Translating environmental memory in a natural history museum

ABSTRACT

Faced with the environmental crisis, natural history museums have started to redefine their roles and look for new ways to represent natural changes. In exhibitions, this has led to an evolution conceptualized here as a shift from natural history to environmental memory. The article starts with theoretical reflections from museum and memory studies and is followed by an analysis anchored in a case study of the Museum of Natural Sciences in Brussels. Central is a display where memories about nature’s past and present are shared in the form of fictional audio testimonies in four languages. I contend that the transition from history to memory in representations of the environmental crisis is, in fact, a translational problem that manifests itself on multimodal, intralingual, and interlingual levels.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental memory
• museum translation
• natural history museums
• multimodal translation
• slow memory
• translation studies
• memory studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Unless otherwise mentioned, the cited text is taken from the English text of the museum labels.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Ghent University’s Bijzonder Onderzoeksfonds.

Notes on contributors

Sophie Decroupet

Sophie Decroupet is a PhD fellow at the Department of Translation, Interpretation, and Communication of Ghent University, with a background in Museum Studies. Her research focuses on translation and museums, and combines an analysis of translated texts with a broad perspective of the museum as translation. Her project proposes a multiple case studies analysis of natural history museums, examining their transition towards the memorialization of the environmental crisis.