Critical Translation Studies

Douglas Robinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138229839
• eBook ISBN: 9781315387840
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book offers an introduction for Translation Studies (TS) scholars to Critical Translation Studies (CTS), a cultural-studies approach to the study of translation spearheaded by Sakai Naoki and Lydia H. Liu, with an implicit focus on translation as a social practice shaped by power relations in society. The central claim in CTS is that translators help condition what TS scholars take to be the primal scene of translation: two languages, two language communities, with the translator as mediator. According to Sakai, intralingual translation is primal: we are all foreigners to each other, making every address to another "heterolingual", thus a form of translation; and it is the order that these acts of translation bring to communication that begins to generate the "two separate languages" scenario. CTS is dedicated to the historicization of the social relations that create that scenario.

In three sets of "Critical Theses on Translation, " the book outlines and explains (and partly critiques) the CTS approach; in five interspersed chapters, the book delves more deeply into CTS, with an eye to making it do work that will be useful to TS scholars.

Critical Theses on translation 1

Sakai circa 1997

• Critical Thesis 1.1 In Translation Studies (TS) we have grown accustomed to figuring translation as “a somewhat tritely heroic and exceptional act of some arbitrator bridging two separate communities” (Sakai 1997: 3) – and specifically as a secondary exceptional act that normatively follows the act of writing monolingually for a source audience that we take to be fully and unproblematically competent in the source language.

Sakai’s project is apparently quixotic, interrogating assumptions that seem to be inescapably, even comfortably, cozily, lodged in the way things are; what makes that project powerful is not only the impetus he takes from Jean-Luc Nancy’s rethinkings of Heidegger, but his own experience of writing the book in the interstices between language communities, Japanese-speaking and English-speaking, shuttling between them, taking insights from one to transform his address to the other, translating-before-writing, translating-as-writing.

The TS assumptions he challenges are assumptions that have taken hold in our thinking over several centuries of normative nationalism – by which I mean the image of the world, born in Europe in the early modern period and most influentially theorized by the German Romantics, according to which there is a “natural” or “organic” relation between a nation and the single language spoken in it by the single ethnic group that comprises its population. Ein Land, Ein Volk, Eine Sprache: One Land, One People, One Language. If inside the One Land there are “foreigners” – people of a non-majority ethnicity, speaking a language that is not the One Language of the One Land and the One People – they must be banished, sent “back to where they came from,” even if “they” have been living in the One Land for hundreds of years, or else so perfectly assimilated to the One Language that they become honorary (if never perfect) members of the One People. This nationalist conception of the integration of nation, people, and language, articulated by a handful of German-speaking patriots two centuries ago – distressed at the occupation of the German-speaking principalities by Napoleon, convinced that the only thing that could protect “the German Nation” from future such incursions would be a German Empire, the unification of German-speaking peoples into a true pan-Germanic Nation (which did not happen until 1871) – has since been gradually disseminated to the entire world, so that we see nationalist governments everywhere applying the One-Land-One-People-One-Language principle to domestic policy. Sometimes these applications are violent, even genocidal, aimed at purification of the One People through mass murder of the “foreigners”; sometimes they are aggressively legislative, aimed at preventing the use of any but the One Language in government, education, publishing, and so on; sometimes they are “merely” (but this is still extraordinarily high-impact policy-making) definitional, conditioning their subjects to think of all the related languages inside their borders as dialects of the same One Language.

Lydia Liu (2004: 34) inadvertently gives us an example of this One-Land-One-People-One-Language ideology when she refers to the Manchus who ruled China for nearly three centuries (1644–1912, the Qing Dynasty) as “foreigners.” 滿族manzu “Manchu” was a name adopted in the seventeenth century by a Tungusic people from 東北Dongbei “Northeast China” (nowadays mostly referred to by non-Chinese as Manchuria) previously called the Jurchens (女眞ruzhen), who had earlier ruled China for a little over a century in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (1115–1234, the Jin Dynasty). First scenario: if China is China and Manchuria is Manchuria, and if China is One Land inhabited by One People called the Chinese – say, the majority 漢人hanren “Han People” – and Manchuria is One Land inhabited by One People called Manchus, then obviously in China the Manchus are foreigners, or, say, 夷yi “non-Han.”

But of course matters are very, very far from being that simple.

Second scenario: another way of describing the situation is that the Manchus/Jurchens are, and for at least a millennium have been, a quite large ethnic minority in the shifting multitude of lands controlled at various times by the Han (but at other times by the 鮮卑 Xianbei, 契丹 Khitan, Jurchens/Manchus, Mongols, and other groups – the Xianbei and Khitan, like the Jurchens/Manchus, also coming from Dongbei). If we simplify the history along these lines, calling the Manchus foreigners is rather like European-Americans calling Chinese-Americans or African-Americans foreigners.

