Kate Sturge. Representing Others: Translation, Ethnography and the Museum. Manchester, St. Jerome, 2007, 198 p.

In this book, Kate Sturge reviews writings in English in the fields of Ethnography (chapters 2‑6) and Museum Studies (7 and 8), identifying points which she finds relevant to Translation Studies. I should immediately say that I had prior familiarity with only a small part of the literature she surveys, so I cannot comment on how well she covers the two fields. I will outline the book, focusing on those parts I found most interesting, and add some “outsider” observations as I go. In Chapter 1, Sturge identifies those strands of Translation Studies which she believes can benefit from and perhaps also contribute to Ethnography and Museum Studies. Given the nature of writings in these fields, “…it doesn’t make sense to look at translation as a mainly technical process of re‑encoding stable meanings into a second linguistic code. We will see that the ‘meanings’ encoded by ethnographic representation are complex, unstable, hybrid; they are born of the contingencies of the receiving system rather than those of the source. …translation in this view is a usually conflictual encounter…” (p. 2). The emphasis is thus on the idea that the Other (the people represented in an ethnographic publication or a museum) is not a given but is created by the ethnographer/museum curator, who decides how the Other will be described and also speaks for the Other. In Sturge’s view, Ethnography and Museum Studies have advanced further along this line of inquiry than Translation Studies. Chapter 2 introduces the notion of “translating culture.” This does not refer to the translator’s work of conveying to target-language readers the cultural information underlying source-language wordings. It is rather a metaphor used by some anthropologists to talk about the process of writing a description of a colonized or aboriginal people for Western readers. It’s “translation” in a broad sense, which I believe should always be signalled by inverted commas—a practice which would have been helpful here since on several occasions I had to stop to consider whether the broad or the narrow sense was intended. TS scholars will certainly find it of interest to see how ethnographers have handled intercultural relations, but there is an obvious problem in calling their writing on the subject “translating”: while we have a text on the target side—the published ethnography—on the source side we seem to have not a text but rather the lives and practices of the people being described. However, for the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz, culture is a semiotic and therefore language-like entity; that is, people’s behaviours have meanings for them, and it is these meanings which constitute culture and which we want to have interpreted for us when we read an ethnography (p. 6). Members of a culture who serve as “informants” interpret their culture’s behaviour for the visiting anthropologist, who then makes sense of what has been said. These statements can thus be seen (with some stretching, except where the statements are actually quoted) as a source text. Chapter 3 discusses what anthropologists have had to say about differences between cultures. Franz Boas, the founding figure of American anthropology in the early 20^th century, saw every culture as being equal in the sense of being highly developed in its own terms. Each culture was to be studied on its own terms rather than as an exemplar of various points on a universal scale from primitive to advanced, as the 19^th century “evolutionists” had done. I would add in passing that Boas took this same approach in linguistics, another discipline in which he is a founding figure in the U.S. Indeed his two roles were …