Journal of Universal Language

Sejong University Language Research Institue

J. Univers. Lang. 2008; 9(2):31-48

pISSN: 1598-6381

DOI: https://doi.org/10.22425/jul.2008.9.2.31

Article

Cultural Misrepresentation through Translation

Said Faiq¹

¹American University of Sharjah

Copyright ⓒ 2016, Sejong University Language Research Institue. This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Published Online: Jan 01, 2017

Abstract

The space of intercultural communication is bound to make translation the par excellence site for the negotiation, understanding and/or contestation of the relationships of power and knowledge across cultures. In these intercultural encounters, translation has played a decisive role in the formation and/or deformation of cultural realities through systems, the master discourses, of representing the foreign (other) for the local (self). In the process of translation, a master discourse, the product of a specific cultural context where translation takes place, is used as the medium for the exchange of cultural goods, most importantly literary ones. Drawing on a number of translation instances, this article examines the lack of innocence of translation as the medium of intercultural communication.

Keywords: translation; representation; master discourse; self; other; culture; intercultural communication

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