Anthony Pym, on Inculturation and Its Alternatives

Anthony Pym is Professor of Translation and Intercultural Studies, University of Rovira i Virgili, Spain. Currently, he is Visiting Researcher at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, a Graduate School of Middlebury College. He is also President of the European Society for Translation Studies, a fellow of the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies, and Professor Extraordinary at the University of Stellenbosch. He has been invited to give a talk about the Vatican’s translation policy:

 

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?