Presentation

Although translation and migration have always been intimately connected, their relationship is only beginning to attract the attention of translation scholars and cultural theorists. Migrants are translated beings in countless ways. They remove themselves from their familiar source environment and move towards a target culture which can be totally unknown or more or less familiar, depending on factors such as class and education as well as reasons for migrating; they most likely will have to learn or perfect their skills in another language in order to function in their new environment; their individual and collective identities will experience a series of transformations as they adjust to the loss of their place of birth and attempt to turn it into a gain; they may be expected to leave their history behind so as to fit better into the socio-historical context of their place of adoption; the new versions of their selves may be “perfect” translations, creating the illusion that they are native to the target culture, or retain traces of the foreign, proclaiming their difference and forcing transformation on the target culture. While some migrants achieve a high degree of translatability—hence of invisibility—most remain visible because they carry along many untranslatable components, ranging from visual appearance to cultural practices and beliefs. The title chosen for this special issue endeavours to illustrate these difficulties of insertion by bracketing off the prefix in “immigration”. In other words, immigrants always remain migrants at some level since they continue to belong to at least two cultures, often in problematic ways. As many of the essays included here show, the concept of space is central to understanding the phenomenon of migration. Early voyages of exploration created what Mary Louise Pratt terms contact zones between explorers and natives where, in spite of uneven power relations, negotiation and interpretation had to take place in order to make sense of each other’s language and customs. This hybrid space gave rise to the métier of interpreter and to the genre of travel writing, respectively addressed here in different contexts by Ginette Demers and Paola Smecca. Throughout history migration has led to the creation of what Homi Bhabha has called a “Third Space” (Bhabha, 1994). In today’s age of globalization it has become particularly pressing to theorize about what happens within this space in terms of cultural transformations and linguistic tensions. The question which Ovidio Carbonell was asking in 1996—“What does it mean to migrate into another tongue?” (Carbonnell, 1996, p. 81)—still needs to be carefully examined from a translation perspective. Bhabha has convincingly written about the third space as “a contradictory and ambivalent space of enunciation” which “though unrepresentable in itself, … constitutes the discursive conditions of enunciation that ensure that the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity; that even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read anew” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 37). According to Carbonell, who borrows from Bhabha, a close examination of the translational process within that space is necessary because “[w]riting in postcolonialism, an age of constant definition, contention and ambivalence, requires that the motives, the processes and the outcome of all translation activity be defined by translation theory, as one of the most relevant fields of any cultural project” (Carbonell, 1996, p. 94). In addition to the very productive metaphorical treatment of migration, as illustrated by Bhabha’s formulation, translation studies can investigate the harsh realities of the difficulty of insertion into a new context, the learning of another language, the loss of a mother tongue and of one’s own history, the necessity to construct a new identity in order …