Date & Time: March 18th (Fri.), 2011, 12:00-14:00
Place: Small-sized Meeting Room II (Room No. 331), Inamori Foundation Memorial Building, Kyoto University
Topic: "Targeting Translation: US Counterinsurgency and the Weaponization of Language"
Speaker: Prof. Vicente L. Rafael, University of Washington
Abstract:
Much has been written recently about the rise of counterinsurgency, stressing the "protection of the population" as the preferred strategy of the U.S. in its permanent "global war on terror". In this talk, I will focus on two of the most prevalent tropes in the discourse of counterinsurgency: the "weaponization" and "targeting" of foreign languages. How is the counterinsurgent notion of languages as "weapons" and "targets" linked to the strategic imperative of deploying translation as a means for colonizing the life world of occupied populations? How does the American military seek to expropriate the practice of translation through the development of automatic translation systems and the exploitation of the mediating power of native interpreters? What are the limits and contradictions to the targeting of speech and the militarization of linguistic exchange between occupiers and occupied? What do these limits on the weaponization of translation tell us about the vicissitudes of counterinsurgency as a strategy for sustaining the US empire?
Vicente L. Rafael is Professor of History at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA. He is the author of several works on the colonial Philippines, including Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society Under Early Spanish Rule (Duke UP, 1993), White Love and other Events in Filipino History (Duke UP 2000), and more recently, The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines (Duke UP, 2005). His current research deals with the use and abuse of language by the US military in its attempts to mobilize translation in its "global war on terror."