Kate Sturge challenges the reader, in her paper ‘The Other on Display’, to view the ethnographic museum as a translation process. In this case, once again, as it happens with feminist approaches, the idea of translation is stretched beyond what is perceived as ‘translation proper’, or interlingual translation, as it was defined by Jakobson, and is reflected in the strategies she proposes further on in the study (1959:233). She invites the reader, therefore, to view the curator as the translator of an old narrative into the language of today.
Sturge makes an analogy between the artifacts displayed in traditional museums and the interlinear, prescriptive approach on translation: the objects are displaced from their time and their context, and seen as entities exiting in a sort of ‘arrested development’ (3), ‘talking’ to the target reader in a familiar, domesticating language. Thus a pot is not an object that once used to store liquids, it is an artifact made from a certain type of clay and belonged to a certain trend of painting flowers on it.
She argues further on that this Victorian approach is outdated and, even worse, in some cases denigrating for the cultures represented by artifacts in these museums, and proposes two methods that would put the source and the translator on display, getting rid in the same time of the colonial, imperialistic ways in which the objects have been presented so far. One is the use of ‘thick translation’, that is, ‘translation heavily glossed and annotated to enable engagement with the original’s complexity’ (p.5). This would require use of multimedia materials, booklets and catalogues, but would enable the reader to become aware of the fact that translation shouldn’t be taken for granted, that there is an intermediary who enables the access to the old culture, and that culture is more than a piece of jewelry or clothing.
The other method is called ‘reflexive translation’, that is, ‘gearing the whole structure of a gallery to the histories of collection’ (7). This method would employ a ‘put oneself on the map’ type of strategy: the Western culture would be emphasized by the display of the artifacts, not the exotic.
I believe this is an interesting case of postcolonial – ethnographic cross-disciplines study, that shows how the classical view of the original-copy dichotomy can be broken or reversed. It would be interesting to see, if these methods are going to be applied increasingly in the future, what the reader response might be and how they would understand these changes.
References:
Jakobson, Roman (1959): 'On Linguistic Aspects of Translation', R. A. Brower (ed.) On Translation, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Sturge, Kate (2003): 'The Other on Display: Translation in the Ethnographic Museum'
Thursday 17 June 2010
Response Paper to 'Reconceptualizing Translation Theory’ by Maria Tymoczko
In her paper ‘Reconceptualizing Translation Theory’, Maria Tymoczko mainly argues for the broadening of the Translation Studies field by including non-Western and marginal Western thinking, in order to get a panoramic view of the field and set the basis of a translation theory that would account all forms and traditions throughout the world. Her approach stems from postcolonial studies, and acts as a reaction to the hegemony of the West imposed on the rest of the world, and against the ‘positivist framework’ and the ‘generalized and prescriptive discourse’ (14) of the current trends.
In order to be able to build new foundations in reconceptualizing translation theory, the main assumptions drawn from Western thinking must be first deconstructed. As such, Tymoczko puts forth the most common myths of contemporary thinking on translation. The most notorious are: translators seen solely as professionals with degrees or special training, or acting as mediators between two cultures who never happen to be plurilingual; translations which involve only written texts, and most of the time these texts are taken for granted as the Western canon – drama, epic and lyric- the rest being left outside; objects of study in TS are already defined, and therefore are supposed to stay forever encrypted in their crystallized form; the lines between the source and the target texts are settled for good, with a few minor disagreements. These assumptions are taken for granted in the contemporary TS mainstream thinking, and Tymoczko argues that changes must be done in order to establish a solid basis for a universal accepted translation theory.
Her suggestions in overcoming the miss-outs encountered mainly involve acknowledging various traditions from outside the Western canon, like oral cultures and their type of texts, different than the canonized ones, being aware of the existence of multilingualism and multiculturalism, and recognizing translational activity beyond professionalism.
Further on the author proposes three modes of cultural interface that would hold back the ‘Eurocentric stereotypes of translation’ (27) and prevent non-Western cultures to assimilate these canonized paradigms and concepts that exist through English terminology, and which might eventually end up as the ultimate hegemonic prototypes. These modes are ‘transmission’, seen as symbolic transfer of material across cultures, ‘representation’, which would both construct and symbolically substitute the image of an object into the target culture, and transculturation, or ‘the transmission of cultural characteristics from one cultural group to another’ (28).
Tymoczko constructs in a short paper very ample and well structured arguments which both denounce Eurocentrism and Western hegemony and come with solutions for preventing this tendency to fully occur. I would argue that her idea of reconceptualizing translation theory is a step forward into the TS field that would facilitate cultures with traditions in translation to make their strategies and methods well-known.
References:
Tymoczko, Maria (2006): Reconceptualizing Translation Theory. Integrating Non-Western Thought about Translation, in Hermans, T. (Eds),Translating Others: Volume 1, St. Jerome Publishing, UK: Manchester
In order to be able to build new foundations in reconceptualizing translation theory, the main assumptions drawn from Western thinking must be first deconstructed. As such, Tymoczko puts forth the most common myths of contemporary thinking on translation. The most notorious are: translators seen solely as professionals with degrees or special training, or acting as mediators between two cultures who never happen to be plurilingual; translations which involve only written texts, and most of the time these texts are taken for granted as the Western canon – drama, epic and lyric- the rest being left outside; objects of study in TS are already defined, and therefore are supposed to stay forever encrypted in their crystallized form; the lines between the source and the target texts are settled for good, with a few minor disagreements. These assumptions are taken for granted in the contemporary TS mainstream thinking, and Tymoczko argues that changes must be done in order to establish a solid basis for a universal accepted translation theory.
