Translators Producing Knowledge: Where There Is No Doctor in Tamil

Lillian Walkover

doi:10.17351/ests2019.236

Lillian Walkover DREXEL UNIVERSITY http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6337-8244

DOI: https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2019.236

Keywords: postcolonial translation studies, postcolonial STS, sociology of knowledge, critical global health

Abstract

Where There Is No Doctor is one of the most widely used community health books in the world and has been translated into over 80 languages. This paper traces four aspects of translation in Tamil-language editions of the text, including Doctor Illaadha Idaththil and related books. First, translators choose and create language to produce a colloquial text related to, but different from, the original. Second, the translated text, as part of a genre of health writing, is edited to motivate readers to take new and different actions related to their bodies and wellbeing. Third, the success of this work is assessed by asking future readers to respond to the draft. Finally, the finished translation circulates to new arenas, influencing popular writing on health and ways of understanding the body. Analyzing the translation of a health text through the lens of postcolonial translation studies, this paper argues that the translation and adaptation of Where There Is No Doctor and the books it inspired engage translators, clinicians, and future readers in a transnational knowledge production process.

Author Biography

Lillian Walkover, DREXEL UNIVERSITY

Lillian Walkover received her PhD in Sociology from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) in 2018. A sociologist of global health with an interdisciplinary orientation, she has experience conducting qualitative global health research in the US and abroad. She focuses on the production, valuation and movement of health knowledges, both globally and in the US. Her doctoral work focused on how health knowledges are produced and travel through an analysis of the translation and adaptation of "Where There Is No Doctor," the most widely used health manual in the world. This project explored translations and adaptations in Hindi, Tamil, Kannada and English for use in India, and the analysis sits at the intersection of sociology of health and illness, critical global health, and postcolonial science and technology studies. In addition, she works with the Structural Competency Working Group to use structural competency and other social science frameworks for health professions education. Her postdoctoral research at Drexel University with Susan Bell, PhD, is a study of the experiences and career paths of physicians who enter the US as refugees.

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