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PART 1: ENLARGING TRANSLATION
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When the first surviving pronouncements about the practice of translation appear in the records of Western culture – and they appear early, some two thousand years ago – it is assumed that translation is a defined process with a circumscribed domain. This is no surprise: to Cicero, whose comments in De oratore (ca. 55 B.C.E.) are generally recognized as offering the earliest Western norms for translation, the circumstances and function of translation are treated as self-evident. The languages (Greek and Latin) and their anisomorphisms are taken for granted; the text types are well known (oratory in Cicero’s case) and considered unproblematic as types; the purposes of translation are presupposed (facilitating the formation of a Roman citizen, learning public oratory, developing more powerful models than Latin oratory itself could provide, increasing the vocabulary stock of Latin, defamiliarizing Latin rhetoric so that Cicero would not sound like Ennius); and the cultural context of both source and target text are assumed (Greek city-state rhetoric, public contexts in Rome such as the Roman Senate).1
Before continuing, let me say a word about terminology. I am using the term Western to refer to ideas and perspectives that initially originated in and became dominant in Europe, spreading from there to various locations in the world, where in some cases, such as the United States, the Americas in general, and Australia, these ideas have also become dominant.2 I am capitalizing the word to indicate that the term refers to a concept, not a direction. There is an obvious difficulty with the terms East and West, both of which imply perspective and position. East or west of what? In Chinese tradition where China is the “Middle Kingdom”, India is “the West”, but for the British India was part of “the East”. To the Romans the nations of southwestern Asia were considered “the East”, a perspective still encoded in the phrase “the Near East”. Moreover, at present, when Western ideas have permeated the world and there is widespread inter-penetration of cultures everywhere, the terms West and Western have become increasingly problematic.
Şebnem Susam-Sarajeva (2002:193) discusses difficulties with this terminology including the polar opposite “non-Western”, which reduces the rest of the world to being defined (by contrast or opposition) in terms of the Western. She points out as well that the terminology aggregates vastly different cultures outside Eurocentric spheres and effaces great differences within Western cultures (epitomized by differences among Britain and the Celtic fringe – Ireland, Scotland, and Wales – or Switzerland and the United States). Although I basically agree with her assessment of the difficulties, I find her solution of using the discourses of center and periphery problematic. I see knowledge as ultimately local, with life being lived and experienced in a multicentered manner. Reification of some parts of the world as center and others as periphery undermines that the valorization of the multiplicity of perspectives in translation studies that constitutes one facet of the argument I am developing in this book. I believe that every place and every nation is a center of experience, knowledge, and wisdom, where I use nation in the oldest sense of the word, namely to indicate a people or a community. There is no ideal solution to these problems of terminology, especially at a time when Western culture is being rapidly taken up all around the world and naturalized to the local. Thus, although I use the term Western, I am also avoiding the term non-Western which constructs an implied binarism that effaces distinctions of cultures everywhere. Widely varied patterns of cultures are lumped together, particularly in the aggregate non-Western, and then collectively silenced.
Let us return to Cicero’s statements about translation. These comments by Cicero were not, of course, the first reflections on translation in human history or even in Western history, but they are some of the earliest to come down to the present day because they are among the first associated with literacy practices in the various languages of the world.3 Thus they have survived the course of time. Before written comments about translation practice, there were certainly oral observations about the practice of translation or interpreting, but they have not been preserved because writing is one of the principal means by which humans transmit culture wholesale to the future. No doubt, however, oral statements about interpreting were equally straightforward, for again the situation of any particular oral practice of cultural exchange was well defined: the languages, the types of utterances, the persons communicating, the purposes of communication, and the cultural contexts were all ostensively apparent.
Like most teachers of translation theory and practice, I dutifully include a unit in my classes in which I have students read surveys of early statements and pronouncements about translation such as those of Cicero, asking students to become familiar with various canonical texts about translation from the earliest period to the twentieth century. What I have realized over the years, however, is that I tend to approach this question of the history of translation theory and practice with a sense of dread. It was in part the investigation of the reasons for that dread that led me to write this book.
