Ethnography, Born-Translated Literature, and Translation: The Case of Syaman Rapongan

• Main Author: Che, Richard Rong-bin
• Format: text
• Published: Archīum Ateneo 2024
• Subjects: “born-translated” Indigenous literature; cross-cultural communication; cultural other; ethnographic translation; literary ethnography; Syaman Rapongan
• Online Access: https://archium.ateneo.edu/kk/vol1/iss41/5; https://archium.ateneo.edu/context/kk/article/2047/viewcontent/KK_2041_2C_202023_205_20Regular_20section_20__20Chen.pdf
• Institution: Ateneo De Manila University

Located in East Asia, Taiwan is an island off the southeast part of Mainland China. After martial law was lifted in 1987, one of the ways by which the long-suppressed Taiwanese Indigenous communities can make themselves be seen has been writing in Chinese, but in a style that intentionally mixes Chinese with their ethnic mother tongues. Accordingly, this mixed literary style brings about great challenges for the English translators of Taiwan Indigenous literature. This paper deals with the English translation problems of Syaman Rapongan’s works against the background of an ongoing dispute over “domestication” and “foreignization” in translation studies, focusing on the issue of how translators can keep the “cultural other” in the texts while succeeding in the task of cross-cultural communication. What can be of great help is the “ethnographic translation” method proposed by, among others, anthropologist Vincent Crapanzano: that is, “the coupling of a presentation that asserts the foreign and an interpretation that makes it all familiar” (52). Focusing on Taiwanese Indigenous literary ethnographer Syaman Rapongan, this paper explores the problems of the English translations of his works and contends that the problems can be attributed to Syaman Rapongan’s writing being a type of “born-translated” literature, as defined by Rebecca Walkowitz. I will then explain specifically how the ethnographic terms he uses can be properly translated without sacrificing their foreignness, so as to retrieve the erased cultural other in translation.