Translation and Transaction in American Immigrant Phrasebooks
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8895698 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Laura J Murray (0000-0001-6828-5119, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1996 |
| Volume | 26 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 139-162 |
| Publication date | 1996-08-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Canadian Review of American Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0007-7720 • E-ISSN: 1710-114X |
| Publisher | University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.3138/cras-026-02-06 |
| OpenAlex | W2054421395 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 6 |
Think about the phrasebook—perhaps one of those infuriating and handy guides you've taken along on a holiday. A phrasebook stages an encounter between two people speaking different languages. It is a script, an ideal scenario, for courteous and intelligible cross-cultural dialogue. The script of the phrasebook may be a product of the cultural and linguistic patterns of either of the languages it includes, or it may represent an attempt by an author from one of the cultures to guess the conversational norms and topics of the other. The phrasebook's downfall is, of course, that it presupposes that the unsuspecting partner in dialogue will also know the script, and agree to follow it. If this does not happen—that is, if the interlocutor, instead of cooperating by saying, "Oui, Monsieur, le train va partir à sept heures moins quart," goes off on a diatribe about the railway strike—then the phrasebook user is stranded. If the interlocutor does cooperate (unlikely as it may be outside of the language classroom), the resulting conversation is not in fact a significantly cross-cultural event, but a trivial or at least controlled encounter on a small piece of shared ground. Either way, the phrasebook represents a very precarious and limited sort of interaction. And this is what interests me. Phrasebooks, to the extent that they display or enable scripted, blocked, or uncomprehending encounters, may serve as a productive meta- phor for scripted, blocked, or uncomprehending encounters between dif- ferent peoples.1
Conversation · Database transaction · Event (particle physics · Ideal (ethics · Immigration · Linguistics · Political science · Product (mathematics · Sociology · sort · Computer Science · Law · Philosophy · Translation Studies and Practices
| Citations per year | 0.08 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2001 - 2017 (17) |
| Highly cited | No |