Sarah Maitland (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Wednesday, 16 October 2019, 4.00-6.00pm
G.06 50 George Square, University of Edinburgh
What Can Memes Teach Us About Cultural Translation?
This talk explores the terms through which memes are made. It is constructed around a series of meme case studies designed to demonstrate two key ideas: first, that memes are translational by design, and second, that they are dialectical in nature. The term “meme,” originated by Richard Dawkins, draws on the ancient Greek mimeme, meaning “something imitated,” mimeisthai “to imitate,” and mimos “mime.” In this way, the construction of a meme becomes linked inextricably to ideas of playfulness, mimicry, emulation, imitation, verisimilitude, and metonymy. As cultural reproduction, memes make use of processes of copying and imitation, practices which, as Limor Shifman writes, “have become essential in contemporary digital culture” (2013, 4). The cultural stimulus that is copied in the meme functions as the “source text” of translation. This source text is interpreted, imitated, parodied, transformed, reshaped, and “translated” by Internet users, turning it into something new, a “third object,” alike and akin to the original cultural stimulus, yet undeniably different. Just like a translation, this new form is intended to find a new audience in a new time and new place. When memes go viral, we witness how a singular idea or stimulus can be propagated and remolded in different ways by different users. With every meme, we see an infinite layering of reception and creative cultural production; text upon image, image upon image, parody upon parody, interpretation upon interpretation. As twenty-first century palimpsests, memes add new layers of meaning on top of the cultural phenomena they translate.
But what do we gain from conceiving of memes in translational terms? To translate, which is an act of reading par excellence, is to take a political position. It is to send a deliberate message to an identified audience; it is to address someone with intentionality, following a deliberative engagement across the borders that separate author from text and text from reader. If to read is to understand, and to understand is to interpret, then to translate is to seek to share with another the contingent results of this act of reading. As translations, memes have a particular point to make in the here and now. They do not claim to be neutral readings of the phenomena they interpret, but instead tell us something about the ways in which they simultaneously depend upon and yet depart radically from the sources on which they are based. They are translations that offer new ways of looking at things precisely by criticising the old. They are both the vestiges of and the precursors to public dialogue, and they serve as a reminder that “truth” is never bounded and can be infinitely extended. Viewed through the lens of cultural translation (Maitland 2017), memes are a call to engage in a dialectic of understanding, to explore not just what they “mean” but what phenomena they are engaged in interpreting productively. By deconstructing memes in translational terms, we can question not only how we acquire knowledge online but also how such knowledge is constructed.
[translation studies ]
Dr Sarah Maitland is Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she leads the MA in Translation. She is an elected member of the Executive Council of the International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies and Managing Editor of the Journal of Specialised Translation. Sarah is co-investigator on the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project ‘Translation and Interpretation Work in Multilingual Business Communities: Roles, Perspectives, Agency’, and is author of What is Cultural Translation? published by Bloomsbury Academic. She is also author of various articles on cultural translation, translation philosophy, theatre translation, and hermeneutics.
Sarah is a Memsource Certified Trainer and leads project TransCast: Making Translating and Interpreting Research Public, which hosts free podcasts of cutting-edge translation research for students, scholars and practitioners of translation worldwide.
As a professional theatre translator, Sarah has translated for the Royal Court Theatre, Cervantes Theatre, CASA Latin American Theatre Festival, Words without Borders magazine, Martin E. Segal Theatre New York, Theatre Royal Bath, and Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance, among others. Her most recent work includes creating production video subtitles for A Universe (Alone), by Cuartoymitad Teatro.
Sarah is also an active member of Out of the Wings, hosted by King’s College London, a collective of theatre-makers, researchers, translators and academics united by a shared love of theatre and the possibilities of cross-border collaboration and exchange that are released when works for the stage are translated for new audiences.