Translation and Empire

Douglas Robinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317642275
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Arising from cultural anthropology in the late 1980s and early 1990s, postcolonial translation theory is based on the observation that translation has often served as an important channel of empire. Douglas Robinson begins with a general presentation of postcolonial theory, examines current theories of the power differentials that control what gets translated and how, and traces the historical development of postcolonial thought about translation. He also explores the negative and positive impact of translation in the postcolonial context, reviewing various critiques of postcolonial translation theory and providing a glossary of key words. The result is a clear and useful guide to some of the most complex and critical issues in contemporary translation studies.

1. Postcolonial Studies, Translation Studies

Translation and empire

Let’s begin with a brief overview of the main terms in this book’s title, translation and empire. In the rest of the chapter we will explore the main term in its subtitle, postcolonial.

Translation and empire are terms that do not at first glance seem to go together. The most common terms associated with translation over the two thousand or more years that it has been studied are meaning, equivalence, accuracy, technique, and so on – concepts that are purely technical (‘how to’) and evaluative (‘how good’) and that point to an activity performed on words, sentences and whole texts. Translation has traditionally been thought of in highly mechanical ways: as an impersonal process of transferring a meaning from a source text to a target text without changing it significantly. The primary people behind this process, translators, have been studied largely in negative ways, in terms of the distortive or disruptive impact of their ‘opinions’, ‘biases’, or ‘misunderstandings’ on the successful completion of the process. Theoretical attention to translators has been largely directed at stripping the ideal translator of such disruptions. Specifically, it has been directed at warning real translators against errors of all sorts, deliberate or inadvertent divergences from the strict meaning of the original text, so that the textual process can proceed without interference from the real world of human interaction and motivation.

In this scholarly tradition, any linkage between translation and empire seems at first improbable, even impossible, certainly counterintuitive. What could translation possibly have to do with empire? Empires are large-scale military, political and economic bodies covering centuries in time and whole continents in space; they involve the complex interactions and transactions of invasions and resistance, occupation and accommodation, propaganda and education, domination and submission, and so on. An empire is a political system based on military and economic domination by which one group expands and consolidates its power over many others – usually one nation over many other nations. Empire-building has traditionally been justified on the grounds of economic gain (the conquered lands will enrich the imperial power), strategy and security (the conquered lands will serve as buffer zones between the imperial power and its enemies), moral obligations (tyrannized peoples must be liberated from their oppressors and protected from them), and Social Darwinism (stronger cultures will naturally rule over weaker ones). At worst, empires destroy entire peoples and cultures; at best, they bring about a fruitful mixing and mingling of cultures that gives new life blood to isolated communities.

Empire is far from a modern development; it is, in fact, one of the oldest forms of macropolitical system we know (others include various leagues and alliances; see Schumpeter 1951, Doyle 1986). We speak in ancient times of the Egyptian empire, the Chinese empire, the Assyrian empire, the Persian empire, the Macedonian empire, the Roman empire and, from the coronation of Charlemagne in 800 C.E. through to the last emperor’s renunciation in 1806, the Holy Roman empire. The Mongol empire controlled a territory from Russia to northern China in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; the Ottoman empire covered an area from the Mediterranean to beyond the Black Sea from 1300 to well into the modern era, in some areas until the early twentieth century. Over the past four centuries, the world history of empire has mainly revolved around various European empires: the Portuguese began to build their commercial empire in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries; the Spanish began to colonize the Americas in the early sixteenth century; and the Dutch, the French and the British began to expand in the early seventeenth century. Various parts of Europe have been unified over the centuries by the Austro-Hungarian empire, the Russian empire and the German empire. Imperialist latecomers that did not begin to build an empire outside Europe until the late nineteenth century include Germany, Belgium and Italy (which were involved in the general European partitioning of Africa between 1880 and 1914), Russia and Japan (Korea, China and various island groups) and the United States (Cuba, Hawaii, Philippines, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico) – itself a former colony of England that had achieved its independence and grown so rapidly that influential imperialists in the government believed it important that the country build an empire of its own.

Even as late as the first half of the twentieth century, an empire was still generally considered a source of pride: not only were the British (for example) proud to have conquered so much of the world (‘The sun never sets on the British empire’, ‘Hail, Britannia, Britannia rules the waves!’) but many of their imperial subjects as well found pride in their belonging to such a mighty conglomeration. As Walter Pater wrote in Marius the Epicurean (1885:204):

The mere sense that one belongs to a system – an imperial system or organisation – has, in itself, the expanding power of a great experience; as some have felt who have been admitted from narrower sects into the communion of the catholic church; or as the old Roman citizen felt.

This attitude began to erode as independence and liberation movements spread throughout the colonized countries and imperial subjects increasingly began to perceive empire less as ‘protection from external enemies’ or ‘belonging to a mighty enterprise’, as it had long been idealized, and more as military bullying, political domination, economic exploitation and cultural hegemony. Especially as one colonized country after another won its independence from the great European imperial powers throughout the middle decades of this century (the 1945-1965 period brought independence to nearly every colonized society in the world), the adjective imperial began to lose its positive connotations of ‘high’, ‘mighty’, ‘lofty’, ‘exalted’ and became a mere neutral term describing empire (‘the imperial powers’). At the same time, the adjective imperialist came to be used more and more negatively, to portray imperial activities and attitudes as antidemocratic and exploitative bullying.

