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Between specialised texts and institutional contexts – competence and choice in legal translation
Edited by Valérie Dullion
[Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts 3:1] 2017
► pp. 47–63

Cultural translation, traveling law, and the transposition of indigenous rights to Indonesian contexts

| Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale, Germany | Leipzig University, Germany
In this article, I propose a methodological specification of the concept of cultural translation as a heuristic tool, with which to gain a better understanding of what is at stake when law “travels” across legal cultures, from one society to another. Applied to the transposition of indigenous rights to different Indonesian contexts and locales, the proposed methodological specification reveals a paradoxical shift that occurs in the course of this transposition, not so much in terms of the legal content of indigenous rights, but with regard to their institutional framework and intended target communities.
Keywords: Cultural translation, traveling law, indigenous rights, Indonesia
Article outline
  • 1.On ‘cultural translation’
  • 2.On traveling law and cultural translation
  • 3.Methodological specification of an unwieldy concept
  • 4.Indigenous rights as cultural translation
  • 5.The cultural translation of indigenous rights into Indonesian contexts
  • 6.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 1 June 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ttmc.3.1.04ram
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