Perhaps more than in any other period in modern history, our globalized present is characterized by a constant interaction of, and exposure to, different peoples, regions, ways of life, traditions, languages, and cultures. Cross-boundary communication today comes in various shapes: as mutual exchange, open dialogue, enforced process, misunderstanding, or even violent conflict. In this situation, ‘translation’ has become an inevitable requirement in order to ease the flow of disinterested and unbiased cultural communication. The contributors to this collection approach the subject of the ‘translation of cultures’ from various angles. Translation refers, of course, to the rendering of texts from one language into another and the shift between languages under precolonial (retelling/transcreation), colonial (domestication), and postcolonial (multilingual trafficking) conditions. It is also concerned with the (in-) adequacy of the Western translation concept of equivalence, the problem of the (un)translatability of cultures, and new postcolonial approaches (representation through translation). Translation here is used as a broader term covering the interaction of cultures, the transfer of cultural experience, the concern with cultural borders, the articulation of liminal experience, and intercultural understanding.
Table of Contents
Petra Rüdiger and Konrad Gross: Translation of Cultures: An Introduction
Translatability and Untranslatability of Cultures
Omotayo Oloruntoba-Oju: Translation, Adaptation, and Intertextuality in African Drama: Wole Soyinka, Zulu Sofola, Ola Rotimi
Joseph Swann: Open Boundaries: Encountering Nissim Ezekiel and A.K. Ramanujan
Petra Rüdiger: ‘Nordism’: The Translation of ‘Orientalism’ into a Canadian Concept
Monica Bottez: Translation of Romanian Culture in Kenneth Radu’s Fiction
Eva Knopp: ‘There are no jokes in paradise’: Humour as a Politics of Representation in Recent Texts and Films from the British Migratory Contact-Zone
Ursula Kluwick: Postcolonial Literatures on a Global Market: Packaging the ‘Mysterious East’ for Western Consumption
Travel and Translation in the Contact Zone
Tobias Döring: Transporting Ceylon: Robert Knox (1681) and the Temptations of Translation
Joanna Collins: Transcribing Colonial Australia: Strategies of Translation in the Work of Rosa Campbell Praed and Daisy Bates
Translation of the Transcultural Self
Michaela Moura-Koçoglu: Swarming with Ghosts and Turehus: Indigenous Language and Concepts in Contemporary Maori Writing
Christine Vogt-William: Of Serpents and Swastikas: Transcultural Interrogations in Two Poems by Indian Women Writers of the Diaspora
Kirsten Sandrock: Scottish Territories and Canadian Identity: Regional Aspects in the Literature of Alistair MacLeod
Agnese Fidecaro: “But who is that on the other side of you?” Translation, Materiality, and the Question of the Other in Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day
Sabine Schlüter: Deconstructing the Canadian Mosaic: Heaven by George F. Walker
Postcolonial Multilingualism
Timo Lothmann: Functional Equivalence Revisited: Adequacy and Conflict in the Tok Pisin Bible Translation
Christine Möller: The History and Future of Bilingual Education: Immersion Teaching in Germany and its Canadian Origins
Silke Stroh: Transperipheral Translations? Native North America/Scottish Gaelic Connections
Taiwo Oloruntoba-Oju: Translation Shifts in African Women’s Writing: The Example of Nigeria
Marie Chantale Mofin Noussi: Translation, Multilingualism, and Linguistic Hybridity: A Study of The Heart of Redness by Zakes Mda.