Interculturality and specialisation in contemporary art museum translation: translation challenges of the Spanish leaflet of Jan Fabre: stigmata, actions and performances 1976-2017

Abstract

In the last three decades, Spain has experienced an exponential growth of the number of public museums of contemporary art. This situation entails a flow of art and promotional material in which intercultural translation is present to allow public access to exhibitions that are based on material edited in a foreign language.

This trend represents an opportunity as a new niche in the translation market and as an object of study, since museum typology has been hardly addressed from an epistemological approach within Translation Studies. Thus, in order to take the first steps in this direction in a still marginal line of research, we select the texts that belong to the textual typology “leaflet” of the exhibition Jan Fabre: Stigmata. Actions & Performances 1976-2017, organized by the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo of Seville in 2018. We identify translation challenges, strategies and techniques in the EN to ES transfer taking into account the translation brief as well as the guidelines given by the initiator thereof. In the light of the results obtained, we recognize the hybrid characteristics (typology, modality, multiculturalism) of this translation practice that deserves greater interest on the part of the Academy.