The question remains, however: What does all this have to do with translation? If translation has to do with textual equivalences, words and phrases and their meanings, what possible common ground does it have with the macropolitics of empire?

The study of translation and empire, or even of translation as empire, was born in the mid- to late 1980s out of the realization that translation has always been an indispensable channel of imperial conquest and occupation. Not only must the imperial conquerors find some effective way of communicating with their new subjects; they must develop new ways of subjecting them, converting them into docile or ‘cooperative’ subjects. One of the earliest areas of concern in the history of translation as empire was the selection and training of interpreters to mediate between the colonizer and the colonized. Was it better, for example, to send linguistically gifted members of the conquering power in to learn the indigenous languages of the conquered peoples, or to teach linguistically gifted members of the conquered culture to communicate in the imperial language? In both historical processes, which often coexisted in the same cross-cultural interactions, it was crucial to control the loyalties of the interpreters thus trained, so that they would serve the imperial power and not retain or develop ‘counterproductive’ loyalties to the conquered peoples. What steps had to be taken to ensure the reliability of translation or interpreting across such power differentials? Who would vouch for the accuracy of a translation if the interpreter was the only available mediator between colonizer and colonized?

Two examples:

In 1519, the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés in Mexico relied on his native mistress and interpreter Malintzin or Malinche, called Doña Marina by the Spanish, to communicate with the Nahua whose territory he was attempting to seize. In one Nahua town, Cholula, Cortés was received with entreaties of peace, but Malintzin is said to have overheard a local woman talking about the ambush the men were planning against the tiny Spanish army of 400, and reported it to Cortés, who foiled the ambush and entrapped and slaughtered 3000 Choloteca men. This was the turning point in the Spanish conquest of Mexico; when the Nahua king Montezuma heard Cortés had uncovered and undone the plot against his troops, he became increasingly convinced that the Spanish conquistador was not a man but an incarnation of the god Quetzalcoatl. Malintzin has often been reviled by Mexicans as a traitor to her people; but her contemptuous nickname, la Chingada, ‘the Fucked’, reveals as much about her difficult position in the middle of power politics, a woman among men, a multilingual among monolinguals, as it does about treachery. What power do translators and interpreters have in the political realm? And how is that power complicated by factors like membership in a despised gender, race or class?

A century or more later, in the early decades of Plymouth Plantation (1620-1640) in what is now Massachusetts, the Pawtuxet brave Squanto served as the primary native interpreter for the English colonists, and has gone down in (imperial) history as a peace-maker, treaty-maker, etc. He learned English rather traumatically, by being kidnapped from his tribe and sold into slavery in England; he escaped and made his way back to his tribe, which had by then been exterminated; was recaptured and sold into slavery again, escaped again, and returned to his homeland, which the colonizers were calling the ‘New World’. What human (emotional, political) complexities underlay the ‘accuracy’ of his translations, and how were those complexities manipulated by Squanto himself, the Indian chief Massasoit and governor William Bradford in the interests variously of maintaining self-respect, destroying the European settlement and expanding European hegemony?

In order to explore the implications of empire for translation, clearly, and of translation for empire, we must move past traditional conceptions of translation as a purely linguistic or textual activity. The groundwork for this expansion of the conventional concept of translation has been laid by several different theoretical schools, especially:

• The hermeneutical work of George Steiner in After Babel (1975), who draws heavily on the German Romantics and Postromantics from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger to explore translation as aggression, invasion, capture and plunder;

• The polysystems or descriptive translation studies group, including Itamar Even-Zohar (1979, 1981), Gideon Toury (1980, 1981, 1995) and André Lefevere (1992), who explore the macropolitics of translation in terms of the cultural and literary systems into which specific texts are translated;

• Skopos and Handlung theorists like Hans J. Vermeer (1989) and Justa Holz-Mänttäri (1984), who examine the social contexts and activities of translation, translation as performed by real people in real social networks for specific purposes.

These approaches, which all push back the boundaries of what is legitimately considered ‘translation studies’, have been around and increasingly influential since the mid-1970s. It should be clear, however, that it is enormously difficult to displace intellectual assumptions that were first formulated by classical authorities like Cicero, Horace, Pliny and Quintilian two millennia ago; the classical ideas have widely been considered the only acceptable way of thinking about the practice of translation for three or four centuries. And indeed the old assumptions about translation, that it is a purely linguistic and largely impersonal process for achieving semantic equivalence between texts, still dominate thinking about translation in many parts of the international translation-studies community. If you share those assumptions, the ideas in this book will seem quite bizarre and largely irrelevant to the ‘proper’ study of translation.

What does postcolonial mean?

