This came across as an ‘emerging theme’ from AHRC research strand.

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The need for diverse cultures to understand and communicate with each other is stronger than ever, and ‘translation’ is an essential tool in ensuring that languages, values, beliefs, histories and narratives can be mutually shared and comprehended. We need to consider not only the complex mechanisms of translating one language into another, but also more broadly how cultural exchange and transmission functions in a variety of circumstances and periods, including communication and miscommunication, multiculturalism, toleration and migration. Translation includes the translation of the past into the present; and of ideas from one culture to another, one medium to another, or from one discipline to another.

These issues have enormous policy relevance. The UK needs its policy-makers, intelligence services, legal system and police force to be fully informed about the cultural, linguistic and ethnic diversity of its multi-faceted diasporic communities. We also require diplomats, charitable organisations, senior military officials and businesses who can engage sensitively with a highly complex global cultural landscape. Research in these fields informs knowledge of strategically significant parts of the world, such as Afghanistan, India, Iraq and South America, and helps us engage in true dialogue with our near neighbours in Europe in government, business and cultural matters. Furthermore, the global significance of the UK creative economy—including institutions such as the BBC World Service and the forthcoming Cultural Olympiad—will need to build upon a deeply informed engagement with cultural dynamics and diversity. In terms of skills and capacity, the Translating Cultures theme will reinforce the next generation of language-based area studies in fields of international strategic significance, and it will influence the development of modern languages curricula at a time when economic success and cultural diplomacy have a great dependency on linguistic skill.

Theme Development

The AHRC has identified Translating Cultures as a priority area. We are at an early stage of scoping out both the focus of our activity and the mechanisms by which any activity will be delivered under this emerging theme. However based on our initial scoping activity there are a range of possibilities for cross-disciplinary and cross-sectoral work, including: how different cultures engage with concepts such as freedom; the significance of non-textual forms of communication (art, dance, music); the power and creativity of language and rhetoric; the development of new languages and codes; the support of endangered languages and the understanding of how languages are interpreted.
The ‘Translating Cultures’ theme will bring together a critical mass of arts and humanities researchers across a range of disciplines to provide a powerful engagement with these intellectual challenges and opportunities for political, social, economic and cultural benefit.

Current Funding Opportunities

Research Networking and Fellowships
The AHRC’s Research Networking and Fellowships schemes currently have highlight notices for Translating Cultures. Initially, these highlight notices will remain in place until April 2011. Proposals should have arts and humanities research at their core, although collaboration with disciplines or organisations outside the arts and humanities will be welcomed where appropriate.

Whilst the criteria for Research Networking remain the same, the highlight notice builds on the flexibility of the Fellowships Scheme to encourage collaborations across disciplinary and institutional boundaries and to allow researchers to conduct research in different cultural settings and contexts. For example, proposals could involve researchers spending focused time at an overseas institution or embedded within a particular cultural group with a view to enhancing cross-cultural interaction, understanding and/or collaboration. Proposals involving creative or cultural institutions (such as museums, galleries, performance groups) that seek to foster cultural interchange or cross-cultural understanding would also be welcomed.