Chapter published in:
Translating Asymmetry – Rewriting PowerEdited by Ovidi Carbonell i Cortés and Esther Monzó-Nebot
[Benjamins Translation Library 157] 2021
► pp. 15–33
Translating strangers
It has been argued that traditional notions of
the stranger, as put forward in classical accounts by Simmel, Schütz
and others, need to be re-examined in the light of widespread social
developments that challenge the divisions between the self and the
other that were once taken for granted. This chapter addresses the
significance of the cosmopolitan stranger, whose skills are
especially important under conditions of generalised societal
strangeness. A consideration of the interrelated notions of distance
and strangeness in the social experience of the stranger is offered
and the specific features of the cosmopolitan stranger examined.
After that, the cases of two cosmopolitan strangers (“dog whisperer”
Cesar Millan and 9/11 impostor survivor Tania Head) who have played
a prominent social role in societies that were not initially their
own are discussed. A concluding section returns to the notions of
distance and strangeness in order to generalise from these
particular cases by relating them to different strategies for
translating the foreign.
Keywords: strangeness, cosmopolitan stranger, distance, otherness, cosmopolitanism, Cesar Millan, Tania Head
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