Traduciendo la transculturalidad: mediación de la identidad en los diarios de John Rabe

Abstract

Along with people’s movement and technology, local and foreign components in language and culture become interconnected. Hence translation and cultural studies need approaches, beyond the national, to fuzzy linguistic and cultural forms. One such case originates from the Nanking Massacre, which occurred in the East Asian theatre of WWII. John Rabe, a businessman from Hamburg and a foreign resident in Nanking, was elected by the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone to be its chairman. His humanitarian efforts eventually won him a special cultural identity, «the Living Buddha». This article focuses on mediation of identity. It presents «translating transculturality» as a new research approach, and applies it to the mediatedness related to Rabe’s identity in his diaries and their revised, edited and translated versions.