Translation Practices in Museums: What the Research Says

Abstract

ABSTRACT Historically museums have provided select introductory orienting materials in languages other than English to support a tourist base. Increasingly, museums are looking to increase their interpretive materials in other languages to provide linguistic diversity, and the institutional motivations for doing so are expanding beyond the needs of tourists. This article will review new trends and research on current translation practices across a broad range of U.S. museums and provide considerations for how the staffing and assessment of translation work in a museum setting may work, taking into account the trade-off between lack of resources and burden on multilingual staff. To inform possibilities for museums, this piece looks at protocols from other public-facing organizations that have a standing history of facilitating linguistic access.