A Companion to Translation Studies

Sandra Bermann, Catherine Porter, Sandra Bermann, Catherine Porter

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780470671894
• eBook ISBN: 9781118616154
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This companion offers a wide-ranging introduction to the rapidly expanding field of translation studies, bringing together some of the best recent scholarship to present its most important current themes

• Features new work from well-known scholars
• Includes a broad range of geo-linguistic and theoretical perspectives
• Offers an up-to-date overview of an expanding field
• A thorough introduction to translation studies for both undergraduates and graduates
• Multi-disciplinary relevance for students with diverse career goals

 

Part I

Approaches to Translation

Histories and Theories

1

The Changing Landscape of Translation and Interpreting Studies

Mona Baker

While traditionally wedded to the written and oral text as the locus of translation activity and the primary object of investigation, the study of translation and interpreting has widened its scope considerably in recent years. It no longer reduces its primary object to textual material but has sought to incorporate within its remit various types of non-verbal material as well as the different agents who produce translated texts and mediate oral interaction, and the cultural, historical, and social environments that influence and are influenced by cultural agents and their production. The definition of “translation” itself has been extended to encompass a wide range of activities and products that do not necessarily involve an identifiable relationship with a discrete source text. Against this background, and given the ready availability of historical overviews and syntheses of theoretical trends, this essay will focus on a number of interrelated themes that have strong resonance in contemporary society and have received growing attention in translation studies and neighboring disciplines since the 1990s.

Representation

Translation is one of the core practices through which any cultural group constructs representations of another, as has been widely recognized and debated in the ethnographic context (Asad [1986] 2010; Sturge 2007). Translation-generated re­presentations of Italy, a culture which has been “one of the most represented loci of the Western imagination,” did not simply circulate within and influence the target culture's understanding of its “heritage,” but also made their way back to Italy and influenced Italians' own processes of self-representation (Polezzi [2000] 2009, 263). In the colonial context, translation served as an important vehicle for constructing representations of the colonized as “Europe's ‘civilizational other’ ” (Dodson 2005, 809). The Indian colonial “subject” was constructed through European translations that provided educated Indians with a range of Orientalist images they came to internalize as their own (Niranjana 1990). Colonial translations presented Indian texts as specimens of a culture that is “simple,” “natural,” “other-worldly,” and “spiritual” (Sengupta 1995). The impact of such translations and the representations they generated can be seen in the self-translations of “native” works by the colonized themselves, as in the case of Rabindranath Tagore, who adapted his own works to conform to the image of the East as constructed by the English-speaking world at the time (Sengupta 1995).

Translation continues to generate powerful representations of other cultures long after the colonial encounter has officially come to an end. In the postcolonial context, the continued hegemony of the ex-colonizers ensures that the dominant represen­tations of the ex-colonized remain powerful. The Orientalist tradition of translation continues to thrive in France and embraces a set of textual and paratextual techniques that “inscribes in the structure of language itself the image of a ‘complicated Orient’ … irremediably strange and different” (Jacquemond 1992, 149). Within the wider context of cultural and political imperialism, translations continue to exercise discursive power over “Third World” subjects by representing them in ways that cater for the expectations of the target audience (Venuti 1995); in the case of Muslim Arab women, the representations typically draw on one of three stereotypes: the Arab or Muslim woman as a victim of gender oppression; as an escapee from her intrinsically oppressive culture; and as the pawn of Arab male power (Kahf [2000] 2010). Global conglomerates play a vital role in propagating their own representations of marginalized communities and “enemy” cultures in venues such as advertisements (Nardi 2011) and news media (Campbell 2007), especially in the context of new information and communication technologies that harness the potential of multi-modality in genres such as televised newscasts to create powerful stereotypes (Desjardins 2008). Scholarly works, too, can generate and consolidate stereotypical representations of the other by (mis)translating key concepts such as intifada and shahada in ways that do not reflect their use among those being represented (Amireh 2005). Powerful political lobbies represent certain communities and regions as a source of threat to the free world, a threat that has to be monitored regularly through translation, primarily into English (Baker 2010a).

The dynamics of representation involved in the (post)colonial and imperialist contexts are more complex than the traditional model of unilateral imposition might assume, however. One aspect of this complexity concerns the diversity of attitudes on both sides, as well as the impact of the environment of reception, which may frustrate the intentions of translators who belong to the colonizing group but empathize with the colonized and attempt to present them in a positive light, as in the case of George Staunton's highly influential 1810 translation of the qing penal code (St. André 2004). Staunton sought to persuade British readers that the Chinese had a concept of justice and that they were no better or worse than the British. And yet examination of published reviews suggests that the translation was read against the grain, so much so that it lent itself to later use by the British as part of a legal apparatus for governing Chinese residents of Hong Kong.

Representations generated through translation are often contested, undermined, exploited, and negotiated by the less powerful party in various ways (Rafael [1988] 1993; Israel 2006). As in the Chinese context, Orientalist translations of Indian vernacular literature were not always aimed at a simple “containment of representations” but were the product of negotiations between local scholars and Orientalists, with the “competitive, resistant and appropriative energies of local voices involved in defining and representing their literatures and traditions” (Boratti 2011, 88). The less powerful also use translation to generate competing representations that counter the stereotypes established by the colonizer and serve a nationalist agenda, as in the case of English translations of the medieval Irish text Táin Bó Cúailnge, which attempted to portray the Irish as a morally upright nation (Tymoczko 1999). There have therefore been calls for a shift in perspective to acknowledge that at times the translator functions as “an agent for subaltern resistance, instead of an extension of the long arm of the oppressor” (Rose 2002, 259).