Translation is primarily instrumental for many of the early authors, facilitating activities that are themselves worth discussing. As a process translation often seems obvious to early commentators, as does their task as translators, which is to find solutions to the problems posed by translation as it is defined in their context. This is true even when the authors are promoting or prescribing a specific approach to translation as a whole. The presupposition that the problems of translation are obvious and that the solutions of the writers are clearly correct and generalizable is what makes most statements about translation before 1900 difficult to use and to teach as translation theory. These early statements have a transparency about them resulting from implicit assumptions that the activity of translation is circumscribed by the situations and presuppositions of the several writers; such assumptions thus offer a self-evident bottom line to any particular writer’s inquiry about and position on translation.
This transparency in the early record stands in sharp contrast to the current problematizing of translation and the probing into its nature. It is as if before 1900 translation were conceived as a closed feld, a feld similar to the geography of a single country or even simple arithmetic calculation. One may continue to learn information virtually indefinitely about such a closed feld by increasing the delicacy of the inquiry, but essentially the broad strokes of what can be learned and the boundaries of the domain are well defined at an early stage. In such inquiry the task of researchers is to fill in more and more detail on the basis of the given parameters and the structure of the defined domain.
Reading the early history of Western thinking about translation can be both stultifying and disturbing, therefore, because it consists of statement after statement about how to translate, statements that are delivered in positive, declarative, and definitive terms about issues that in modern approaches to translation are complex, open, and often indeterminate. The tone of the early statements is significant: the writers give prescriptive and definitive advice and they proclaim clear norms. It does not seem to matter to the writers that they contradict each other from decade to decade, from century to century, often knowingly.
When my students and I undertake this investigation together, I usually ask in an openended way what the students think about the reading. I am often amazed to hear them say that they find the sequence of statements interesting and useful: they say that the survey gives them ideas about how to translate and they report finding it gratifying to be given definite instructions about the process. The disjunction between my own response and those of my students ultimately caused me to begin to interrogate my own reactions: why do I find the early statements so unhelpful and in fact so frustrating? Why do I read such statements as I would read journal entries about travel abroad, revealing as much about the viewer as about the viewed? To a large extent I believe that the answers to these questions lie in my unease with and aversion to normative stances that are delivered without any indication of self-refection and self-reflexivity about the speaker’s own place of enunciation and without even minimal acknowledgment of the relationships binding the speaker’s beliefs, actions, and ideological context.
By and large the attitudes of most early writers about translation reflect what have come to be known as realist or positivist orientations to knowledge,4 but since the early decades of the twentieth century such uncritical and transparent approaches to knowledge have been increasingly discredited. The importance of acknowledging position and perspective has become almost universally recognized in academic discourses, and a certain metacommentary and self-reflexivity about the researcher’s position and stance are now expected. These expectations are associated with the popular dictum in contemporary literary studies that the task is not to solve the problems but to problematize the solutions. Marilyn Gaddis Rose offers a similar judgement, observing that the history of early statements about translation is “essentially a record of successive guides to pleasing literary taste”, and that these statements do not constitute theory per se in the contemporary understanding of that concept; instead they are “recommendations for adhering to accepted rhetorical practices as the recommender understands them” (1997:15). Similar issues have led Martha Cheung to title her collection of primary documents about translation in Chinese as An Anthology of Chinese Discourse on Translation (2006a), and she discusses in her introduction why she rejected calling these statements “theory” (cf. Lin 2002:162).
Thus, my disease with the approaches of early writers to translation is not merely a matter of personal taste. To a large extent what is troubling about the early statements has to do with the huge shift in how knowledge itself has been viewed since the beginning of the twentieth century. Associated with the demise of positivism in the West, this shift makes it increasingly difficult to enjoin people to translate in any single way or, in fact, to take rigid normative stances toward any social practice and to view any subject from a single perspective exclusively, as the early statements about translation tend to do. Accordingly, it becomes increasingly difficult to use early pronouncements about translation and to recommend them to students without extensively contextualizing the material, showing how each statement served the ethos and logos of its day and how it can be related to its cultural moment. This work has not been systematically attempted in translation studies, and it is certainly beyond my own personal reach, particularly in an introductory course on translation theory and practice or even in a study such as I have undertaken here.
