The Translation of Experience: Cultural Artefacts in Experiential Translation

Experience is a multilayered, cumulative affair with transformation at its core. Its study, a necessary first step for its translation, requires an exploration of embodiment, the senses, and cultural and social environments.

The second of two volumes, this book explores how artefacts, as outcomes of experience brought about by the “artistranslator” perform semiotic work. This semiotic work arises through the intervention of their makers but also through their viewers/audience, often through the latter’s direct participation in the artefacts’ creation, which we see as an open-ended process. Drawing on diverse examples from across the world, the chapters explore visual materiality, the digital world and the multisensory nature of artefacts such as monuments, festivals, theatre performances, artworks, religious rituals, the urban environment and human bodies―the embodied perception of which may draw holistically or variously on the haptic, olfactory, auditory, kinetic or kinaesthetic senses. Throughout the book, experiential translation is framed as a political endeavour that allows experience to be shared across linguistic, cultural, generational or gendered divides in the form of artefacts that facilitate transformation and the acquisition of knowledge.

This book and its companion volume The Experience of Translation: Materiality and Play in Experiential Translation include an international range of contributions from graduate students and early career researchers (ECRs) to tenured academics in translation studies, comparative literature, performance arts, fine arts, media and cultural studies, as well as educators, artists and curators. It will be of particular interest to translators and arts practitioners, scholars and researchers in the transdisciplinary field of humanities.