Translation Between Cultures Is Never Easy Or Total

By Author: linda clinton
Total Articles: 11
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In linking three key texts and their interactions rather than focusing on one text or one concept, I glimpse how the first emperor would know the texts in competition for founding the authority of a legitimate state, but I also demonstrate how under-standing one moment in one culture requires a significant investigation of earlier texts and traditions. If Qin Shi Huangdi established an empire, he established and ruled through the political and communication theories that preceded him, just as his founding act would persist after him. In arguing for the need to know at least one culture beyond their own another's cosmology, language, educational attitudes, speech genres, and intellectual debates I ask scholars of rhetoric and composition to slow the rush to Juicy Couture Watch apprehend the globe and its transnational spaces, and instead to study and teach a specific culture, recognizing its history, complexity, and diversity more fully. Translation between cultures is never easy or total, but it can be "more than the mirror of our minds" (Richards 86).

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... earlier work ("Why Do") I argued that, to better understand classical Chinese communication theory, one must engage Chinese vocabulary unique to their theories of communication. I examined two key concepts, shi and wuivei, concepts not concerned with textual features, but with the rhetorical situation. My purpose was to avoid the established concepts of Western rhetoric and its well-known descriptions of tropes and genres, and instead to develop insights based in the Chinese tradition. I tried to give up persuasion, sophistry, deliberation, identification, and the dictionary full of Western words that enable the study of Western rhetoric but also close off understanding of other cultural rhetorics. Although my purposes are different in Juicy Couture Necklaces this essay, I also seek to escape rigging out Western ideas in "some fresh terminology or other disguise". Even so, those Western concepts, so entwined with comparative work, slip in under the guise of contrast and expediency. Comparative work is fraught with contradiction and contamination, yet it must continue, as cross-cultural communication requires the languages of two cultures, not just a general interest or tolerance.

The study of a different culture nurtures counter-discourses, the discourses that speak back to power, and as Wendy Brown teaches us, the counter-discourses help us in two ways. First, they help us respond to the dominant discourse with voices strong from different traditions of thought. Second, they unmask dominance's pretence to depoliticize education and render it as neutral writing or reading. When the texts of other cultures speak with rich and full voices, then issues of power and justice, different conceptions of power and justice, are audible. If a teacher knows Chinese texts, then she can respond to claims that China lacks a metaphysical tradition with evidence from the Daodejing. She can respond to claims that China lacks a tradition of the rule of law with evidence from Han Fei. She can respond to claims that China lacks a tradition of care ethics with Confucian ethics based in family care. She can respond to claims that China has no tradition of rhetoric with a careful discussion of what political communication meant in classical China.