Translation Studies 5, no.

3 (2012): 264279
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A Conceptual and Empirical Approach to Cultural Translation

Kyle Conway
Abstract: This article synthesizes debates about cultural translation that have taken place in a
recent Translation Studies forum and in other venues. It offers a conceptual map by
examining the matrix formed by pairing meanings of culture (in an anthropological sense,
in a symbolic sense, and in the sense of a community) with meanings of translation (as
rewriting and as transposition). This map shows how different notions of cultural translation
contradict and complement each other, and it provides concepts that can be tested empirically.
The article concludes by using these concepts to describe a bill in the legislature of the
Canadian province of Quebec (Bill 94) and by calling for further empirical investigation as a
way to refine theories of cultural translation.
Keywords: cultural translation; definitions of culture; translation as rewriting; translation as
transposition; Quebec Bill 94; veiling
This article is about cultural translation, an idea or, rather, a frequently messy collection of
ideas that has captured the imagination of scholars in fields ranging from anthropology to
translation studies to cultural studies. The ideas popularity has had a strange consequence:
discussion about it, especially across disciplinary lines, often moves in circles because
scholars do not define what they mean by it, presuming that others share their definitions even
when they do not.
My purpose here is to make explicit a number of those implicit assumptions. My
contribution, however, will necessarily be modest. I do not define cultural translation but
instead trace the contours of the debates that surround it. To attempt more would be an act of
hubris, as Lieven Dhulst (2010, 354) argues: a rigorous historical approach would have to
account for the broader history of the intellectual and cultural traditions that shape those
disciplines where ideas of cultural translation have been employed, a task that exceeds the
limits of a single article. As a result, this paper is schematic, aiming not for some putative
completeness but to provide an initial map of the terrain.

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In addition to the challenge of scope, a second factor complicates my task: people

have used terms other than cultural translation to describe the practices I address. However,
these practices are informed by identifiable logics, and those logics, rather than uses of the
term itself, are my starting point. This approach allows me to follow lines suggested by one of
the critiques that appeared in the recent Translation Studies forum on cultural translation (vol.
2, no. 2 in 2009 and vol. 3, nos. 1 and 3 in 2010). There, Mary Louise Pratt (2010, 94) writes:
In the growing literature on cultural translation, the dearth of examples is a
symptom that often nags. The thing is referred to as if we already know what
we are talking about; our scholarly ruminations retain a vagueness that the
ungenerous could take for intellectual impoverishment, or languor. When
specific examples are introduced, they are often cited as self-evident instances
of a self-evident practice called cultural translation, not analyzed so as to
demonstrate how that concept actually works, what kind of understanding it
enables, what it misses or obscures.
Identifying the logics underpinning practices of cultural translation makes it possible to
overcome this vagueness and to generate and evaluate examples, yielding a conceptual and
empirical approach to cultural translation.
The idea of cultural translation is doubly ambiguous. First, it is not clear what is being
translated. Is it culture itself, or something else? And what exactly does culture refer to?
Second, it is not clear what operation translation describes. Indeed, what happens when
concepts of translation are expanded beyond linguistic re-expression?
Culture refers to at least three distinct but related ideas. 1 First, it refers to the shared
set of taken-for-granted assumptions that structure how members of a community make sense
of the world. Second, it refers to objects or artifacts that communities invest with meaning,
where these assumptions become manifest. Television scholar Richard Collins (1990, 35)
provides a useful shorthand here, describing culture in the first sense as anthropological

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culture and in the second sense as symbolic culture. Finally, it refers to the communities
themselves whose members share (or feel that they share) a common culture in the
anthropological sense, with all its symbolic trappings.
Similarly, translation refers to at least two distinct but related ideas. Scholars
theorizing cultural translation frequently look to the etymology of translation from the
Latin transltus, the past participle of transferre, meaning to carry across to explain the
concept.2 This carrying across, however, takes different forms. For cultural anthropologists
and ethnographers, foreign cultures are carried across to domestic readers in textual form,
that is, as described in articles and monographs. Working from Clifford Geertzs (1973) notion
of culture as text, I will refer to this as translation as rewriting. For scholars from the field
of postcolonial literature, what is carried across is not so much culture as people who leave
their place of origin and enter a new locale, bearing their culture with them. I will refer to this
as translation as transposition.
My approach to the logics of cultural translation will be to examine the matrix of
concepts that is formed by pairing meanings of culture with meanings of translation. This
matrix will provide a conceptual map for discussing how the term has actually been
employed, as well as how its different meanings compete with and complement each other.
After a consideration of cultural translation as rewriting and as transposition, I will turn my
attention to a set of specific historical circumstances that illustrate cultural translation in its
different modes. Those circumstances relate to a bill introduced in the provincial legislature of
Quebec, Canada, in 2010 that would force Muslims to change their behavior to conform to a
hegemonic notion of national identity. I examine the bill through the lenses of transposition
and rewriting, then use this analysis to evaluate claims about cultural translations potential to
open up a space for cultural Others. To theorize cultural translation, I conclude, we need to be
able to evaluate claims made about it, and empirical work is a first step in that direction.

