Roger F Malina
Draft April 25 2011
Michael Punt in his LRQ editorial asks some simple questions:
as we move into a new cultural context, of e-culture, what is gained, what is
lost? When two cultures interface there can be constructive or destructive
interference. What knowledge is being transferred, or constructed, by whom and
to whom? Is the e-book really that
important in the context of global culture? His skepticism I think rightfully
argues that we are very much in the ‘dark’ ages and not yet the “middle ages”
of the way that digital cultural is re-shaping texts. Martin Zierold in his LRQ
commentary, points to the writing of Vilem Flusser who emphasized that
these new cultural tropes have to
be learned, and this takes time.
One way to think of this is as a problem of ‘translation”.
In Euclidian Geometry the three ‘orthogonal” transformations
are translation, rotation and reflection. Euclidian “rigid’ transformations
preserves the properties of the objects, they are”isometric”. The nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries saw the development in mathematics of ‘non-Euclidian’
geometries with profound consequences in physics. We now know that the universe
is “non-Euclidian”. Special and General Relativity informs us that space and
time are un-separable and that we need to think of ‘manifolds’ which may be
Euclidian on small scales but very much more complex on larger ones, with folds
and singularities.
Needless to say “culture’ is non-Euclidian and as we move
ideas, or objects or processes, around ‘the space of culture”, the move to
e-culture is not isometric.
Translation Studies have recently emerged as a new focus for
understanding a number of problems in the humanities, with the expansion of the
métier of textual translation to cross- cultural studies, and more recently
inter-disciplinary studies. I want to explore here the usefulness of some of
the concepts of Translations Studies to current discussions on the relations
between the art and sciences.
