Let us put aside the content of these questions and ask instead what their purpose actually is. What is your opinion on this?”, “Please explain the right of Israel to exist”, or “If someone said the Holocaust was a myth or a fairytale, what would you answer?” For instance: “A woman shouldn't be allowed to go out in public or to travel alone without the company of male relatives. Some of the questions are quite peculiar. There are actually many other questions (100 altogether) in the test, mostly dealing with German history, the German Constitution, civil rights, the German juridical and political system, German culture, sport, national symbols, etc. In fact, this is the 85 th question of a 2006 test which had to be passed in the federal state of Hesse in order to achieve German citizenship (Lehrbuch Einbürgerungstext Hessen 2008). But the question is not addressed to them. To be sure, people interested in culture and arts, mostly members of the well-educated middle class known in Germany as the Bildungsbürgertum, can easily answer this question. Let us evoke one recent case of a cultural translation by quoting a curious question: “Every five years one of the most important exhibitions of modern and contemporary art takes place in Kassel. Giving correct answers to wrong questions Precisely by becoming cultural, translation opens up the problem of its intrinsic political meaning. The political meaning of cultural translation is not a quality external to the concept and capable of being discussed in a haphazard way. No discussion of the concept of cultural translation can easily dispense with an analysis of the very concrete devices of such translation if it strives to maintain contact with the political and existential issues at stake in the debate on cultural translation. Thus, one can culturally translate people – for a political purpose and with existential consequences. They too can be moved across all sorts of differences and borders and so translated from one place to another, for instance from one cultural and political condition to another. This does not apply only to the words of different languages, but also to human beings and their most important properties. Etymologically, translation evokes an act of moving or carrying across from one place or position to another, or of changing from one state of things to another.
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