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Six modes of cultural translation

If we pair the three notions of culture listed above with the two notions of translation, we get
something like Figure 1, which presents six different modes of cultural translation and lists
scholars (both supporters and critics) who have spoken of it in terms reflecting these modes.
The schematic nature of Figure 1 suggests that the distinctions between modes are clear cut,
but they are not. As the presence of some names in multiple squares makes clear, scholars do
not necessarily delineate the boundaries between meanings of cultural translation in the way
that I describe here. Figure 1 aims, instead, to be heuristic, drawing attention to the points of
conceptual convergence and divergence between modes, as well as their relationships to each
other.
notion of
translation

anthropological culture symbolic culture

culture as community

translation as
rewriting

explanation of a foreign
interpretive horizon

explanation of a
communitys constitutive
mythology

explanation of how
members of another
community interpret an
object or event

examples Lienhardt (1956); Geertz Geertz (1973); Jordan

(1973); Ingold (1993);
(2002); Conway (2010)
Jordan (2002); Bery
(2009); Pratt (2010)
translation as
transposition

transposition of foreign transposition of artifacts, transposition of people

interpretive horizon into foreign texts into new
(for example immigrants)
new locale
locale

examples Ribeiro (2004)

Collins (1990); Conway Bhabha (1994); Jordan

(2012a)
(2002); Longinovic
(2002); Trivedi (2007);
Buden and Nowotny
(2009); Chesterman
(2010); Pratt (2010);
Simon (2010)
Figure 1: Six modes of cultural translation

Translation as rewriting
Cultural translation as a form of rewriting has its roots in 1950s British cultural anthropology
(Asad 1986), although anthropologists have not always employed the term cultural

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translation. For instance, in a talk given in 1954, Godfrey Lienhardt (1956, 97) offered a
hermeneutic account of the anthropologists task:
The problem of describing to others how members of a remote tribe think
[appears] largely as one of translation, of making the coherence primitive
thought has in the languages it really lives in, as clear as possible in our own.
Geertz (1973, 5), nearly two decades later, offered a semiotic account:
Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of
significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the
analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but
an interpretive one in search of meaning.
To be sure, these notions are not identical. They differ in their underlying assumptions and
epistemologies. For instance, an implicit teleology of advance toward European civilization
underlay Lienhardts use of the term primitive to describe the people studied by Western
(civilized) anthropologists. Geertz, on the other hand, assumed no such telos and was
considerably more reflexive. However, they shared a common impulse, namely to explain to
members of one cultural community how members of another interpreted their experience in
the world, if not the world itself. Historically, the outcome of that impulse has taken the form
of a written text (Clifford and Marcus 1986). Hence my designation translation as rewriting.
What exactly is being rewritten? That is a thorny question. For Lienhardt, it was
anthropological culture itself how members of a remote tribe think an assumption that
led to a certain methodological approach. To understand how members of a community think,
the anthropologist had to step into that community and see the world from within the
interpretive horizon provided by its beliefs, customs, and so on. This idea of rewriting
anthropological culture is paradoxical, however, as a comparison with linguistic translation
makes clear. In language, we understand the meaning of a word against the horizon of
interpretive assumptions that we call culture (i.e., anthropological culture). That

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relationship the word in the foreground, culture in the background is crucial to the notion
of translation insofar as translation is the attempt to choose a word in a different language that
resonates in roughly the same way against a different horizon of interpretive assumptions. If
cultural translation refers to an attempt to translate the entire horizon of interpretive
assumptions, then we run into a conceptual problem against what larger horizon are we
interpreting the horizon that we are attempting to translate? In other words, linguistic
translation assumes a foreground/background distinction, but the rewriting of anthropological
culture removes the foreground.
There are two approaches to this contradiction, one which attempts to resolve it by
conceiving of the object of rewriting differently, and one which pursues its implications
further as a way to critique the relations of power underpinning the ethnographic project. The
first approach conceives of cultural translation as the rewriting of symbolic culture, or the
explanation of how members of a community interpret an a particular event, ritual, custom,
idea, or whatever (Geertz 1973, 9). It is worth noting that this form of cultural translation is
also practiced outside of anthropology. More than 60 percent of US journalists, for instance,
regard the interpretive role as essential to journalistic life (Weaver et al. 2007, 141). They
are often called upon to explain how people whom their audiences perceive as foreign
understand an event, such as when US journalists explained how Iraqis interpreted the
invasion of their country in 2003 (Conway 2010).
The second approach leads to a critique of anthropology as an instrument of
colonialism. At a conceptual level, Tim Ingold addresses the foreground/background paradox
when he writes that the ability to observe and describe other cultures implies that the observer
can see them from some outside position. Although anthropologists strive to overcome the
forces of ethnocentrism, the project of [...] using observation and reason to transcend the
limited horizons of species and culture, is none other than the [Western] project of modernity
(1993, 217). Expressed in terms of the foreground/background paradox, anthropologists

