Evaluating “Cultural Translation” and Intermodal Address in the Musée du quai Branly's Exhibition of African Material Objects
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The debate on what cultural translation as an analytical and political tool can offer has sparked much discussion in translation studies as well as in the fields of anthropology, literature, and cultural studies. To a lesser degree, some museum studies scholars have likewise evoked the notion of translation to address the ethics of representing culture in and across differences. This article expands on these discussions by evaluating whether a translational lens can serve to rethink the display of African material culture in museums. Through an analysis of the textual, spatial, and visual elements of the permanent African exhibition at the Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac (MQB) in Paris, France, I argue that though the MQB claims that it seeks to foster cultural dialogue, the “translations” of its African collection tend to reproduce the museum’s norms of meaning-making, rather than the norms of the non-European cultures it presents. However, I also suggest that by approaching its task as one of multimodal translation, the MQB could reshape its museographic language to reflect ways of making meaning that are more evenly in dialogue with ways of making meaning from the objects’ contexts of origin.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.020 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".