Changing the Terms : Translating in the Postcolonial Era

World Literature Today, 1999

This outstanding collection brings together eminent contributors to examine some crucial interconnections between post-colonial theory and translation studies.

The proposed research paper will reflect on the theoretical broodings on the concept of translation in a postcolonial set up concentrating mainly on the Anglophonic context in general and Indian literature in English in particular. The main thrust area of the study is the concept of translation as a channel of colonization and a vehement instrument for maintaining cultural inequalities and diversities in the post British Empire. Today, as we put the postcolonial or postmodern translator in the concept of " the World as a Global village " partaking of a drive towards universality and a quest for uniformity in culture and world view. The translation as an activity becomes an ethical act. The writer Theo Hermans quotes that the translation as a means of transport and transference of various civilizations has proven a narrow basis for an encounter of complexities and inequities of an unstable, postcolonial and globalized world.

Linguistica antverpiensia, 2003

Postcolonial intercultural writing has been likened to translation both in terms of the writing practice and the nature of the postcolonial text, which often involves multiple linguistic and cultural systems. To highlight the significance of this view of translation as a metaphor for postcolonial writing and its impact on current translation theory, this paper attempts to lay the groundwork for defining the linguistic and cultural status of postcolonial discourse and to establish parallels between the translation process and some strategies for crafting the postcolonial text. The ontological relation between translation theory and practice is discussed in the light of postcolonial translation practices which have broadened the scope of research in translation studies to include issues of ideology, identity, power relations, and other ethnographic and sociologically based modes of investigation.

Post-colonial translation: Theory …, 1999

This outstanding collection brings together eminent contributors to examine some crucial interconnections between post-colonial theory and translation studies.

Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series – Themes in Translation Studies, 2021

Translation has meant different things at different times; it has always been an unstable concept. This instability has, for the most part, been due to variable views first on the relations between translated texts and their source and target languages, and later on similar binary relations between translated texts and their source and target cultures. The evolution of discussions in terms of faithful versus free translation, source text oriented versus target text oriented translation, and foreignizing versus domesticating translation with their varying focuses on either the source or the target end, reflects how approaches to translation often remain overdetermined by binary concepts (see Bandia, below) but also how new insights gradually enter the discussion. One such insight is that both translation and views on what translation should be, are determined by historical and ideologically coloured social practices. Indeed, as Theo Hermans writes "Cultures, communities and groups construe their sense of self in relation to others and by regulating the channels of contact with the outside world." (1999: 95) Translation is one such channel. Historical, audiovisual and postcolonial studies into the relations between translation and power have all demonstrated the influence of power and ideology on the production of translations and suggested new terms such as the 'metonymy' of translation (Tymoczko 1999) and 'transadaptation' rather than 'translation' for audiovisual texts (Gambier 2003) to deal with the complexity of relations that demonstrably transcends binary oppositions. The production of 'difference' in ever-changing gradations is-in some contexts-just as central a concern to translators as the production of 'equivalence' (taken in its hypothetical literal meaning). Which way the cat eventually jumps is determined by cultural-ideological norms just as much as functional ones. In fact, "[…] the normative apparatus which governs the selection, production and reception of translation, together with the way translation is conceptualized at certain moments, provides us with an index of cultural self-definition." (Hermans 1999: 95) 'Cultural self-definition' is, however, becoming increasingly problematic in a world torn between globalizing and localizing tendencies. On the one hand, the cultural identities of some minorities, for instance, are under threat in an anglicized MacWorld (see Snell-Hornby below), on the other hand, globalization stimulates extreme forms of localization or identity assertion, as the popularity of nationalist and religious forms of self-identification demonstrates. In between there lies a virtually limitless spectrum of interactional struggles and variable relations between more or less powerful actants, both locally and internationally.

Language Sciences, 2020

These few decades have witnessed a surge of postcolonial translation movements which put the Western transference ideal, one that sees translation as transference of meaning between two languages, to the test. Two of such movements are postcolonial literalism and Antropofagia, which both redirect significance from the meaning to the form and unsettle the colonial notion of 'originality' in translation. This paper introduces a semiological viewpoint on these two movements, evaluating the similarities and incongruities between a postcolonial re-theorization of translation and an integrationist theoretical account of translation. It is argued that while postcolonial translation theories show some tendencies to break away from 'the language myth' inherent in colonial translation i.e. a supposition of pre-given language codes for translation to take place between (Harris, 2011a), demythologization is never the postcolonialists' primary concern nor achievement, who still ultimately rely on the language myth and its entailments to serve political ends.

Annals of Philosophy, Social & Human Disciplines, 2023

The postcolonial theory of translation has emerged as a pattern of systems that enables a translator to re-conceptualize and revisit texts and redirect his attention to the dichotomy of Subject/Object relationships far from the hegemonic language of the logocentric Europe. Reproducing a text through rewriting is subjugating it to the will and intention of the localthe margin / the Other. Culture and Translation are two very polemical elements in perpetual tension due to the amount and the degree of reliability of the transfer from the source text to the target. Many studies have been made to find an issue and an adequate theory of translation to transfer the culture of the source to the target smoothly. However, these studies are not as effective as they might be because translation is rather a maneuvering and a biased manipulation of the text, and what is transferred as culture is just what is conceived or rather perceived by the translator whose background is the cornerstone of his rendering. Postcolonial theory has come in recourse to translation: its basic strategy is translation through dualism and alterity. It is a kind of H. Bhabha's Third Space or Bill Ashcroft's Rewrite: revisiting the text and its culture through the Other's Eye / "I." But this Rewrite pattern of translation needs more adequate mechanisms to transfer one culture into another language and avoid the constraints imposed by the power of the Subject that hinders the reading, rethinking, and interpreting of the text and is, frequently, hovering around and behind any translation activity.

In Gayatri Spivak's Politics of Translation, she remarks that "[t]he politics of translation takes on a massive life of its own if you see language as the process of meaning-construction" (369). Translation as a mode of constructing a new representation of a cultural epistemology for a targeted audience has been heavily discussed within the realm of postcolonial studies. 1 We also understand that more than language is translated through these mediating acts. Cultures, ideas, perception and imagination fall to the will of the translator's interpretation. In the colonial and postcolonial socio-historical contexts that shape translation there is a formation of a "certain kind of subject," and irrevocably, questions of alterity and authority enter into the foray of understanding a translated cultural reality or representation of that reality (Niranjana 2). The translator becomes a recreator of sorts-interpreting and evaluating both target and source audiences. This is particularly true when dealing with translated works framed within asymmetrical political power relations, and this dimension of understanding translation has also been heavily theorized in this context. What has yet to be theorized is the function of the untranslated word within a translated text given the socio-historical lenses of colonial and postcolonial discourses. In the colonial and postcolonial contexts there are two overarching functions of the untranslated word. The first is, the untranslated word serves as an active mediating agent of cultural representation even more so than the translated word. It is a heavy and many other postcolonial scholars have dissected and theorized over the political underpinnings that contextualize translation within asymmetrical relations of power.