Her suggestions in overcoming the miss-outs encountered mainly involve acknowledging various traditions from outside the Western canon, like oral cultures and their type of texts, different than the canonized ones, being aware of the existence of multilingualism and multiculturalism, and recognizing translational activity beyond professionalism.
Further on the author proposes three modes of cultural interface that would hold back the ‘Eurocentric stereotypes of translation’ (27) and prevent non-Western cultures to assimilate these canonized paradigms and concepts that exist through English terminology, and which might eventually end up as the ultimate hegemonic prototypes. These modes are ‘transmission’, seen as symbolic transfer of material across cultures, ‘representation’, which would both construct and symbolically substitute the image of an object into the target culture, and transculturation, or ‘the transmission of cultural characteristics from one cultural group to another’ (28).
Tymoczko constructs in a short paper very ample and well structured arguments which both denounce Eurocentrism and Western hegemony and come with solutions for preventing this tendency to fully occur. I would argue that her idea of reconceptualizing translation theory is a step forward into the TS field that would facilitate cultures with traditions in translation to make their strategies and methods well-known.
References:
Tymoczko, Maria (2006): Reconceptualizing Translation Theory. Integrating Non-Western Thought about Translation, in Hermans, T. (Eds),Translating Others: Volume 1, St. Jerome Publishing, UK: Manchester
Friday 28 May 2010
A Sociological Approach in Translation: Burdieu’s Concepts of Field and Habitus
It was in 1972 when James Holmes, during The Third International Congress of Applied Linguistics from Copenhagen, drawing an outline of the Translation Studies field, spoke of ‘a sociology of translation’ (1972). He argued that, as a branch of Function-oriented DTS, it would ideally focus on ‘the description of [translations] function in the recipient socio-cultural situation’ (ibid.), and it would therefore consist of a study not of texts, but of their contexts and their influence on a certain social environment. Nonetheless, it has been during the past ten years that sociological approaches started to become a field of interest, due to the work of scholars like Pierre Burdieu, Bruno Latour and Niklas Luhman (Inghilleri 2008). That is not to say however that interests in this matter had not been previously taken, for it is considered that the basis of Translation Sociology branch is Itamar Even-Zohar’s Polysystem Theory and Gideon Toury’s Cultural Planning concept.
In his paper ‘A Bourdesian Theory of Translation, or the Coincidence of Practical Instances’, Jean-Marc Guoanvic makes a succinct description of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological theory of symbolic goods and how can it be adapted to translation practices. The theory revolves around the coincidence of two instances in a given social context: external, which represents the – in our case, literary – field, and internal, which consists of textual productions and products, the producing agents and their habitus. Burdieu emphasizes on the idea that these two instances should not be taken separately, for ‘there exists neither internal nor external dimensions, but a concurrence of both’ (Gouanvic; 2005:148), but should be considered as a two-way relationship where the habitus contributes to the structuring of fields, which in turn structure the habitus.
Speaking of habitus, this is a concept coined by Burdieu to define an individual’s ‘embodied dispositions’ (Inghilleri 2008:280), which are acquired throughout time and which shift according to his or her social and biological trajectory. The fields, on the other hand, are social micro cosmoses, sites where different forms of symbolic and material capital are disseminated. Through Burdieu’s theory the individual and the society are - perhaps for the first time - brought together, and, finally, a (re)conciliation occurs between the subjective and the objective, something that previous scholars in Translation Studies haven’t manage to fully achieve. Fields are therefore objective, dynamic sites that interrelate with each other, but contain in the same time a subjective aspect, that is, a display of confrontations between various forces, which aim to become dominant. This is the crossroad where Toury’s concept of norms failed to become operative, because it offered static frames of various occurrences ‘frozen’ in time, whereas using the notion of force one may trace the origins of that occurrence and how it shifted throughout time. One good example which can be interpreted from both Toury’s and Bordieu’s concepts is an instance of translation practices in Romania during the nineteenth century. From the look taken at the works translated and published in the newspapers of the time – they were published in episodes, the so-called feuilleton – one could infer that, judging from a quantitative perspective, the norm was to translate light, easy-reading literature (Kohn 2008:536). What was the cause and the outcome wouldn’t matter from this point of view, and it would be easy to assume that the Romanian readership as a whole simply enjoyed that one type of literature. Taking into account Bourdieu’s theory however, the context is enlarged, and one can also look at the fact that there were heated debates among the literary scholars of the time, who argued that high literature should be translated and published in the newspapers instead, as a way to literate the masses. It was through the decision of a prominent writer and translator, Ion Heliade-Radulescu - who believed that the common Romanian reader was not ready to understand and assimilate international masterpieces, yet still needed to be motivated to read – that ephemeral literary works started to appear in the periodicals of the time. We can therefore speak of the struggle between two forces – that of promoting high or low literature, respectively – in the field of novel Romanian translation from the 19th century, and of the role played by the agent - Heliade-Radulescu - and his habitus, that is, his academic background, his understanding of the culture’s needs, and his power to disseminate the products (he was the founder of several cultural periodicals).
