The articles in this special issue, and another that will follow in the next issue, arise from a three-year research project that brought together researchers and practitioners of theatre and performance from South Africa, India and the Netherlands to focus on translation and performance, particularly in a context of global power asymmetries and discontinuities. The project was generously funded by the National Research Foundation of South Africa with additional funding from the University of Cape Town, the Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies and the Netherlands Institute of Cultural Analysis. The focus in the project was not so much translation in the linguistic sense, in which it is most commonly understood (although it did not ignore this aspect either). Rather, the focus was on translation in its root sense of ‘a carrying over’ across a much broader range of semiotic, sensory and inter-subjective forms and practices, including the conveying of gestures, styles, dramaturgy, and genres, moving across media, historical periods, cultural contexts and physical spaces. The field of translation studies has opened up in recent times broadly speaking ‘from textual to cultural translation, or from the translation of language to the translation of action’ (Bachmann-Medick 2009, p. 5). While Homi Bhabha’s concept of the ‘translational transnational’ in his book The Location of Culture (1994, p. 173) is an obvious, high profile and influential example, there have been a whole host of areas that have been investigated through the lens of translation since the turn of the millennium. A sample of these studies and areas would include migration as a form of translational action (Papastergiadis 2000); violence and translation (Das 2002); translating terror (Bassnett 2005); translation and conflict (Baker 2006). Our project took shape against the backdrop of two broad processes at work in the world that could be seen as both generally applicable to all contexts and specifically applicable to South Africa: globalization and post-apartheid. We would suggest that these two processes taken together could be described as forming one of the key social questions globally today. What has become known as globalization – the vast interconnection of peoples, economies, political processes with its intensive migratory and intercultural consequences – requires of us to engage in active and urgent ways with the challenge of being together rather than being kept apart or keeping ourselves apart. If the period we are living through in South Africa today is truly post-apartheid then in a very literal sense the project we must be engaged in is that which lies beyond separateness. It is the project of trying to ‘be together’. While this is obviously apparent in the South African context it is not limited to it. In the context of Europe, the recent resurgence of a racialized underpinning of national identity in different European societies alerts us both to the infinite translatability of the phenomenon of fascism as well as to the importance of a continual recalibration of translation towards the goals of a radical planetarity, rather than a narrow and aggressive, racially coded cultural determinism (Gilroy 2019). In India, alarming levels of socio-economic disparities

中文翻译：

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全球不对称时代的翻译与表演

本期特刊以及下一期的另一篇文章来自一个为期三年的研究项目，该项目汇集了来自南非、印度和荷兰的戏剧和表演研究人员和实践者，专注于翻译和表演，特别是在全球权力不对称和不连续的背景下。该项目得到了南非国家研究基金会的慷慨资助，另外还有来自开普敦大学、阿姆斯特丹全球化研究中心和荷兰文化分析研究所的额外资金。该项目的重点不是语言意义上的翻译，在语言意义上它是最常被理解的（尽管它也没有忽略这方面）。相当，重点是翻译的根本意义，即跨越更广泛的符号学、感官和主体间形式和实践的“延续”，包括手势、风格、戏剧和体裁的传达、跨媒体、历史时期、文化背景和物理空间。翻译研究领域近来大体开放，“从文本翻译到文化翻译，或从语言翻译到行动翻译”（Bachmann-Medick 2009，第 5 页）。虽然 Homi Bhabha 在他的著作 The Location of Culture (1994, p. 173) 中的“翻译跨国”概念是一个明显的、引人注目的和有影响力的例子，但已经有大量领域通过千禧年以来的翻译。这些研究和领域的样本将包括作为转化行动形式的移民（Papastergiadis 2000）；暴力与翻译（Das 2002）；翻译恐怖（Bassnett 2005）；翻译和冲突（贝克 2006 年）。我们的项目是在世界上两个广泛的进程背景下形成的，它们可以被视为普遍适用于所有环境，也特别适用于南非：全球化和后种族隔离。我们认为，这两个过程结合在一起可以被描述为形成当今全球的关键社会问题之一。众所周知的全球化——人民、经济、政治进程及其密集的移民和跨文化后果——要求我们采取积极和紧迫的方式来应对团结而不是孤立或孤立的挑战。如果我们今天在南非所经历的时期真的是后种族隔离时期，那么从字面上看，我们必须参与的项目是超越分离的。这是一个试图“在一起”的项目。虽然这在南非的背景下很明显，但不仅限于此。在欧洲的背景下，最近在不同的欧洲社会中民族认同的种族化基础的复苏提醒我们注意法西斯主义现象的无限可译性，以及不断重新校准翻译以实现激进行星的目标而不是狭隘的目标的重要性和激进的、种族编码的文化决定论（Gilroy 2019）。在印度，令人震惊的社会经济差距