Of particular interest are the mechanisms by which representations of a cultural other are generated through translation. These may include identification with a particular group through the choice of a dialect or sociolect, as in opting for an urban variety of German associated with working-class youths to dub African American English, thus aligning AAE speakers with German speakers of that variety “and in so doing constitut[ing] them ideologically along similar lines” (Queen 2004, 522–23). Discussion of less discreet mechanisms used to generate representations of a (post)colonial other through translation might explain how these representations come to exercise such a hold on the imagination of the represented. Shaden Tageldin talks of a “politics of translational seduction” that relies on affect rather than coercion by strategically “re-present[ing] the colonizer as the most flattering ‘likeness’ of the colonized” (2011, 17), thus binding the colonized to the colonizer through an inverted process of self-love.

Minority–Majority Relations

Minority languages are languages of relatively limited diffusion or languages spoken by politically and economically marginalized populations. In the latter sense, the hegemony of English and the economic and political power of the English-speaking world now mean that all languages other than English have become minority languages (Cronin 2003).

For minority groups such as the Scots, Welsh, Bretons, Catalans, or Corsicans, translation can serve a number of purposes. Translation into the minority language may be undertaken as a strategy of survival; translation from a variety of languages allows a minority language to expand its repertoire as a means of ensuring its survival (Woodsworth 1996). Where the source language is the majority language, translation may simultaneously function as a symbolic act of resistance to displace that language within a shared social space, especially in cases where translation is not needed because the minority group speaks the dominant source language. The mere act of writing or translating into the minority language then becomes a political statement against the majority language and culture. Examples include literary translations from French into Corsican (Jaffe [1999] 2010) and from English into Scots (Findlay 2004). Translation into a minority language can therefore have a perlocutionary function, as evident in the diglossic mixing of joual in theater translations with the Standard French used to address readers in prefaces and producers and actors in stage directions in Quebec (Brisset 1989). The use of the minority language also has implications for representations of protagonists who are made to speak that language. Annie Brisset (1989) notes that because joual is associated with the working classes, theater translations into joual lead to a proletarization of language and a lowering of the social status of the protagonists.

Translation out of the minority language is usually undertaken to raise awareness of the minority language and literature and allow its writers to reach a wider audience. This is often achieved through English, even when the minority language's relation to English is embedded in a history of oppression, as in the case of Scots, Welsh, and Irish. For some, however, translating their literature into a dominant language such as English only serves to add to the latter's “already large canon … by translating what relatively little there is written in a minority language” into it (Krause 2008, 128). One form of resistance to the majority language therefore consists of refusal to be translated into it: Irish poet Biddy Jenkinson refuses to be translated into English as “a small rude gesture to those who think that everything can be harvested and stored in an English-speaking Ireland” (quoted in Kenny and Cronin 1995, 245). Resistance can also take the form of contaminating the majority language by mixing it with the minority language in such genres as bilingual poetry (Hedrick 1996; Mezei 1998).

Imbalance in patterns of translation flow between majority and minority languages and literatures reflects a history of political and cultural domination, with English in particular occupying a hegemonic position in relation to all other languages (Venuti 1995). From a Bourdieusean perspective, the translation of great literary masterpieces into a dominated/minority language allows it to import capital and prestige and hence constitutes a “diversion of capital” (Casanova 2004). Translation into the dominant/majority language of works by authors writing in the minority language, on the other hand, is a form of consecration: it introduces the periphery to the center in order to consecrate it and grants minority authors “a certificate of literary standing” (Casanova 2004, 135).

The deaf community has long resisted the disability model that framed its position in society in the past, and is now widely recognized as a minority group with its own language and equal rights of access to all aspects of social life. This includes the right to be provided with interpreters in day-to-day interaction and subtitled programs on television. In this context, interpreting between the relevant spoken and signed languages becomes a tool of empowerment for the deaf. At the same time, however, interpreting has the disempowering potential to create an illusion of access or independence that is not always actualized (McKee 2004). This also applies to other minorities in society, especially in the context of migration. In the Italian health-care system, interpreter mediation “mainly supports a doctor-centred communication, preventing the empowerment of linguistic and cultural minorities” (Baraldi 2009, 120); similar patterns that result in disempowering minority groups have been documented in the US hospital system (Davidson 2000). It has therefore been argued that the disempowered position of the deaf and other minorities “requires interpreters not simply to act as neutral professionals but to take on an empowering role” (Brennan and Brien 1995, 113–14), one of advocacy or active cultural mediation.

Interpreting for minority groups is often provided by members of the same minority culture, including young family members (Angelelli 2010). This has affective implications for young and ad hoc interpreters, and for professional interpreters. Interpreters who belong to the same minority group as the less powerful, non-institutional party are vulnerable to pressure from both sides: from the less powerful participant, who expects the interpreter to empathize with them and act as their advocate, and from the institutional represe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Approaches to Translation
• Part II: Translation in a Global Context
• Part III: Genres of Translation
• Index