References:
GOUANVIC, Jean-Marc (2005) ‘A Bourdesian Theory of Translation, or the Coincidence of Practical Instances’, The Translator. Volume 11, No2, 147-166
HOLMES, James (1972) ‘The Name and Nature of Translation Studies’, http://www.prevajalstvo.net/files/upload/File/the%20name%20and%20nature%20of%20translation%20studies.pdf
INGHILLERI, Moira (2008), ‘Sociological Approaches’ in Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies By Mona Baker and Gabriela Sadanha, Second Edition
KOHN, Janos (2008), ‘Romanian Tradition’ in Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies By Mona Baker and Gabriela Sadanha, Second Edition
In his paper ‘A Bourdesian Theory of Translation, or the Coincidence of Practical Instances’, Jean-Marc Guoanvic makes a succinct description of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological theory of symbolic goods and how can it be adapted to translation practices. The theory revolves around the coincidence of two instances in a given social context: external, which represents the – in our case, literary – field, and internal, which consists of textual productions and products, the producing agents and their habitus. Burdieu emphasizes on the idea that these two instances should not be taken separately, for ‘there exists neither internal nor external dimensions, but a concurrence of both’ (Gouanvic; 2005:148), but should be considered as a two-way relationship where the habitus contributes to the structuring of fields, which in turn structure the habitus.
Speaking of habitus, this is a concept coined by Burdieu to define an individual’s ‘embodied dispositions’ (Inghilleri 2008:280), which are acquired throughout time and which shift according to his or her social and biological trajectory. The fields, on the other hand, are social micro cosmoses, sites where different forms of symbolic and material capital are disseminated. Through Burdieu’s theory the individual and the society are - perhaps for the first time - brought together, and, finally, a (re)conciliation occurs between the subjective and the objective, something that previous scholars in Translation Studies haven’t manage to fully achieve. Fields are therefore objective, dynamic sites that interrelate with each other, but contain in the same time a subjective aspect, that is, a display of confrontations between various forces, which aim to become dominant. This is the crossroad where Toury’s concept of norms failed to become operative, because it offered static frames of various occurrences ‘frozen’ in time, whereas using the notion of force one may trace the origins of that occurrence and how it shifted throughout time. One good example which can be interpreted from both Toury’s and Bordieu’s concepts is an instance of translation practices in Romania during the nineteenth century. From the look taken at the works translated and published in the newspapers of the time – they were published in episodes, the so-called feuilleton – one could infer that, judging from a quantitative perspective, the norm was to translate light, easy-reading literature (Kohn 2008:536). What was the cause and the outcome wouldn’t matter from this point of view, and it would be easy to assume that the Romanian readership as a whole simply enjoyed that one type of literature. Taking into account Bourdieu’s theory however, the context is enlarged, and one can also look at the fact that there were heated debates among the literary scholars of the time, who argued that high literature should be translated and published in the newspapers instead, as a way to literate the masses. It was through the decision of a prominent writer and translator, Ion Heliade-Radulescu - who believed that the common Romanian reader was not ready to understand and assimilate international masterpieces, yet still needed to be motivated to read – that ephemeral literary works started to appear in the periodicals of the time. We can therefore speak of the struggle between two forces – that of promoting high or low literature, respectively – in the field of novel Romanian translation from the 19th century, and of the role played by the agent - Heliade-Radulescu - and his habitus, that is, his academic background, his understanding of the culture’s needs, and his power to disseminate the products (he was the founder of several cultural periodicals).
References:
GOUANVIC, Jean-Marc (2005) ‘A Bourdesian Theory of Translation, or the Coincidence of Practical Instances’, The Translator. Volume 11, No2, 147-166
HOLMES, James (1972) ‘The Name and Nature of Translation Studies’, http://www.prevajalstvo.net/files/upload/File/the%20name%20and%20nature%20of%20translation%20studies.pdf
INGHILLERI, Moira (2008), ‘Sociological Approaches’ in Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies By Mona Baker and Gabriela Sadanha, Second Edition
KOHN, Janos (2008), ‘Romanian Tradition’ in Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies By Mona Baker and Gabriela Sadanha, Second Edition
The Meeting Point of Postcolonial and Feminist Approaches in Translation Studies: An Overlook of Gayatri Spivak’s ‘The Politics of Translation’
Translation is the most intimate act of reading. I surrender to the text when I translate (1993; 180).
Gayatri Spivak is an accomplished Indian scholar who has concentrated her efforts in promoting the literature of third world countries women, and who believes that language is one of the essential tools in making their voices heard worldwide. In her paper 'The Politics of Translatio'n, she advocates for the use of a proper – understood as opposite to accessible - English as a target language, that would overcome the perpetuation of postcolonial stereotypes and misrepresentations.
The translator, seen as an ‘agent’, must have a sense of the rhetoricity of the language, and moreover, must understand the logic of the text and thus be able to construct a similar connection between them in ‘the shadow’ – that is, the translation - of the original (1993;181). Spivak believes that Western feminists fail to accomplish this thing and, by using a plain, ‘with-it translatese’ English(ibid.182), they project an imperialistic approach on the writings of the colonized, and therefore allow third world countries women to speak in English not through a sense of democracy but through what might be better expressed as a feeling of superiority.
