"Lost in Translation" - Transcultural Translation and Decolonialization of Knowledge

Translated by Camilla Nielsen and Shirley Anne Tate

Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez

This article addresses the articulation of commonalities in transcultural encounters. I will be focusing on the encounter between myself, as a researcher, and the participants in a research project on the affective relationship between domestic workers and their employers. I begin with an excerpt from a conversation between Carla and Dani and myself as a prelude to speaking about the creation and destruction of commonalities in difference.

First a few words about the conversation context. The conversation took place in 2004 with participants from the domestic workers’, political and support group Respect based in Berlin. Five women took part in the conversation – two academics and a German member of the Respect group. I selected a small excerpt for the discussion here. My interlocutors are Dani from Santiago de Chile who returned to Chile in 2005 and Carla from Otavalo in Ecuador. At that time both were working as domestic workers and lived without residency permits in West Germany. I was working at the time as an Assistant Professor. I initiated the discussion by telling the participants about my own biographical approach to the subject matter.

 
ENCARNACIÓN: Since the 1990s the Spaniards who live here today have no longer experienced this racism but at that time (I’m referring to the 1970s): Oh, you’re the child of a foreigner, you reek of garlic and they always insult you, you encountered teachers who rejected you because you couldn’t speak German, then there was this form of racism ... and this leaves a mark on you even as an adult. Because you are in a different country and you don’t want to be here, because you are with your parents, and it is different, because you are not part of the society and before (in Spain) you were.

CARLA: Excuse me, that can also happen in your own country, when we are from different cultures, because that also happened to me. I am from a different culture and I used to speak a different language. My mother spoke a different language and I used to speak her language. I began school when I still spoke my mother’s language and then learned Spanish in school; when I was six I still couldn’t speak Spanish. It does not just happen to you if you are from a different country, it can also happen in the same country.

DANI: In Latin America, in general, it happens. There is strong racism against the indigenous and black population.

ENCARNACIÓN: Yes, and in Spain as well if you are Basque or Catalan, you couldn’t speak the languages and you had to learn Spanish.

CARLA: And what did they say in our country: They are white If you are an Indio, then you are an India that stinks, all of that, and if you are a girl, then it sticks to you and it still does to this very day.
"Lost in Translation" could be the title of this discussion. It shows that it is impossible to translate life events even though they seem to relate to each other. "No speech is speech," Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak writes, "if it is not heard. It is this act of hearing-to-respond that may be called the imperative to translate […] But the founding translation between people is a listening with care and patience, in the normality of the other, enough to notice that the other has already silently made that effort." [1]

 
As Spivak notes, the imperative of translation then arises when an attempt is made to listen in a space of "bringing to silence". But initially we cannot simply grasp this space of "bringing to silence" by our individual intention of listening. Spivak refers here to a structural moment in the encounter of various geopolitical positions. We are stuck in a dilemma, in an attempt to create commonalities we keep hitting upon irresolvable differences – differences that as Adorno and Horkheimer pointed out in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, are packaged as homogenous identitary entities in the cultural industry. As Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer note: "Whenever the culture industry still issues an invitation naïvely to identify, it is immediately withdrawn. No one can escape from himself any more. Once a member of the audience could see his own wedding in the one shown in the film. Now the lucky actors on the screen are copies of the same category as every member of the public, but such equality only demonstrates the insurmountable separation of the human elements. The perfect similarity is the absolute difference."[2]

According to the capitalist logic of marketing and consumption, the homogenous is sold as that which is different. Difference is translated into identity. Adorno and Horkheimer made these observations at a time in which the dimensions of time and space had hardly been touched by the new technologies, the increasing global mobility and transnational and/or postcolonial migration.

