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Lost in translation? The role of language in migrants’ biographies: What can micro-sociologists learn from Eva Hoffman?
Abstract
In her famous memoir Lost in Translation (1989), the journalist and psychoanalyst Eva Hoffman describes her childhood metamorphosis from a Polish into a North American girl by reconstructing her experience with learning a new language. She equates this with loss and acquisition of identities. This article focuses on Hoffman’s interest in language as an identity issue since this is a highly relevant theme for migration researchers, particularly for those working with narrative material. The article explores the role of language in biographical interviews with migrants and discusses language use as an instrument for data collection. It argues that we need to ensure a sensitive and vigilant handling of language in the interview setting, which takes into consideration context, coding, articulation and hybridity. The final part raises questions about the ways in which gender comes into play in migrants’ narratives.
... Ana narrates her biography with an ambiguous articulation of her aspirations to belonging and her trajectory as refugee and migrant. She is always in an in-between or Third Space (Bhabha 2004;Lutz 2011) of negotiation: the liminality (Bhabha 2004) of Ana's position served to counter the conflict created by her abrupt departure from Latin America and the locality she has built for her children and for other migrants in Germany. ...
... Ana narrates her biography with an ambiguous articulation of her aspirations to belonging and her trajectory as refugee and migrant. She is always in an in-between or Third Space (Bhabha 2004;Lutz 2011) of negotiation: the liminality (Bhabha 2004) of Ana's position served to counter the conflict created by her abrupt departure from Latin America and the locality she has built for her children and for other migrants in Germany. ...
The case studies in this volume illustrate the global dimension of flight and migration movements with a special focus on South-South migration. Thirteen chapters shed light on transcontinental or regional migration processes, as well as on long-term processes of arrival and questions of belonging. Flight and migration are social phenomena. They are embedded in individual, familial and collective histories on the level of nation states, regions, cities or we-groups. They are also closely tied up with changing border regimes and migration policies. The explanatory power of case studies stems from analyzing these complex interrelations. Case studies allow us to look at both “common” and “rare” migration phenomena, and to make systematic comparisons. On the basis of in-depth fieldwork, the authors in this volume challenge dichotomous distinctions between flight and migration, look at changing perspectives during processes of migration, consider those who stay, and counter political and media discourses which assume that Europe, or the Global North in general, is the pivot of international migration.
... This can be contentious due to language differences between the researcher and participants, as well as differences in cultural backgrounds, which provide context and meaning to the social world each inhabits. There is a growing body of research that deals with the issues of language interpretation in cross-cultural research, the general consensus of which is a move away from a structuralist framework towards that of poststructuralism (Temple, & Edwards, 2011;Temple, 1997;Lutz, 2011). ...
From 2009 - 2013 Australia witnessed a rapid increase in the number of asylum seekers traveling irregularly from Indonesia to Australia by boat. The then opposition Liberal-National Party (LNP) presented this phenomenon to the Australian public as a consequence of the Labor government’s dismantling of the hard line border security policies implemented by the previous LNP government. However, this framing obfuscated the fact that most industrialised countries around the world witnessed a similar increase in the number of asylum applications during the same period. This trend suggests that a more complex analysis of the root causes of irregular migration is needed in order to explain why asylum seekers were again resorting to this course of action. With the aim of understanding the factors that influence migration paths, thirty male Hazara asylum seekers who were either in transit in Indonesia at the time of interview, or had previously transited through Indonesia before making irregular boat voyages to Australia were interviewed. Through these personal accounts a greater understanding of the factors that influenced their migration decisions can be gained.
Qualitative analysis of these personal migration experiences reveals a variety of pressures that shaped the migration decisions of these men. The findings suggest that forced migrants have a limited ability to direct their own migration outcomes as they encounter a series of barriers and exclusionary policies designed to foster immobility. The analysis highlights structural constraints, personal motivations and fraught tensions between choice and compulsion that people confront in transit locations. The research found that respondents did not want to travel irregularly, and that they emphasised the dangers associated with this action. Nonetheless, the perceived lack of genuine alternatives, and the inability to gain protection in Indonesia drove people towards irregular migration. Participants viewed the Refugee Status Determination process in Indonesia as ineffective, and incapable of finding durable solutions. Participants also felt unable to endure protracted processing periods due to a lack of material support during this time. Other factors included the widely held view of Indonesia as an inhospitable location for forced migrants to live indefinitely. The lack of legal status and protection also contributed to a sense of vulnerability in transit. This vulnerability was coupled with a fear of being arbitrarily detained in one of Indonesia’s detention centres or, worse still, refouled.
