Translation — 9/11: Terrorism, Immigration, Language Politics

Abstract

As my book The Translation Zone: a New Comparative Literature (2006) neared completion, I noticed that the topic of translation was increasingly coming out from behind the shadows of academic discussion and into the light of the cultural mainstream. Films such as Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003), in which the Japanese language is associated with a high-rise Tokyo hotel, walling the American traveller into psychic anomie; Sydney Pollack’s The Interpreter (2005), featuring a translator at the United Nations entangled in a plot to assassinate an African leader; or Alejandro González Inárritu’s Babel (2006), a ‘global’ version of the multi-ethnic metropolis movie Crash (2005) drawing English, Arabic, Spanish and Japanese into suspense-ful relationality, have all highlighted the mystery of untranslatability and the paranoia-inducing closure of foreign language worlds. Books like Gregory Rabassa’s 2005 memoir If This Be Treason: Translation and its Discontents, Héctor Tobar’s Translation Nation (2005), a look at the bilingual culture of Los Angeles, and Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson’s Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior (2005) also capitalized on the premise that translation carries you over to some other place, a different site of consciousness, cultural space, national or even species affiliation.