Public, scientific and everyday discourse in our country is full of foreign terms and words that are imported and assimilated either in the original language or in translation into Greek. Translation and assimilation in the original languagemainly in English, has been the subject of many discussions by linguists, philologists and sociologists on the level of linguistic proficiency and performance of the Greek language in the context of globalization.

However, an issue requiring special attention and attention is that translation of foreign terms and words in the Greek language, especially their subsequent spread from one scientific branch to another and social and everyday speech is unconscious. The problem of translation in Greece goes back a long way, and while translation has improved over time in terms of linguistic accuracy, most terms and words lack the theoretical history, debate, and context that led to their invention. A typical example of unsuccessful attribution of concepts is Levi Strauss’s 1988 translation of the anthropological classic Tristes Tropiques as “Sad Tropics” instead of Thlimmeni Tropicoi (ed. Hatzinikoli, 1988), revealing the unconscious or conscious ethnocentric view of an advanced Westerner who writes or translates an underdeveloped and therefore regrettably the unfortunate Other.

A recent example is the term self-reflexivity, also deriving from the newly emerging scientific branch of anthropology in Greek academic life. Although “I” means reflection of self and reflectivity, the term has been translated as “re-reflection” (instead of self-reflection) and is to this day repeated uncritically in almost all disciplines and, ultimately, in the media and in everyday speech. However, the term, coined by the famous “father of anthropology” Franz Boas, meant and still means the ability of ethnographic researchers to be able to read, observe and reflect on their interpretive activities in this area at the same time. It is a term that centralizes the intermediate and subjective role of the culturally formed self in the field of ethnographic field research, as well as in the subsequent production of scientific knowledge from this field of research through ethnography. OUR ethnography therefore, it is at the intersection of science and narrative, textual or otherwise.

On the contrary, the term “rethinking” means rethinking, rethinking, i.e., an attempt at a detached reasoning about a theoretical object. Also, the verb to reflect catches the light in Greek philosophy. The Enlightenment’s emphasis on vision and transparency, stemming from the idea that the mind can illuminate the nature of man and the world, stems from Plato’s search for objective truth behind the diversity of the world of appearances through the mind as a mirror.

What has thus been eliminated by the translation of the term “re-reflection” is the “I” as an essential participant in the process of field research. This “misreading” of the concept neutralized the sense of dual consciousness or cross-cultural consciousness of the ethnographic self. The translated term refers to thinking in a purely internal or Cartesian context. Therefore, the Greek term that translates English self-reflexivity has nothing to do with what the original term wanted to describe, namely the self as a cultural agent in the context of another, and not just someone who first notices something and in the second phase he reflects on it. And the repetition of “re-reflection” (instead of self-reflection) in scientific, media and everyday discourse indicates that the anthropological text is not understood as a multicultural field, as an intercultural situation in which it is involved, and, thus, it turns out to be incorrectly translated both at the level of cultural context and at the language level. It also shows that translation is perceived as a purely linguistic process and therefore is often passively transferred from one text to another and from one discipline to another unconsciously.

The term self-reflexivity has been translated as “re-reflection” (instead of self-reflection) and is repeated uncritically in almost all disciplines to this day.

But is translation a process of unconscious intellectual consumption, or is it and should it be an academic and intellectual part of a conscious creative process and a central element of intellectual production? A translator, and especially an anthropologist-ethnographer, does not just translate languages, but brings two or more cultures and societies into communication and dialogue. When he crosses boundaries, he must maintain the boundary of difference in the very act of crossing them.

In this particular case, if the anthropological term “self-reflection” is approached with the well-known existing terms “self-consciousness” or “self-consciousness”, the performative and social mediation (agency) arising from the anthropological meaning is eliminated. At the same time, ethnographic dynamics, despite all its specificity, is absorbed by the general philosophical framework that blurs the intercultural contradictions that the ethnographic term gives us access to. Thus, the question here is “the possibility of translating the translation ethics of the research field into the level of a (ethnographic) text” (K. Nadia Seremetakis, “The Sense of Everyday”, Routledge, 2019, Greek edition of The Knowledge of Everyday, ed. Pedio).

The usual concept of translation as purely text processing may be appropriate for many types of texts, but certainly not for anthropological-ethnographic text. For the vast majority of anthropologists, translation has a deeper and more holistic meaning, equally textual and extra-textual, both within the book and before it and beyond it. Without extra-textual, intercultural empirical translation, no ethnographic text can exist or be translated from one language to another. Because the anthropological idea of ​​translation goes beyond the mere ability to deal with two linguistic codes, such as English/French and Greek. It is based on immersion in the structure of everyday life of two or more societies or social groups and acquaintance with the intellectual traditions of two or more societies. And this, of course, is achieved by knowledge and familiarity with numerous cultural codes, in addition to linguistic ones, of course.

Anthropologists, in particular, would betray their very training if they refused to translate the sociocultural and historical contexts they manage in translating their final texts from one language into another. This is especially true for an “indigenous” or “indigenous” anthropologist trained and working in a foreign society and/or culture.

Ms. K. Nadia Seremetaki was Professor of Cultural Social Anthropology at the University of Peloponnese and previously at New York University.