Until recently, the role assigned to translation in ethno-anthropological studies has remained controversial and/or marginal. After the famous debate on British social anthropology at the turn of the 1960s (Asad 1986), the many and diverse approaches to translation – especially by the American linguistic anthropology and ethnopoetics – are still affected by epistemological, semantic, and ontological challenges: the impossibility to define language unequivocally (is it a concept, a text or a statement?), the inscrutability of reference (as in Willard Quine’s terms) and the methodological oscillation between universalist, ethnographic and pragmatic models. Rodney Needham devoted his Belief, Language and Experience (1972) to the translatability of concepts, indicating the act of translation as a constitutive moment of anthropological knowledge, while Dennis Tedlock, a prominent figure in ethnopoetics, applied new translation strategies to Amerindian myths. Studying several versions of Zuni tales and the Mayan Popul Vuh, Tedlock remarked that in the transition from orality to writing the suppression of oral markers irreversibly conditions the translation process. Thus, in his translation practice, he began using typographic devices that could incorporate the specificity of the oral dimension into the text; in a few instances, he even provided the recordings of oral performances along with the transcriptions (Tedlock 1983). More recently, Dell Hymes’ ethnopoetic research has focused on the retranscription and critical retranslation of some texts of the Amerindian tradition previously published by Edward Sapir and Melville Jacobs. Hymes has shown that the performances of oral traditions are deeply connected with the communicative competence understood as the ability to produce voice, and are thereby linked to the specific modalities in which reality is experienced, be they linguistic-poetic, cognitive, cultural, or emotional: “ethnopoetics involves not only translation but also transformation, transformation of modality, the presentation of something heard as something seen. The eye is an instrument of understanding” (Hymes 2003: 40).

References

Asad, Talal

1986 “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology.” In Writing Culture. The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. by James Clifford and George E. Marcus, 141–164. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Baracchini, Leïla

2020 “Tableaux et titres: les enjeux de la traduction dans un atelier d’art au Botswana.” L’Homme 233 (1): 45–74.

Borutti, Silvana

2019 “Relativism and Intercultural Translation.” Paradigmi 2 (3): 449–466.

Clifford, James, and George Marcus

1986 Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Geertz, Clifford

1973 “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.” In The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, 3–30. New York: Basic Books.

Handman, Courtney

2015 Critical Christianity. Translation and Denominational Conflict in Papua New Guinea. Oakland: University of California Press.

Hanks, William F., and Carlo Severi

2015 “Introduction.” In Translating worlds. The epistemological Space of Translation, ed. by William F. Hanks and Carlo Severi, 1–20. Chicago: Hau Books.

Hymes, Dell

2003 Now I Know Only So Far: Essays in Ethnopoetics. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Lavieri, Antonio, and Danielle Londei

2018 “Entre traductologie et anthropologie. La reconstruction pragmatique et interdisciplinaire du sens.” In Traduire l’Autre. Pratiques interlinguistiques et écritures ethnographiques, ed. by Antonio Lavieri and Danielle Londei, 9–26. Torino: L’Harmattan Italia.

Malinowski, Bronislaw

1935. Coral Gardens and their Magic. A Study of the Methods of Tilling the Soil and of Agricultural Rites in Trobriand Islands. Vol. 2: The Language of Magic and Gardening. London: Allen & Unwin.

Needham, Rodney

1972 Belief, Language and Experience. Oxford: Blackwell.

Tedlock, Dennis

1983 The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Vilaça, Aparecida

2018 “Le diable et la vie cachée des nombres. Traductions et transformations en Amazonie.” L’Homme 225 (1): 149–170.

Further essential reading

Duranti, Alessandro

2001 Linguistic Anthropology. A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell.

Maranhão, Tullio, and Bernhard Streck

(eds) 2003 Translation and ethnography. The Anthropological Challenge of Intercultural Understanding. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Rubel, Paula, and Abraham Rosman

(eds) 2003 Translating cultures. Perspectives on translation and anthropology. Oxford: Berg.

Sammons, Kay, and Joel Sherzer

(eds) 2000 Translating Native American Verbal Art. Ethnopoetics and Etnhography of Speaking. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Sturge, Kate

2007 Representing Others: Translation, Ethnography and the Museum. Manchester: St. Jerome.