Comments on: Seeing is Disbelieving http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/2012/11/05/seeing-is-disbelieving/ Responses to Media and Culture Fri, 12 Feb 2016 19:35:04 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.7.5 By: Liz http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/2012/11/05/seeing-is-disbelieving/comment-page-1/#comment-370792 Thu, 08 Nov 2012 21:10:32 +0000 http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/?p=16210#comment-370792 Thanks, Kyle. I actually finished writing this piece and ordered your book, because I realized I’m getting closer to issues of translation in my own work. Increasingly, as you say, I’m thinking about how access and translation reveal the constructedness of media experiences and the normalization of certain constructions to the exclusion of others. Hope to talk about it in person one of these days!

]]> By: Kyle Conway http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/2012/11/05/seeing-is-disbelieving/comment-page-1/#comment-370769 Thu, 08 Nov 2012 15:54:25 +0000 http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/?p=16210#comment-370769 Liz, thank you for this post. I spent last weekend at a translation studies conference, where people frequently invoked the metaphor of invisibility. (It’s a common metaphor largely because of Lawrence Venuti’s book The Translator’s Invisibility.) Translators are very conscious of the idea (according to some) that because their function is to transmit ideas rather than originate them (i.e., because they are mediators, not authors), they should be self-effacing. What your post does is add another dimension to the political aspect of invisibility — this is an important intersection (one that is unexplored, to my knowledge) between translation studies and disability studies.

What’s different, however, is that in translation studies, calls to make mediation visible are usually calls to make the people consuming translations aware of the foreignness of what they are consuming. Translations into English, for instance, that appear to present a foreign text as if it had been written in English have the effect of erasing markers of difference. There’s something paradoxical about erasing difference when the purpose of translation is to bring something foreign into a domestic sphere.

Here, though, it seems the politics of visibility has much less to do with the consumers of translation (who are certainly well aware of the mediation taking place) and everything to do with people able to understand the original, who are forced to recognize that the message they are receiving is also mediated. I doubt they would put it in these terms, but making fun of Callis seems to signal a deeper, unspoken unease with the mediated nature of communication. (Of course, it signals much more than that, as you point out.)

I hope you’ll write more on this. I’m going to have to think about the implications of this shift in focus, but I’m eager to hear more.

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