I was pointed to Regender from a friend's blog. The site, which runs a logarithm through other urls, reconfigures the pronouns and proper names of any text in English so that "she" becomes "he," and vice-versa, while "Charles" becomes "Charlene," and "Emma" turns into "Emmanuel." I'm in favor of this kind of a rethinking of sex and gender, particularly in a making the stone feel stony method of linguistic enstrangement, but what interests me about the Regender site is that it calls itself "a different kind of translator."

What kind of translator would that make it, then? One of the terms I've become familiar with since coming to graduate school is "cultural translation." It's an act of finding, or examining, the cultural equivalents between languages, in effect translating not the text so much as the context. God and Allah are, I would imagine, cultural translations of each other, serving equivalent purposes in each cultural context. The fact that both words refer to the same cosmic identity makes the issue somewhat more complicated, I would think.

The first time I heard about a cultural translation was when I was describing my experience teaching English to kindergartners in Taiwan. The school I was working for knew of the benefits of teaching--especially language teaching--through song, and so I was supposed to teach an English children's song to the Taiwanese students. The song the school found a language tape for was the English version of "Frère Jacques," "Brother John." To explain the context of the lyrics to the students, the language tape explained that it was about your brother (the language tape spoke in second-person) John, who was asleep while his alarm clock was going off, and he was going to be late for school. This struck me as quite distinct from what I had heard as the original context for the French "Frère Jacques"; as I understood it, Frère Jacques was not "brother Jacques" but Friar Jacques, a medieval priest who had suffered from the plague. The ringing bells weren't waking him up not because he had overslept, but because he was dead.

This all came back at me in one instant when I was riding on the Métro in Paris, reading George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, as a young girl was singing "Frère Jacques." In that moment, I literally forgot what language I was living in, reading and hearing English or French.

These examples surrounding "Frère Jacques" and its various permutations are all acts of cultural translation. While the text itself may change, the question really is how the context changes as words pass through different languages. How did hearing "Frère Jacques" in French--so familiar that it made the English of Orwell's writing about Paris seem strange--alter my understanding of my own context? Or, how does a Taiwanese children's language lesson alter the meaning of a song as it passes from French to English and from medieval Europe to postmodern Taiwan (then again, imagine if the language tape had explained that "Brother John" would not wake up?).

Nevertheless, we can understand why these are instances of cultural translation because in one way or another they are instances of a transfer between languages, whether textual or contextual. But as for the Regender site, we're dealing with a cultural translation that plays on contextual changes surrounding a specific kind of change within texts only in English (I checked some sites in French, and masculine and feminine had not been destabilized, though names such as Dominic / Dominique do get swapped). Certainly Regender doesn't present translation in any strict sense of the word, but inasmuch as it does enact a textual change that forces questions about the context--according to its website, those questions are,

What would the world look like if the two sexes switched places?
What would it look like if English had genderless pronouns?
What would it look like if English identified races the way it identifies gender?

though I couldn't find any way in which Regender identified race--then this "different kind of translation" can only be a cultural translation. But as I think about the impermanence of Regender's deconstruction (or reconstruction) of sex and gender stability, I wonder again about the impermanence of any kind of cultural translation. Running a website through Regender, I get a cute kick out of it, noticing how it functions--when I ran my own blog through, it turned the "MA" in my bio to the right into "MARK"--and appreciate its goals, but then I move away and, aside from writing a blog entry about it, don't look back. We can't really answer the questions that Regender proposes, because Regender has too much to overturn. Faced with this, "he" remains "he," "she" remains "she," and Jacqueline Derrida & Rolanda Barthes are always already men again.

What I find depressing is that this may be the fate of all cultural translation: after my strange moment in the Parisian Métro, I may re-tell the story, but in the transition from experience to narrative I am always certain what language I am speaking. While the Taiwanese children may imagine that "Brother John"--or even "Frère Jacques"--is about a brother sleeping through his alarm clock, their belief does not disrupt the song's true history (even given the possibility that my own story about the derivation of "Frère Jacques" is inaccurate). Worse, the obstacle that all translation faces, when viewed politically, may be too large to counter: translation will likely never succeed in dismantling the isolation of American literature.

True, not everyone, not even all translators and readers of translation, are bound to see this as the political goal of literature in translation. But if, to refer to an earlier entry, postmodernism is a recognition of the local, then my own desire is for American literary culture to see itself as one instance of the local, and yet still be a locality with a particular relationship to other, foreign, localities. The evidence of gender-political goals marks this as a pretty futile fight, but it's a fight I'm willing to take part in, nonetheless.