Special Issue: 'Language and Translation in the Pacific'

Abstract

Language in the Pacific is central to education, governments, health and social care industries, policy-making and justice. For many people in the Pacific region, language is taonga, a treasure, bestowing mana on its empowered speakers. Language has been central to cultural and national renaissances, a stimulus to carry on the fight for independence from the colonial yoke, a way to affirm ethnicity, diversity and social and legal rights. Living in translation, or in the impossibility of it, has become an integral part of the life of many inhabitants of the Pacific, constantly engaged in the processes of linguistic mediation, (re)presentation, or (mis)representation and adaptation both in professional and everyday lives. The discursive dimension of linguistic and translation practices is particularly significant in the postcolonial reality of the Pacific, whereby language in translation can provide access and insight to constructions of gendered, collective and national identities. Once a tool of the colonizer to represent and contain the colonized, translation has become a key