Translation and Cultural Identity. The Case of Minority Writers

MARÍA LAURA SPOTURNO

St Andrews, Escocia

Conferencia; Seminar presentation - Institute of European and Cultural Identity Studies; 2015

Institute of European and Cultural Identity Studies, School of Modern Languages, St Andrews University

This seminar explores the unavoidable relation between translation and identity, which was suggested by Lefevere and Bassnett, among others, in 1990 when they advanced the hypothesis of the cultural turn in the field of Translation Studies. According to these authors, translation and, consequently, the translator, adopt a crucial role in the construction of identity and culture as well as in the formation of cultural identities. As argued by Gentzler (2008), translation is a discursive practice and as such it unveils the heterogeneous and polyvalent construction of culture. Translation stands out as a privileged genre in the configuration of identity, especially in the case of the literary and cultural production of peripheral and minority communities within which translation becomes a strategy to remember and (re) historicise memory. As put forward by Sidiropoulous (2006), the question of identity is crucial in the theoretical debate in the field of Translation Studies. Moreover, translation must be at the centre of any reflection about identity in contemporary societies (Cronin, 2006). During the seminar, the relation between translation and identity will be analysed in a corpus of literary texts belonging to minority writers.