Traduttore traditore, The Translator as Traitor

Abstract

This paper discusses the specific situation of French geography with respect to what has been termed “Anglo hegemony” and uses this example to shed some light on issues of translation in geography. Different geographic concerns and ways of writing and doing research emerge not just from different vocabularies, but from a number of social and political specificities of which this paper gives a few examples. That the translator may sometimes be cast as traitor says a lot about a whole “geopolitics of geography”, which for some time in France revolved around the question of postmodernism, and which now probably has more to do with specific understandings of the ethics and relevance of geographical research. In many ways French universalism is second to Anglophone universalism only, but displays strikingly different characteristics in terms of the recognition of difference.