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reduce the horizon they sought to discover through their engagement in the world to an
object, which they then interpret against what appears as universal reason but is really the
horizon of Western modernity in disguise (ibid., 223).
Observations such as these have prompted anthropologists to become more reflexive,
for instance by advocating approaches that test the tolerance of [the anthropologists] own
language for assuming unaccustomed forms as a way to subvert their own authority (Asad
1986, 157). Normalizing approaches, characterized by their portrayal of the source culture as
fundamentally intelligible to the English-speaking reader, and estranging approaches, where
precedence is given to target-language expectations of the abnormality of the source
culture, have given way to reflexive approaches, where it is not just the strangeness of the
source language but that of the target language, and the historical relationship between them,
which becomes capable of exploration (Sturge 1997, 26-34). Thus, anthropologists have
come to emphasize the ways in which cultural translation has a transformative effect on the
translators themselves: To produce cultural translation is not a question of replacing text with
text [...] but of co-creating text, of producing a written version of a lived reality, and it is in
this sense that it can be powerfully transformative for those who take part (Jordan 2002, 98).
Of the modes of cultural translation described in Figure 1, one remains, namely the
rewriting of culture as community. One way we might conceive of this mode is as the
rewriting of the stories that form the basis of the rituals binding a community together their
constitutive mythology, so to speak. The distinction between these stories and symbolic
culture is subtle, the product of a different level of analytical abstraction. Examining symbolic
culture means examining how artifacts are invested with meaning that makes anthropological
culture manifest. Examining a communitys constitutive mythology means examining how
stories as artifacts work together to form a whole. In other words, it means examining the
relationship between symbolic culture and anthropological culture itself. The description of
this relationship is one of the defining tasks of anthropology, which provides one clue as to

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why the rewriting of culture as community has received little explicit attention it is one of
the implicit, underlying assumptions of the field itself. As the next section shows, however,
the translation of culture as community is one of the main focuses of scholars treating cultural
translation as a form of transposition, and this disconnect, I believe, is one source of the
conflict between supporters and critics of cultural translation.

Translation as transposition
In the striking opening scene of Salman Rushdies The Satanic Verses, a plane bound for
England from India explodes over the English Channel, and the books protagonists fall to the
ground. As they fall, the narrator asks: How does newness come into the world? How is it
born? Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made? (1988, 8).
These questions and, more to the point, the recognition they signal that
transmissive means are also transfigurative (Simon 2009, 209) have been one point of
departure for the second notion of cultural translation, which treats translation as a form of
transposition. Homi Bhabha (1994), citing Rushdie, was one of the first to explore cultural
translation in this sense. The movement of people from one locale to another, and their ability
through that movement to interrupt hegemonic narratives of national identity, is one means by
which newness enters the world, in Bhabhas paraphrase of Rushdie. In particular, such
transposition has the potential to destabilize notions of foreign and familiar, especially in
contemporary Western society, where narratives of national identity presuppose artificially
clear distinctions between the West and its former colonies. This destabilization results from
way that the linguistic and cultural disjunctures brought about by the movement of people
draw a communitys received sense of itself into question, opening up a hybrid space, neither
foreign nor familiar, where interactions have the potential to operate contingently, outside of
the prevailing cultural logics.

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Boris Buden and Stefan Nowotny present an extended examination of cultural

