The related notions of frames, frameworks and framing are used in a variety of ways by researchers working within different scholarly traditions. They are also often used in conjunction with the concept of schema or schemata. The latter generally denote those ‘expectations about people, objects, events, and settings in the world’ that participants bring with them to the interaction (Tannen and Wallat 1993: 60). This definition of schemata overlaps considerably with Goffman’s notion of framework, especially when he talks about ‘a group’s framework or frameworks’ as ‘its belief system, its “cosmology”’ (1974: 27). Frames, on the other hand, emerge out of the interaction itself as participants develop ‘a sense of what activity is being engaged in, how speakers mean what they say’ (Tannen and Wallat 1993: 60). The above definition of framework then suggests a set of static beliefs and expectations, whereas the definition of frames stresses the dynamic nature of interaction.
Although Goffman endows individuals with agency in arguing that a participant does not just perceive frames but ‘also takes action, both verbal and physical, on the basis of these perceptions’ (1974: 345), he and many of his followers clearly focus on questions of interpretation rather than active and conscious intervention to frame an event for others; hence Goffman’s interest in how ‘an individual’s framing of activity establishes meaningfulness for him’ (1974: 345; emphasis added). In much of the literature on social movements, by contrast, framing is treated as an active process of signification; frames are defined as structures of anticipation, strategic moves that are consciously initiated in order to present a movement or a particular position within a certain perspective. Framing processes are further understood to provide ‘a mechanism through which individuals can ideologically connect with movement goals and become potential participants in movement actions’ (Cunningham and Browning 2004: 348). I follow this particular scholarly tradition here in defining framing as an active strategy that implies agency and by means of which we consciously participate in the construction of reality.
A good example of the way in which processes of framing are encoded in translation is discussed in Behl (2002). The frame in question is that of‘revelation’in the context of religious traditions. Behl tells us that the seventeenth-century Zoroastrian ethnographer Mubad Shah demonstrated the importance of this frame in his Dabistan-i Mazahib (School of Religious Faiths), in which he divided and ranked religious sects largely according to whether their religion is revealed or nonrevealed. As Behl explains, one of the main ways in which the Islamic community then came to distinguish itself from the Hindus is by pointing out that the latter had no revealed book, that‘they had not received divine revelation (wahi) from heaven’(2002: 91). The frame was thus set for any subsequent dialogue with the Hindus:‘We have the truth because it came down from heaven and is present in the form of a book; therefore, in order to prove that they have a truth and it is the same truth, we must prove that a similar condition obtains among the Hindus’ (2002:91–2). The main task for any translator, such as Prince Dara Shikoh (1615–1659), who wanted to effect a dialogue between the two communities was therefore to demonstrate that the Hindus too had heavenly books that expressed the same mystical truth. In other words, Prince Shikoh had to actively frame Hindu religious texts as‘heavenly’and‘revealed’. Of all the other frames within which this dialogue could have been contextualized, that of ‘revelation’ was deemed the most effective.
Translation may be seen as a frame in its own right, whether in its literal or metaphorical sense. Draper uses translation as a metaphor in his discussion of rhetorical strategies used to frame political violence since September 2001:
the United States has justified its post-September 11 actions by translating all original violence, that is the many and diverse forms of violence it does not support, into the target language of 'terrorism,' and has consequently encouraged other major global powers such as Russia and India to translate violent opposition similarly. Such a mode of translation involves a transmission of the pure instance of violence into the discourse of terrorism. This transmission is always accompanied by the work of forgetting and elision of the historical context of the violence in order to evacuate it of all meaning. Translating a violent act as terrorism thus reifies the act as a commodity of pure negativity, a commodity which can then be inscribed with whatever moral or political connotations the translator deems expedient. Such a translation can thus be effectively marketed to domestic and international audiences. The global translatability of the Terror discourse can be seen from the remarkable popularity of the notion of terrorism demonstrated not only by the countries allied with the United States but even by its most intractable enemies. (Draper 2002)
In other words, terror is deliberately exploited as – or ‘translated into’ – what we might call a ‘master frame’ to streamline the narratives of US political opponents and divest them of all historicity as well as potentially understandable, if not justifiable, motivation.
Translation may also be treated as a frame in a less metaphoric sense. In his discussion of performance vs. literal communication, both of which he regards as interpretive frames that guide the way we make sense of messages, Bauman (2001: 168) goes on to list an additional number of such interpretive frames. This list includes‘translation, in which the words spoken are to be interpreted as the equivalent of words originally spoken in another language or code’.
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