Translating Others (Volume 1)

Theo Hermans

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138172524
• eBook ISBN: 9781317640448
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Both in the sheer breadth and in the detail of their coverage the essays in these two volumes challenge hegemonic thinking on the subject of translation. Engaging throughout with issues of representation in a postmodern and postcolonial world, Translating Others investigates the complex processes of projection, recognition, displacement and 'othering' effected not only by translation practices but also by translation studies as developed in the West. At the same time, the volumes document the increasing awareness the the world is peopled by others who also translate, often in ways radically different from and hitherto largely ignored by the modes of translating conceptualized in Western discourses.

The languages covered in individual contributions include Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Hindi, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Rajasthani, Somali, Swahili, Tamil, Tibetan and Turkish as well as the Europhone literatures of Africa, the tongues of medieval Europe, and some major languages of Egypt's five thousand year history. Neighbouring disciplines invoked include anthropology, semiotics, museum and folklore studies, librarianship and the history of writing systems.

Contributors to Volume 1: Doris Bachmann-Medick, Cosima Bruno, Ovidi Carbonell, Martha Cheung, G. Gopinathan, Eva Hung, Alexandra Lianeri, Carol Maier, Christi Ann Marrill, Paolo Rambelli, Myriam Salama-Carr, Ubaldo Stecconi and Maria Tymoczko.

1 Grounding Theory

Reconceptualizing Translation Theory

Integrating Non-Western Thought about Translation

MARIA TYMOCZKO

University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA

Abstract: In Eurocentric tradition most statements about translation that date before the demise of positivism are relatively useless for current theorizing, because most encode the dominant perspectives of Western imperialism or respond to particular Western historical circumstances. Some of the limitations of Eurocentric thinking about translation are patently obvious. Most statements have been formulated with reference to sacred texts, for example, including religious scripture and canonical literary works. Similarly, Eurocentric theorizing has been marked by its concentration on the written word and by the vocabulary in many languages that links translation with the notion of conveying sacred relics intact from place to place.

Translation studies must strive for more flexible perspectives, and the thinking of non-Western peoples is essential in achieving broader and more applicable theories about translation. This contribution explores the implications of several non-Western concepts of translation, as well as marginal Western ones that fall outside the dominant domain of Western theory. In addition the concept of translation is related to three adjacent concepts about intercultural interface, namely, transmission, representation and transculturation. These three concepts relate to particular, though not always separable, aspects of translation: communication of content, exhibition of content and performance. One way to enlarge thinking about translation is to move beyond Eurocentric tradition, opening translation studies to other cultures’ views of transmission, representation and transculturation.

In Western¹ tradition most statements about translation that date before the demise of positivism are relatively useless for current theorizing about translation, because most are limited by the dominant ideological perspective of their time – say, Western imperialism – or are primarily applicable to a particular Western historical circumstance – say, the position of a national language and literature within a larger cultural hegemony. These problems are before me whether I read the statements of Latin writers, including Cicero and Jerome, the Germans, including Martin Luther and Friedrich Schleiermacher, or the English, including Alexander Tytler and Matthew Arnold. Such early writers speak to their own condition, out of their own time and their own historical circumstances, but there is rarely any self-reflexivity or acknowledgment about limitations of their own perspective. The result is a narrow-minded declamation that is supposed to address translations of all times and everywhere, but that is sorely circumscribed by a cultural moment.

The restricted perspectives of Western pronouncements about translation before World War I are not always apparent because of the positivist, generalized and prescriptive discourses that frame them. Yet some of the boundaries of Western thinking about translation in these statements should be patently obvious: the fact that most views have been formulated with reference to sacred texts, including both religious scripture and canonical literary works, for example. Similarly, Western theorizing has been distorted by its concentration on the written word. Not least are difficulties caused by the vocabulary in some languages that links translation with conveying sacred relics, unchanged, from place to place: the word translation is paradigmatic of this problem (cf. Tymoczko 2003a). Western translation theorists are heirs to these limitations. It is only in the postpositivist period that Western theory begins to show an awareness of its circumscribed nature, and even then many theories of translation retain surprisingly positivist formulations or efface recognition of their own specific commitments and pretheoretical assumptions.

