Translation

翻译

‘Translation’ is often imagined as a simple, concrete transfer of meaning from one language into another, but in practice it is a far more layered cultural act. To translate means navigating between histories, values, and interpretive traditions. Translators do not merely replace words; they negotiate difference while attempting to preserve nuance, and sometimes deliberately reshape a text to meet the expectations of varied imagined audiences. In this sense, translation is both an act of fidelity, transferral, and creativity. It reveals the porousness of linguistic and cultural borders, reminding us that no text or culture is ever fixed, but always in motion through the languages and contexts that produce and negotiate it.

While we often think of language when speaking of translation, the concept can easily be extended to the migration of meaning across media. Adapting a novel into a film, or a painting into a musical performance, involves more than technical transfer. Each medium frames perception differently, shaping how stories, images, and ideas are perceived. Translation across media is therefore never neutral, and analysing these translations can highlight what is lost, what is gained, and what is transformed when meaning shifts from one expressive form to another.

Translation is also embedded in the act of interpretation itself. Even in daily conversations we are constantly translating between intentions and words, between tone and meaning, between what is said and what is understood. Paul Ricoeur described interpretation as ‘a translation without a foreign language’: an attempt to render intelligible what is opaque, to make sense of another’s perspective through one’s own conceptual framework. This everyday translation reminds us that even the most ‘banal’ forms of communication are never simple transmissions of information; they are always mediated by acts of interpretation, negotiation, and rephrasing, which transform meanings as much as they convey it.

The same counts for conducting research, whether this entails doing fieldwork, interpreting a legal framework, or analysing a cinematographic corpus.

For further reading, please find a bibliography here.