translation as transposition in the article that opened the Translation Studies forum on the
topic. For them, the political has been superseded by the cultural, and cultural translation a
movement of human beings and their most important properties (2009, 196) is a means of
intervening in the political. To illustrate this, they describe two citizenship tests. The first
reduced German identity to an essentialized notion of German culture and thus translated
[applicants] into being German (ibid., 197). The second, described in a poem by Bertolt
Brecht, did the same for US culture, but differed in its administration and its effect. In
Brechts poem, the judge asking questions realizes that an applicant is answering 1492 to
every question because he does not speak English. The judge finally asks when Columbus
discovered America, at which point the mans answer is correct. The judge posed the correct
question to a wrong answer, which leads Buden and Nowotny to ask, is democracy simply
a wrong answer still waiting for a correct question? The search for this question, and nothing
else, is cultural translation (ibid., 207).
The theme of cultural translations utopian potential runs through much of the work
scholars have done to theorize it. Tomislav Longinovic (2002, 6-7), for instance, looks at
micro-instances where legal and illegal immigrants, refugees, asylum-seekers as well as
itinerant academics come to understand their identities through their displacement and their
experience of being Other. He writes hopefully: The impossibility of absolute sameness in
translation opens a horizon for a new performance of cultural identity as a process of dynamic
exchange between semiotic registers motivated by non-hierarchical openness and movements
of meaning and identity (ibid., 7-8). At the same time, however, scholars are aware of
cultural translations more threatening potential, which results from what Longinovic calls the
double bind of global inequality, or fearful asymmetry, in the rate and value of minor
cultures representation (ibid., 6).

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As these examples show, cultural translation as the transposition of a community (or

its members) has received more attention than the other modes described in Figure 1. Cultural
translation is rarely described, for instance, as the transposition of a foreign interpretive
horizon into new locale. Perhaps Antnio Sousa Ribeiro comes the closest. For him, cultural
translation is tautological: culture is a border phenomenon, constituted by contact with
alterity, and translation is the logic of the border, where the commonplaces of a given culture
[...] no longer apply as premises, and rather become themselves an object of contention and
argumentation of negotiation (2004, 6). Thus we might not be able to speak of the
transposition of a foreign interpretive horizon into a new locale, but we can speak of
interactions resulting from contact between interpretive horizons. Typically, however, this
mode is subsumed under the category of the transposition of people, who act as bearers of
anthropological culture.
The transposition of symbolic culture has received more attention in the field of media
studies, although not always within the framework of translation. Collins (1990), for
instance, asks what effect the circulation of US television programs in Canada has had on
notions of English-Canadian identity. Others have asked how various actors in the global
media industries, especially those who adapt program formats to serve specific local
audiences, perform acts of negotiation in ways similar to that of Longinovics itinerants
(Conway 2012a).
In the Translation Studies forum, some responses to Buden and Nowotny
demonstrated a desire to maintain a sense of rewriting when talking about translation. Ashok
Bery (2009, 213), for instance, wrote that he looked mainly at ethnographic perspectives,
drawing on the work of [...] Clifford Geertz and Godfrey Lienhardt rather than on Homi
Bhabha. Indeed, there are a number of points of overlap between anthropology and
postcolonial literary studies, as Bery and others point out. Shirley Ann Jordan (2002), for
instance, evokes ideas of negotiation similar to those described by Longinovic when

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describing anthropologists engaged in fieldwork, who are working toward a rewriting of the
community they are studying. Geertz (1973, 22), too, emphasizes the conceptual importance
of physical displacement in the anthropologists job: Anthropologists dont study villages
[...]; they study in villages (emphasis added).
cultural translator act of cultural
translation

context of cultural
translation

effect of cultural
translation

judges and other

uphold categories situations where
enforce exclusionary
figures of authority of national identity definitions of identity or identity norms
group membership are
produced and enforced
expand categories situations where
challenge exclusionary
of national identity definitions of identity or identity norms; expand
group membership are definitions of identity
produced and enforced
immigrants and
members of other
subaltern groups

journalists and
other media
producers

conform to
imposed national
identity

situations where identity bend to (and thus

or group membership
reinforce) exclusionary
are determined
identity norms

perform ongoing
negotiation

contingent moments
mediate between culture
that constitute everyday of origin and new
life
culture; negotiate
continued presence in
new locale

mediate between
media production
media consumers
and cultural Others

anthropologists and learn about foreign field work and

other scholars
culture through
ethnographic writing
immersion
experience

facilitate flow of media

across cultural borders
explain foreign culture
to readers who have not
experienced it

Figure 2: Acts, contexts, and effects of cultural translation as transposition

Taken collectively, the preceding observations allow us to map out different acts,
contexts, and effects of cultural translation as a function of the position occupied by the
person acting as translator, as shown in Figure 2. In some cases, such as that of the applicant
for German citizenship described by Buden and Nowotny, there is a clear sense of the object
of translation the applicant himself or herself, transformed from a non-German into a
German citizen. In other cases, the object of translation is less clear if, in the case of

