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volved, because this same viewer may have no difficulty whatsoever listening to a "disembodied" omniscient voice-over on a TV program.
Any person who has had prolonged interactions with country people and villagerswhether from their own culture or from another cultureknows that you have to learn to, speak differently in order to be heard in their context. So if you listen carefully to your own speech in your interactions with them, you recognize that even though you may both speak the same languagethe case is further complicated when you don'tyou speak differently. This sounds like a very banal statement until you find yourself in a situation where you wish to relate what the villagers say, to your audiencein other words, to translate them. Translation, which is interpellated by ideology and can never be objective or neutral, should here be understood in the wider sense of the termas a politics of constructing meaning. Whether you translate one language into another language, whether you narrate in your own words what you have understood from the other person, or whether you use this person directly on screen as a piece of "oral testimony" to serve the direction of your film, you are dealing with cultural translation.
To give an example: a villager may say, while pointing toward the front court of her dwelling: "Calabash, we call it the vault of heaven." The local interpreter may translate: "The calabash is the vault of heaven." But when outsiders to the culture try to translate this to their audience back home, it might come out, "The calabash is like the vault of heaven" or "stands for the vault of heaven." There are all these little devices in language that "explain'' instead of stating "this, this" or "this is this" with no explanation added. When you translate, you automatically rationalize what people say according to the logic and habits of your own language or mode of speaking. This tendency, which seems to me to be particularly naturalized in the media, is dealt with in
Naked Spaces
by assigning the explanatory logic and its ensuing linguistic devices to the voice of the woman (Linda Peckham) whose English accent (actually South African) is easily detectable. It was a real challenge for me to try to bring out these subtleties of translation and to remain consistent in the distinction of the three discursive modes. Moreover, the only voice in the film that can afford to have some kind of authority (not media or academic institutionalized authority, but rather a form of insider's assertion) is the mediated voice of the people, the low voice that quotes the villagers' sayings and other statements by African writers. My voice gives little anecdotes and personal feelings.
The distinction made between the voices is not a rigid one; the voices of the women of color at times overlap in what they say and how they speak. All three voices are joined together in the last third of the film, when the viewers see images of the Fon's lake-dwellings. The two