Translation and Minority

Special Issue of "the Translator"

Lawrence Venuti

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781134966097
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The premise of this volume is a question: What can the concept of minority bring to the practice and study of translation? Minority is understood here to mean a cultural or political position that is subordinate, whether the social context that so defines it is local, national or global. This position is occupied by languages and literatures that lack prestige or authority, the non-standard and the non-canonical, what is not spoken or read much by a hegemonic culture. Yet minorities also include the nations and social groups that are affiliated with these languages and literatures, the politically weak or underrepresented, the colonized and the disenfranchised, the exploited and the stigmatized.

Translation today is itself a minor use of language, a lesser art, an invisible craft that commands less cultural capital and fewer legal privileges than original composition. Yet the focus in this collection is not on what translators worldwide have in common but on the distinctive forms that translating takes when it is done by or on behalf of minorities. The articles in this volume present a variety of case studies that illuminate the linguistic and cultural problems posed by such translating, as well as the economic and political agendas it has served. Together, these pieces show that the concept of minority is worth exploring because it inspires innovation in translation practice and research. Minor cultures are coincident with new translation strategies, new translation theories, and new syntheses of the diverse methodologies that constitute the discipline of translation studies.

Book Reviews

Translation and Creation: Readings of Western Literature in Early Modern China, 1840–1918. David Pollard (ed). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1998. 336 pp. Hb. ISBN: 90-272-1628-2 (Eur)/1-55619-709-8 (US). Hfl. 170/US$85.

The essays in this volume are selected from a conference held in 1994 by a group of university professors in Hong Kong, later supplemented with essays by scholars from Beijing, Shanghai, Japan and the US. The volume addresses the translation boom that occurred in China at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. Rather than focusing on technical aspects of translation, most writers concern themselves with the historical context and cultural effects of translated texts.

The volume is divided into three sections: ‘Background’, ‘Translated Works’, and ‘Making Waves’. ‘Background’ consists of three essays by Xiong Yuezhi, Tarumoto Teruo and Wang Xiaoming, providing rich historical in formation from recent research, complete with figures and charts. ‘Translated Works’ presents six case studies of translation, all pointing to implications of the difficulties in presuming either fidelity of translation or adequacy of representing cross-cultural experience. The studies deal with Aesop’s Fables)- (Leo Chan), English detective fiction (Eva Hung), Byron’s The Isles of Greece (Chu Chi Yu), the rise of political fiction (Lawrence Wong), the treatment of religious material in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Martha Cheung), and Jules Verne (David Pollard). The third section, ‘Making Waves’, emphasizes cultural effects of specific translated texts. It includes five essays: Chen Pingyuan on science fiction, Xia Xiaohong on Mrs. Stowe, Cecile Sun on Wang Guowei, Yuan Jin on La Dame Aux Camélias and Chinese romantic fiction, and David Wang on the effect of translation on re-forming Chinese writers’ vision of reality and modernity.

Cross-references abound between the essays and across the sections, so that the aggregate picture from this collective work is far more nuanced than any single treatment could hope to be. Protean themes, such as the translation of science fiction, echo back and forth with different variations (Wang Xiaoming, David Pollard, Chen Pingyuan and David Wang). Long forgotten texts, such as Lin Shu’s translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, acquire real explanatory power as essays address them from different perspectives (Martha Cheung and Xia Xiaohong). Previously neglected topics receive sustained treatment, such as the translation of poetry (Chu Chi Yu) and the different roles of two collaborative translators (Martha Cheung).

The historical period covered in this volume is a fascinating one, when the Chinese society was undergoing tremendous change, in part due to the increasing presence of the Western powers after the Opium War. Whatever interpretive frameworks historians may adopt in understanding the China of this period, the interaction between China and the West is impossible to ignore. As Liang Qichao, the most influential reformist at the time puts it, “the importation of new thought was like a prairie fire” (p. 241). And Lin Shu, the most popular translator of the period, formulates the task of the translator as that of “the rooster crowing for the morning”. As the essay by Tarumoto Teruo clearly demonstrates in a meticulous statistical survey, between 1902 and 1907 published translations exceeded original works in number.