Drawing on the complimentary political philosophies of Giorgio Agamben and Simone de Beauvoir, this thesis charts the struggle between structure and agency that participants embody throughout their forced displacement and time in transit. It is argued that while powerful states of the Global North have developed complex exclusionary strategies from territories where the rights of asylum are formally enshrined, asylum seekers find ways of resisting these exclusionary practices, by reasserting their rights in the face of shrinking access to protection.
As a result, it is argued that irregular migration is a consequence of structural limitations embedded in state-centric responses to global displacement. Within this broader context, asylum seekers viewed irregular migration as one of the only logical ways to access protection and reassert their agency. This series of qualitative interviews enables a more complex understanding of the migration experiences of forced migrants navigating the international protection system in the Asia-Pacific region.
... It simply has no social script. Consequently, migrants have to work individually to integrate their migrant experiences into their life stories (Lutz 2011). Biographical interviews such as those presented here can be a relevant pedagogical tool to assist migrant students in this demanding identity-construction process. ...
This study explored the impact of communication strategy (CS) teaching on students’ qualitative and quantitative use of such strategies. In addition, it examined students’ metacognitive awareness related to CSs. The context of the study was English as a foreign language education in Norway. The investigation furthermore examined the influence of proficiency level and motivation on the use of CSs. One group (n = 22) of lower secondary school students (age 15-16) received explicit CS instruction in four two-hour sessions over the course of a semester; a comparison group (n = 13) received no such instruction. An end-of-semester test was employed to examine their actual use of strategies, and questionnaires and interviews were used to tap into their motivation for learning English and their metacognitive awareness of CS use. The results showed that the students who received explicit instruction employed communication strategies more frequently than the students who received no instruction. They also used a higher number of good-quality strategies. In addition, they appeared to be more conscious of the strategies that they utilised. No association between proficiency level and strategy use was found, but there was a modest but positive correlation between motivation and the employment of strategies.
... Schon im Falle klassischer EmigrantInnen wissen wir, dass die Vorstellung vom "Zurücklassen" des bisherigen Lebens, der Erfahrungen und der Sozialisation des Herkunftslandes im Moment der Emigration eine Fehlinterpretation ist: Dies verdeutlichen nachdrücklich etwa biographische Dokumente (Briefe und Tagebücher) polnischer Auswanderer in den USA vom Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts(Morawska 2001) oder das in Eva Hoffmans autobiographischem Roman "Lost in Translation" beschriebene Ringen zwischen Her-und Ankunftssprache(Lutz 2011). Im Falle heutiger, eindeutiger transnationaler Biographien, wird Mehrsprachigkeit oft tagtäglich praktiziert. ...
Obwohl Mehrsprachigkeit auch den Alltag der empirischer Sozialforschung immer stärker prägt, bleibt das Thema in der theoretischen Reflexion über deren Methoden weitgehend ausgeblendet – dies gilt insbesondere für einen Bereich, in der ihr eigentlich eine zentrale Bedeutung zukommt: der Forschung zu transnationalen Biographien. Dieser Beitrag versucht, die Rolle von Mehrsprachigkeit in der Biographieforschung und die Notwendigkeit von Übersetzung als Hindernis und Ressource zu akzentuieren. Zunächst wird dargestellt, welche theoretischen Diskussionen zur Bedeutung der Übersetzung in anderen Disziplinen – Linguistik, post-colonial studies, Ethnologie und Translationswissenschaften – den Stand der Forschung in diesem Feld prägen; anschließend wird anhand von empirischen Fallbeispielen diskutiert, inwieweit der Stand der Theorie der realen Forschungspraxis angemessen ist. Abschließend folgen ein Resümee und ein Ausblick auf aktuelle Entwicklungen in Bezug auf das Thema Übersetzung in der sozialwissenschaftlichen Forschungsmethodologie und -praxis.