The tension between identity and difference has shifted in this new, transformed global world. Some speak of the dissolution of this relation, pleading for a new theoretical model that sees various lines of movement, layers and oppositions in the diversity and overlaps not in the linearity of juxtaposition. This logic has influenced new marketing strategies, engaging in promoting diversity. Diversity is here set on the level of locality. However, while the attempt is to transmit diversity, the representation of diversity is coupled with one single message. This message is produced in different appearances, but is transmitted as an identical message. As Stuart Hall notes in his essay "The Local and the Global"[3] globalization is characterized by two movements – that of homogenization and that of differentiation. Using the cultural industry as an example, for instance television, he describes how formats and contents are unified and transmitted in various languages all over the world as identical messages.  As early as the late 1980s also Nestór García Canclini[4] and Jésus Martin Barbeiro[5] already referred to these homogenizing tendencies in global capitalism and its local translatability. In particular García Canclini has drawn attention to the one-dimensional character of this movement with regard to the relation between Mexico and the USA. The transfer of US-American cultural industry to the Mexican context has ignored local cultural articulations and networks. The media streamlining through CNN en español, MTV latino, etc. may well incorporate the Ranchero music of the border zones, but it presents this difference by means of an interchangeable image, rehearsed by US-American market research companies. Through the homogenization of media images and information, simulating the perception of difference, a fundamental mechanism is produced which establishes values and norms in global capitalism.

In this regard, we need to ask what concept of translation is used. This question is relevant for understanding the translation of universal values and norms to the local level. Accordingly, this form of translation is related to what Emily Apter[6] describes as "a corporate, global United Nations-speak": a corporate language of the United Nations, which wrapped universal capitalist societal values in a language of difference and sameness. A uniform market logic is translated into several languages, but without taking note of the specific grammar and semantics of the context. Identical messages are thus broadcast in a multilingual space, devoid of all special geographical, political and historical content. This production of the ever-same in the different follows an identitarian logic that leaves or provides no room for polyphony. This act of translation aims to transfer one single dominant idea into a variety of languages without experiencing any transformation/alteration through the specific context of reception. Apter assesses this process of global homogenization and its linguistic mediation as one of the basic features of the cultural industry. She writes:

"The auditory effect of multilingual utterances has an uncanny, double-edged quality as well: on the one hand, it suggests a corporate, global United Nations-speak, in which every message is beamed in simultaneous translation around the world, devoid of context and deceptively “value free”; and yet, on the other hand, this auditory effect reveals how politically unneutral the rules of grammar and translation are, depending on how and where they are used."[7]

As a counter-movement to this effect of idiomatic homogenization simulating linguistic difference, the strand of "translational transnationalism" in translation studies focuses on what Lawrence Venuti[8] has referred to as the "ethics of the local" or Colin MacCabe[9] as the "eloquence of the vulgar". This strand addresses idiomatic articulations which are exempt from the market of diversity in the dominant language. These are usually minority languages and not standardized forms of speech, such as dialects, vernacular languages, creole, slang or accents. Yet as Spivak notes, this translation project within the global logic of the mode of capitalist accumulation can only be fulfilled to a limited extent. For "no one will ever translate into Fulani or Maya-Quiché without some particularly egregious agenda."[10]

 
Ethics of the local – Language and Difference

Also in the encounter with Dani and Carla the translation project in the sense of an "ethics of the local" can only be fulfilled to a limited extent. As our encounter shows, there are various accents and forms of Spanish that cannot be leveled to a single standard Spanish. They reflect various sites of our speech. In my case it is a "hybrid Andalusian" influenced by living in Germany in a Spanish-speaking community of Latin American and peninsular accents and dialects. Carla’s Spanish is shaped by Quechua and the Northern Ecuadorian accent from Otavalo. Dani’s Spanish, in turn, is influenced by Chile. The translation project that emerges from this encounter does not pursue the goal of articulating a universal commonality but rather attempts to find a language in difference. Of course, the question emerges: How can you be understood if a common language is not assumed as a given? What I would like to show with this example is that even under the condition of sharing a common language, e.g., Spanish, this language bears differences which create new conditions for formulating a common political, social and cultural project.

We see that in the conversation here different biographies intersect with each other and they enter into a conversation about common denominators like "language", "migrancy", and the identity category "woman". Thus, while commonalities of language, migration and gender can be identified, a closer look at them reveals social inequalities and differences. In my article "Positionalität übersetzen" (translating positionality)[11] I have indicated the paradox that emerges when commonalities are assumed and differences are spelled out. Thus, the "degrees to which and different ways in which one’s Spanish is informed by Quechua or one’s Quechua has been Hispanicized are key indications of socieconomic status."[12]

While my attempt to connect with Carla did not entirely fail, our encounter is marked by distance, which could not be overcome by my story of Franco’s Spain. In the above cited article, I note that "the assumed common identity as Spanish speakers" is challenged by the panoply of different social positionalities that textured our encounter, resonating with legacies of a racist colonial and imperial past, new border and migration regimes, heteronormativity and the current world order.

