Engaging Audioguides? Translation in the Memorial Museum

For many museum visitors, audioguides are a primary or complementary means of interacting with exhibitions; they provide guidance on how to move through the museum space and offer summaries of or more detailed information on exhibition content. In the case of museums with an international audience,audio guides also tend to be multilingual, with users relying on translation to facilitate their access to written and audiovisual material in another language. But, despite the prevalence of multilingual audioguides in the museum setting, the question of how translation mediates visitor experience has elicited only marginal critical attention in Translation Studies, or elsewhere. This paper will attempt to delve deeper into translation in the context of the memorial museum by exploring how the use of translated audioguides might shape the cognitive, emotional and ethical engagement of the visitor with the events and stories portrayed. In order to do so, it will integrate theories and concepts from the fields of Museum Studies and Memory Studies: museums will first be understood as constructed and contested spaces, while Alison Landsberg.s notion of .prosthetic memory. will then be used as a way of investigating how translatedaudioguides might affect whether and how the visitor .takes on a more personal, deeply felt memory of a past event through which he or she did not live. (2004: 2). Real-life examples will be taken from the French and English audioguides provided by various memorial museums in France, including the Oradour-sur-Glane Remembrance Centre and the Museum of Resistance and Deportation in Besancon.