Der Artikel knüpft an ein Forschungsfeld an, das sich mit individuellen (bildungs-)biographischen Erfahrungen, Deutungen und Bestrebungen zur sozialen und transnationalen Mobilität von neu zugewanderten Schüler*innen befasst. Anhand der biographischen Erzählungen einer aus Griechenland stammenden Biographin, die sich im Interview als Angehörige der albanischen Minderheit und mehrsprachig positioniert, wird das Spannungsverhältnis zwischen ihren Exklusionserfahrungen im griechischen und deutschen Bildungssystem und ihren (familialen) Bildungsentscheidungen für eine exklusive akademische Bildungsbiographie rekonstruiert. In diesem Zusammenhang wird auch die Bedeutung ihrer – in beiden Bildungssystemen systematisch deprivilegierten – Mehrsprachigkeit für die eigene biographische Praxis herausgearbeitet. Abschließend werden selbst- und machtkritische methodologische Reflexionen für die Weiterführung des Projektes vor dem Hintergrund einer Verknüpfung transnationaler Perspektiven mit einer dialogisch-translingualen Interviewführung diskutiert.
This paper examines the translator’s invisibility and visibility in applying the translation strategies of domestication and foreignization used in autobiographical self-translation from Japanese to English. This study is part of a larger research project investigating the self-translation process I experienced while self-translating my autobiography, originally written in Japanese, my native language, into English, my second language. In this autobiographical self-translation process, the roles of the author, first-person narrator, protagonist, and translator are coterminous. Therefore, the narrative's translation process must be examined from multiple perspectives, which involve, for instance, the author-translator’s perceptions of the new target audience, the events, and participants described in the story, etc. Focusing primarily on the influence of the audience, the present study examines, from a social-psychological perspective, the translator’s style-shifting behavior as manifested in the application of the two translation strategies. Domestication, for instance, can be seen as the translator’s convergence toward the target text audience (i.e., readers) and foreignization as a divergence from them. Self- translators may apply foreignization, not only for divergence but for other reasons—e.g., their emotional attachment toward the source text, story, and characters. In self-translation, the author and translator are identical. This fact may make the issue of translators’ invisibility insignificant. Yet, self-translators may still become invisible when they apply domestication and converge toward the target text audience. But at the same time, the application of domestication or foreignization by self-translators may be regarded as their expression of their selves, which makes them truly visible as translators—likely not to the audience but to themselves.
This paper inquires into the self-translator’s [in]visibility by examining the translation strategies of domestication and foreignization used in autobiographical self-translation from Japanese to English. This study is part of a larger research project investigating the self-translation process I experienced while self-translating my autobiography, originally written in Japanese, my native language, into English, my second language. In this autobiographical self-translation process, the roles of the author, first-person narrator, protagonist, and translator are coterminous. The translation process of the narrative, therefore, must be examined from multiple perspectives, which involve, for instance, the author-translator’s perceptions of the new target audience, the events, and participants described in the story, etc. Focusing mostly on the influence of the audience, the present study examines, from social psychological perspectives, the translator’s style-shifting behavior as manifested in the application of the two translation strategies. Domestication, for instance, can be seen as the translator’s convergence toward the target text audience (i.e., readers), and foreignization as divergence from them. Self-translators may apply foreignization, not only for divergence, but for other reasons – e.g., because of their emotional attachment toward the source text, story, and characters. In self-translation, the author and translator are identical. This fact may make the issue of translators’ invisibility insignificant. Yet, self-translators may still become invisible when they apply domestication and converge toward the target text audience. But at the same time, the application of domestication or foreignization by self-translators may be regarded as their expression of their selves, which makes them truly visible as translators – likely not to the audience but to themselves.