In the micro spaces of the every day we are embedded in this historical, political, social and cultural complexity. In this regard, communication happens or fails. Thus, assuming that a commonality exists between the participants enables communication on the one hand. On the other, however, this assumption ignores the differences influencing this communication, which can result in its failure. The act of meaning transfer or attempt to make oneself intelligible, when one is aware of these positionalities, does not require a linguistic or literal translation. Rather it requires that one acknowledges the twofold character of translation as means of translation and expression of untranslability, at the same time.

Accordingly, the question that arose in my encounter with Carla and Dani was: How can my background or that of my parents be translated into that of Carla or Dani? How can a communication emerge between the experience of my parent’s generation and Carla’s and Dani’s experiences?

 
Translating Experiences

My parents emigrated to West Germany in 1962. My mother came with a group of sixty young women from Seville and settled in Kirchenlamitz, a Catholic town in the heart of Germany’s Oberfranken (Upper Franconia). There she met an equally large group of Greek and Turkish women. These young single women were the attraction of the town which at that time had a population of about 2000. My father worked in mining in the Ruhrgebiet. Both met as immigrants and I was born in Kirchenlamitz. Shortly after I was born we returned to Spain. After some back and forth we moved back to Germany and settled in Frankfurt am Main in 1972.

I was born into a Europe in construction. I spent my first years in Franco’s Spain, where I went to a Catholic school, run by nuns. I grew up between a Spain in transition from Franco’s dictatorship to democracy in 1982, and a (post-) Fordist Germany. These different historical events have marked my positionalities from a "daughter of guest workers" to a "European citizen". As Spain became part of the European Union my parents’ emigration was omitted from the official historiography of the Spanish state.[13] Their generation of emigrants seems to have been forgotten. The forgotten generation of Spanish emigrants[14], reminds one of a fascist and imperialist Spain, which has colonies in Morocco like Spanish-Morocco until 1956 and Spanish-Sahara until 1975, as well as in Equatorial Guinea, Spanish-Guinea, until 1968. Nevertheless, in comparison to other parts of Europe, at this time, Spain was considered to be economically underdeveloped.    

Considering this historical background, how can the experiences of my parents as "guest workers" in West Germany be translated into the experiences of Carla and Dani, who live in Berlin without papers and work as undocumented domestic workers?

In comparison to my parents, Dani and Carla have not been recruited by the German state. They had to find a clandestine way to enter Germany since the official doors of immigration are closed for them as non-EU citizens, while the doors of private households which demand their service and care are wide open. Dani and Carla told me about their experiences of sexism and racism and the police violence they face on an everyday level in West Germany.  How can their experience be translated into that of my parents?

My parents faced many difficulties when they were lodged in barracks on their arrival in Germany, when they struggled to overcome the inhumane conditions of factory work, when they were trying to find a way to reunite their family. Despite the German state’s constant demand to the "guest-worker" generation to remain for a limited time, my parents became pensioners in Germany. Since the 1960s Spain has changed politically and economically. Today Spain is a "global player" in the international financial market[15] and in the development of the European Union directives regarding the restriction and control of asylum and migration[16]. Dani in Berlin is facing the effects of the EU migration policies. She was forced to return to Chile as she could not regularise her legal situation. Life in West Germany was exhausting and she wanted to continue the struggle she started for domestic workers’ rights and access to legal residency back home in Chile. Some of her fellow political activists who were also undocumented domestic workers in Germany, became ill due to their physically and psychologically draining everyday life. A life affected by the search for stable working and living conditions.    

Some of the aspects of my parents’ experiences in West Germany may be reflected in Dani’s and Carla’s experiences, but the picture that is reflected is a broken one. It is one that does not allow for a translation of the original into a copy, one that requires a translation beyond the reproduction of the ever-same. My encounter with Carla and Dani, determined by relationships of power, emerges through the attempt to translate our life situations. The impossibility of a commonality in identity becomes clear, ultimately revealing this encounter as one of radical difference. Deep division lines, articulating social inequalities, structured our space of encounter. Two opposing spaces are competing here with each other, resulting for a brief moment in the creation of a common space. These spaces do not automatically overlap, as they are divided by the existing division of labour and other social boundaries. How then can these opposing spaces be translated?

