Saturday, September 15, 2001
Unpacking Our Cultural Baggage
Alan Brender, director of Writing Programs at Temple University Japan, demonstrated in his March 22 presentation how stimulating a good teacher and writer can be. Inviting a jaded audience of experienced writers, editors, and translators to unpack our cultural baggage and catalogue the ways deeply embedded aspects of our cultures affect our writing, Brender soon had us all sharing experiences and puzzling over the riches of our diverse backgrounds.
As a moment’s thought about the connotations of “pink"in Japanese and in American English should make obvious, the metaphors that we use most unconsciously can create serious problems when we are writing for audiences of a different culture. Or subculture: most of us of the pre-CD generation now know that “the flip side"is a metaphor that can cause premature wrinkles in younger brows.
For many of us, working daily to make aspects of Japanese culture (and, occasionally, Culture) comprehensible in English, it was refreshing to think not about the nuances that we have to pack into a text but how our own culture informs and booby traps our writing. It was pleasing, too, to work in small groups through the examples of other Englishes Brender provided and find that, all in all, SWET members are not fazed by Indian English (after all, the subcontinent does have the largest English-language publishing industry in the world), exotic sports English, or Art Speak. We collectively stumbled over only one word: knobkerry (or knobkerrie); obviously a club of sorts likely to be used in anger upon colonial invaders—but in Africa or Austrialia?