Besides its vast quantity, another outstanding feature of translation at the time was the liberty that translators such as the prolific Lin Shu took with the SL texts. The essays in this volume provide a range of interpretations for the ‘mistakes’ in cross-cultural interpretation. Some writers see them as errors and try to explain them by means of divergent cultural conventions. Other writers demonstrate that certain apparent mistakes are better understood in their historical contexts as cross-cultural negotiation rather than the results of simple ignorance.

The essays by Leo Chan and Xia Xiaohong provide excellent case studies in this context. Chan focuses on the translation of Aesop’s Fables and argues that “the intended purpose of the target text is what determines the choice of translation strategy” (p. 71). The 1840 version, for example, is heavily sinicized and uses colloquial language because it catered for missionaries trying to learn Chinese, whereas the 1903 version is in classical Chinese, intended for a highly educated Chinese readership. Especially interesting is Chan’s observation that the 1903 readership was exposed to social-Darwinism, and correspondingly, this rendition of Aesop’s Fables portrays a “hierarchized animal world where the fittest survives” (p. 72). Xia Xiaohong’s essay is a detective story in itself, as she traces the mysterious figure of ‘Ms Picha’ whose name was on everybody’s lips at the time, to Mrs. Stowe who was credited with authoring ‘Black Slaves Appeal to Heaven’ (Uncle Tom’s Cabin). One woman writer in America thus appeared in two different guises in Chinese reception, supplying heroines for an age that needed them. Rarely a neutral linguistic exercise, translation proved to be a kind of tension-ridden ‘contact zone’, where the cultural implications of global and local politics manifested themselves in subtle ways.

In Eva Hung’s richly nuanced analysis of the translation of English detective stories between 1896 and 1916, cross-cultural negotiation ranges “from over and non-textual manipulation of reader response, to the deliberate excision or substitution of culturally problematic textual material, to unconscious substitution of Chinese norms – cultural or literary – for English ones” (p. 163). Especially important is Hung’s articulation of the criteria for assessing the importance of any given translation: (a) the translator’s status in the receiving culture, (b) the needs of the receiving culture at a given historical period, (c) literary norms at the time of assessment (p. 168). All three were in great flux in China around the turn of the century. One of the observations that Hung draws from this case is that, contrary to popular belief, translators who used the classical language as TL tended to take their task more seriously and hence produced a higher quality translation, an observation which is further confirmed in David Pollard’s essay.

Two essays in the third section give much insight into the far-reaching cultural implications of fiction writing at the time, obliquely reflecting the influence of translated works. Focusing on an apparently narrow subject matter of the ‘flying machine’ in science fiction, Chen Pingyuan’s essay draws on a wide range of material, from contemporary diplomatic journals, missionary periodicals and popular pictorials to fantastic stories from ancient classics and fictional accounts. While his general conclusion resonates with those of Chan and Hung in that “the fantasies of future worlds are influenced by con temporary reality” (p. 238), Chen’s analysis also reveals a rather disturbing aspect of this reality, as several Chinese writers of science fiction demon strate their own penchant for imperialist imagination in their fantasies of conquering the moon. However unsettling, Chen’s conclusion powerfully contradicts a prevailing characterization of this historical period simply as “anti-imperialist” (p. 145). The last essay by David Wang analyzes the fantastic construction of future in this period through what he calls “the future perfect mode” in science fiction, whereby “a mysterious leap of time” allows the author to deal “not with what may happen in the years to come but with what will happen” (p. 310). In this rush toward the future, translation functions as “a way of appropriating new knowledge and getting access to the mysterious modernity” (p. 305). Appropriately, Wang’s essay ends with an English poem which appears in a 1908 Chinese novel, conspicuously untranslated, alerting us that “narrative of modernization has to be conveyed in a multilingual discourse” while at the same time questioning the legitimacy of those qualified to translate (p. 326).

