Dr. Anthony Pym (Professor of Translation and Intercultural Studies, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Spain), “Inculturation and its Alternatives”
The Vatican, as one of the world’s largest multilingual institutions, has a highly developed translation policy. The cornerstone of that policy is called “inculturation,” understood as the incorporation of primary cultures into the culture of the Church, and the enrichment of Church culture as a result. The Catholic Church thus rewrites its history as a story of successive translations. This dynamic model can be made to speak to Homi Bhabha’s use of “cultural translation,” or indeed Brazilian theorizing of translation as cannibalism, except that here, in the Vatican, what is being justified is well-argued cultural imperialism. This lecture will interrogate the origins of inculturation as a concept and attempt to apply it to other large-scale translation projects: world literature, the European Union, capitalism, modernity, even the university system. Is translation perhaps always in the service of one kind of inculturation or another? Then again, if there is inculturation, could there also be out-culturation, meta-culturaltion, sub-culturation?
