Translation

GUSTAVO SORÁ

The Palgrave dictionary of transnational history

Macmillian

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2009; p. 378 - 379

A translation is a text that expresses in one language what was originally written in another one. To a lesser extent the term translation is also applied to oral performances (e.g.: the simultaneous translation of a conference) that interpret and communicate in one language what has been said in another one. It is enough to consider the multiplicity of existing languages to understand the centrality of translations in the production of cultural relations across borders. Translations make possible the understanding of languages that are not those of origin. However, their potential contribution to intercultural understanding is not self-evident. Translation serves two purposes. In the first place it involves a mediation: the translation is a device that allows to comprehend a message expressed in a language that a potential receiver does not know. Unlike the inter-linguistic experiences of the polyglot,  translation generates indirect communication. Secondly it is a phenomenon of cultural selection: not everything is translated. Decisions about what is translated reflect social and cultural rules and hierarchies. In order to understand the power and the meaning of translation in the establishment of transnational cultural relations, it is necessary to consider it as a historical phenomenon. In societies without writing, the communication is restricted to the direct interaction of the interlocutors. Cultural transmission is imprisoned in the homeostatic process of orality and memory. Although communication among different linguistic and cultural groups can be made by polyglots, the span of oral transmission is limited in terms of social space as well as in time. Writing is, foremost, accumulated material. Jack Goody and Ian Watt have demonstrated that the spread of the phonetic alphabet from Ancient Greece represented the most universal phenomenon of cultural diffusion in human history. If the famous case of the Rosetta Stone has shown the importance of translation of the written word in the constitution of bureaucratic power, the earlier emergence of technologies , like the papyrus and its later composition in codex, had amplified the possibilities of intercultural transmission of thought in a large territorial scale and duration. Although in Medieval times written culture was restricted or monopolized by the Catholic Church, and in spite of the fact that the use of Latin as a universal language limited the need for translation, towards the year 1135 there was a school of translators in Toledo which translated Greek texts in Arab into Latin.