Sites of Translation: What Multilinguals Can Teach Us About Digital Writing and Rhetoric, Laura Gonzales. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI (2018)

摘要

Every so often, I will struggle to try to describe an Indian spice to someone who isn't Indian and doesn't speak Hindi. Hing (pronounced hee-ng), for example, is one such spice. In very small amounts, you put it in a wide variety of Indian dishes-but specifically lentils (or dal in Hindi). Raw, hing has a mildly off-putting and sulfuric smell, but cooked, it provides a kind of garlicky, onion-like saltiness to Indian dishes. As Indian food writer Priya Krishna writes, it is "like salt but in a funkier way (and without any sodium)." It is, to her, what "makes Indian food taste more Indian" (Krishna, 2018). While I recently learned that the English word for hing is Asafoetida (a word that no Indian person would use), I still describe hing not by translating it into its English word, but rather by describing what it tastes or smells like, how it is used, where you might find it. In translating, I evoke embodied experiences that are intrinsically linked to my identity and culture. This process is not only multisensory, but it is also multimodal. In Sites of Translation, Laura Gonzales insightfully explores this exact phenomenon among multilinguals and its implications for multimodal rhetoric. She calls these moments "translation moments," instances in time "when individuals pause to make a rhetorical decision about how to translate a word or phrase from one named language to another" (2). Translation moments, she argues, are when one might pause to ask, "Should I use this word or that word? What word or phrase would be most appropriate in this context, for this audience? Should I use a word at all, or would a picture be more useful" (2)?