This article discusses the identity reconstruction experiences of the highly educated/skilled Muslim Uyghur immigrants in some Canadian contexts. As a marginalized Muslim ethnic group in China, their migration to the West could be regarded as one of the most effective ways to gain socio-economic and political freedom. With this background, this article tries to explore 12 highly educated/ skilled Muslim Uyghur immigrants’ integration experiences in Canada, through the perspectives of critical race theory, identity politics and Lost in Translation (Hoffman, 1989)—the story about a Jewish family’s new life in Canada. The
Hoffman family, as part of a marginalized Jewish community in the communist
Poland in the 1950s, would struggle to integrate into Canada during the 1960s
and later, which resonates much with the experiences of the Uyghur immigrants
who participated in this study. In a context of “blurred genres” (Geertz, 1983),
where literary works can influence the production of academic texts in multifarious ways, we consider how our engagement with Hoffman’s Lost in Translation compares to how other scholars have sought to make use of her memoir. The findings show that the Uyghur participants have been experiencing very similar dilemmas and challenges that the Hoffman family underwent, but they are not only lost in the relatively apolitical local culture, but the much politicised “White” culture hidden in the discourses around nation building which continue “to centre the experiences of the ‘two founding’ nations of Canada”
(Leroux, 2012, p. 67). Their experiences belie the more optimistic assumptions
that Canadian multiculturalism inevitably fosters fluid pathways to inclusivity
and belonging.
This article is a case study that uses the notion of cosmopolitanism as an analytical tool to explore the life experiences and cultural identities of three children of Chinese migrants living in Spain. Based on life narrative interviews, the article demonstrates that cosmopolitan outlooks and practices emerge in the lives of the participants as a multilayered mechanism that involves, on the one hand, circumstances and conditions such as educational and socioeconomic background, and on the other, a creative strategy aimed at subverting power dynamics and asserting one’s place within society. It is in this regard that the cosmopolitanism of children of Chinese migrants in Spain can be seen as both given and created.
In this essay, I discuss self-translation, particularly autobiographical self-translation, from various perspectives relating to identities, distance, imagination, creativity, and autonomy, while reflecting on the process I experienced self-translating my autobiography, originally written in Japanese, my native and first language (L1), into English, my second language (L2). The present study is unique in that the process of self-translation is examined by the self-translator herself. In the process of self-translation, the self-translator adopts a new language to tell his or her story to a new target audience, using a new set of lenses to view and project the world and the self. This process makes the self-translator discover, rediscover, affirm and/or reaffirm his or her identity – or identities. As this paper attempts to demonstrate, one’s self-translation can thus be regarded as a reflection of his or her self or selves. That is, self-translation is “translating the self,” or as in my case, translating the hybrid self.
This study is an exploration of the self-translation process I experienced while translating my autobiography/memoir, originally written in Japanese, my native and first language (L1), into English, my second language (L2). Entitled Samurai and Cotton: A Story of Two Life Journeys in Japan and America, the English edition was published in the United States in November of 2011. Prior to that, the original work in Japanese was published in Japan in June of 2010. The study is unique in that the process of self-translation is examined by the author-translator herself, who is an applied linguist by training. Moreover, the story, being autobiographical in nature and narrated by the translingual writer and protagonist, serves as metanarrative providing clues about the author-translator’s psyche and transformation as she transitions through geographical, cultural, and linguistic changes. Another uniqueness lies in the fact that the book was translated from Japanese to English. Self-translation between languages as typologically distant as those is extremely rare, whereas self-translation is commonly practiced be-tween Indo-European languages. Japanese and English being so different, linguistically and culturally, translation between these two languages is uniquely challenging. The present study is also significant in that it investigates the dynamic process of self-translation, being one of the pioneering works in self-translation research, a newly emerging branch of translation studies, while focusing on a theme that has not received much attention in the field—loss and gain. As reflected in the title of the study, "Lost and Found in Self-Translation," the main question being asked is: What is lost and gained in self-translation, especially from L1 to L2 and between languages as remote as Japanese and English? While asking this question, the study investigates the process of self-translation that was experienced by the author-translator, in search of an answer to the broader and more fundamental question: What is self-translation? As suggested by its subtitle, "Author-Translator’s Re-encounter with the Past, Self, Inner Voice, and Hidden Creativity," this study also explores the hidden creativity fighting against, and creating value out of, the multiplicity of constraints in self-translation as the author-translator re-encounters the past, self, and inner voice through the mirror of self-translation reflecting the dual selves. Centering upon the main goal of unveiling the dynamics of loss and gain in self-translation, the present study examines the aforementioned topics and questions from interdisciplinary perspectives—not only linguistic, but also textual (e.g., original and second original), motivational (e.g., pain and pleasure), and sociocultural or social psychological (e.g., loss and gain of self-identity). By so doing, this study attempts to “bind” these issues in self-translation by examining the relation-ship between the creativity and the multiplicity of constraints that are linguistic and cultural (e.g., untranslatability), textual (e.g., fidelity, audience), interlingual (e.g., L1 interference), sociolinguistic (e.g., transfer, L1 sociolinguistic norms), rhetorical (e.g., L1 norms), sociocultural or social psychological (e.g., identity crisis), sociopolit-ical (e.g., displacement, immigration), and spatiotemporal (e.g., distance). Each topic is explored and discussed closely with examples drawn from the original and the translated text of Samurai and Cotton.
