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Thematic issue: (Non)translating marginality - Stifled and liberated narratives and languages in museum translation

(Non)translating marginality: Stifled and liberated narratives and languages in museum translation

Recent decades have seen many publications concentrating on the connections between memory and translation. In an early conceptual discussion on “Translation as re-membering”, Susan Bassnett (2003, 308-309) pointed to the “unfaithfulness” of both translation and memory, reminding that “no absolutely perfect memory or absolutely perfect translation can exist”. Although this “unfaithfulness” may be blamed from an ethical perspective (especially in the case of trauma narratives), it reminds us of the dynamic nature of both translation and remembering together with their ties to the present needs of cultures. Foregrounding the dynamic nature of remembering, Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney defined cultural memory as “an ongoing process of remembrance and forgetting in which individuals and groups continue to reconfigure their relationship to the past and hence reposition themselves in relation to established and emergent memory sites” (Erll & Rigney, 2009, 2). This dynamicity of remembering is closely tied to the process of remediation. Scholars working in the fields of Memory and Translation Studies have shown that our memories can survive thanks to a series of multiplying representations in a variety of media and genres and that translations have a crucial role to play in the remediation of memories, either protecting or renewing them (Brownlie, 2016; Hermans, 2022).

A growing number of scholars have examined the ties between memory and translation in monographs (e.g., Boase-Beier, 2015; Brodzki, 2007; Simon, 2012), edited volumes (e.g., Boase-Beier et al., 2017; Deane-Cox & Spiessens, 2022; Radstone & Wilson, 2021; Simon, 2016) and a special journal issue (Malena, 2016), presenting a broad range of perspectives, also reflected in individual articles or book chapters dedicated to the analysis of painful memories with particular attention to Holocaust narratives, and to the influence of politics and ideology in national and transnational contexts or in urban settings and museums.

Studies concentrating on “translation in museums” and “museums as translation” (Sturge, 2007) have also increased recently, covering a wide range of topics going far beyond the quality of interlingual translation in the museum setting. Handbook chapters (Neather, 2018, 2021, 2022) and special journal issues (Mertens & Decroupet, 2024; Garibay & Yalowitz, 2015; Rizzo, 2022) dedicated to the various aspects of translation in the museum context also testify to an increased attention at this research area. Researchers dealt with all aspects of translation, including interlingual, intralingual, intersemiotic and intrasemiotic transfer, to explore a wealth of topics and concepts including but not limited to accessibility and inclusivity (Greco et al., 2022; Neves, 2018), audio description (Asimakoulas, 2024; Manfredi & Bartolini, 2023; Perego, 2019; Spinzi, 2019; Soler Gallego, 2018), multimodality and digital displays (Liao 2018,;Valdeón 2015; Greco et al. 2022) and, cultural translation and the colonial past (Celis, 2019; Valdeón, 2015; Sturge, 2007; Song, 2023), memory, and memorial museums.

The wide extent of topics is also reflected in the various methodologies used by researchers. In most studies scholars provided detailed descriptive, comparative analyses of textual and multimodal material gathered from the museums or their digital platforms. These included guidebooks, catalogues, labels, audio guides, visual and digital displays. In their analyses researchers made use of methodologies such as critical discourse analysis, systemic functional linguistics, and corpus studies (i.e., Greco et al., 2022; Perego, 2019; Soler Gallego, 2018; Spinzi, 2019). Although less in number, some research has also concentrated on visitor response, relying on questionnaires or interviews (Song, 2023; Asimakoulas, 2024), or analysing the comments left by visitors in visitor books (Liao, 2015), or on online travel platforms as Tripadvisor, Google Review and Qiongyou (Liao, 2018).

The focus of this special issue will be the interplay of translation and memory in the museum setting with a special focus on marginality: marginality of certain languages, women, gendered identities, ideological positions, or translators in museums located outside the European centres of power. The authors contributing to this special issue will specifically scrutinise the ways in which ideologies, traumatic events, gendered identities, authors, and translators are remembered, represented, and translated in various museums, seen as also as translations. With this special issue, we would like to question if translations in a museum setting can participate in this struggle to reanimate and reinstate or to suppress and hide the marginalising narratives. The articles in this special issue will problematize the connections between translation and multilinguality, inclusivity, and cosmopolitan memory in the museum setting and discuss the conditions under which museums can become spaces of supporting or suppressing marginality.
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