Response: Two Notes on the Topic of Translation

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It is an honor to have been given a chance to be an early reader of the valuable papers gathered in this special issue of Cultural Analysis . I have enjoyed and profited from each of the contributions shared here and each has prompted new reflections in, on, and for my own scholarly practice and for the webs of collaboration and communication within which I am suspended (Jackson 2023). As a monolingual English speaker whose main ethnographic engagements have unfolded among other English speakers, I approach sharing any reflections here with considerable sheepishness. Yet, despite my own monolingual positionality, linguistic, and more broadly communicative and semiotic, frameworks have provided much scholarly capital across my work as a folklorist and ethnologist. In the frameworks in which I was trained, questions of translation have been a constant center of attention, and I have benefitted mightily from these streams of scholarship and practice. In dialogue with the authors, I would like to evoke something of the “Americanist tradition” in which I was socialized, particularly as relates to the issues under discussion here (Darnell 1973, 2001; Valentine and Darnell 1999).

In a private letter sent to W. H. Holmes by Franz Boas (July 24, 1905), later published by George Stocking under the title “The Documentary Function of the Text,” Boas argued for the importance of publishing fully bilingual editions of Native American (and, by extension, other) narratives collected during linguistic and ethnographic fieldwork (1974, 122–23). The specific case prompting Boas’s intervention was the then-forthcoming publication, by the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE), of Haida Texts and Myths: Skidegate Dialect as recorded, translated, and edited by John R. Swanton (Swanton 1905). Holmes was then Chief of the BAE, for which Swanton was the first staff researcher to have trained formally and earned the PhD. While technically a Harvard University graduate, he worked closely with Boas at Columbia University while still a student, earning his PhD with a study of the “Morphology of the Chinook Verb.” Folklorists will wish to recall that, like Boas himself, Swanton was an active member of the American Folklore Society, serving as its President in 1909 (Swanton 1910; Steward 1960). In urging Holmes to publish all—and not simply a smaller sample—of the Haida stories that Swanton gathered from, and translated with, Haida consultants in a full bilingual edition, Boas stressed:

I do not think that anyone would advocate the study of antique civilizations or, let me say, the Turks or the Russians, without a thorough knowledge of their languages and of the literary documents in these languages; and contributions not based on such material would not be considered adequate. In regard to our American Indians we are in the position that practically no such literary material is available for study and it appears to me as one of the essential things that we have to do, to make such material accessible. My own published work shows, that I let this kind of work take precedence over practically everything else, knowing it is the foundation for all future researches. Without it a control of our results and deeper studies based on material collected by us will be all but impossible. (Boas 1974, 122–23)

I recommend reading the full letter, where Boas lays out all the varied good ends that such future research can achieve and where he highlights the disadvantages that accrue when translations enter the scholarly record unaccompanied by companion source texts.

For the history of linguistics, anthropology, and folkloristics, Boas’s letter is now an oft-cited document for understanding and assessing the “text tradition” within the larger “Americanist tradition” in these fields (ex. Bauman and Briggs 2003, 255–98). This is not a suitable context for a deeper reading, or fuller contextualization, of it. The narrower point that I wish to raise here is how, within the scholarly stream of which my teachers, myself, and my students are a part, translation was of the greatest significance, but it was always to be iterative and provisional. Among other battles that Boas’ is fighting in his letter to Holmes is against the widespread notion that translation is a mechanical, one-time process that results in a stable, primarily referential, target document that then is thus made into the primary or sole resource for target language users or audiences.

Boas’s larger arguments for a more dynamic approach—what Patience L. Epps, Anthony K. Webster and Anthony C. Woodbury call “A Holistic Humanities of Speaking” are made in other venues, most famously in his founding “Introduction” to the International Journal of American Linguistics and in the Introduction to the Handbook of American Indian Languages (Boas 1911, 1917; Epps, et al. 2017). For our purposes here, I would just note that I read the authors in this collection to be framing their approaches to translation—as diverse as these are—in alignment with this basic orientation within the text-minded, but still contextualist, Americanist approach to linguistic anthropology and folkloristics. A translation, whether literal or more broadly conceptual, is an often remarkable as well as helpful, but still always contingent and provisional, accomplishment. As suggested by each of the authors in this issue, translations can always be further thickened, can be more carefully or critically annotated, and can always be shifted towards (still) more dialogical engagement and reflexive reassessment.

Cultural Analysis responses are intended to be brief, and I am already on track to exceed my allotment of words. I would like to pursue individual engagement with each of the fine papers gathered here. Each in their own way is intersectional with my own concerns and each is, or can be set, in intertextual relationship with the others. I will find opportunities to engage with the authors in other venues. With what space remains to me, I would like to note that translation of longer runs of oral or written discourse is a concern for all of the authors, but that in each instance, special attention is being given—and needs to be given—to essential keystone words and phrases. There is a kind of partiality in which a key term like quilt (Luo) or sustainability (Thurston) or race (Zhang) or survivance (Bender) has to be given special attention because so much hangs on the specific contextualized translation involved. This dynamic is true also in “monolingual” contexts of cross-cultural and inter-semiotic translation and explication, but as shown in this collection of papers, it is of particular importance in multilingual settings across greater and lesser degrees of difference.

This instructive partiality is the nature of the classic keywords phenomenon and work of the sort pursued in this collection can be related to newer and very therapeutic scholarly interest in bilingual keyword studies.¹ Illustrative of such related work is the Chinese-English Keywords Project (CEKP) led by Louisa Schein and pursued with a range of colleagues (China Made 2019; Rippa 2019). As part of their larger work, this group of scholars has limned the Chinese terms通道 (tongdao, +/- “passageway”), 区 (qu, +/- “area”), 物流 (wuliu, +/- “logistics”), 速度 (sudu, +/- “speed”), 安置 (anzhi, +/- “suitable resettlement”), and 方便 (fangbian, +/- “convenience”). This project comes to mind when contemplating Wenhong Luo’s thick translation work on “quilt”—as the case best known to me from my work with her in joint projects—but examples are abundant in these collected papers. Instances herein include Juwen Zhang’s important consideration of “race” (vis-à-vis Chinese), Mark Bender’s consideration of “poison” (vis-à-vis Northern Yi) and Timothy Thurston’s account of “sustainability” (vis-à-vis Tibetan). All of these instances are in accord with this important bilingual keyword studies research line, as is Thurston’s earlier work on 文化载体 (wenhua zaiti, +/- “cultural carriers”) and all of the contributions to a valuable recent issue of Western Folklore on keywords in Chinese folkloristics (Thurston 2025; You et al. 2025).² Related too is Yu Luo’s (2018) very instructive thick translation work on 原生态 (yuanshengtai, +/- “original ecology”).

There is so much more that I would like to say related to these important papers. I know that I have benefitted greatly from reading them and that I will revisit them regularly in the context of my own work. Each author, in their own way, has been an invaluable translator helping me gain access to diverse colleagues, experiences, discourses, and understandings of worlds not my own.