The Hotel as a Translation Site: Place and Non-place, Difference and Indifference

Abstract

The hotel is a translation site, a place of accelerated language transactions. The Hotel Bristol in Vienna beloved of Joseph Roth, Cees Nooteboom’s Ritz in Barcelona, and Wes Anderson’s fictional Grand Budapest Hotel speak the language of community. By contrast, the Tokyo Park Hyatt in Sofia Coppola’s 2003 film Lost in Translation is more like a “non-place” and aligns with weak, ineffective forms of translation, with apathy, and with cultural indifference.