Cartographies transverses. Traduire la ville
Cross-cutting cartographies. Translating the city

Summary/Abstract: Contemporary Hungary is constructing a glorious historical narrative to legitimize the current authoritarian regime. This process permeates all cultural aspects of its capital, Budapest, including its urban landscape. How can we decipher the rhetoric of architecture and the way it is reinterpreted in a political context? Few studies in polysemic translation studies explore the link between translation and urban space, yet a polysemic approach in semantics allows for an analysis of this cultural transfer. Using translation as a tool to analyze urban linguistic transactions involves mobilizing the notion of zones of translation, inspired by Mary Louise Pratt’s contact zones. Polysemy, as a semantic approach, guides this reflection. Our objective is to examine how certain elements of historical falsification appear in the ongoing architectural reconstructions, and how this history – recreated, redone, renarrated – is translated and transformed once again into language. The relationship between language and the city is underexplored, yet cities are living texts, shaped by history, architecture, infrastructure, and their inhabitants. They are built through narratives, lived experience, and memory. The urban landscape is a process in perpetual transformation, modification, and translation.

• Details
• Contents