I've been thinking a lot about the concept of "intervention" lately, since I feel as if I've just come to look at in a critical context for the first time. In international relations and economies and social work, it's so common place to jump right in "to create change" that we almost never question if it's the right thing to do, blinded as we are by the overarching goal.
I'm currently working on homework for my translation course and I realized there are really cool parallels between translation and socially focused intervention. Basically, you are motivated by a good goal: translating a work into another language so that more people can enjoy it or understand.
BUT, your job is frustrated by levels of cultural meaning that you cannot interpret. Your act may have significance beyond itself, for example, reinforcing the global primacy of English. Mainly however, in the process, you need to be sure that you say no more or less than the text itself does or what the author suggested. Doing no harm is the very basic first step.
I'm taking a really cool course through Tufts' Experimental College on Crisis Mapping, a very new method of humanitarian intervention. Today, we talked with a Tufts alum who is working with internally displaced persons from the earthquake in Haiti, in large part making use of technology to have input from affected individuals on their survival needs. She talked literally in terms of translation, mainly of taking human need and turning it into humanitarian response.
So, today's big question: how can we learn to enter into each other's lives and texts without doing harm?
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