Let’s first begin with my space: the British and German universities. In the last eight years the European and, in particular, the German university system has been reformed. These reforms took place as part of a process of transnationalization of tertiary education proclaimed by the Bologna Declaration of 1999.[17] This is an expression of the transformation of the Welfare State educational system into a global market oriented educational system.  For example, the World Bank, in 1994, published a strategy paper in which the relevance of the educational sector for the global economy is underlined. This is one of the further coordinates defining my encounter with Dani and Carla.

Carla’s space, by contrast, is defined by the violent effects of a migration regime and a racialized and gendered labour market. It is characterized by an ongoing feminization and devaluation of domestic and care work. Carla works as an undocumented domestic worker and earns five euros per hour. To what extent can the name "woman" translate our life situations and represent both of us?

 
From Becoming a Woman to Woman in Translation

In the Italian feminist post-operaist movement of the 1980s and 1990s theorists such as Judith Revel, Antonella Corsani and Sara Ongaro discussed the feminization of work as the common feature of "becoming a woman" (Ongaro[18], Corsani[19], Revel[20], Querrien[21]). Judith Revel in particular introduces the idea of "becoming a woman" through the concept of "feminization of work". Via this perspective Revel invites us to reflect on the given presence of the identity category "woman" as an ontological moment. Referring to Deleuze/Guattari’s[22] idea of becoming which is a state of flux, evading the binary logic of identity, "woman" stands for both what is and what is not. It indicates a mode of existence that is empirically linked with women’s life situations, but refers qualitatively to a general form of being in society and work conditions related to devaluation and precariousness. The idea of "Becoming a woman" becomes the primordial point of reference in the debate related to the feminization of labour. According to Tiziana Vettor from the group S/Convegno it underscores two aspects: "the presence of more women in every sector of the labour market and having all types of contracts (not only insecure jobs); and that in work today, in the so-called post-Fordist era, female attitudes have been shaped by production, in which – according to Deleuze – there are traces of the symbolic and female as a corporeal entity. The expectations, desires and presence of women have indeed been one of the main reasons for the transformation in types of production in the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism."[23] So, the "feminization of work" is not related to the quantitative aspect of work, but to its qualitative dimension, such as stressing the effect of "female subjectivity" in the process of change in work.

A female subjectivity which relates ambivalently to the new precarious labour conditions[24] affects women just as individuals in general who in such precarious labour conditions experience the fusion of paid work and unpaid domestic and care work as primordial coordinates of the organization of time and social relations. The concept of "feminization of labour" comprises ambivalent and contradictory processes of socialization in which skills designated as "female" are absorbed as unpaid by the production process. It is the experience of organizing and administering several realms of life – such as the care of others, profession and household – out of which "female subjectivity" emerges.[25] Dealing with the different challenges in these realms requires a flexible, resilient subject. Accordingly, the "feminization of labour" describes a general tendency in the current logic of capital production. 

Can we really apply this diagnosis to all social processes related to hierarchies and differences? Aren’t we dealing with other forms of socialization and subjectivation when a border and migration regime dictates and destroys our possibilities for movement?

What strikes me as problematic is the attempt to describe the biopolitical character of working conditions, related to common features of emotional and subjective labour associated with feminized work, through the attribution of the gender category "woman". It is problematic, even if this category might be considered in the Deleuzian sense of becoming. This is so, not because I don’t share the analysis of momentary processes of exploitation and disfranchisement but, rather, because in this relation there is no consideration of the necessary translatability of the identity category "woman".  As the example from my own research cited above demonstrates, we mean different things when we say "woman" and speak of migration. Thus the analysis of the "feminization of labour" always arises within a geo-political and historical framework. This analysis is imbued with an array of differences that can only be transferred to another socio-political context through translation. 

Thus, how far can we translate my working conditions in the Univerity with Dani’s and Carla’s paid domestic work? We might share commonalities on the basis of gender identity and the association of "woman" with domestic and care work. Hence, our professions and legal status as recognised or denied citizen establish social inequalities between us. The translation of my social position into that of Carla’s and Dani’s requires the recognition of these differences and hierarchies.