Throughout the text, Spivak uses a series of concepts that define her way of understanding and performing translation, like ‘textile to weave in’ (when she speaks about the target text), ‘the translator’s love for the text’ as well as ‘a complete surrender’ (to describe the way to approach the source text), or ‘the exchange of language’ (to show that both the source and the target language must be seen on the same level, with no traces of superiority of one over the other). I would argue that this is yet another example of how one’s cultural background, personal character and affinities influence and shape their own perspective on translation approaches, for it is yet difficult to understand how one could objectively ‘surrender’ to the text ‘with love'.
The idea of ‘a complete surrender’ is, for Spivak, counter related with the notion of accessibility; in this sense, to be accessible is ‘to betray the text and to show rather dubious politics’ (1993; 191), or, to put it in other words, to deliberately ignore the connotations and the cultural implications that make the original text unique and representative for its contextual background. This is the underlying statement that she makes when she speaks about ‘making the literature of a woman in Palestine resemble something by a man in Taiwan’ (ibid.182). One must not forget, however, about the postcolonial and feminist intricacies ‘weaved’ in Spivak’s discourse. She mainly argues, as I’ve mentioned before, that Western feminists have an imperialistic attitude towards former colonized countries, an attitude – considered altruistic, but in fact discriminatory - which is embodied in their translation strategies of third world material, and which does not either represent or favor their writers. When thinking of the historical past of the colonized, it is very easy to invoke the stereotyped inference of the hegemony of England (and therefore English) over countries like India (and Bengali). Moreover, orientalistic approaches have perpetuated the misrepresentations of third world’s culture, and translators have reinforced, through the strategies used, the artificial and misunderstood image of the colonized, constructed by the Western world for its own purpose and understanding of the Orient. The latest postcolonial approaches in translation studies do attempt to change this perception and affirm the genuine value and validity of the literature of these countries, and Spivak is perhaps the most eager militant in this aspect; however, one must also wonder if her method of using an elitist and somewhat seclusive language – as a backlash to the ‘accessibility’ of Western translation strategies – is really the best choice to support her cause. We have to acknowledge the fact that English is the lingua franca of our century, whether we like it or not, and in the strive for reaching an audience as broad as possible, it is perhaps more productive to play the devil’s advocate role and to use this fact in our advantage. It would be interesting to see if Spivak would apply the same considerations when performing a translation from English into Bengali; she would nonetheless have the same strategies and approaches in mind, but would the rhetoricity of English or the linguistic and stylistic norms of Bengali prevale?
References:
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1993) ‘The Politics of Translation’, Outside in the Teaching Machine, New York: Routledge (p.179-200)
Feminist Approaches: A Constructive ‘Dis-Unity’
Luise Von Flotow brings in her paper ‘Dis-Unity and Diversity.Feminist Approaches to Translation' a short but succinct update on the diversification of feminist discourse in Translation Studies. She accounts this increasing phenomenon of the last fifteen years on the focus on the notion of difference that cross-cultural work has created. The main factors which seem to boost the proliferation of feminist approaches are dis-unity, diversity and complexity.
When it comes to diversity, the author believes that one must maintain a survival strategy which should cluster around two poles: ‘response-ability’ and ‘desire-ability’ (1998:3). Given the fact that feminist discourse criticism is rarely neutral – a thing which is utterly undesirable, for a general consensus wouldn’t then encourage development within the field - Von Flotow believes it achieved the required strategic complexity. Nonetheless, she feels the necessity to pinpoint the main factors which bring disunity in feminist approaches and which may not be as constructive as wished to be.
One of the factors Von Flotow chooses to examine more closely is maintaining a ‘mainstream “translatese” of third world material’, which not only perpetuates stereotypes and misrepresentations in the Anglophone world, but also ‘deprives the texts of their original style’(1998;5). To illustrate this issue Gayatri Spivak argues that, by writing in an ‘available English’, Western feminists end up erasing the cultural particularities of the original, making ‘the literature of a woman in Palestine (…) resemble, in the feel of its prose, something by a man in Taiwan’ (ibid.).
The Canadian scholar also brings into question the issue of elitist translation. By deliberately translating from a feminist perspective, the resulting texts, full of complex wordplay, become very difficult to comprehend by the general public, except for a small academic, bilingual elite. One good example would be Barbara Godard’s translation of L’Amer (These Our Mothers). Thus, by supplementing the wordplay from the title, the original L’Amer (a reference to mere –mother, mer –sea, and amer – bitter) becomes These Our Mothers (The Sea Our Mother + Sea (S)mothers + (S)our Mothers) (1991;75).
Another issue that Von Flotow raises in this paper is the hypocrisy of some feminist translators, who criticize the use of ‘male violence’ in translation (1998:7) but who approach the same type of aggressive methods in their own work, like ‘hijacking’, a term defined as a deliberate act of feminizing, appropriating the target text(1991;75). To use as an example the same translator, it seems that Godard’s translations involve as ‘dis-unifying’ strategies both the use of elitist and the theoretically non-coherent – that is, hypocrite – translation approaches(1998;5); in other words, she makes use of sophisticated and inaccessible word games along with the violent appropriation of the source text (a perfect example is the famous translation of "Ce soir j'entre dans l'histoire sans relever ma jupe” with “ Tonight I shall step into history without opening my legs”(1991;69)).
