Cultural artefacts and experiential translation: An entangled experience

Taking its cue from the outward turn in translation studies and the expansion of translation beyond the linguistic, this chapter explores the entangled relationship between experience, translation and artefacts. It builds on our previous elaboration of experiential translation as a meaning-making process which is in-the-moment, temporally contingent, relational, material, ludic and embodied (see our Introduction to The Experience of Translation, 2024). Here we turn our attention from the translator to the role of experiential translation in the creation of cultural artefacts. Underpinned by an ecological view of the entangled nature of human and material agency, we explore conceptualizations of experience and artefact through a transdisciplinary lens including art and design, art history, anthropology, archaeology, material culture, social semiotics and cognitive and educational sciences. Through a discursive engagement with insights from these disciplines, the chapter presents a broad frame of reference within which to understand a spectrum of cultural artefacts as the translation of experience. Experience is here understood as a multilayered affair which is shaped by culture and society as well as by the senses (themselves influenced by culture and biology). With much of experience occurring on a prenoetic level, uncertainty plays an important role in the transformative and epistemic outcomes of experience. Further, we understand artefacts to comprise tangible and intangible instantiations like performance events, immersive art installations, or the conduct of religious or cultural ceremonies and festivals. Ultimately, the chapter argues that the translation of experience involves a transformative step whereby experience becomes embodied and materialized, even ephemerally, as an artefact in a perpetual state of becoming.