Here is a description of my doctoral dissertation "Transfrontera Translations: Language, History, and Culture in the U.S./Mexican Borderlands" taken from the abstract:
The U.S./Mexican borderlands are a region where people, cultures, and ideologies meet, integrate, coexist, and clash. These varied encounters happen against a background of economic inequality, national divisions, deeply embedded racial stereotypes, and linguistic difference. It is therefore the case that constant acts of translation are necessary to navigate the borderlands’ unique and uneven social landscape. The premise of this work is that translation in the borderlands bridges disjunctures not only between languages, but also between bordering and converging cultural, political, and national bodies. In this way, translation is essential to the exposition and negotiation of difference. Yet translation is also a subjective practice, with meaning simultaneously lost and made in the process. This makes difference difficult to fully reconcile and acts of translation import to examine. Since the disjunctures bridged by translation often go either ignored (in cases when translations are erroneously thought to provide unmediated access to the original) or met with fear, resistance, or aggression towards the other (in cases when the need for translation is abandoned in favor of perpetuating difference) the imperative for a sustained investigation into the methodologies that guide translation in the borderlands rests in a need for improving understanding and assuaging violence.
The U.S./Mexican borderlands are a region where people, cultures, and ideologies meet, integrate, coexist, and clash. These varied encounters happen against a background of economic inequality, national divisions, deeply embedded racial stereotypes, and linguistic difference. It is therefore the case that constant acts of translation are necessary to navigate the borderlands’ unique and uneven social landscape. The premise of this work is that translation in the borderlands bridges disjunctures not only between languages, but also between bordering and converging cultural, political, and national bodies. In this way, translation is essential to the exposition and negotiation of difference. Yet translation is also a subjective practice, with meaning simultaneously lost and made in the process. This makes difference difficult to fully reconcile and acts of translation import to examine. Since the disjunctures bridged by translation often go either ignored (in cases when translations are erroneously thought to provide unmediated access to the original) or met with fear, resistance, or aggression towards the other (in cases when the need for translation is abandoned in favor of perpetuating difference) the imperative for a sustained investigation into the methodologies that guide translation in the borderlands rests in a need for improving understanding and assuaging violence.
Click here to read Chapter One, on the various English language translations of Cabeza de Vaca's colonial narrative Naufragios.
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