Presentation

The encounter between the East and the West has generated a great deal of scholarship from various disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences, from a variety of perspectives having to do with ideology and culture, politics, and the economy, among others. The essays in this two-volume issue deal with East-West encounters from the perspective of translation and intercultural communication, expanding the East-West paradigm beyond its usual conceptualization of relations between Western and non-Western cultures to include relations between radically different cultures and traditions in encounters that can be local, national or global. These encounters may be between cultures of orality and cultures of writing, between minority and majority language cultures, between dominated and dominant entities, or between colonized and colonizing cultures. They are sometimes expressed in intercultural relations pertaining to gender, sexuality, (im)migration, or alternative artistic modes of expression. The encounters can also be viewed in terms of the tensions between the local and the global, between literacy and aboriginal forms of expression. Some of these encounters are horizontal, based on cultural exchanges between rival global cultures without the notable influence of power differential, while others are vertical, driven by the imbalance of power relations between the centre and the periphery of the global marketplace. The common thread that runs through these multiple encounters is the implied sense of radical difference in need of mediation through translation and related forms of transformation and re-enunciation. This broad conceptualization of the East-West paradigm accounts for current trends in contemporary history, which have rendered the paradigm somewhat problematic. In our globalized world, owing to the movement of peoples and the relocation of cultures, myriads of encounters have occurred between diverse cultures, ethnicities and traditions, resulting in the rampant interpenetration of cultures. The East-West paradigm has therefore become more of an epistemological construct than a regional or geographical representation. It is hoped that the East-West paradigm can nudge translation research towards reconciling a mainly Eurocentric tradition and theories and practices from other non-Western cultures and societies. The East-West paradigm therefore provides the basis for mapping forms and concepts of translation and related forms of transformation from diverse cultures, in an attempt to explore the commensurability of translation practices and concepts across cultures. In this encounter between the East and the West, there is deliberate emphasis on the various concepts of translation, adaptation, transformation, re-enunciation or rewriting developed in different parts of the globe, in an attempt to highlight how and what Western or mainstream translation theory can learn from these concepts. Questions are raised regarding the culture specificity of translation concepts. To what extent are these concepts rooted in specific cultural histories and practices and can they be understood across culture and language boundaries? There is an implied challenge here to the dominance of Western translation concepts and their uncritical adoption or application to other cultures. Translation plays an important role in the movement of texts across languages, cultures and media. This role becomes even more significant in the movement of ideas and cultural commodities across radically different language cultures. Given its mediating function, translation raises certain ethical issues regarding the cultural and symbolic representation of otherness, including the agency of power relations in asserting national and transnational identities. Vertical encounters, such as those between the Third World and the West or postcolonial societies and imperial powers, often involve the quest by minority cultures for representation in the global marketplace. It is therefore important to study the role of translation in the representation of these cultures in global languages and how translators and other language practitioners have met the rising challenges posed …