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Longinovics itinerants, translation becomes manifest as negotiation, what has been

transformed?
The ambiguity of cultural translations object is one of the principal points raised by
critics of the concept. Pratt, cited above, offers a critique along these lines. Anthony Pym, in a
text that describes his decision not to contribute to the Translation Studies forum, goes still
further. He writes of being appalled that [Buden and Nowotny] are apparently unable to
break cultural translation down in terms of appropriate distinctions (like the one between
translations as products and translating as a process), taking them to task for what he sees as
sloppy thinking (2010, 7). Moreover, he says, their emphasis on hybridity sets up a
Manichean world of good (peopled by cosmopolitans such as Buden and Nowotny) and bad
(peopled by authority figures who enforce exclusionary norms of identity), one that Pym finds
troubling. Harish Trivedi, in an essay that predates the Translation Studies forum, offers an
equally scathing critique. Like Pym, he attacks the focus on hybridity, whose utopian
potential, in his view, has seduced scholars into abandoning their study of difference by
abandoning the study of literary translation: if literary translation is allowed to wither away
in the age of cultural translation, we shall sooner than later end up with a wholly translated,
monolingual, monocultural, monolithic world (2007, 286).
These are important critiques, and they should be addressed on their own, largely
theoretical terms. My more modest goal here to trace the contours of the debates about
cultural translation and to apply the resulting conceptual map to a set of specific historical
circumstances is an important step in that direction, as I argue in the next section.

Quebec, reasonable accommodations, and cultural translation

Cultural translation as transposition and cultural translation as rewriting can operate in a
complementary manner. For instance, people frequently want to understand newcomers to
their community, in other words, people who have been transposed into a new locale. The

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idea of cultural translation as rewriting (following in the anthropological mode) can serve as a
starting point for this process of understanding. Here I offer a brief case study of an attempted
translation of this kind to demonstrate the ways in which we can make use of this
complementarity by employing notions of cultural translation to describe specific historical
events, and in the process evaluate the claims made by both supporters and critics of the term.
My case study concerns the recent debates in the Canadian province of Quebec about
reasonable accommodations and the Muslim niqab or face veil, debates that culminated in
March 2010 in the introduction of Bill 94 in Quebecs legislature. 3 The bill, whose title in
English is An Act to Establish Guidelines Governing Accommodation Requests Within the
Administration and Certain Institutions, would require people requesting services from the
government, as well as the representatives of the government fulfilling those requests, to
interact with their faces uncovered. Although the bill does not mention Islam specifically, it is
widely accepted that it would have a disproportionate effect on Muslim women wearing a
veil.
The roots of Bill 94 can be found in the controversy surrounding reasonable
accommodations that reached a high point in 2006 and 2007. At that time, Quebec premier
Jean Charest appointed a commission, chaired by sociologist Grard Bouchard and
philosopher Charles Taylor, to suggest ways to resolve the controversy. In their report,
Bouchard and Taylor (2008, 24-6) explained that the practice of reasonable accommodation
originated in the realm of labor jurisprudence in the 1980s, where employers would find ways
to enable people with physical disabilities to perform their duties so long as the
accommodations did not impose an undue burden on the employer. By the mid-2000s, notions
of reasonable accommodation had expanded, through a number of high-profile requests made
by Sikhs, Muslims, and Orthodox Jews, to include accommodation of religious preferences.
Many Quebecers of French Canadian origin saw such requests as a threat to the provinces
hard-won secularism, which was the result of years of struggle begun in the 1960s to create a

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modern bureaucratic state. Before the 1960s, the Catholic Church controlled much of Quebec
society, and as Quebecs modern nationalist movement took shape, its leaders worked to shift
control of the provinces social institutions from the Church to the state, establishing an
autonomous network of social institutions: a system of hospitalization, trade networks,
voluntary associations of many kinds, and so on (Canada 1965, 112). Accommodations made
for religious reasons threatened, at least in popular perception, fifty years of Quebecs
nationalist project. In the case of accommodations made for women wearing a veil, they also
appeared to threaten another hard-won value gender equality that accompanied the
secularization of Quebec society and was formalized in the provinces Charter of Human
Rights and Freedoms in 2008.
The apprehensions felt by many Quebecers of French Canadian origin have grown as
the Muslim community in Quebec has grown. In 2001, there were a little more than 96,000
Muslims living in Montreal (just under 3 percent of the population), but by 2017, that number
is expected to rise to about 227,000 (or about 6 percent of the population) (Dib 2006, 41). The
growing atmosphere of conflict fed the perception that religious minorities were receiving
undue special treatment. As Bouchard and Taylor (2008, 1317) wrote, [i]f we can speak of
an accommodation crisis, it is essentially from the standpoint of perceptions, and the
negative perception of reasonable accommodation that spread in the public often centred on
an erroneous or partial perception of practices in the field. Their report, however, did not
change these perceptions, nor did it quell the controversy about reasonable accommodations,
prompting the introduction of Bill 94.
The purpose of Bill 94, then, was to provide concrete guidelines for accommodations
in such a way as to mitigate the threat that they appeared to pose. Its fourth clause (out of ten)
spelled out the bills rationale: An accommodation must comply with the Charter of human
rights and freedoms [...], in particular as concerns the right to gender equality and the
principle of religious neutrality of the State. Its sixth clause stipulated in part: The practice

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whereby a personnel member of the Administration or an institution and a person to whom

services are being provided by the Administration or the institution show their face during the
delivery of services is a general practice. The remaining clauses described when the bill
would enter into effect, who was affected by it, and who would enforce it.