The task of such a translation is tied to Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s project of a geo-political and historical contextualization of the production of gender relations and the articulation of "femininity" and "masculinity".[26] This attempt at translation in turn is influenced by Benjamin’s idea[27] that a good translation is not necessarily the one that repeats the idea of the original by creating a copy of it but the one that stems from a failed translation of the original. In the case of translating "woman" we could say: Here the issue is a translation which bears the traces of "becoming a woman" but points to something new which cannot be found either in the original or in the copy. This other is what Derrida sees as a sort of surplus. Derrida refers to it as supplement. The supplement that is not inscribed in a recognizable or identical language cannot be made understandable through the creation of a third concept: "[...] the supplement is neither a plus nor a minus, neither an outside nor inside as its counterpart, neither accident nor essence."[28]   

This supplement, which lies in the failure of translation, in the untranslatability of oppositions, could be understood in regard to Alberto Moreira’s "aporetic impossibility" in transcultural encounters.  

 
Uncompromised Transculturation

The project of translation in regard to "uncompromised transculturation" goes beyond the binary logic of original and copy. The translator’s activity begins, as Spivak notes, where the boundaries of comprehensibility become evident. For Spivak translation is a way to move closer to the boundaries of our own identity.  This captures the persuasive character of translation as she notes: "One of the ways to get around the confines of one's identity as one who produces expository prose is to work at someone else's title, as one works with a language that belongs to many others. This, after all, is one of the seductions of translating. It is a simple miming of the responsibility to the trace of the other in the self." [29]

The above mentioned scene articulates uncompromised transculturation. This is characterized to our attempt to communicate, but, at the same time, to the experience of inaccessibility, produced through the incompatibility of our different socio-political locations. It expresses the resistance and contradictions implied in an explanatory framework, in which Dani, Carla and I are interpellated as "migrant women" and along the analysis of the "feminization of labour". The space of "uncompromised transculturation" is created through the unyieldingness of contradictions defining our everyday life, indissoluble through the flux of the process of becoming or exodus. This space points to the limits of translatability. At the same time the space of transculturation emerges in the encounter, through the coming together of moments of life which are spatially shared, but not jointly experienced. Transculturation is the space of an ambivalent conviviality, marked by intimacy, on the one hand, and by distance, on the other.

The term "transculturation" goes back to the Cuban theorist Fernando Ortiz.[30] Ortiz coined the neologism transculturación in the Cuban context in the 1940s. He thus formulated a critique of a certain strand of US American anthropology and its concepts of "cultural contact" and "acculturation". In particular, Ortiz understood the concept of "acculturation" as an imposition of the dominant culture on the minoritized culture. Indeed, Ortiz interprets "acculturation" as a form of assimilation. In response to "acculturation", he analyses the tobacco and sugar industries in Cuba, emphasising the relationship between culture and the modes of production and acknowledging the overlapping of various social conditions and historical legacies. In the case of Cuba, this is manifested in the encounter of the former enslaved population, Asian indentured labourers and Spanish day labourers on the sugar plantations. In the encounter of these three groups new forms of communication and creativity emerged as well as affective bonds. These were not forged through harmonious conviviality, but more through strategies of survival under conditions of hierarchy and difference. Fernando Coronil[31] notes that Ortiz’s concept of culture is to be understood as a field of political negotiations. Ortiz’s concept of transculturation transgresses culture by focusing on uneven power relations.

In 1982 Ortiz’s notion of transculturation was adopted into literary studies. In this regard, the Uruguayan literary critic Angel Rama[32] develops the concept of transcultural narrativity in Latin American literature. Using this concept he studies Latin American literature in the encounter between literature and popular culture. John Beverley[33] criticizes Rama’s approach as by incorporating the tradition of orality into a literary cannon the politics of the popular and the radical difference between these two means of articulation is denied. Beverley suggests instead a "transculturation from below", articulated in everyday practices and languages or in the vernacular in market places or in the streets of migrant neighborhoods. Alberto Moreiras suspects that this approach mystifies the subaltern. His argument ties in with Ortiz’s project, but distances itself from the rhetorical implications of a discourse of modernization which he believes to be present in Ortiz’a transculturation. Instead of relating to a European discourse of modernization, Moreiras emphasizes the critical reading of transculturation as an ideological tool. 

