processes and problems of transfer, in terms of both the circulation of global representations and 'travelling concepts' and of the interactions that make up cultural encounters. Here, translation becomes, on the one hand, a condition for global relations of exchange ('global translatability') and, on the other, a medium especially liable to reveal cultural differences, power imbalances and the scope for action. An explicit focus on translation processes— something increasingly prevalent across the humanities—may thus enable us to scrutinise more closely current and historical situations of cultural encounter as complex processes of cultural translation. Translation is opened up to a transnational cultural practice that in no way remains restricted to binary relationships between national languages, national literatures or national cultures.
The "World Geography" ("Wanguo dili quanji" 萬國地理全集) published in 1844 by the Protestant missionary Karl F.A. Gützlaff was the first geographical account to introduce some European ethnotypes to China. Based on recent archival findings, my article compares this book with both its presumed Western source and its rendering in the 1847 edition of Wei Yuan 魏源's "Maps and Documents of the Maritime Countries" ("Haiguo tuzhi" 海國圖志). It thus explores the role that interlingual and intralingual transfers respectively played first in negotiating and then renegotiating two European stereotypes in their early travels to and within the Qing empire.
What if one thinks not in terms of shared meanings or contents, but rather in terms of iterable gestures available for reenactment in different times and places in order to conceive of a cross-cultural world of literature? This essay sets out to explore, within the discursive mode of the lyric, whether the notion of gesture could be more helpful than meaning-based translation to account for the transferability of literary texts and for envisioning a form of community based on the shareability of certain gestures. To do so, it will look at how the act-event of reading described by Derek Attridge is processed in two cases in which poems are transferred from an earlier authoritative tradition into a new one.