Translation as transposition
What do notions of cultural translation as transposition reveal here? First of all, Bill 94 bears
a striking resemblance to the citizenship tests described by Buden and Nowotny. In effect, it
would force Muslim women to conform to a hegemonic notion of Quebec national identity,
one premised on a strict separation between religion and the state and a notion of gender
equality that presumes that the veil is necessarily a sign of oppression. In response, the
Fdration des Canadiens musulmans (2010, 6) has argued that it is inappropriate for Western
feminists to impose their notions of equality on all the women on the planet. Instead of
speaking on behalf of women wearing the niqab, it would be better to allow them to speak so
that they themselves might describe their reality and explain their choices. 4
This interpretation of Bill 94 foregrounds what Longinovic referred to above as the
global inequality [...] in the rate and value of minor cultures representation. In Buden and
Nowotnys terms, Quebec has not found the correct question to what appears to many nonMuslim Quebecers as the wrong answer (i.e., the wearing of a veil). In Ribeiros terms, the
commonplaces of a given culture Quebecs remain hegemonic.
This enforcement of hegemony operates in tension with Quebecs policy of
interculturalism, which received considerable attention in Bouchard and Taylors (2008)
report. The policy has never been explicitly articulated, they explain, but has operated instead
as a guiding principle in the formation of policies related to immigration in Quebec:
[I]nterculturalism seeks to reconcile ethnocultural diversity with the continuity
of the French-speaking core and the preservation of the social link. [...] By

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instituting French as the common public language, it establishes a framework

in society for communication and exchanges. It has the virtue of being flexible
and receptive to negotiation, adaptation and innovation. (Ibid., 39-40)
Bouchard and Taylor are at pains to point out that interculturalism implies that transformation
will take place both among immigrants and among Quebecers. It emphasizes interaction, in
particular intercommunity action, with a view to overcoming stereotypes and defusing fear or
rejection of the Other, taking advantage of the enrichment that stems from diversity, and
benefiting from social cohesion (ibid., 40). As a result, [m]embers of the majority
ethnocultural group, i.e. Quebecers of French-Canadian origin, like the members of
ethnocultural minorities, accept that their culture will be transformed sooner or later through
interaction (ibid., 41).
Viewed this way, the effects of cultural translation as transposition are ambiguous and
contradictory. It appears that the effect of Bill 94 is to preclude the transformation of Quebec
society that interculturalism encourages. This contradiction raises a number of important
questions. How does it play out among Quebecers themselves, both Muslim and non-Muslim,
who are directly affected by the bill? What form does the negotiation take between members
of different communities occupying the same geographic space? This is where the idea of
translation as rewriting can provide additional insights.

Translation as rewriting
The Fdrations point above brings to light ways in which thinking of cultural translation as
rewriting complements the analysis of the transposition of people into a new locale. In an
attempt to allow Muslim women to describe their reality, Radio-Canada.ca, the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporations French-language website, published a series of seven stories by
Anne-Marie Lecomte collectively titled Derrire le voile... des femmes, or Women Behind
the Veil. The series appeared in May 2010. In describing the impetus for the series, Lecomte

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wrote about Nama Atef Ahmed, an Egyptian woman at the center of one controversial
episode related to reasonable accommodations. She had refused to remove her veil during a
French-language class and was expelled. Later, when she explained herself on the Rseau de
lInformation, a French-language cable news network, Lecomte (2010a) observed that
language was not her only obstacle: to overcome the gulf that separated this woman from
viewers and journalists, more than an interpreter would be necessary. Also necessary were
time and understanding. Lecomtes purpose, she said, was to work to provide that
understanding.
How exactly are these stories examples of translation as rewriting? First of all, they
were shaped by an impulse to explain to non-Muslim Quebecers how certain Muslim
Quebecers made sense of the world and their place in it. Lecomtes approach in the first two
stories after her introduction was to let Muslim women speak for themselves. The first story
featured a self-described niqab-wearing Muslim feminist (Lecomte 2010b), and the second a
woman who had worn a veil in the past but no longer did so (Lecomte 2010c). Dayna Ahmed,
the subject of the first story, was at pains to explain how she arrived at her decision. She
became friends with a group of Muslim students when she enrolled at Concordia University in
Montreal, and with them she explored her faith, leading to her decision to wear a veil. For her
part, Sheeba Shukoor, subject of the second story, explained,
I was seven when my mother began to wear a hijab [head scarf]. She never
tried to get me to do as she had done, but I looked up to my mother. For me,
the hijab had a cultural meaning. At fifteen, I began to wear a veil after doing
research about it. It was important for me and for my faith. (Ibid.)
Lecomtes act of cultural translation was more complicated than it might appear, however.
She provided an explanation of how these two women understood their choices, an
explanation that differed from the perceptions of most Quebecers. Dayna Ahmed even noted
that she had long sought the opportunity to speak provided by Lecomte (Lecomte 2010b).