There is a need in translation studies for more flexible and deeper understandings of translation, and the thinking of non-Western peoples about this central human activity is essential in achieving broader and more durable theories about translation. Here I explore the implications of some non-Western concepts and practices of translation, as well as marginal Western ones that fall outside the domain of dominant Western theory. As a whole, I argue that in order to expand contemporary theories of translation, it is not sufficient merely to incorporate additional non-Western data pertaining to translation histories, episodes and artifacts. The implications of those data must be analysed and understood, and the results theorized. The consequence will be the refurbishing of basic assumptions and structures of translation theory itself.²

Let me begin by observing that all theory is based on presuppositions – called axioms or postulates in mathematics. In the case of translation theory, the current presuppositions are markedly Eurocentric. Indeed, they grow out of a rather small subset of European cultural contexts based on Greco-Roman textual traditions, Christian values, nationalistic views about the relationship between language and cultural identity, and an upper-class emphasis on technical expertise and literacy. For more general and more universally applicable theories of translation, those presuppositions must be articulated and acknowledged; they must be reviewed and rethought.

Before turning to such an articulation, however, an excursus is in order. It’s worth asking whether a universal theory of translation is possible and, if so, whether constructing such a theory should be a goal of translation studies. This question is, of course, a subset of a larger question, namely, is it possible to construct any humanistic theory that will have universal applicability? It is quite feasible to construct theories of solar systems that are universally applicable, or theories of the cell. There can be theoretical knowledge that pertains to all six-sided geometrical objects. But can there be a theory of literature, say, or human cultural behaviours in general? Is it possible to have more than a local theory of translation? In fact, is ‘normal’ a concept that applies to human culture at all, or is it just a label, like a setting on a washing machine?

Here I weigh in with those who believe that much is to be learned by attempting to formulate general theories, even if such attempts are ultimately defeated or only partially realised. General theories are not necessarily achievable – a complete description of literature, for example, may be impossible – but the virtue of pushing theories of human culture toward broader and broader applicability is that, paradoxically, researchers actually end up learning more and more about the particular phenomena that are of greatest interest to them. It is only possible to define the self when we are clear about the boundary that divides the self from the other (cf. Luhmann 1984). Thus, the nature of literature in a specific culture and the positioning of that literature with reference to its own culture become clearer when such arrangements are compared to the situation of other literatures; the broader the comparison, the deeper the resulting understanding of specific local phenomena. I believe that broader and more general theories of translation will illuminate all specific phenomena related to translation everywhere, if only in virtue of the increased awareness of difference.

1. Rethinking current presuppositions about translation

Let us turn to some current presuppositions about translation that are taken as a matter of course by most Western translation scholars and that underly most Western translation theory. Why wouldn’t they be taken as givens, in view of their widespread applicability in Western countries? Yet these are presuppositions that are in need of rethinking if translation theory is to be extended to non-Western situations, as is increasingly the case. Moreover, there are many situations within Western cultures that current translation theory cannot adequately account for or describe because of these prevailing assumptions. In what follows I draw on such marginal examples to illustrate some of the problems with current paradigms, which incorporation of non-Western experience, thought and perspectives may mitigate. What follows is a selection of basic assumptions upon which contemporary Western translation theory rests, assumptions that have not been well examined or fully interrogated.

1.1 Translators are necessary in interlingual and intercultural situations; they mediate between two linguistic and cultural groups

This is a basic assumption of the discipline of translation studies, yet all who study translation are subliminally aware that there are many situations in which this presupposition does not apply. Monolingualism has been taken as the norm, whereas it may turn out to be the case that plurilingualism is more typical worldwide. I think, for example, of my grandmother who grew up in the southeast corner of Slovakia at the turn of the twentieth century, left school at the age of twelve, but spoke, as a matter of course, two languages: Slovak and Hungarian. The same grandmother later learned to switch back and forth between Bohemian and Slovak; she came to understand Polish, and she learned to speak, read and write English as well. What is the role of translation in such plurilingual communities as those of my grandmother? Are there normally translators per se in such cultures? Or are the monolingual marginalized and relegated to restricted and impoverished domains of cultural participation and competence, monolinguals not being privy to participation in the world of, say, commerce? Are monolinguals afforded summary more than translation, observation more than participation? These are questions that translation studies has not adequately researched.

