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88 books match the query 'Translation' and 2 start with n

cover of Nature in Translation: Japanese Tourism Encounters the Canadian Rockies

Nature in Translation

Japanese Tourism Encounters the Canadian Rockies

Shiho Satsuka

Duke University Press, 2015

Nature in Translation is an ethnographic exploration in the cultural politics of the translation of knowledge about nature. Shiho Satsuka follows the Japanese tour guides who lead hikes, nature walks, and sightseeing bus tours for Japanese tourists in Canada's Banff National Park and illustrates how they aspired to become local "nature interpreters" by learning the ecological knowledge authorized by the National Park. The guides assumed the universal appeal of Canada’s magnificent nature, but their struggle in translating nature reveals that our understanding of nature—including scientific knowledge—is always shaped by the specific socio-cultural concerns of the particular historical context. These include the changing meanings of work in a neoliberal economy, as well as culturally-specific dreams of finding freedom and self-actualization in Canada's vast nature. Drawing on nearly two years of fieldwork in Banff and a decade of conversations with the guides, Satsuka argues that knowing nature is an unending process of cultural translation, full of tensions, contradictions, and frictions. Ultimately, the translation of nature concerns what counts as human, what kind of society is envisioned, and who is included and excluded in the society as a legitimate subject.
 
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cover of North Coast of the North: Travels and Translation in Arctic Norway

North Coast of the North

Travels and Translation in Arctic Norway

Barbara Sjoholm

University of Minnesota Press, 2027

A traveler and translator explores the multiethnic cultures, histories, and landscapes of Norway's high north

A companionable travel memoir about Arctic Norway, North Coast of the North details Barbara Sjoholm’s trip in the summer of 2024 to the northernmost region of the Scandinavian peninsula, a borderland that is home to a richly multicultural society, an expanding tourist industry, and landscapes bearing the marks of colonization, environmental damage, and climate change. A writer with decades of experience in the Nordic countries, Sjoholm flew from her home in the Pacific Northwest to Norway’s high north to research a collection of Sámi folktales and witness firsthand the settings from which the stories emerged.

Sjoholm’s journey takes her from Kirkenes, the final port on the Hurtigruten coastal route and an outpost on the Russian border, to the fertile farmlands of the Pasvik River Valley and to Indigenous archaeological sites and historic trading posts around the Varangerfjord. She voyages west along the Barents Sea coastline and south to Tromsø, past islands and inlets of surpassing beauty (as well as liquid gas plants and wind farms), and writes about the ongoing resource exploitation and local resistance to Norwegian and global corporate interests. North Coast of the North intertwines Sjoholm’s observations on the tragedies of World War II and the literature and folklore of the Sámi with her own warm memories of Norway, a country that never ceases to intrigue her.

An absorbing and expansive blend of travel writing, memoir, and reflections on translation, history, and literature, North Coast of the North is a vivid look at an often exoticized, frequently overlooked, yet increasingly important environmental and geopolitical region of Northern Europe.

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