Babel - Volume 70, Issue 5, 2024

The scholarly debate in translation studies and related fields has extensively addressed the definition, scope, and limitations of translation. We contend that museum translation, which encompasses both the traditional “translation proper” as well as the non-verbal and multimodal aspects of translation, is central to this debate. Museum translation covers an extensive spectrum of perspectives, which contribute to the expansion of the concept of translation and the field of translation studies. It capitalizes on the intrinsic interdisciplinarity of museum studies and translation studies, fostering a profound exchange of disciplines and serving as an ideal foundation for discussing the boundaries of translation. It has a dynamic nature that can contract or expand to suit the researcher’s perspective and disciplinary concentration. A comprehensive examination of the intricate procedures encompassed by museum translation is, therefore, timely. In this article, we examine and compare different applications of this concept and provide an overview of how various disciplines and research foci have approached this area of study. We aim to contribute to the ongoing development of the concept of museum translation and its position in translation studies, a call further addressed by each author in this special issue titled “Museums as Spaces of Cultural Translation and Transfer.”

This paper explores the museum visitor experience as a form of translation. It argues that if a given exhibition can be seen as a cultural translation, then it is also true that the visitor’s reading of that exhibition constitutes a further layer of translation, as the visitor enacts their own transformation of the culture on display. The paper draws on intertextuality as a means to understand the ways in which this transformation occurs. It delineates a three-level typology of intertexts employed by the visitor and considers how the use of such intertexts constructs the visitor’s positionality in regard to the exhibition. The paper focuses on data from a diasporic museum, the Museum of Chinese in America, and applies a methodology involving analysis of TripAdvisor reviews and post-visit diaries to the online museum. The paper concludes that diaspora museums are a case in which the particular nexus of identity issues at work provide a more complex view of the visitor experience as translation.

This contribution, which sits at the intersection of translation studies and museum studies (MS), seeks to explore multiple forms of interpretation developed by museums, whereby interpretation is considered, from an MS perspective, as a variety of museum aids creating a context and conveying mediated meanings about the objects on display. The focus is on individual interpretative texts produced by an Italian art gallery, the Pinacoteca di Brera, as the results of various interpretation processes about the same piece of art: the traditional label, the online description, the general audio guide, and the audio description for the blind and the visually impaired (the latter comprising both the visual description itself and the art historical description). A selection of texts in Italian and their translations into English describing four artworks from the museum collection are compared in a bid to shed light on the distinct layers of interpretation and ways of translating and representing the objects for different expected audiences through intralingual, interlingual, and intersemiotic translation practices.

According to Statistics Estonia, in 2022, there were 170 museums in Estonia with 277 visitor sites, all of which contribute to preserving, shaping, and communicating our memory and identity, translating our culture to the people of Estonia and international visitors alike. Among European countries, Estonia has the most museums per 100,000 inhabitants. In 2022, nearly 2.5 million people visited museums, which makes 1,769 attendances per 1000 inhabitants. Museum translation is integral to translation studies but has not been thoroughly studied in Estonia. The article attempts to reflect on the communicative potential of interlingual translation in the University of Tartu Museum, using the concepts developed in museum translation research. Estonia is an interesting case for discussion because, while it is a country with a very small population, it is a multilingual country, where about 30% of the population do not speak Estonian as their first language. As a small and multilingual country, museums cannot rely on Estonian-speaking visitors only; they also depend on foreign visitors. The research objective is to find out how the University of Tartu Museum communicates with visitors who do not understand Estonian and what communicative strategies have been used in the past.

This paper addresses the challenge museums of catastrophic history face, striving to translate between history and memory in creating a meaningful and sensitive experience for individual visitors, not only evoking the past but also impacting the present and future. This study focuses on the Jewish Museum Berlin and asks how the museum can impact individual visitor journeys and concurrently address the public demand for memory, the contradictions between museum mission and public perception, and the perceived distance of visitors from historical events. The study builds on memory and translation studies research and the concepts of history, story, and identity. An analysis of entangled memory (Feindt et al. 2014), here applied as an inspiration for generational translation, shows how the crossover between memory and translation studies provides insight into the work of memory museums. Previous research and the history, mission, identity, architecture, and conflicts of the Jewish Museum Berlin show that museums – as (unfinished) collective memories – allow the creation of space for individual reflection and the interpretation of past and present to create a narrative. The work of memory museums is complex, but the concepts of generational translation and entangled memory are valuable tools in provoking and enabling meaningful experience and reflection.

Whether directed at adults or children, popularization can be viewed as a process of “translating” and “recontextualizing” expert discourse for a lay audience. In fact, knowledge dissemination for children appears to entail an additional form of “translation,” given their limited background knowledge. This “re-translation” often occurs on dedicated websites based on “edutainment.” While most museum websites function as promotional tools or as agents of knowledge dissemination, a small number of them are targeted at children and offer texts that insert museum objects in a broader context. By means of a small case study, this paper explores how knowledge is popularized and presented in two science museum websites: the Natural History Museum (NHM) in London and OLogy, the science website for children of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York. From a corpus-linguistic and discourse-analysis perspective, our interest lies in how popularization takes shape in these two websites, the former intended for different age groups and the latter explicitly addressing children. Quantitative and qualitative results show similarities and dissimilarities, thus accounting for different types of popularization as forms of translation. The analysis aims to grant insights to translators and interpreters engaged in museum adaptations and translation of contexts.

This article analyzes the recently renewed, permanent exhibition of the Royal Museum for Central Africa (AfricaMuseum) in Tervuren, Belgium. The museum is seen as a translational space, considering the parallels between, on the one hand, curatorial strategies to represent cultural otherness and, on the other, processes of cultural and interlingual translation (Sturge 2007). We draw on an interdisciplinary mindset of translation as change and choice, as a multimodal and multimedial activity, and as an inevitably meaning-transforming process. Pressured to keep pace with the rapidly evolving public debate on decolonization, the curators-translators of the AfricaMuseum are aware that they are dealing with “sensitive texts” (Simms 1997) and have, accordingly, adopted a set of strategies to reduce perceived “translation risks” (Pym and Matsushita 2018). The article explores these strategies at three levels of translation operating in the museum: cultural, intersemiotic, and interlingual. In particular, we reveal the inherent tensions in the current display by discussing scenographic interventions that undermine the decolonization efforts in a number of galleries. These tensions are conceptualized as incomplete or incoherent forms of translation and illustrate the “work in progress” in the AfricaMuseum.