Translation and the Archive: Language, Text and Memory

Description

Situating our research project within the theme of “Translating Cultures’ we will reflect on how its key research questions offered a framework within which we could collaborate on a highly interdisciplinary topic in a productive way. The project brought together for the first time South Asianists working in translation and literary studies with scholars researching South Asian religions. The focus on translation invited new questions regarding religious conversion and its representation through autobiography. We have viewed religious conversion as ‘acts of translation’ both linguistic and metaphorical, as individuals negotiate a change in religious culture through language.

We will next focus on the trickiest challenge that we faced as a team: the missionary archive. While we found many times the number of autobiographical accounts than we had anticipated, with written evidence on several documents that they were translations, we were unable to trace both the source and target text in each case. This meant developing a new set of questions on translation and its relationship with the archive. Methodologically, how could we compare texts in translations without complete versions of their source texts? How can we study what we term “translation traces” in the texts we discovered: bilingual texts, translated extracts, fragments, and evidence of repeated relay translations? And, why were some translation pairs preserved and not others? Can we think of the archive as a ‘contact zone’ where languages, texts and memory intersect through translation? We hope to make a contribution to the discipline of translation studies by suggesting some means of addressing the way archives from the past inevitably shape our study and understanding of translation in the present; and how asking the translation question opens up new ways of working with historical archives.

Period	10 Sept 2018
Held at	Arts and Humanities Research Council
Degree of Recognition	National