Further on Von Flotow presents three factors which she believes to play a role in feminist dis-unity(1998;10). The first one, 'identity politics', refers to that certain consciously identifiable cultural/political characteristics that will determine one’s opinions and prejudices. She mentions Gayatri Spivak as an example, her multicultural heritage and how this might have influenced her political views and consequently the way she translates.
The second factor, 'positionality', accounts for the way personal values are reinterpreted and constructed in time and space according to different economic, political and cultural backgrounds. A good example for this case would be the feminist approach of Suzanne Levine’s translations.
Lastly, the ‘historical dimension’ of scholarly discourse refers to the way gendered subjectivity changes with the time and with the political and institutional contexts. As such, where Theo Hermans saw in Earl of Roscommon’s Essay on Translated Verse a sense of affinity between the author and the translator, Lori Chamberlain sees with her feminist approach a ‘form of struggle for the right of paternity’ (1998;11).
Taking a broad picture of the field of feminist translation as it has developed so far, I would argue that the proliferation of various ‘dis-unifying’ approaches is constructive, for it increasingly incorporates traditions and perspectives of women from very different social backgrounds, which is helpful for a better understanding of their needs and expectations; moreover, it may have positive repercussions not only in the world of translation studies, but in their social and economic environments as well.
References:
Von Flotow, Luise (1998) “Dis-Unity and Diversity. Feminist Approaches to Translation', Unity in Diversity? Current Trends in Translation Studies, Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing
------------------(1997) Translation and Gender. Translating in the Era of Feminism. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing (http://www.litere.usv.ro/pagini/Volume_manifestari_studentesti/CONSENSUS%20lucrari/11.pdf)
------------------(1991). “Feminist translation: Context, Practices and Theories”. TTR: traduction, terminologie, redaction, vol.4, no.2, (p.69-84) (http://www.erudit.org/revue/ttr/1991/v4/n2/037094ar.pdf)
When it comes to diversity, the author believes that one must maintain a survival strategy which should cluster around two poles: ‘response-ability’ and ‘desire-ability’ (1998:3). Given the fact that feminist discourse criticism is rarely neutral – a thing which is utterly undesirable, for a general consensus wouldn’t then encourage development within the field - Von Flotow believes it achieved the required strategic complexity. Nonetheless, she feels the necessity to pinpoint the main factors which bring disunity in feminist approaches and which may not be as constructive as wished to be.
One of the factors Von Flotow chooses to examine more closely is maintaining a ‘mainstream “translatese” of third world material’, which not only perpetuates stereotypes and misrepresentations in the Anglophone world, but also ‘deprives the texts of their original style’(1998;5). To illustrate this issue Gayatri Spivak argues that, by writing in an ‘available English’, Western feminists end up erasing the cultural particularities of the original, making ‘the literature of a woman in Palestine (…) resemble, in the feel of its prose, something by a man in Taiwan’ (ibid.).
The Canadian scholar also brings into question the issue of elitist translation. By deliberately translating from a feminist perspective, the resulting texts, full of complex wordplay, become very difficult to comprehend by the general public, except for a small academic, bilingual elite. One good example would be Barbara Godard’s translation of L’Amer (These Our Mothers). Thus, by supplementing the wordplay from the title, the original L’Amer (a reference to mere –mother, mer –sea, and amer – bitter) becomes These Our Mothers (The Sea Our Mother + Sea (S)mothers + (S)our Mothers) (1991;75).
Another issue that Von Flotow raises in this paper is the hypocrisy of some feminist translators, who criticize the use of ‘male violence’ in translation (1998:7) but who approach the same type of aggressive methods in their own work, like ‘hijacking’, a term defined as a deliberate act of feminizing, appropriating the target text(1991;75). To use as an example the same translator, it seems that Godard’s translations involve as ‘dis-unifying’ strategies both the use of elitist and the theoretically non-coherent – that is, hypocrite – translation approaches(1998;5); in other words, she makes use of sophisticated and inaccessible word games along with the violent appropriation of the source text (a perfect example is the famous translation of "Ce soir j'entre dans l'histoire sans relever ma jupe” with “ Tonight I shall step into history without opening my legs”(1991;69)).
Further on Von Flotow presents three factors which she believes to play a role in feminist dis-unity(1998;10). The first one, 'identity politics', refers to that certain consciously identifiable cultural/political characteristics that will determine one’s opinions and prejudices. She mentions Gayatri Spivak as an example, her multicultural heritage and how this might have influenced her political views and consequently the way she translates.
The second factor, 'positionality', accounts for the way personal values are reinterpreted and constructed in time and space according to different economic, political and cultural backgrounds. A good example for this case would be the feminist approach of Suzanne Levine’s translations.
Lastly, the ‘historical dimension’ of scholarly discourse refers to the way gendered subjectivity changes with the time and with the political and institutional contexts. As such, where Theo Hermans saw in Earl of Roscommon’s Essay on Translated Verse a sense of affinity between the author and the translator, Lori Chamberlain sees with her feminist approach a ‘form of struggle for the right of paternity’ (1998;11).
