The Ethics of Cultural Translation 101: Translating Geography

Foreword

Translating between languages tends to be a highly ethical practice, or at the least one that stimulates frequent conversation about ethics. This is especially true in the present day, when international discourse places high value on respecting other cultures. An ethical breach can take many forms, from misguided translation choices to intentional efforts to redefine a work of literature in a different and distortional manner. This series explores some of the ethical challenges translators face, either due to the challenge of the translation itself or willingly, while reflecting on the continuing debates between translators, translation scholars and others about what constitutes an ethical breach.

The Ethics of Cultural Translation 101 will be mainly divided into the following chapters of content:

1. The Ethics of Cultural Translation 101: Challenges To Originality

2. The Ethics of Cultural Translation 101: A Translator’s Boundaries

3. The Ethics of Cultural Translation 101: Tinkering With Canons

4. The Ethics of Cultural Translation 101: Cross-Language Plagiarism

5. The Ethics of Cultural Translation 101: Shortcuts Between Distances

6. The Ethics of Cultural Translation 101: Translating Geography

7. The Ethics of Cultural Translation 101: From Language To Motion Picture

8. The Ethics of Cultural Translation 101: Ideology

The Ethics of Cultural Translation 101: Translating Geography

Apart from writing the groundbreaking book After Babel, George Steiner is also known for having one of the most famous quotes on translation attributed to him: “without translation, we would be living in provinces bordering on silence” (Wynne, 2018). While this nugget of wisdom has many dimensions to it, the most compelling element of this poetic yet affirmative truth is the geographical component. Contrary to a popular expression often seen on social media and used to affirm a greater human unity, the borders between language are rarely arbitrary even if land borders sometimes reflect a different reality.

Figure 1: Photograph of George Steiner, author of After Babel, taken by Tom Pilston (n.d.)

The base definition of culture is usually, if not always, impossible to express without emphasizing some form of reliance upon either a geographic entity as one might see on a political geography map or physical environment. As research done by linguistic anthropologist David K. Harrison has shown, the depths to which a language can connect to its terrain are considerable, an example being the Tofa reindeer herders of Siberia. (Harrison, 2007, p. 57). The example Harrison provides of the Tofa language is the word döngür, or “male domesticated reindeer in its third year and first mating season, but not yet ready for mating.” Döngür, suffice to say, is virtually untranslatable into any major Western language. While some cultures, like the Sami of Northern Scandinavia, would find cultural points of linguistic reference due to a shared tradition of reindeer herding, most world cultures