Eine transnational-biographische Perspektive zeigt Bewältigungsmuster und subjektive Wahrnehmungen von Handlungsmacht von Migrantinnen türkischer Herkunft mit depressiven Beschwerden.
Öffentlich-mediale und professionelle Debatten zeichnen ein Bild von Migrantinnen als Risikogruppe. Das Buch untersucht das Gesundheitshandeln von Migrantinnen türkischer Herkunft mit depressiven Beschwerden aus transnationaler Perspektive. Es zeigt transnational-biographische Orientierungen, differenzierte Wahrnehmungen von eigener und anderer Handlungsmacht sowie Auswirkungen auf die Nutzung formeller und informeller Unterstützung. Der transdisziplinäre, mehrsprachige und traumasensible methodische Ansatz trägt zu Debatten um transnationale Agency und diversitätsbewusste Soziale Arbeit bei.
Obwohl Mehrsprachigkeit auch den Alltag der empirischer Sozialforschung immer stärker prägt, bleibt das Thema in der theoretischen Reflexion über deren Methoden weitgehend ausgeblendet – dies gilt insbesondere für einen Bereich, in der ihr eigentlich eine zentrale Bedeutung zukommt: der Forschung zu transnationalen Biographien. Dieser Beitrag versucht, die Rolle von Mehrsprachigkeit in der Biographieforschung und die Notwendigkeit von Übersetzung als Hindernis und Ressource zu akzentuieren. Zunächst wird dargestellt, welche theoretischen Diskussionen zur Bedeutung der Übersetzung in anderen Disziplinen – Linguistik, post-colonial studies, Ethnologie und Translationswissenschaften – den Stand der Forschung in diesem Feld prägen; anschließend wird anhand von empirischen Fallbeispielen diskutiert, inwieweit der Stand der Theorie der realen Forschungspraxis angemessen ist. Abschließend folgen ein Resümee und ein Ausblick auf aktuelle Entwicklungen in Bezug auf das Thema Übersetzung in der sozialwissenschaftlichen Forschungsmethodologie und -praxis.
This introductory chapter elaborates the theoretical and empirical starting points for this book. Brazil’s Landless Movement (MST) is here construed as a political subject, formed by individuals with divergent experiences, contingently unified in political struggle. Such contingent political subject formation is here critically related to MST’s story of continued resistance. By focusing on how the movement narrative is retold, revised and revived, the book aims to capture continuity of a contingent political subject. The theoretically derived research problem is situated within the interdisciplinary research field of resistance and social movement studies, here introduced through its analytical foci on agents, activities and advocacies. The chapter then introduces the analyzed empirical material—Jornal Sem Terra (all issues between 1981 and 2013), MST-related literature (275 academic texts), and ethnographic sources (18 focus group interviews, 14 individual interviews, participant observation)—in order to discuss how these sources have been selected, retrieved and produced. The chapter also introduces the analytical concepts employed for this book’s exploration into the dimensions of resistance.
This concluding chapter refines the scientific argument unfolding throughout this book, that is, the intimate relation between the writing of history, and the making of resistance. By returning to the book’s original research problem—how to understand continuity of a contingent political subject—the chapter discusses theoretical implications of the presented empirical analyses. In line with previous research, the MST case verifies the movement narrative as a stabilizer that enables political subject continuity. But the empirical analyses of this book also problematize narratives as mere formative stabilizers. The MST story is obviously a flexible enterprise, with ongoing modifications that indicate a most active, and contextually adaptive, usage of the movement narrative. These findings suggest an analytical focus, not only on historiography as political resource, but also on its flexible features. Moreover, the MST story appears to be continuously recharged. Narrative enactment, performed through confrontative and constructive resistance activities, is key for MST’s political subject formation. Hence, the MST story is not only revisited by movement participants, reinforced through their personalized storytelling, revised for more precise applicability, but also revived when recurrently enacted. The making of resistance, through animate storytelling and narrative enactment, thereby nurtures continuity of a contingent political subject.
