Performing intercultural translation

Translation has been an ongoing challenge worldwide, whether it is of ethnographic, other scholarly or literary works. The anthropological classic, Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, for example, was first translated into Greek as Thliveri Tropiki (‘Pitiful Tropics’) rather than Thlimeni Tropiki (‘Melancholic’, or ‘Sad’ Tropics). ² For me the challenge of translation in Greece hit close to home as early as the 1980s, when I published almost simultaneously in Greek and English one of my first articles ‘The Eye of the Other’. ³ As I searched for available Greek translations of English anthropology and related social sciences to see how core technical terms were being glossed and translated, I realized there was no anthropological translation canon. This lack in translation made clear the fact that transmission of anthropological texts into Greek was itself a project and an exercise in cultural exploration and interpretation, and an ethnographic experience as complex as field research in another society.