The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Politics

Jonathan Evans, Fruela Fernandez, Jonathan Evans, Fruela Fernandez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781317219484
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Politics presents the first comprehensive, state of the art overview of the multiple ways in which 'politics' and 'translation' interact. Divided into four sections with thirty-three chapters written by a roster of international scholars, this handbook covers the translation of political ideas, the effects of political structures on translation and interpreting, the politics of translation and an array of case studies that range from the Classical Mediterranean to contemporary China. Considering established topics such as censorship, gender, translation under fascism, translators and interpreters at war, as well as emerging topics such as translation and development, the politics of localization, translation and interpreting in democratic movements, and the politics of translating popular music, the handbook offers a global and interdisciplinary introduction to the intersections between translation and interpreting studies and politics. With a substantial introduction and extensive bibliographies, this handbook is an indispensable resource for students and researchers of translation theory, politics and related areas.

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Introduction

Emancipation, secret histories, and the language of hegemony

Jonathan Evans and Fruela Fernández

Translation and politics: setting the stage

A Soviet joke claims that Karl Radek (1885–1939), a leading figure of the Communist International (Comintern) and a well-known polyglot, was once asked by a visiting delegate how he was able to interpret and translate so fluently between several languages. Slightly surprised, Radek answered, ‘I just know what people here are allowed to say’ (Lewis 2008: 60). Although probably apocryphal, the anecdote has the power to illuminate to what extent ‘translation’ and ‘politics’ have interacted through history; in just one punchline, multiple questions can be raised about communication within multilingual organizations and empires, the impact of direct and indirect censorship, or the evolution and transformation of political ideologies across languages and cultures.

For many years, the strength of this long-standing bond and mutual dependency between ‘translation’ and ‘politics’ was subject to a peculiar academic contradiction: while interest in the political role of translation grew across disciplines like social movements studies, history, sociology, diplomacy, and international politics, it was palpable that these disciplines were not necessarily engaging with the field of translation studies, and that translation studies was, conversely, not always very receptive to a dialogue with them. Thankfully, the tide seems to be changing and this Routledge Handbook of Translation and Politics, which brings together scholars from a great diversity of fields, aims to make a decisive contribution to this momentum.

Locating the spaces of interaction between ‘politics’ and ‘translation’ is, however, no easy task. For a start, defining ‘politics’ has been considered a political act in itself (Leftwich 2004: 2). Like any definition, this definition will be dependent on an understanding of what its content and limits are and should be: for example, while certain approaches restrict politics to the act of governing (Peters 2004), others argue that ‘politics is everywhere’, since ‘no realm of life is immune to relations of conflict and power’ (Squires 2004: 119). As will be seen in this handbook, different objects of study favour different understandings of politics: the study of policies, for instance, has received more attention in a relatively institutionalized field like audiovisual translation (see Gottlieb, this volume) than in an all-encompassing way of life and protest such as feminism (see Castro and Ergun, this volume). In spite of this, we feel that a working definition of ‘politics’ could be set out by adopting Jacques Rancière’s understanding of ‘the political’ (2004: 112–113) as a site of tensions between ‘police’ (i.e. the process of governing and organizing humans in communities subject to hierarchies and power relations) and ‘emancipation’ (the set of practices aimed at asserting and exerting equality between individuals). ‘Politics’ is, therefore, a space of oppositions between systems and individuals, hierarchy and equality, police and emancipation, that is always subject to contestation and expansion.

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Similarly, ‘translation’ is also a disputed concept. First, it is frequently used to encompass two related practices: ‘translation’ and ‘interpreting’, as we will do in this introduction for convenience. At a deeper level, both researchers and ordinary users seem to be expanding the concept beyond a purely ‘linguistic’ sense to a wide understanding that also involves the translation of practices, ideologies, concepts, and values (see below and in Ban, Doerr, Liu, Xie, and Marais, among others, this volume).