Third scenario: when the Mongols overthrew the Jurchen Jin Dynasty and established the Yuan Dynasty in 1234, they divided their old overlords/new vassals into two groups: those who for generations had lived in 華北Huabei “North China” (北京 Beijing means the “Northern Capital”) and spoke fluent Chinese, and those who lived in their traditional homeland Dongbei and spoke no Chinese. The former effectively became Han – mingled, intermarried, and within a century became indistinguishable from the Han (low status) – while the latter were politically, culturally, and linguistically Mongolized, within a century becoming almost indistinguishable from the Mongols (high status). It was the latter whose descendents some centuries later renamed themselves Manchus. Still non-Han, still 夷yi, still the “foreigners” of the second scenario – but what kind of racial purism would it take to distinguish them radically from the group of Huabei-born Jurchens who had become Han?

Fourth scenario: the mid-seventeenth-century military force – the 八旗baqi “Eight Banners” – that overthrew the Ming Dynasty and established the Qing was multiethnic, made up of only 16% Manchus. The vast majority, a good three-fourths, were Manchu-acculturated Han. The Manchus constituted the 夷yi “non-Han” elite in this force; but beginning in 1632 and continuing until late in the dynasty, intermarriage between Han men and Manchu women was not only allowed but strongly encouraged, and widely practiced, to promote interethnic harmony. By the late Qing, in other words, whenever the Han of the day resented the Manchu rulers as “foreigners,” they were resenting being ruled by people who were mostly either Han themselves or the descendents of Han-Manchu intermarriages, and had lived in the Beijing area for two centuries – but who had retained the “foreign” (Manchu) customs of the ruling elite. Culturally they were foreigners; culturally they were 夷yi “non-Han.” These were the rulers who had to deal with the British invaders in the Opium Wars – a history to which we will be recurring repeatedly throughout the book.

By parroting, in her reporting on that history, the Han xenophobia of the day – by declaring in passing that “the Manchus were also foreigners in the country they ruled” (34) – Liu is either subtly and parodically highlighting or unconsciously perpetuating what we will see Sakai calling the “homolingual” myth of ethnic, cultural, and linguistic purity. As we’ll see, Liu’s brief is that the British had earlier translated 夷yi as “foreigner,” but in the Opium Wars decided that the Chinese were using it to call them “barbarians,” and so in the Tianjin Treaty document in 1858 banned the use of that character in reference to the British. But also, in light of her claim that the “Chinese” whom the British were branding xenophobic were actually Manchus and thus “foreigners,” Liu might be read as implicitly:

1. [a] denying that the British accusation of Chinese xenophobia had any validity at all (the Manchus could not have been xenophobic because they were non-Han “foreigners” themselves, to whom 夷yi applied as well as it did to the British); or
2. [b] suggesting that in accusing the Manchus of xenophobia the British were in fact replicating Han xenophobia; or
3. [c] undermining all (“Chinese” or “Han” or British) xenophobia on the grounds that heterolingual or heterocultural “foreignness” is preferable to nationalist membership in a hegemonic group; or
4. [d] fill in your own answer.

Unfortunately, since Liu does nothing with this identification of the Manchus as foreigners – it’s a throwaway – it is difficult to determine what she might have been trying to achieve with it. My guess is that her authorial intention is something like (a), backed by a repressed version of (b); my preference would be (c); but I’m just guessing.

These days, of course, this German Romantic nationalist ideology is increasingly being undermined by global capitalism, global communication, and global mobility. We like to complain that globalization has meant the universal dominance of Global English, and at a highly abstract level of Occidentalist ideologization that is indeed the case: if everyone speaks English, then all communication becomes effortless because monolingual, and therefore guaranteed to succeed. But the more closely one examines actual social relations on the ground, the less convincing that complaint becomes; and Sakai’s project challenges every assumption in that if-then proposition. Not only does everyone not speak English; those who do speak English (as a Lingua Franca) refract “English” as One Global Language into regional Englishes that are “dialects” in the sense that Cantonese, Shanghainese, Hunanese, Hokkien, Hakka, Beijingese, and so on are “dialects” of Chinese, or as Catalan, Occitan, Galician, Portuguese, Castilian, Aragonese, French, Provençal, Italian, Corsican, Neapolitan, Sicilian, Sardinian, Venetian, Romanian, Ladin, Friulian, Romansh, and so on are “dialects” of Romanic Latin. In Southern Europe some of those “dialects” have been assimilated to the One-Land-One-Language policy – Castilian as “Spanish,” Dantean Florentine as “Italian,” Daco-Romanian or Moldovan as “Romanian,” Parisian French as “French” – and in China they have all been assimilated to that policy, with Beijinghua or the Beijing dialect called Putonghua (the “common speech,” formerly called Mandarin) and the other Sinic languages all defined as dialects, because they all use Chinese characters. In fact each major “dialect” itself has hundreds of different “subdialects” that are often mutually incomprehensible.

