ABSTRACT
Writing about embodiment is an act of compression: reducing the sensory complexity of someone else's physical experience, or even one's own, into written language that somebody else will understand through sight or sound. Translation, for certain anthropologists and literary critics, can go on between more things than just languages: between forms of expression, for instance, or between cultures. Translation scholarship increasingly centres the intermediary, and puts them in the centre of conflict as it does so. Subtitling is a problematic kind of compression, as told by critical visual anthropologists who study and make subtitled ethnographic film. The paradox of writing about embodiment might be best summed up by thinking about this process of audiovisual translation. The move from embodiment to language is, first, a shift of form: if languages are codes, then so is form; the form of a translation isn't always the form in which the original was expressed.