Both in a restricted and an expanded sense, the interaction between ‘translation’ and ‘politics’ has been a constant throughout history, which this handbook tries to capture through the combination of historical and contemporary approaches. Following the Rancièrian understanding of ‘police’ and ‘emancipation’, it could be argued that two main lines cut across this area of study: on the one hand, how translation has contributed to the evolution and transformation of political practices (what could be properly called the ‘translation of politics’); on the other, the place of translation within political structures (‘politics of translation’), as both a political means and a politicized object. It should also be taken into account that these lines of analysis are not mutually exclusive: a political praxis largely shaped by translation, such as Marxism (Boothman 2010), can eventually evolve into a political structure that impacts and shapes translation (see Ertürk and Serin 2016 for an excellent overview; and Lacorte, Lygo, Luong, Popa, and Wang, this volume, for specific case studies). Our aim in this introduction is to consider existing work on the political nature of translation and the uses of ‘translation’ as a concept in political science and praxis, in order to set the stage for the discussions of translation and politics in this volume.

Translation as political activity

Translation is political as it affects the interactions among groups and communities (in relation to both Rancière’s notions of ‘police’ and ‘emancipation’), as well as between states, and in supranational organizations such as the European Union. Like most human actions, translation can have intended and unintended effects on other people and the environment, and what was not intentionally political can have political effects. In addition, translation and interpreting are used in many situations that are explicitly political, from state visits (where heads of state meet and use interpreters) to war (e.g. the use of interpreters by occupying forces), as well as on a daily basis in organizations like the United Nations or European Parliament. While we cannot cover every possible example of the ways in which translation has political effects in this part, we aim to demonstrate some ways in which the act of translation is political.

One of the key ways in which translation intersects with politics is by providing increased accessibility to information and services. In England, for instance, doctors’ surgeries often provide information in languages other than English for people whose home language is not English (often those who are immigrants to England). This allows access to health information and can improve quality of life. The decision to provide such translated materials is political, however, as it intersects with debates about immigration policy and questions of multiculturalism. Not only that, but the decisions over which languages and services to offer (as it would cost too much to offer all possible ones) mean that, while some groups have improved access, others do not (or have to learn English to receive it). In different circumstances, the translation into another language of official documents and web pages, and even road signs, can affect a sense of national or local identity (see Cronin 2006). For instance, many official documents in England and Wales are available in English and Welsh, recognizing the standing of Welsh as a national language. In Ireland, there is institutional support for Irish Gaelic, including the dual presentation of road signs in English and Irish. In other instances, translation is used to make areas accessible to travellers or immigrants. In Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, for instance, signage now tends to be available in French, English and Chinese, while the metro in Shanghai is signposted in Chinese and English. These examples demonstrate how translation policy cannot be fully separated out from other forms of language policy (see González Núñez and Meylaerts 2017) and research on multilingual states (e.g. Wolf 2015, Meylaerts, this volume) has demonstrated the complex interplay between languages and translation in such states. Given the complexity of global demographics, with high volumes of movement of people, the political importance of translating (or not translating) for speakers of languages other than the local, national, one can only grow.

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While translation can serve to include, it can also exclude. Translators can exclude material that they deem ‘unfit’ and thus stop target language readers accessing aspects of a text. An example is Howard M. Parshley’s translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe/The Second Sex, which cut over ten per cent of the work, including a chapter on married women (Simons 1983). This has had an effect on the understanding of this work in anglophone academia due to the omissions made (Moi 2002). Translation can also obscure the specificity of cultures in different locales by eliding the differences between them (Mignolo 2000: 1). This may take place in any number of ways. Gayatri Spivak, for instance, argues that there is a risk that translation can make all non-Western writers sound the same, with differences between genders, statuses and ethnicities erased (Spivak 2012: 315). Emily Apter (2013) puts forward a similar critique of the discipline of world literature (where texts from around the world are generally read in translation), arguing that it can elide the differences between texts and cultures. While Spivak and Apter are dealing with literature, Eric Cheyfitz (1991) demonstrates how translating concepts of property in the North American context allowed European settlers to appropriate land, erasing Native American concepts of land use, which were not exclusive in the same way as ‘property’ is understood in English terms (Cheyfitz 1991: 57). Other postcolonial translation scholars (e.g. Niranjana 1992; Rafael 1988) have also demonstrated the potential for translation to be used as a tool of colonial rule by excluding local populations from the colonial discourse unless translated into the language of the colonizer.