The field of study called ‘postcolonial theory’ or ‘postcolonial studies’ is considered part of the interdisciplinary field of cultural theory or cultural studies, which draws on anthropology, sociology, gender studies, ethnic studies, literary criticism, history, psychoanalysis, political science and philosophy to examine various cultural texts and practices. Even more important than this general description is the observation that cultural studies brings together critics of culture; it is not merely a forum for exploring culture in value-neutral ways but a strategic consolidation of critique. Cultural theorists often feel that disciplinary divisions in the academy serve to block cultural critique by isolating individual thinkers in different departments and different methodologies – so that, for example, a sociologist doing quantitative research and a literary scholar doing rhetorical analyses could not converse well enough to discover that they shared similar goals, especially that of exposing various insidious and well-concealed forms of thought-control. Drawing on Antonio Gramsci’s notion of ‘hegemony’ as the ruling political, social, cultural, ideological and intellectual structures of a society, cultural theorists typically describe themselves and their work as ‘counterhegemonic’.

Postcolonial studies, then, grows out of both the break-up of the great European empires in the 1940s, 50s and 60s and the subsequent rise to prominence in academic circles of counterhegemonic cultural studies (see Ashcroft et al. 1989, Tiffin and Lawson 1994, Williams and Chrisman 1994). In many individual cases, postcolonial studies predates cultural studies; but the two have grown up together, and today they are thought of as closely and fruitfully linked. Another term sometimes used for postcolonial studies is ‘subaltern studies’, after a series of essay collections by that title edited in the 1980s by Ranajit Guha.

The precise scope of postcolonial studies remains controversial. It has been defined in a variety of ways:

(1) The study of Europe’s former colonies since independence; how they have responded to, accommodated, resisted or overcome the cultural legacy of colonialism during independence. ‘Postcolonial’ here refers to cultures after the end of colonialism. The historical period covered is roughly the second half of the twentieth century.

(2) The study of Europe’s former colonies since they were colonized; how they have responded to, accommodated, resisted or overcome the cultural legacy of colonialism since its inception. ‘Postcolonial’ here refers to cultures after the beginning of colonialism. The historical period covered is roughly the modern era, beginning in the sixteenth century.

(3) The study of all cultures/societies/countries/nations in terms of their power relations with other cultures/etc.; how conqueror cultures have bent conquered cultures to their will; how conquered cultures have responded to, accommodated, resisted or overcome that coercion. ‘Postcolonial’ here refers to our late-twentieth-century perspective on political and cultural power relations. The historical period covered is all human history.

This series of definitions may seem grandiose, even itself progressively imperialistic, colonizing more and more of human history for a certain critical perspective. In ‘Marginal Returns: The Trouble With Post-Colonial Theory’, for example, Russell Jacoby (1995:30) shakes his head at the expansive focus of the second definition:

Some adherents maintain that imperialism defines colonialism and its sequel, post-colonialism, which restricts the terrain to South America, Africa, and parts of Asia. Others argue that the term includes the ‘white settler’ colonies like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and even the United States. What’s left out? Very little. In their 1989 study The Empire Writes Back (Routledge), a founding text for post-colonial theorists, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin estimate that three quarters of the globe suffered from colonialism. Here is a new field that claims four centuries and most of the planet as its domain. Not bad.

And of course that ‘domain’ is even larger in the third definition; for was there ever a culture that at some point in its history was not controlled by another?

Some postcolonial scholars have been at pains to establish one of these three demarcations as the definitive one. In an introductory text of this sort, however, it may be more useful simply to note that the debate over the proper extension of the term postcolonial continues. Indeed, it may be even more useful to note that each of the three definitions will tend to appeal to, and be useful for, a different group of scholars:

(1) ‘Post-independence’ studies. This narrowly circumscribed approach will prove fruitful for scholars of the recent history of specific postcolonial cultures such as India, various African nations or the West Indies. It will allow them to focus on the new (and partly old) problems arising out of the survival of the colonial legacy in independence: problems of language, place and self, political and legal issues, etc.

(2) ‘Post-European colonization’ studies. This approach will prove fruitful for counterhegemonic European scholars interested in undermining the cultural and political hegemony of Europe, and for scholars from the former colonies who are interested in validating their culture’s experience with the imperial power through the exploration of parallels with other postcolonial cultures. It will enable them to place specific historical events in a larger geopolitical context.

(3) ‘Power-relations’ studies. This approach will prove fruitful for cultural theorists who are most interested in foregrounding power relations that until recently have been repressed, idealized or universalized. It will enable them to draw on the full range of human history for examples of human domination and its costs, thus effectively blocking the dismissive conservative response that such-and-such ‘postcolonial’ phenomenon isn’t true of us, or of the cultures we value.

It is possible to go further still: “Some contemporary critics”, write Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin in The Empire Writes Back, “have suggested that post-colonialism is more than a body of texts produced within post-colonial societies, and that it is best conceived of as a reading practice” (1989:193). This stricture could apply equally well to all three definitions of the postcolonial.

In ‘post-independence’ studies, postcolonialism is one way of looking at the history of Europe’s former colonies after independence – an enormously productive and seemingly ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Postcolonial Studies, Translation Studies
• 2. Power Differentials
• 3. Translation as Empire: The Theoretical Record
• 4. Translation and the Impact of Colonialism
• 5. Resistance, Redirection, and Retranslation
• 6. Criticisms
• Glossary
• Bibliographical References