This empirical chapter sketches the historiography of Brazil’s Landless Movement. By recapturing historical events used by movement participants for contextualization, agents and activities of that context are here re-presented in historiographic terms. The analysis draws empirically on ethnographic interviews and participant observations, as well as MST-produced material, in particular the internal newspaper Jornal Sem Terra. Based on this empirical analysis, historical events are presented as a prequel to the MST story. The portrait of MST’s historiography is fleshed out through aligned historical research, and chronologically presented along the Colonial, Imperial and Republican Epochs of Brazilian history. In sum, the MST prequel encompasses five centuries of insurgencies, construed as historical struggles against nation building, and for land. This overarching theme of the MST prequel then guides the movement’s navigation across Brazil’s uneven politico-economic topography. Thus, the critical inquiry into the MST historiography, analyzing the linkage between prequel and story, particularly explores how political subject formation is performed in dialogue with the past.
This empirical chapter focuses on narrative enactment—how the MST story is actively revived—to explore how the animate movement narrative is related to political subject formation. Drawing empirically on ethnographic interviews and participant observations, the chapter analyses the complex art of becoming the MST protagonist. The mutual search for autonomy, and the collective activity of agricultural food production, are here identified as both horizon of expectation and space of experience. Yet these are also differentiated due to MST participants’ divergent experiences, particularly notable when analytically focusing on the female subject position. Nonetheless, protagonists certainly become articulate when affixing narrative antagonists of state and capital. The ethnographic case study documents how confrontative resistance activities, like the MST luta (struggle), enact the narrative plot of agrarian social conflict. Such narrative enactment embodies the protagonist, and affixes the antagonist, thus reviving the story of Brazil’s Landless Movement.
This empirical chapter examines the stability and flexibility of the MST story, critically dissecting narrative components to identify changes and continuities over time. A qualitative meta-analysis of 275 MST-related scholarly texts demonstrates how aggregated research topics comprise an academic storytelling that replicates the narrative contours, in turn attaining the stability of the MST story. To study narrative changes over time, the chapter then embarks upon a corpus analysis of Jornal Sem Terra between 1981 and 2013. Combined with ethnographic sources, the empirical analyses clearly verify that the movement narrative is considerably constitutive for MST participants, thereby requiring a certain level of stability. At the same time, the historical analysis of Jornal Sem Terra suggests that key narrative characters—antagonists and protagonists—actually change over time, while the narrative plot, that of agrarian social conflict, remains constant. Nevertheless, as the ethnographic analysis suggests, narrative flexibility is clearly limited by the risk of jeopardizing the story’s stability-producing function for MST’s political subject formation.
This paper investigates visual representations of migrants in Slovenia. The focus is on immigrant groups from China and Thailand and the construction of their ‘ethnic’ presence in postsocialist public culture. The aim of the paper is to provide a critical angle on the current field of cultural studies as well as on European migration studies. The author argues that both fields can find a shared interest in mutual theoretical and critical collaboration; but what the two traditions also need, is to reconceptualize the terrain of investigation of Europe which will be methodologically reorganized as a post- 1989 and post-westernocentric. Examination of migration in postsocialism may be an important step in drawing the new paradigm.
The critique of methodological nationalism in the social sciences has posed a theoretical and methodological challenge to qualitative social research. It has forced researchers to reflect on the possibilities and limitations of applying qualitative research methods in their research on transnational social phenomena. We underline the need to examine the influence of the biographical experiences of the researcher on the research process in transnational research settings. We argue that by inducing biographical self-reflection during the research process, it is possible to work out the possible biographical entanglements with the research topic and to reflect their influence on the further development of the research process. In consequence, it is possible to tackle methodologically the “invisible” role of the researcher in the narrative construction of transnational social fields and to show how transnational knowledge production is an intersubjective, relational activity.
The article takes up the novel Sweet Rolls in a Tattoo (2011) by a contemporary Slovak writer, Zuska Kepplová, in order to interrogate the issues of migration, nomadism, travel and mobility in the post-Schengen New Europe. This novel, offering a narrative of transcultural mobility, consists of several interconnected stories of young people moving from the post-socialist Europe in order to study, find work, or merely experience adventure in major European cities such as London or Paris. Unlike previous generations, the nomads of New Europe enjoy freedom to travel, but this unprecedented condition requires negotiating new social contracts, even searching for a new language for their new transnational and transcultural experience.