Moreiras uses transculturation to grasp the complex cultural power dynamics of rapid urbanization, migration, cultural dislocation and the transformation of societies in Latin America which have been caused by transnational capital.[34] Transculturation for him refers to the encounter between transnational capital and national economies or between everyday practices and technologies of knowledge, in which social encounters are produced in the ambivalence of the simulation of "cultural fusion", on the one side, and the enduring factuality of compartmentalization of society, on the other. For Alberto Moreiras transculturation becomes "a radical concept, insofar as it is oriented toward a possible restitution, preservation, or renewal of cultural origins, and not toward a mere phenomenology of culture, transculturation runs into the theoretical wall that marks its conditions of possibility as heterogeneous with respect to itself: the critical concept of transculturation, paradoxically enough, seems to originate not in the anthropological concept but rather in a different, nontransculturated realm of (unexamined) truth: the realm of ideology."[35] The translation of this analysis to the European context requires, as Moreiras notes for the Latin American context, an understanding of transculturation as an ambivalent process. Thus, transculturation does not entail the story of a successful intermingling of cultures. Rather, the fulfilment of transcultural encounters is prone to fail as long as the historical and social context in which it occurs is structured by fundamental antagonisms producing social and economic inequalities. In this tension between social structures and people’s agency transculturation articulates an "aporetic impossibility".[36] Hence, transculturation is not an outcome of a compromise or fusion between two cultures. It is an unsolved dilemma, an encounter without the possibility of compromise – an "uncompromised transculturation".[37]

In the encounter between transnational capital and a national or local state network, economic and social interests, a process of communication takes place. Here it is not just the generation of coherent meaning which is foregrounded but rather the implosion of meaning. The failure to establish a process of understanding is summarized in Moreiras’s idea of "aporetic impossibility".[38] The analysis of an "aporetic impossibility" as "uncompromised transculturation" can offer us an unpleasant insight into the fact that "a departure from the dehumanizing logic of capital is nowhere in sight."[39] In regard to "aporetic impossibility" and the permanent failure in attempting to understand, the project of translation becomes necessary to apprehend the implosion of meaning not as a supplement but as dissemination. In this dissemination transculturation becomes "an utterance of a melancholic relationship to Western ideology, where the weight of the past cannot be alchemized into a discontinuous future."[40]

Translating it to the European context the project of "uncompromised transculturation" could be understood as an attempt to provincialize Europe.  This is a project that links to the paradoxical dimension of translation.  While we need to consider the historical, semantic and regional differences in which these concepts are located (as, for instance, that of transculturation in the Latin American context), the analytical potential of this concept is useful for understanding the relationship of power in regard to culture in European societies. Thus, the project of "transcultural translation" is interested in an analyis of hegemony. It relates to a (post-)Marxist tradition of cultural theory, in which culture is related to the modes of production. Yet this approach does not reduce culture to economy. Rather it delineates the transgressive and transformative character of culture. Consequently, the concept of transculturation invites us to rethink translation by acknowledging the substantiality of culture, the formation of modes of production and their differential articulation. 

Translation, in regard to "uncompromised transculturation" refers to the transmission between the originality of social struggle and their translation into the institution. Therefore, the aim of a decolonising proposal of "transcultural translation" is to counter the attempt to appropriate, neutralize and depolitizise radical critique. In this sense, "transcultural translation" conceptualizes a strategy of intervention to transform the production of knowledge. Here, it represents an attempt to connect with Marta Malo’s questions of  how one can break with ideological filters and their transmitted frameworks, "[...] how knowledge can be established, one that is directly fed from the concrete analysis of life realms, cooperation, experience of dissatisfaction and rebellion, how the knowledge already circulating in the networks can be effective, how it can be reinforced and connected with praxis, etc. – how ultimately our mental skills, our intellect can be disassociated from the dynamics of labour, production of profits and/or governmentality and linked to a (subversive, transformative) collective action by merging it with a creative event."[41]

Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez

biography

Camilla Nielsen (translation)

biography

Shirley Anne Tate (translation)

biography

languages

transversal