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I work at a research centre specializing in
translation studies. When the centre was set up at Warwick in 1982,
translation studies was an entirely new discipline in the UK, but over the
last twenty years the research and teaching in this field have grown
rapidly. Traditionally, the research in the field tended to be either
directed towards linguistics or the applied translation studies. In the
last decade however, there has been a marked shift in translation studies
towards the cultural aspect of translation i.e. towards the issues of
cultural transfer.
My interest in the
Linguistic Ethnography conference results from my particular research
project on the Holocaust narratives. The issue I am investigating is how
our knowledge about the Holocaust is constructed on the basis of texts
which are read primarily in translation. It seems to me that my work bears
some relation to the situation of an ethnographer, who often negotiates
between very different cultures and two languages. I was curious to find
out how the two disciplines, ethnography and translation studies relate to
each other, and what useful conclusions can be drawn from this meeting of
the two disciplines.
The seminar was very well
organised. I particularly appreciated the small size of the group and the
length of presentations. The format encouraged genuine discussion and the
workshop sessions allowed us to do some interesting conceptual work. The
two sessions devoted to translation ( Moira Inghilleri, Rosaleen Howard
and Lindsey Crickmay) served as a good illustration that translation
studies methodology could be important to ethnographers working in an
intercultural context. The speakers clearly demonstated useful links
between translation and ethnography, and their presentations embraced both
the theoretical and practical aspects of the two disciplines.
Although the remaining
presentations were not directly related to translation, they had a strong
link to intercultural aspects of educational processes and the
organization of field work in diverse cultural environments. Personally, I
was struck by the fact that
research carried out by colleagues working in education showed that there
was a huge gap between the knowledge
researchers arrive at and the
consistency with which educational authorities ignore this knowledge while
planning the educational policy.
It is not often the case
these days that one can find a genuinely academic event that is not
prompted either by RAE, or some other equally philistine invention. This seminar was certainly a rare bird in the present
intellectual climate in the UK academia. I shall certainly keep my eye on
the SIG’s web site and recommend the group to my colleagues at home.
Piotr Kuhiwczak
Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies
University of Warwick
30th April 2003 |