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Other stories in the series worked to cast Lecomtes explanation into doubt, however. In an
effort presumably to present as wide a range of perspectives as possible, Lecomte wrote
stories about people such as Patrick Snyder, a religious studies professor at the Universit de
Sherbrooke, and Rachida Azdouz, the associate dean of continuing education at the Universit
de Montral, who expressed opinions about the veil that represented the hegemonic
consensus. Snyder, for example, summarized many Quebecers a priori judgment that religion
was necessarily oppressive (Lecomte 2010d), while Azdouz characterized the act of
wearing a niqab as a radical religious practice (Lecomte 2010e). Whereas Lecomte worked
to explain Muslim womens choices from their own perspective, Snyder and Azdouz
explained them from a hegemonic perspective. In both cases, however, those explanations
served to rewrite the women in question for Quebec readers.
If we take a step back and examine the series as a whole, one striking aspect is the
way that it appears as an intervention by one person, Lecomte, in the negotiation described by
scholars such as Longinovic. That negotiation also becomes evident within single stories
Dayna Ahmed wanted to explain herself and, in the process, mediate between her Muslim
culture and larger Quebec society. It also becomes evident between stories Snyders and
Azdouzs responses are two among many made by Quebecers in that same process of
negotiation. Bhabha, Longinovic, and Ribeiro see the clearing of a space for the Other as one
potential effect of this negotiation, and Lecomtes justification for the series suggests that she
wanted to clear such a space for women like the one expelled from the French-language class.

Evaluating claims
Taking a step back also allows us to evaluate claims made by cultural translations supporters
and critics. Specifically, what does this examination of Bill 94 reveal about claims for the
potential for cultural translation in all its modes to open up a space for the Other?

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Quebecers have demonstrated considerable resistance to reasonable accommodation

practices and considerable support for Bill 94. For instance, in a poll taken shortly after the
bills introduction, 95 percent of Quebecers supported it (Angus Reid Public Opinion 2010).
The poll, however, did not tell the whole story. Quebecers interpretations of the bill and its
implications were not uniform. Supporters generally saw it as upholding the Qubcois values
of secularism and gender equality, values they saw as universal. The bills opponents, on the
other hand, were concerned that the interpretation of these values underpinning the bill was
culturally specific and exclusionary in effect. Thus, from opponents perspective, the bill
enforced rather than challenged exclusionary notions of national identity (Conway 2012b).
Readers comments on the Radio-Canada.ca website in response to Lecomtes articles
give us a sense of the effect of her efforts to improve non-Muslim Quebecers understanding
of the Muslim women in their midst. Of the 148 responses posted between 19 May and 18
October 2010, 116 opposed the act of wearing a niqab. (Of those that remained, 14 did not
oppose it, although they did not necessarily support it, while 18 were not clear.) More
tellingly, the majority of respondents expressed a refusal to see the veil from a perspective
other than their own. Seventy-six either made the a priori judgment that their interpretations
of secularism and gender equality were universal or implied that the act of wearing a veil
demonstrated womens inability to think for themselves. A handful of these expressed
indignation at the elitism of the public broadcaster and its attempts to force them to see
the world from a foreign perspective. Twenty-two respondents, however, expressed openness
to the idea that women wearing a veil might interpret that act differently than they, with one in
particular explaining that she was open to hearing the perspective of such women precisely
because she had gotten to know some personally. The orientations of 40 respondents were not
clear. For most of this group of self-selecting readers, Lecomtes cultural translation did not
necessarily have its desired effect, but some were more willing than others to be open
(Conway forthcoming).

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These responses present an incomplete picture of Quebecers, and it would be hasty to

draw too many conclusions from them about the potential of cultural translation in all its
modes to bring about social change. On the one hand, the opposition Quebecers have
expressed should temper scholars optimism about cultural translations transformative
potential. On the other, it is possible that change is occurring slowly, in a way that this
snapshot cannot capture. For scholars wishing to bring about change, certain points provide
clues about strategies to adopt. As the reader cited above stated, and as Bouchard and Taylor
point out, when contact with people perceived as Others is ongoing and meaningful, it can
have a salutary, humanizing effect.

