Translating for Museums, Galleries and Heritage Sites

Book excerpt: In any museum, gallery, or heritage site that wishes to engage with foreign-language visitors, translation is essential. Providing texts in foreign languages – whether for international visitors from different language cultures or for heritage speakers of local minority languages – is centrally important in enabling these visitors to make sense of what they see displayed. Yet despite this awareness, and a growing body of research in the field, there has hitherto been little available in the way of practical training in this area of translation. This book aims to help fill that need. Translating for Museums, Galleries and Heritage Sites focuses on the translation of interpretive and information texts, particularly in the museum context. After an initial introduction and an overview of key concepts in both museums and translation, it looks at three broad groupings of texts from the museum text system: fixed labels and wall panels, leaflets and other portable learning resources, and catalogues and guides, including a section on websites. It concludes with a call to place translation centre stage in museum, gallery, and heritage practice. The book will be of use as a coursebook for students at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and for practitioners in the sector, and is designed to be suitable for both individual and class-based learning.