One way of approaching the point between inclusion and exclusion is the idea that translation performs ‘bordering.’ This term is used by Naoki Sakai (2009: 83) to discuss the way in which translation creates borders between languages and people. Translation effectively posits that one language is different from another (see Evans and Ringrow 2017: 5); translating implies that one language is not intelligible by speakers of another. The effect of this is double-edged: it can increase access to texts through making them available in translation, but the necessity of translation can have the effect of separating out and distinguishing speakers of another language. This is especially important given the connection found so often between national language and national identity (Sakai 2009: 73), where speakers of other languages become excluded from the national public sphere or placed in a subordinate position in it. So, translation can effectively cross borders, but at the same time it can create borders. The same action can both include and exclude.

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Translation can also have a significant effect on how communities are represented and, consequently, understood. The question of representation has been addressed by many scholars not working directly on translation (e.g. Hall 1997; Said 1978), but there is also work within translation studies on the ways in which translation can affect the representation of communities (e.g. Cronin 2006). A particularly politically focused approach can be found in Mona Baker’s Translation and Conflict (2006). Baker uses narrative theory as developed in the social sciences (as opposed to narratology: the study of narrative forms) to explore how understandings of the world are created, maintained and contested. Translating texts can alter narratives about specific communities in other communities as well as the narratives communities tell about themselves, thus affecting the ways in which people understand situations and act. This is the case for non-political texts as much as political texts, as they all contribute to a narrative understanding of a community or group.

The political potential of translation is recognized by the expanding body of work on activist translation (Boéri and Maier 2010; Tymoczko 2010; Baker 2016, among others), feminist translation (e.g. Simon 1996; von Flotow 1997; Castro and Ergun 2017; von Flotow and Farahzad 2016, among others), as well as the practices of translation in political institutions such as the European Union (Wagner, Bech and Martínez 2002; Koskinen 2008), the United Nations (Baigorri-Jalón 2004), and non-governmental organizations (e.g. Schäffner, Taciuc and Tesseur 2014). In the next part, we shall review the work in translation studies on the politics of translation.¹

A secret history of translation studies

There is a rich body of work on the relationship between translation and politics, yet it tends to belong to a ‘secret history’ of translation studies. This term comes from Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (1989), where Marcus uses it to discuss the history of artistic and political movements throughout the twentieth century that coalesce in punk rock. The history is ‘secret’ as it is not obvious: it forms, in some ways, a counter-history to the standard histories of the twentieth century (although, arguably, Marcus’s history has now been incorporated into more mainstream history). The study of political aspects of translation is also a secret history that is often submerged in overviews of the discipline, but still present. By thinking of it as a ‘secret history’, we posit its continuity and avoid the sense of it as a new ‘turn’ in translation studies (see Snell Hornby 2006). It is impossible to survey all the work on translation and politics (the BITRA Bibliography of Interpreting and Translation lists over 600 items); what follows focuses on presenting key ideas and moments rather than aiming to be comprehensive.

There is a great deal of writing on translation from before the twentieth century (see Robinson 1997 for a selection from the European tradition; Cheung 2006 offers a selection of the Chinese tradition). Some of this discourse is written by diplomats, missionaries, and other politically active individuals, and deals with political aspects of translation. However, more sustained theoretical work on translation begins in the mid-twentieth century, after the Second World War, and is strongly interwoven with political events. Wartime interests in code-breaking and in the relationship between language and power affected the nascent discipline of translation studies (Tymoczko 2007: 21). Supranational organizations like the United Nations (founded 1945) and the European Economic Community (the future European Union, created in 1957) also brought a renewed interest in translation, as such organizations, which a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Politics
• Routledge Handbooks in Translation and Interpreting Studies
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Emancipation, Secret Histories, and the Language of Hegemony
• Part I Translation and Political Ideas
• Part II Translation and Structures of Power
• Part III Politics of Translation
• Part IV Case Studies
• Index