Translating...Or not.

While trying in vain to find something in Spanish that hasn't been translated into English for a final project, I came across this interesting article. Words are so great. yeah. Ok, back to finding something global scholarship has neglected to render bilingually.
http://matadornetwork.com/abroad/20-awesomely-untranslatable-words-from-around-the-world/

February 9: Intervention/Translation

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?

February 5th: Somerville Adventures:

"No text is entirely original because language itself, in its essence, is already a translation: firstly, of the non-verbal world and secondly, since every sign and every phrase is the translation of another sign and another prhase."
-Translation Studies, Susan Bassnett McGuire

So after a productive stint of research memo writing (sans internet, obvioooo) at the o-so hipsterlicious Bloc 11 Café in Union Square (there were also a lot of small children there too which was rather an odd mixture), I went on a quick grocery run to explore the local food store offerings. I stopped into a Brazilian Paderia (bakery) for some delicious and reasonably price coconut /sweet bread. YUMMM. There's also an Italian store and several stores with Indian products and several with Hispanic food products: basically, it's an awesome cultural hodgepodge.

I stopped in Market Basket as well, the dirt cheap grocery store with the amusingly economic sounding name, which never ceases to inspire me with its astounding multiculturalism. I was only buying eggs and ended up having to wait in line for nearly half an hour since pretty everyone who lives in Somerville and their mother (literally) were trying to buy things before the storm. I heard Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Haitian Creole, Nepali or some other language from the Indian subcontinent, Chinese and possibly Korean and Russian. Mothers and children, pregnant women, the elderly, college students, the working poor, Cambridgey hippies, immigrants representing every single legal category and nationality , middle class moms, White, Black, Latino, Asian American, Muslims, mixed race, etc. etc. etc.
And I realized how absolutely singular* this particular moment was: each of us was interpreting the same space and sensory inputs was and translating what we saw in the world around us into our own language, maybe even languages, our own biases, our own very very varied life experiences. All of us waiting in line together, no one with any more power to change the situation than anyone else despite our complete differences in opportunity and wealth and happiness and socially constructed labels. And where else could this possibly occur but America: a conjunction of people who have so little and yet so much in common, all sharing the same corner of this earth, making the best of what we are given, striving for better lives for ourselves and/or potential offspring. HELL YEAH.

*Probably pretty singular. In my class on globalization, however, we've been talking about how incredibly diverse trading communities in the Indian Ocean in the 1300s-1500s or so were. But I'm going to guess not quite this diverse.