Translating power: the fuzzy path of law from international convention to local politics in Japan

Abstract

The vernacularization of international policy involves a highly complicated process of legal and cultural translation. Ethnographic research on the role translation played in the UNESCO World Heritage Site nomination of Catholic churches in Japan's Nagasaki prefecture illuminates the way existing social hierarchies struggle to maintain themselves in the current tide of globalization. Framed as a universal legal regime with specific policy requirements of enhanced democratic, gender balanced political participation, the Convention nevertheless became a tool for intermediary actors in their attempts to maintain and even strengthen local hierarchies of power. Focusing on the communicative aspects of law in daily practice, particularly the constant interpretation and reinterpretation needed to give contextual, metapragmatic meaning to the words and phrases of the law, reveals layers of multilingual and multi-administrative system vagueness that presents politically informed translation opportunities for chains of actors from national local levels. Legal translation involves not only exuberances and deficiencies between languages but also between regimes of power represented by systems of administrative law and politics.