Translation of museum narratives: linguistic and cultural interpretation of museum bilingual texts.

Sonaglio, Claudia (2016) Translation of museum narratives: linguistic and cultural interpretation of museum bilingual texts. Masters thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

As organisations in the service of society, museums are platforms where cultural heritage is valued and where cross-cultural understanding (or misunderstanding) takes place. The contribution of translation studies to museum communication is still largely unexplored, despite museums increasingly playing relevant roles in collecting, preserving, representing and translating cultures for audiences no longer community or nationally determined.
This study investigates some fundamental characteristics of how museums interpret their collections and portray them to the public by analysing bilingual texts from object labels presented in museums. Starting from a social semiotic concept of museum communication, this study explores how written texts produced by museums are embedded in the institutional culture and reflect specific, western-centred ideologies. Drawing on Ravelli’s (2006) communicative frameworks, adapted from Halliday’s Systemic Functional Approach, the study analyses how translation deals with the ideational and interpersonal choices of the original text by examining in particular issues of transitivity, modality, attitude and the use of cultural specific items. This has profound implications for a wider international audience who is unlikely to share the same ideologies on past events. Results suggests that translation has a pivotal role to play in ensuring that meanings at ideational and interpersonal level are sensitively communicated to a cultural diverse audience.

Item Type:	Thesis (Masters)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies
Depositing User:	Users 4971 not found.
Date Deposited:	18 May 2017 08:44
Last Modified:	01 Nov 2017 01:38
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/63556
DOI:

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