And even as something called (and even perhaps approaching) Standard English is increasingly adopted as the medium of instruction in schools and universities around the world, national and regional languages continue to dominate writing and speaking in most other contexts, necessitating not only translation but what Sakai calls “the heterolingual address.” And global intellectuals like Sakai and Lydia H. Liu, the two central figures in this book – both holding endowed chairs at Ivy League universities in the US, Sakai raised speaking Japanese, Liu raised speaking Chinese – find themselves honored not only in the global center of Global English, the United States, for their intelligence in English, but in their countries of origin as well, for their intelligence respectively in Japanese and Chinese. In Hong Kong people like to say that we’re all global intellectuals these days, publishing and giving conference talks in at least two languages, building careers in a succession of countries and languages. It’s not entirely true, but it’s increasingly true.

• Critical Thesis 1.2 Writing for two different audiences – especially audiences from two different language-use communities, but ultimately audiences that are different in any way – can help us rethink the traditional TS assumption in CT 1.1, because it “could require an overall reconsideration of the basic terms in which we represent to ourselves how our translational enunciation is a practice of erecting or modifying social relations” (Sakai 3).

The tension at the heart of this passage is one that organizes much of Sakai’s thinking about translation, namely, that between “enunciation” (how we actually address each other) and “representation” (how we say we communicate). At the highest level of “spatial” representation – the figure Sakai uses for abstractions that perfectly stabilize complexly emerging social relations by emptying them of all change and all social relations – we don’t “erect” or “modify” social relations at all, but idealize them into the realm of the transcendental. He begins to broach that idealization in CT 1.3.

• Critical Thesis 1.3 What writing for two different audiences can help us notice, and so begin to theorize within Critical Translation Studies (CTS), is the ideological primacy, in our normative TS assumptions about translation, of what Sakai calls “homolingual address, that is, a regime of someone relating herself or himself to others in enunciation whereby the addresser adopts the position representative of a putatively homogeneous language society and relates to the general addressees, who are also representative of an equally homogeneous language community” (3–4).

Again, here, Sakai is not interested in arguing that the situation in which the addresser and addressee belong to the same language community never happens; his quarrel is with the ideologically mandated assumption that that homolingual address is the norm. Attendant upon the normativity of the homolingual address, as Sakai theorizes it, is a whole raft of other assumptions, including [a] that addressees for whom the language of address is not their first language are “secondary” addressees, or occupy some fractal status between the normative “primary” addressees (members of the perfectly homogeneous language community to which the addresser belongs) and secondariness; and [b] that there is a class of addressees (who may remain normatively invisible and unknown to the writer) who will require translation to understand the address. These non-primary addressees are either (CT 1.3a) admitted to the homolingual address through a mandatory mimesis in which they assimilate themselves, to the greatest extent possible, to the status and competencies of the “primary” addresses – make themselves “native-speaker-like” – or (CT 1.3b) ignored and forgotten as completely irrelevant to the “primary” address.

• Critical Thesis 1.4 Though address to non-primary addressees in CT 1.3a and 1.3b is effectively heterolingual, Sakai notes that as long as (CT 1.3a) the addressees who can read the text in the (for them foreign) language in which it was written are expected to pass as native speakers and (CT 1.3b) “the position of the translator is set aside and viewed to be secondary, this type of address is still homolingual” (5).

If translation is represented as “a transfer of a message from one clearly circumscribed language community into another distinctive enclosed language community” (6), the address to a heterolingual audience remains normatively homolingual. For Sakai all address is actually heterolingual, but in the regime of homolingual address one is required/expected/pressured to believe that address to one’s compatriots – even if they are not native speakers of the One Language – is intrinsically homolingual. “It goes without saying,” Sakai adds, “that the [TS] image of translator as a somewhat heroic prestigious agent derives from these assumptions of the homolingual address” (6): the translator is the mediatory hero who crosses the divide that (so goes the homolingual myth) no ordinary mortals can cross, because to be “ordinary” is normatively to be monolingual.

• Critical Thesis 1.5 Writing or speaking to different audiences without the TS assumptions listed in CT 1.3 – without the division of the audience into ideally separated groups, “locals” (or “native speakers”) and “foreigners,” and without the attitude that only native speakers of the language of address will “automatically” or “perfectly” understand the text – is what Sakai calls “heterolingual address.”

Sakai describes the manner in which he wrote the pieces that make up the book, over many years, in both Japanese and English, either writing each piece first in Japanese and translating it into English or writing it first in English and translating it into Japanese, translating as he wrote, writing as he translated (those italicized phrases a paraphrase of a passage at Sakai 8):

I tried to speak and listen, write and read among the “us” for whom neither reciprocal apprehension or transparent communication was guaranteed. The putative collectivity of the “we” that I wished to invoke by addressing myself to them did not have to coincide with a linguistic community whose commonness is built around the assumed assurance of immediate and reciprocal apprehen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Critical Theses on translation 1: Sakai circa 1997
• Critical Theses on translation 2: Sakai and Solomon circa 2006
• Critical Theses on translation 3: Solomon circa 2014
• References
• Notes
• Index