The Curator as a Translator

Kate Sturge challenges the reader, in her paper ‘The Other on Display’, to view the ethnographic museum as a translation process. In this case, once again, as it happens with feminist approaches, the idea of translation is stretched beyond what is perceived as ‘translation proper’, or interlingual translation, as it was defined by Jakobson, and is reflected in the strategies she proposes further on in the study (1959:233). She invites the reader, therefore, to view the curator as the translator of an old narrative into the language of today.

Sturge makes an analogy between the artifacts displayed in traditional museums and the interlinear, prescriptive approach on translation: the objects are displaced from their time and their context, and seen as entities exiting in a sort of ‘arrested development’ (3), ‘talking’ to the target reader in a familiar, domesticating language. Thus a pot is not an object that once used to store liquids, it is an artifact made from a certain type of clay and belonged to a certain trend of painting flowers on it.

She argues further on that this Victorian approach is outdated and, even worse, in some cases denigrating for the cultures represented by artifacts in these museums, and proposes two methods that would put the source and the translator on display, getting rid in the same time of the colonial, imperialistic ways in which the objects have been presented so far. One is the use of ‘thick translation’, that is, ‘translation heavily glossed and annotated to enable engagement with the original’s complexity’ (p.5). This would require use of multimedia materials, booklets and catalogues, but would enable the reader to become aware of the fact that translation shouldn’t be taken for granted, that there is an intermediary who enables the access to the old culture, and that culture is more than a piece of jewelry or clothing.

The other method is called ‘reflexive translation’, that is, ‘gearing the whole structure of a gallery to the histories of collection’ (7). This method would employ a ‘put oneself on the map’ type of strategy: the Western culture would be emphasized by the display of the artifacts, not the exotic.

I believe this is an interesting case of postcolonial – ethnographic cross-disciplines study, that shows how the classical view of the original-copy dichotomy can be broken or reversed. It would be interesting to see, if these methods are going to be applied increasingly in the future, what the reader response might be and how they would understand these changes.


References:

Jakobson, Roman (1959): 'On Linguistic Aspects of Translation', R. A. Brower (ed.) On Translation, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

Sturge, Kate (2003): 'The Other on Display: Translation in the Ethnographic Museum'