UC Berkeley

Intercultural translation is a salient feature of communicative interactions in multilingual institutional spaces. The dissertation draws on a concept of intercultural translation that functions as a linguistically radical strategy through which other ways of knowing and being are introduced, with particular emphasis on institutions, multilingualism, and Native languages. The dissertation presents an appraisal of instances of intercultural translation whereby different processes of cross-language interaction and interpretation take place, and through which incommensurable forms are juxtaposed. The juxtaposition resulting from these practices highlights equivalence assumptions and draws attention to what remains equivocal—mainly, how intercultural translation interrogates equivalences and acknowledges equivocation as a transformative source. Viveiros de Castro (2004) introduced the concept of equivocation to include the sorts of conceptual relations that emerge in translation offering different perspectival positions. One goal is to recognize that understandings are not the same and that mutual incommensurability is what enables comparability through a difference in perspectives.

Based on a one-year ethnographic study at an intercultural university in Mexico the dissertation presents three examples of how intercultural translation works as a means and end of language socialization in classroom interactions. Examples demonstrate how lecturers and students engage in intercultural translation as a pedagogical practice. Findings show how the study of intercultural translation informs research practice, specifically, how we come to know other ways of doing, knowing, and being in multilingual contexts. The dissertation describes the modes in which indigenous actors used intercultural translation to modify Mexico’s institutional tutoring program in higher education. It focuses on the selective appropriation of words and meanings, the standardization of concepts, and the configuring of an intercultural frame of reference, whereby members of an intercultural Mexican university introduced the Yucatec Maya word iknal as a hybrid educational system. In sum, the disseratation posits intercultural translation as a critical communicative practice ubiquitous to the dynamics of language in socio-cultural spaces.