Taking a broad picture of the field of feminist translation as it has developed so far, I would argue that the proliferation of various ‘dis-unifying’ approaches is constructive, for it increasingly incorporates traditions and perspectives of women from very different social backgrounds, which is helpful for a better understanding of their needs and expectations; moreover, it may have positive repercussions not only in the world of translation studies, but in their social and economic environments as well.
References:
Von Flotow, Luise (1998) “Dis-Unity and Diversity. Feminist Approaches to Translation', Unity in Diversity? Current Trends in Translation Studies, Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing
------------------(1997) Translation and Gender. Translating in the Era of Feminism. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing (http://www.litere.usv.ro/pagini/Volume_manifestari_studentesti/CONSENSUS%20lucrari/11.pdf)
------------------(1991). “Feminist translation: Context, Practices and Theories”. TTR: traduction, terminologie, redaction, vol.4, no.2, (p.69-84) (http://www.erudit.org/revue/ttr/1991/v4/n2/037094ar.pdf)
Monday 12 April 2010
Translation as a Mode: Response Paper on Walter Benjamin's The Task of the Translator
It is difficult to assess Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Task of the Translator’ without taking into account the reason it was written for, that is, as an introduction to his translation of Baudelaire’s Tableux Parisiens. For the first concept that strikes the reader from the very beginning is that art is not intended for its viewers/listeners, and that any form of it, including literature, has an essential substance which cannot be expressed trough words, and above all, it is just ‘for the sake of art’, with no designated, dedicated or even ideal reader. This was exactly the kind of attitude that considered the Functionalist approaches to translation as superfluous and to which scholars like Hans Vermeer and Katharina Reiss responded with very solid arguments that any type of writing, even pure aesthetical, has an intended, though granted unconscious sometimes, reader.
But Walter Benjamin was a man of his time and we must not forget that the comparative linguistic approach to translation was the mainstream thinking and it mainly regarded what would Even-Zohar call ‘high literature’.
I would suspect Benjamin constructed this discourse around the prestige of Baudelaire, and perhaps sometimes as a form of excuse if he couldn’t – or thought he wasn’t able to - manage to fully render the multitude of shapes, meanings and artistical expressions the poetry embeds in its form and structure. Such a source-oriented approach holds the case for Antoine Berman as well, who had very strict opinions about what is good and what is bad translation, an approach which would seem somewhat outdated nowadays, when we contextualize translation and take into account a series of sociocultural aspects along with the micro level of the process per se.
Going back to Les fleurs du mal (and it is interesting to see that internet references in English keep the French title almost all the time), Benjamin argues that translation, as a mode, reveals itself to only those worthy of understanding the translability of a work of art, and this translability comes as a natural connection with the original by transcending the boundaries of languages into an ideal, pure form:
I believe the author is mainly concerned with the semiotic aspect of Baudelaire’s discourse, and he stresses on the importance of distinguishing between various signifiers of the same signified across languages, which carry out infinite and barely perceptible nuances according to every emotional and historical utterance a word may bear. He wants to make sure that the reader fully understands the frisson nouveau, as Victor Hugo put it, of the poems, their sheer expression of the aesthetics of the ugly, and doesn’t fall into the category of those who are shocked by the eroticism and decadence themes, but manage to see beyond the syntactic surface. Benjamin therefore puts a lot of effort in trying to explain how an iconic effect must be achieved when rendering such a high expression of art form, how fidelity can never reproduce the original meaning but carries it on in the afterlife through its image, just like the pieces of a vessel glued together, so that the translation would thus ‘incorporate the original’s mode of signification’ while ‘refraining from wanting to communicate something’ (2000:21).
I would argue that nowadays we would take a more sociological approach when translating Baudelaire, that we would tediously seek every intimate connection between his work and his life, we would want to see how much of his past and personality was embedded in his poems, and therefore search for alternative meanings in connection with his persona and sociocultural background, while striving to reflect all these into translation. No one is to say however that we would be able to do a better job than Benjamin Walter.
References:
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, published in The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venutti (Routledge, 2000)
But Walter Benjamin was a man of his time and we must not forget that the comparative linguistic approach to translation was the mainstream thinking and it mainly regarded what would Even-Zohar call ‘high literature’.
I would suspect Benjamin constructed this discourse around the prestige of Baudelaire, and perhaps sometimes as a form of excuse if he couldn’t – or thought he wasn’t able to - manage to fully render the multitude of shapes, meanings and artistical expressions the poetry embeds in its form and structure. Such a source-oriented approach holds the case for Antoine Berman as well, who had very strict opinions about what is good and what is bad translation, an approach which would seem somewhat outdated nowadays, when we contextualize translation and take into account a series of sociocultural aspects along with the micro level of the process per se.