Both Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation and Edward Said's Out of Place are memoirs that recount a life of constant adjustments and re-orientations of the self, where the anchoring concept of ‘home’ cannot denote a centre upon which their multiple displacements can be tethered. There is no attempt here to imply both of these memoirs can seamlessly be read together in every sense, simply because both are émigré intellectuals; however, their shared trajectory of departures and arrivals crucially foregrounds space in their negotiation of the exilic experience. For both writers, inner dépaysement gives rise to a simultaneous coming to terms with the tensions of belonging that are already apparent within that origin so longed for. To compensate, Hoffman and Said designate language a power of emplacement, in that their shared refuge in it (both linguistic and musical) turns their displaced selves into articulated, and thus inhabited, ones. In configuring the different ‘belongings’ their selves undertake, the displacements and arrivals in Lost in Translation and Out of Place advocate a space for autobiography where plural identity is recognised as ontologically cohesive.
Displacement aufgrund von Verfolgung, Flucht und Vertreibung sowie die verschiedensten Formen von individuellen und kollektiven Arbeitsmigrationen haben in der Gegenwart des ausgehenden 20. Jahrhunderts die „Notwendigkeit des steten Tradierens der akkumulierten Kulturgüter“ (Karl Mannheim) aller scheinbaren Selbstverständlichkeit entkleidet. Nicht nur die verschiedensten Ausgrenzungsprozesse und die damit für einzelne Individuen verbundenen Zwänge, soziale und geographische Orte zu wechseln, sondern auch der darin auch sich vollziehende kontinuierliche Generationenwechsel läßt es fraglich erscheinen, wie Kultur in ihrer Doppelbedeutung als selbstverständlicher „Fonds des Lebens“ einerseits und als „neuartiger Zugang“ zum akkumulierten Traditionsbestand andererseits fortgebildet werden kann.1
Individualität und Individualisierung sind Begriffe, die der Soziologie von ihrem Beginn an eine Herausforderung, vielleicht sogar die Herausforderung bedeutet haben. Die Geschichte des modernen gesellschaftstheoretischen Denkens ist auch die Geschichte des Denkens über Individualität. Daß für die Soziologie das Verhältnis von Gesellschaft und Individuum — oder heute oft: von Struktur und Handeln — das konstitutive Grundproblem bildet, ist jedoch nicht so selbstverständlich, wie wir zu unterstellen geneigt sind; es entspricht der realhistorischen Entwicklung selber und ist durch sie dazu gemacht worden. Der Übergang in die Moderne kann als Individualisierungsprozeß im Sinn einer Freisetzung der Menschen aus ständischen und lokalen Bindungen, einer Pluralisierung der Lebensverhältnisse und eines Geltungsverlusts traditionaler Orientierungen verstanden werden.
Considering the large amount of research being undertaken in Eastern Europe and elsewhere involving the use of more than one language, there has been a remarkable silence in sociological debate about the status of this research. In this article I argue that such issues should be of concern to social scientists generally as well as to linguists. Using my own research with British-Polish communities, I raise some concerns surrounding the translation of concepts. I suggest one way of beginning to address these problematics: an opening of discussion on an analytical level with those who are often seen as mere technicians, translators and interpreters.
This paper argues for treating gender as a key category in the understanding of migratory processes. Starting with an illustration of the absence of women in mainstream migration research, it presents the debate on this phenomenon and its development from a focus on women to one on gender. Through discussion of the debate on current migration phenomena it is demonstrated how gender can be used in a conceptual framework which includes various levels (micro, meso and macro). The paper advocates the analysis of migratory processes within a broader framework of social change.
- Simon S
Lost in translation’: Transcultural translation and decolonization of knowledge. Available at: eipcp
- E Gutiérrez-Rodriguez
Stories of HERMES: A qualitative analysis of (qualitative) questions of young researchers in migration and ethnic studies in Europe
- M Borkert
- De Tona
Towards a methodology of women’s studies. ISS Occasional paper No. 77. The Hague
- M Mies