The Traffic in Meaning: Translation, Contagion, Infiltration

Introduction: The city as translation zone

“…Pratt defined "contact zones" as "social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination-like colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today" (ibid., 4). Translation is logically one of the major activities in the contact zone, and Pratt (2002) developed this connection in "The Traffic in Meaning: Translation, Contagion, Infiltration". Emily Apter's (2006) The Translation Zone is a wide-ranging attempt to reshape both translation studies and comparative literature by including the politics and technologies of translation.…”

An Other Unspeakability: Levi and Lagerszpracha

“…The number on his arm, an indelible element of the camp's living "traffic in meaning," supersedes the narrative potential of his own native language. 36 The sign of the tattooed number is the threshold, indexing a story that cannot be told in a national language. Here we may recall Levi's role as spokesperson for the untranslatable Hurbinek, "who had fought like a man, to the last breath, to gain his entry into the world of men, from which a bestial power had excluded him; Hurbinek, the nameless, whose tiny forearm-even his-bore the tattoo of Auschwitz; Hurbinek died in the first days of March 1945, free but not redeemed" (Truce, 198).…”

Juan de Betanzos, the Man Who Boasted Being A Translator

“…This derives in a decrease in intrinsic, proper, semantic content, and in a super abundance of extrinsic, added meaning. 74 Another example of linguistic, and semantic "traffic" 75 (Pratt, 2002), a form of cultural colonization, will be studied below.…”