Numerous cases also illustrate the fact that translation can be an essential element of plurilingual cultures but not for the purpose of mediation or communication between linguistic groups. For example, there is a bilingual community of Hawaiian nationalists who insist on speaking Hawaiian in official U.S. government contexts, particularly legal ones, and who insist on having the services of government translators who can translate between Hawaiian and English. The speakers of Hawaiian do not ask for translation to facilitate communication, being usually less facile in Hawaiian than in English which is generally their first language. Rather, the Hawaiian speakers insist on translation as part of their attempt to block ‘common-sense’ communication in the United States, to thwart U.S. ‘business-as-usual’ and to promote recognition of the existence of a pre-Anglo culture in their islands.

Similarly, as I have argued in Translation in a Postcolonial Context (1999), postcolonial cultures illustrate the limitation of this presupposition that translation facilitates communication between groups. In fact translation in a postcolonial context can mediate across languages within a single group, functioning to connect a people with its past, for example, more than to connect one people with another. Translation can be made of a source community for the community itself, even when it involves translation between two languages, rather than translation from one state of a language to another.

This basic premise of translation studies is complex, as my counterexamples indicate. It involves presuppositions about the way that languages function in plurilingual layering, the purpose of translation as primarily communicative and the belief that translation operates to connect different groups. These assumptions may all reflect an Anglo-American model of linguistic (in)competence, equating nation with language and national identity with linguistic provinciality.³ Translation studies has, after all, been heavily theorized by English speakers, who are notoriously deficient in language acquisition, and who, thus, may be particularly biased in their theorizing of translation. More research may show that the assumption about monolingualism built into translation studies is ultimately atypical even of Europe, as well as the world as a whole.

1.2 Translation involves (written) texts

This second premise of dominant translation theory has marginalized interpretation as a central activity to be theorized in translation studies. A sign of the bias towards seeing translation as a literacy practice is that even studies of interpretation are slanted in favour of conference interpretation, an activity that begins with a fixed written text. The focus on written texts as the subject of translation has been decried within translation studies by those promoting the study of interpretation (see Cronin 2002 and sources cited). But it is a much more serious deficiency, for most human cultures through time have been oral, and this continues to be the case in much, if not most, of the non-Western world; it follows that most translation through time and space has been oral. Orality is the central condition of human biology and culture, and translation must be theorized so as to acknowledge these conditions.⁴ In expanding translation theory to incorporate non-Western experience, the premise that translation primarily involves written or fixed texts must be adjusted, for the majority of human beings in the world still live in cultures where literacy plays a very restricted role.

1.3 The primary text types with which translators work have been defined and categorized

Many Westerners believe that they know, use, and have categorized the central human text types: epic, drama and lyric poetry, for example; or novel, academic lecture and business letter. In fact, text types can vary dramatically from culture to culture, and defining a culture’s repertory of primary forms and text types is enormously complex. There is even evidence within the Western tradition that those primary forms characteristic of Greek culture (e.g. epic, lyric, drama) are not universal, but the result of cultural diffusion from the Greco-Roman tradition.⁵ Needless to say, the question of text types is further complicated by other aspects of cultural embeddedness of discourse: speech acts (e.g. irony), signals pertaining to relevance and so forth (cf. Hatim 1997: ch. 16). Translation theory has hardly touched these complexities of text type, yet they are essential to understand if current thinking about translation is to be revisioned. The question of text types intersects with the need to understand orality, for oral cultures often have very different text types and different semiotic structurings of texts from those of literate cultures. Far from being well-conceptualized in existing translation theory, questions pertaining to text type must be explored further if translation theory is to expand beyond current models.

1.4 The process of translation is a sort of ‘black box’: an individual translator decodes a given message to be translated and recodes the same message in a second language

Although this classic representation of the process of translation has been criticized by many scholars as being too simple, nonetheless the model continues to operate implicitly in many, even most, formulations of translation theory. The concept of decoding/encoding has become a matter of scholarly debate,⁶ but the overall picture of a single translator engaged in a mysterious inner process (conditioned, of course, by social context) continues to hold sway. The translation process thus conceived is very individualistic and bound to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Grounding Theory
• 2 Mapping Concepts
• 3 Reflexive Praxis