EMS Proceedings and Other Publications

Reproduction par traduction : Préjugés, Connotations, Images

Tatjana Böhme-Mehner

tatjana.mehner@t-online.de

Article

PDF - 148.5 kb
Télécharger l’article

Abstract

Reproduction by Translation: Prejudice, Connotation, Images

Ideas on Cultural Transfer and Self-Reproduction between Electro-Acoustic Music-Cultures in the Middle of the 20th Century and their Historiographical Results until Today.

The fact is well known, but less reflected until today. The actually so much discussed cultural transfer and scientific exchange depends on and is related to the overcoming of linguistic and cultural barriers at the same time. But very often overcoming the one means increasing the other. The culturally different connotation helps often to reproduce predjudices, create and confirm images of the self and the other, and becomes so not rarely the base of theory and historiography. Here this process of intercultural information-transfer using language-transfer will be demonstrated and discussed on several well known terms of our art and researche.

The paper is based on and takes its examples from the authors post-doctoral researche-project (including some own translation-experiences). So it figures especially the famous conflict of electro-acoustic aesthetic concepts in France (musique concrète) and Germany (elektronische Musik) with a special focus on the transfer of ideas or the negation of ideas by translating, not-translating and using specific translations. It uses some ideas of the theory of cultural transfer, but more the theory of the histoire croisée [1] for demonstrating the process of constructing history and theory of the own aesthetic concept by using construction and deconstruction of the image of the other.

The concept trys in general to ask critically and constructively to conclude and complete existing studies dealing with the problem in a wider sens musicologically and interdisciplinary [2].

The importance and unimportance of translating and translations depends first of all on the general cultural and scientific self-confidence. If one compares french and german culture one will find here one of the central differences. The general French use of translations and the non-expressed interdiction of using translations of English as well as often French textes in german university-researche and by that fact the importance of the rare translations, the covered force of the publishing houses using exclusively translated textes will be discussed.

Finally the whole approache can be concluded in some exemplary discussed questions in a theoretical way: So it can be given a typological survey on the question, who translates? By that it can be demonstrated what are the reasons for and the resultats of translating.

What is translated? With this question it should not be asked which concrete texts are translated and which not, but it is posed the question on necessary selectivity in cultural transfer, on tendencies and directions.

By that we pose the question on translated and non-translated terms, on the use of real and constructed internationalisms and their connotation, example par excellence is of course the connotation of the french “concrète” en contrast to the often used german “konkret”, which in several uses seams to mean the opposite, the connotative differences between “experimentell” and “expérimentale” will be parallely discussed. From there prejudices and their reproduction in the use of similar and different terms in different and similar contextes will be demonstrated.

In the way of a conclusion it will be given a short survey on the question: Who knows what when and in which way?, and by that a short franco-german image of electro-acoustic terminological and translation-history.

So finally it can be discussed how reproduction of once used terms and translations and by that theories and images functions and how it influences even our todays cultural and intercultural point of view.

[1] Vgl. Michael WERNER / Bénédicte ZIMMERMANN (Ed.): De la Comparaison à l’histoire croisée, Paris 2004.

[2] some musical approaches on the topic will be used and completed, like Pierre COUPRIE: La Terminologie du genre électroacoustique (= Mémoire de DEA), Paris 1998, as well as usual dictionary-definitions we be demonstrated in their differences and analogies.