Going back to Les fleurs du mal (and it is interesting to see that internet references in English keep the French title almost all the time), Benjamin argues that translation, as a mode, reveals itself to only those worthy of understanding the translability of a work of art, and this translability comes as a natural connection with the original by transcending the boundaries of languages into an ideal, pure form:
While all individual elements of foreign languages – words, sentences, structure – are mutually exclusive, these languages supplement one another in their intentions. Without distinguishing the intended object from the mode of intention, no firm grasp of this basic law of a philosophy of language can be achieved. The words Brot and pain ‘intend’ the same object, but the modes of this intention are not the same. (2000:18)
I believe the author is mainly concerned with the semiotic aspect of Baudelaire’s discourse, and he stresses on the importance of distinguishing between various signifiers of the same signified across languages, which carry out infinite and barely perceptible nuances according to every emotional and historical utterance a word may bear. He wants to make sure that the reader fully understands the frisson nouveau, as Victor Hugo put it, of the poems, their sheer expression of the aesthetics of the ugly, and doesn’t fall into the category of those who are shocked by the eroticism and decadence themes, but manage to see beyond the syntactic surface. Benjamin therefore puts a lot of effort in trying to explain how an iconic effect must be achieved when rendering such a high expression of art form, how fidelity can never reproduce the original meaning but carries it on in the afterlife through its image, just like the pieces of a vessel glued together, so that the translation would thus ‘incorporate the original’s mode of signification’ while ‘refraining from wanting to communicate something’ (2000:21).
I would argue that nowadays we would take a more sociological approach when translating Baudelaire, that we would tediously seek every intimate connection between his work and his life, we would want to see how much of his past and personality was embedded in his poems, and therefore search for alternative meanings in connection with his persona and sociocultural background, while striving to reflect all these into translation. No one is to say however that we would be able to do a better job than Benjamin Walter.
References:
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, published in The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venutti (Routledge, 2000)
Translation as a Violent Act: Response Paper on Antoine Berman's Translation and the Trials of the Foreign
Antoine Berman argues in his paper, Translation and the Trials of the Foreign, that a shift has occurred throughout time in translation approaches, from foreignization towards naturalization, and that the properly ethical aim of translation is receiving the Foreign as a ‘foreign’ (2000:285). He takes a rather radical attitude on translation practices and views the methods used as ‘textual deformations’ (2000:286), deviations from the ‘essential aim’, doomed to produce ethnocentric and annexationist target texts, unable to reflect the original’s spirit.
It seems to me that for Berman translation is a ‘second-hand’ activity; he is determined to prove that the readers’ perception of translation ‘not being a true text’ (2000:294), but a poor imitation is based on solid grounds. The examples he gives as ‘deforming tendencies’ when rendering from a source-text, they all show how the original text is inevitably damaged, and how rationalization destroys the ‘polylogism of language’, or how expansion increases the mass of text without adding value to it. Thinks may not be that clear-cut however. As Michael Holman and Jean Boase-Beier argue, the assumption that ‘the act of translation is by nature less creative than the act of writing an original work’ (1999:1) is not doing anyone any favor. The translator is in a sense bond to the source-text, he has a duty to write in relation with it, but in the same time he has a duty towards the target audience as well, and he must find a middle way out between the constraints of the original and those of the language he renders into, in order to produce a text that would lay out the originality and beauty of the source text while not distracting the reader with too much syntactic and semantic peculiarity. Moreover, where Berman sees ‘deformation’ in translation, procedures which irreversibly alter the original thought like expansion, explicitation, and clarification, other scholars see strategies, tools used - whether consciously or not - to help the translator to best represent the source-text. Lefevere (1992:107) for example, refers to concepts like allusion (use of cultural allusion to establish cultural color even if it doesn’t exist in the original), explicitation (smuggling explanations into the target text because the translators ‘take very seriously their task as mediators between the original and its new readership’), or compensation (adding features that do not match in the original to establish a balance). While he depicts and analyses these strategies in various translations of Catullus’s thirty-second poem he shows how throughout time the translators have used different solutions which, among others, reflected the poetics and the ideology of the time. So these translations may not have accurately represented Catullus in all its expressiveness, stylistic features and spirit of the time, but this is most of the times an inevitable result of the linguistic structure of every language and of the change in social behavior and mentality in time. Who is to say these translations are not standing out as equally valuable works as their originals?
I would argue that Berman’s approach to literature, and therefore, translation, is somewhat elitist and source-oriented. The novel may be perhaps considered a lower form of literature in some cultures, but this is definitely not the case in many others (e.g. USA). Moreover, it is very subjective to argue that a translation of Hölderlin, for example, ‘has been massacred’. While I completely subscribe to the idea that foreignization enriches the target culture with insights from the source, a complete alienation of the target text would lose touch with the readers, for a sort of mediator must still exist in order to ‘move’ the audience towards the author. Especially in our era, whether we like it or not, there is a general tendency toward the so-called ‘fluent reading’, which I believe exists not only in English, but in other languages as well. I’ve noticed how difficult is to follow an English translation from Turkish full of cultural markers like ‘kısmet’, ‘inşallah’, ‘meyhane’, ‘rakı’, and so on and so forth. It is, as I said before, enriching to keep some of them in the text and give a glimpse of the ‘Turkish world’ to the foreign reader. But, as I’ve seen it with the translations of Orhan Pamuk, I would argue it is a shame that the translator sacrificed the fluency of the text that would keep a reader’s interest high for the sake of the ‘foreignness’. And there is another issue that concerns me with respect to foreignness. Apparently this is a desired feature when it comes to Turkish into English translations, but what about the other way around? Is it common to ‘foreignize’ in literary translations, do Turkish readers want to see unusual sentence constructions and calques, with their following explanation as a footnote or in a glossary? Or in non-literary renderings, do they perceive the use of borrowings as threatening to the integrity of the language and therefore dismiss them and call for a ‘naturalizing’ translation? These things should be carefully analyzed and only then a rough conclusion should be drawn, not necessarily on what the translation theories corpora (sometimes unintentionally) prescribe, but on what the readers of the target culture feel it suits best their preferences and needs. Together with, I might add, a certain cohesion on the strategies and attitudes used both for incoming and outcoming translations for the same language.
