A needed reflection for sure. I’d add that culture extends beyond language, which can make even technically well-translated materials ineffective in other cultural contexts. One example is from a friend of mine who is a Chinese screenwriter. She mentioned that there’s a ton of Mandarin-fluent writers from the US who ultimately flop when writing for Chinese audiences. It isn’t the language, she said, but it’s the story arc. In the US and western culture at large (if we can clump so many peoples together) the prototypical story is a battle between good a evil, followed by epiphany/battle (read “Hero With a Thousand Faces”). The Chinese story frame, she explained, was a progression between balance, imbalance, followed by rebalance. As culture is so much more than
language and music (etc), but a system of practices, beliefs, narratives, and social structures. So if/when translation happens, it ought to be by those native to that community, in order to translate not just the language, but the cultural framing as well.
A needed reflection for sure. I’d add that culture extends beyond language, which can make even technically well-translated materials ineffective in other cultural contexts. One example is from a friend of mine who is a Chinese screenwriter. She mentioned that there’s a ton of Mandarin-fluent writers from the US who ultimately flop when writing for Chinese audiences. It isn’t the language, she said, but it’s the story arc. In the US and western culture at large (if we can clump so many peoples together) the prototypical story is a battle between good a evil, followed by epiphany/battle (read “Hero With a Thousand Faces”). The Chinese story frame, she explained, was a progression between balance, imbalance, followed by rebalance. As culture is so much more than language and music (etc), but a system of practices, beliefs, narratives, and social structures. So if/when translation happens, it ought to be by those native to that community, in order to translate not just the language, but the cultural framing as well.