Cutting cultural translation down to size

In the introduction, I observed that cultural translation has captured the imagination of a wide
range of scholars, but that, because of its popularity and because of scholars frequent
assumption that what it means is self-evident, the concept is messy. It is one of those
concepts, as Ribeiro (2004, 2) notes, that at a certain point in time achieve such a broad
circulation that they seem able to name just by themselves the main determinants of the
epoch. Around three decades ago, Geertz (1973, 3) wrote nearly the same thing about
culture, which was one of those ideas that everyone [snaps up] as the open sesame of some
new positive science, the conceptual center-point around which a comprehensive system of
analysis can be built. By the 1970s, however, culture had become part of our general stock
of theoretical concepts as scholars expectations were brought more into balance with its
actual uses (ibid., 3-4). Its status had changed because, as Geertz wrote at the time, people
try to apply it and extend it where it applies and where it is capable of extension; and they
desist where it does not apply or cannot be extended (ibid., 4).
This is the approach we should now take with cultural translation we should apply
and extend it where it is possible to do so, but we should also recognize where it is not

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possible. The analytical value of cultural translation in all its modes depends on our
recognition of the terms limitations, and, ultimately, our application of the idea can only be
strengthened by a critical examination of what cultural translation can and cannot do. That is
the value of an empirical approach based on a conceptual map such as I have traced here:
concrete examples will help us refine theories of cultural translation.
Cultural translation is not a unitary concept, and different conceptions can be used as
complementary tools for examining specific historical events, especially those grounded in
the Wests encounter with its perceived cultural Others. People performing cultural translation
in one sense (for example, the legislators crafting Bill 94, who wanted to translate Muslims
into Quebecers defined by a specific logic of national identity) might act at cross purposes
with people performing cultural translation in another (for example, Anne-Marie Lecomte,
who wanted to open up a space where Muslim women in Quebec could express themselves on
their own terms). People belonging to the community where cultural translation is being
performed might also react in varied and contradictory ways, with some working to safeguard
existing senses of identity while others embrace change. Cultural translation is not so simple
as utopian notions of it might suggest.
The value of the prism provided by notions of cultural translation is that it brings into
focus cultural translators agency as influenced by relations of power. On the one hand,
cultural translators actions are constrained by social and historical circumstances they
operate within a bounded horizon of possible choices. On the other, within that horizon, they
have room to maneuver to address the issues they see as salient. The nature of their agency is
a key point missed by other theoretical prisms.
For the field of translation studies itself, empirically based discussions of cultural
translation provide examples of what happens when we expand notions of translation beyond
linguistic re-expression, a question of great concern to people such as Trivedi and Pym. The
linguistic aspect does not necessarily disappear, as Trivedi fears. Indeed, it is central in the

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negotiations that take place between members of different communities after all, the woman
who inspired Lecomtes series was expelled from a French language class. At the same time,
debates in translation studies can help guide inquiry in cultural translation, too. For example,
what do debates about the ethics and implications of acculturating versus foreignizing
approaches have to say about cultural translation as rewriting versus transposition? This
avenue of investigation is promising but will be most fruitful if it proceeds from analysis of
empirical events, for which the conceptual map I have provided here will I hope prove a
useful starting point.

Notes
1. The breadth of this article comes at the price of depth. Culture is a term with a rich and
complicated history, of which I offer only a sketch here. In English, its meaning evolved,
describing the cultivation of crops or animals in the fifteenth century, civilized society in the
eighteenth century (like its German equivalent Kultur), and the superstition characteristic of
non-Western societies in the mid-twentieth century. By the late twentieth century, this sense
had fallen out of favor as anthropologists became more reflexive in their work. It was at that
point that it took on the valences I employ here (Williams 1976; Clifford and Marcus 1986;
Ingold 1993).
2. Again, this is to abbreviate. Andrew Chesterman (2010, 104) reminds us: The
corresponding terms [of translation] in some other languages (such as Finnish, Turkish,
Japanese, Chinese, Tibetan, Vietnamese, Tamil) do not foreground the notion of carrying
something across, but rather notions of difference or mediation. Even in languages where
words meaning translation do derive from notions of carrying across, notions about
language (whether it is a mere container for ideas or represents a culturally specific mode of
dividing the world into identifiable units) or about the effects of carrying across (whether or

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not the receiving culture is transformed in the process) have varied through time (Berman
1988).
3. The bill was approved in principle on 15 February 2011 and referred to Quebecs
Committee on Institutions.
4. All translations from French are my own.

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