References:
Antoine Berman, ‘Translation and the Trials of the Foreign’, published in The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venutti (Routledge, 2000)
Michael Holman and Jean Boase-Beier, The Practices of Literary Translation: Constraints and Creativity (Manchester: St. Jerome, 1999)
Andre Lefevere, Translation Literature: Practice and Theory in a Comparative Literature Context (NY:MLA, 1992)
It seems to me that for Berman translation is a ‘second-hand’ activity; he is determined to prove that the readers’ perception of translation ‘not being a true text’ (2000:294), but a poor imitation is based on solid grounds. The examples he gives as ‘deforming tendencies’ when rendering from a source-text, they all show how the original text is inevitably damaged, and how rationalization destroys the ‘polylogism of language’, or how expansion increases the mass of text without adding value to it. Thinks may not be that clear-cut however. As Michael Holman and Jean Boase-Beier argue, the assumption that ‘the act of translation is by nature less creative than the act of writing an original work’ (1999:1) is not doing anyone any favor. The translator is in a sense bond to the source-text, he has a duty to write in relation with it, but in the same time he has a duty towards the target audience as well, and he must find a middle way out between the constraints of the original and those of the language he renders into, in order to produce a text that would lay out the originality and beauty of the source text while not distracting the reader with too much syntactic and semantic peculiarity. Moreover, where Berman sees ‘deformation’ in translation, procedures which irreversibly alter the original thought like expansion, explicitation, and clarification, other scholars see strategies, tools used - whether consciously or not - to help the translator to best represent the source-text. Lefevere (1992:107) for example, refers to concepts like allusion (use of cultural allusion to establish cultural color even if it doesn’t exist in the original), explicitation (smuggling explanations into the target text because the translators ‘take very seriously their task as mediators between the original and its new readership’), or compensation (adding features that do not match in the original to establish a balance). While he depicts and analyses these strategies in various translations of Catullus’s thirty-second poem he shows how throughout time the translators have used different solutions which, among others, reflected the poetics and the ideology of the time. So these translations may not have accurately represented Catullus in all its expressiveness, stylistic features and spirit of the time, but this is most of the times an inevitable result of the linguistic structure of every language and of the change in social behavior and mentality in time. Who is to say these translations are not standing out as equally valuable works as their originals?
I would argue that Berman’s approach to literature, and therefore, translation, is somewhat elitist and source-oriented. The novel may be perhaps considered a lower form of literature in some cultures, but this is definitely not the case in many others (e.g. USA). Moreover, it is very subjective to argue that a translation of Hölderlin, for example, ‘has been massacred’. While I completely subscribe to the idea that foreignization enriches the target culture with insights from the source, a complete alienation of the target text would lose touch with the readers, for a sort of mediator must still exist in order to ‘move’ the audience towards the author. Especially in our era, whether we like it or not, there is a general tendency toward the so-called ‘fluent reading’, which I believe exists not only in English, but in other languages as well. I’ve noticed how difficult is to follow an English translation from Turkish full of cultural markers like ‘kısmet’, ‘inşallah’, ‘meyhane’, ‘rakı’, and so on and so forth. It is, as I said before, enriching to keep some of them in the text and give a glimpse of the ‘Turkish world’ to the foreign reader. But, as I’ve seen it with the translations of Orhan Pamuk, I would argue it is a shame that the translator sacrificed the fluency of the text that would keep a reader’s interest high for the sake of the ‘foreignness’. And there is another issue that concerns me with respect to foreignness. Apparently this is a desired feature when it comes to Turkish into English translations, but what about the other way around? Is it common to ‘foreignize’ in literary translations, do Turkish readers want to see unusual sentence constructions and calques, with their following explanation as a footnote or in a glossary? Or in non-literary renderings, do they perceive the use of borrowings as threatening to the integrity of the language and therefore dismiss them and call for a ‘naturalizing’ translation? These things should be carefully analyzed and only then a rough conclusion should be drawn, not necessarily on what the translation theories corpora (sometimes unintentionally) prescribe, but on what the readers of the target culture feel it suits best their preferences and needs. Together with, I might add, a certain cohesion on the strategies and attitudes used both for incoming and outcoming translations for the same language.
References:
Antoine Berman, ‘Translation and the Trials of the Foreign’, published in The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venutti (Routledge, 2000)
Michael Holman and Jean Boase-Beier, The Practices of Literary Translation: Constraints and Creativity (Manchester: St. Jerome, 1999)
Andre Lefevere, Translation Literature: Practice and Theory in a Comparative Literature Context (NY:MLA, 1992)
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