Given shared interest in the cultural effects of translated texts, a crucial consideration of several essays is that of the reception of the translated texts. This subject necessarily involves potentially risky speculations on “the horizon of expectation” of contemporary readers, risky precisely because of what Hung calls “norms at the time of assessment”, which, by the same logic, should include our own expectations. Notwithstanding this excellent precaution, some writers occasionally make sweeping pronouncements about what late nineteenth-century Chinese readers were familiar with, whether it be the “linear” narrative structure of “traditional Chinese fiction” (p. 160), “the oriental novel” which is lacking in “interest in individuality” (p. 187), or “the traditional Chinese ‘scholar-beauty’ tales” that “were simple romances which reflected the author’s fantasies” (p. 291). Recent scholarship has largely repudiated the monolithic image of traditional Chinese fiction, supposedly lacking when measured against the norms of an equally monolithic image of western fiction. For this image of traditional Chinese fiction, among a host of other images of ‘tradition’, was first propagated precisely during the period under study here. Our sense of the ‘norm’ as well as what ‘tradition’ was like is largely shaped by these historically contingent formulations.

A technical point of complaint concerns the partial use of Chinese characters in the volume, and may be peculiar to this reader. Had the volume dealt with other matters, perhaps editorial considerations to exclude foreign languages should have prevailed. Given the subject matter at hand, however, an appendix of key Chinese words would have been helpful to readers. Only in three essays (Yu, Hung, and Pollard) do Chinese terms appear in the original and then in translation, which greatly aid the reader’s understanding of the subtle points of translation that the authors make.

One last feature in particular should be noted. Six of the fourteen essays are translated from Chinese into English, three by David Pollard, one by Eva Hung, and two by Louise Edwards and Kam Louie. The excellent quality of the translations stand as a singular achievement against the sorry state of translated scholarly work usually seen in English language publications, when such translation is attempted at all. The translators and the editor should be lauded for their effort, as it makes available to English language readers im portant scholarship which was previously accessible only in Chinese or Japanese.

The collection as a whole succeeds admirably in re-constructing a rich historical picture of the translation boom in China around the turn of the century. It will no doubt be useful to scholars in translation studies and should also be of interest to readers concerned with issues of cross-cultural interpretation in general, and cross-cultural interpretation between China and the West in particular.

HU YING

Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, UC Irvine, Irvine, CA 92717, USA [email protected]

Translating Ireland: Translation, Languages, Cultures. Michael Cronin. Cork: Cork University Press, 1996. 240 pp. Hb. ISBN 1-85918-018-3, £30; Pb. ISBN 1-85918-019-1, £14.95.

In Ireland, according to Michael Cronin, “translation is our condition” (p. 199). Native speakers of Irish and Anglophones alike share this translated condition, neither group entirely ignorant of the other language, each inhabiting the scene of a dynamic exchange between Irish and English. Translating Ireland is a highly readable account of the process by which Ireland arrived at this condition; I recommend it to anyone interested in the politics of translation, its history, and its powerful potential as a force for change.

The book’s argument is distinguished by a scholarly scepticism which refuses to take Ireland’s translated condition for granted. The process is not an inevitable or obvious one then, as becomes clear in Cronin’s attempt “to give as full a picture as possible of the variety and scale of translation activity over the last thousand years”. Eschewing the standard narrative of Ireland’s fall from an imaginary moment of linguistic grace and plenitude, Translating Ireland tells a complex story which features loss, suppression and silence alongside creativity, inventiveness and ingenuity. In foregrounding the latter rather than the former, Cronin ends on an optimistic note, making translation a model for the co-existence of Ireland’s separate linguistic, cultural and political traditions, a vital alternative to “the muteness of fear” (p. 200).

The role translation plays in the present or indeed in an imagined future is only intelligible within the broader narrative of Ireland’s history, an aspect of his topic which Cronin handles well. He offers judiciously placed detail where needed but never overwhelms the reader with undigested chunks of historical information. The approach is however solidly chronological, be ginning with the Middle ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Introduction
• The Cracked Looking Glass of Servants
• Translation and Postcolonial Identity
• Translation Strategies in a Rapidly Transforming Culture
• The French Connection
• Bilingualism and Translation in/of Michèle Lalonde’s Speak White
• Politics and Poetics in Translation
• Jack Spicer’s Pricks and Cocksuckers
• Translating Camp Talk
• Rewriting Tibet
• Revisiting the Classics Translation, Colonialism and Conversion Expanding Horizons for Translation Studies
• Book Review