Since World War II and the coalescence of translation studies as an independent academic discipline,5 thinking about translation has had a definitional impetus that has grown out of and been motivated by postpositivist perspectives on the subject matter. This definitional impetus has increasingly revolved around two points. First, research and theorizing have steadily expanded, thus opening the domain of translation and problematizing many aspects of translation that were earlier taken as obvious or transparent. It is increasingly recognized that there are more and more strands involved in translation, more and more features of translation that vary across time and space and that must be accounted for and understood. Thus, what seemed transparent to early writers on translation because it was assumed (including characteristics of specific languages, anisomorphisms of specific language pairs, text types, cultural contexts, patronage, power relations, and ideology, to name but a few parameters) is not in fact uniform or even obvious across the whole range of translational phenomena. Indeed the elements of translation viewed by early writers as a matter of common sense are often merely a refection of idées reçues associated with particular cultural situations or ideological positions of their own times. As areas associated with translation have become problematized, therefore, translation theory has also shown a continual tendency to expand the purview of translation, with a concomitant expansion of the scope of translation research.
Second, and clearly related to the first point, there has been a steady movement in the feld toward greater self-reflexivity as scholars and translators have come to realize that their own perspectives on translation are not universal. That is, scholars have begun to understand that any perspective, even a dominant one, is only one way of looking at translation. This chapter will briefly trace these currents through the various developments and schools of translation studies in the second half of the twentieth century. It is not, of course, possible to deal with the history of translation studies as a discipline in detail in this context. Nonetheless the overview below offers a way to conceptualize both the history and structure of translation studies as a whole since World War II and to suggest ways of characterizing the discipline that can serve as alternatives to stereotypical ways of describing it found in the existing literature.
1.1 Initial Considerations: Beyond Positivism
Although the primary focus of this chapter is a brief survey of the major theories of translation that have emerged since World War II, some background material will be useful before turning to the survey so as to locate the various approaches in a broader pattern. In a sense it is possible to undertake a thematic overview of the feld because translation studies has matured sufficiently so that the history of the feld can be written. There are several collections of primary documents pertaining to pronouncements about translation through the centuries, notably André Lefevere’s Translation/History/Culture: A Sourcebook (1992a), Douglas Robinson’s Western Translation Theory from Herodotus to Nietzsche (1997b), and Martha Cheung’s An Anthology of Chinese Discourse on Translation (2006a). There are narrative overviews of such longitudinal views, most of them relatively short, such as chapters in Eugene Nida’s Toward a Science of Translating (1964) and Susan Bassnett’s Translation Studies (3rd. ed., 2002). The sequence of translation theories since World War II has been treated by Edwin Gentzler, Contemporary Translation Theories (2nd. ed., 2001); Jeremy Munday, Introducing Translation Studies: Theories and Applications (2001); and Mary Snell-Hornby, The Turns of Translation Studies: New Paradigms or Shifting Viewpoints? (2006). There are also detailed overviews of particular approaches to translation theory in the series titled “Translation Theories Explained” (currently titled “Translation Theories Explored”) issued by St. Jerome Publishing: Christiane Nord, Translating as a Purposeful Activity (1997) on functionalist theories; Peter Fawcett, Translation and Language (1997) on linguistic theories; Jean Boase-Beier, Stylistic Approaches to Translation (2006), focusing on cog-nitive stylistics in particular; Theo Hermans, Translation in Systems (1999) on systems theories; Luise von Flotow, Translation and Gender (1997) on feminist theories of translation; Douglas Robinson, Translation and Empire (1997) on postcolonial theories; Marilyn Gaddis Rose, Translation and Literary Criticism (1997) on literary theories of translation; and Kathleen Davis, Deconstruction and Translation (2001). Le...
