Editorial

Abstract

Like so many other ideas in our field, the notion of ‘cultural translation’ has been around now for over 30 years; however, it remains a concept which is hotly contested (Maitland, 2017). On the one hand, translation purists maintain that it can only be the provenance of those working professionally in the translating of meanings from one language to another; on the other, cultural translation has been accused of being appropriated by ‘Anglo-American cultural studies, where the trope of translation has been appropriated without the need to actually learn languages other than English in order to do so’ (Trivedi, in Maitland, 2017, p. 20). The four papers which I have managed to assemble into another themed open issue this month all address some aspect of what might broadly be called ‘cultural translation’; and in a happy coincidence, this fifth issue thus previews the theme of the next IALIC Conference to be held at the University of Valencia (20–22 November, http://ialic.international/conference-2019-valencia/). In so doing, this issue also engages with four corners of our multidisciplinary field-ranging from literature to anthropology, and from ideology critique to translation studies. Over the past couple of decades, book groups have become widespread across Europe and North America. These are informal meetings held between groups of readers, usually to discuss novels which their members have chosen to read together. From my own associations it seems that book groups mostly range from a handful of people to around 20. Book groups meet informally in someone’s house or in some form of civic centre, for example a library or book shop; and their members come to view them as a regular part of their monthly social routine, and arguably as part of their ‘social identity’. The first paper in this issue, by Duygu Tekgül, intriguingly proposes that books groups are part of the ‘public sphere’, after Jürgen Habermas’s eponymous book The structural transformation of the public sphere (1962/1989). As a young Turkish woman, Tekgül carried out participatory research around Britain by sitting in on 12 different book groups. These happened to be comprised of mostly white, female, British readers. All of these groups were reading ‘international novels’, i.e. novels set in countries other than the UK, and written in languages which were then translated into English for international consumption. This gave the opportunity for Tekgül to investigate not only how book clubs operate as social practice, but also to observe how their members recontextualised the meanings and values constituted in one cultural context to a different context – be it to a library in Devon or to a bookshop in Dorset. In so doing, these book clubs veered between the ‘cultural hospitality’ of liberal cosmopolitanism to a certain, jokey essentialism – both of which, arguably, constitute different aspects of cultural translation. Elewa opens his paper on the ideological translations of Arabic quotations in English language newspapers by asserting that no act of translation is ever value-neutral. To varying degrees, all translation attempts to ‘naturalize’ the culture of the source text to the expectations of the readers of the target text (after Lefebvre, 2000, p. 237). From a political perspective, this is where ideological meanings also come to be infused into the translated texts. This second paper in the issue considers the way in which a small corpus of translated Arabic quotations are rendered in English in two left-leaning newspapers: The New York Times (USA) and the Guardian (UK). In this, Elewa draws on the principles of Critical Discourse Analysis (hereafter CDA, after Fairclough, 1989, 1992, 1995) to analyse his texts. While Elewa does not adhere slavishly to any particular CDA formula, he captures the spirit of the critical approach by analysing the ways in which the language of the English translations appear to have been knowingly altered from what would otherwise have been their literal meaning in Arabic. His analysis reveals four strategies which were used to accomplish this alteration of the language of these texts: omission, nominalisation, modality, and foregrounding. Through these,