Theoretical Reflections on the Postcolonial Translation Studies (original) (raw)
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Post-Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice
World Literature Today, 1999
This outstanding collection brings together eminent contributors to examine some crucial interconnections between post-colonial theory and translation studies.
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Post-colonial translation: Theory …, 1999
This outstanding collection brings together eminent contributors to examine some crucial interconnections between post-colonial theory and translation studies.
Postcolonial Studies and Translation Theories
What distinguishes postcolonial approaches to translation is that they examine intercultural encounters in contexts marked by unequal power relations. Herein lie their strengths as well as their weaknesses. Their major contribution has been to illuminate the role of power in the production and reception of translation. But it is not certain that the postcolonial framework can be applied to other interlingual exchanges with minimal inequality of power relations. Moreover, there is a general tendency to underrate the differences among (post)colonial contexts themselves. It is suggested that insufficient attention to the socio-political background of translation has been reflected in postcolonial formulations of resistance, which are typically purely textual. It is argued also that some postcolonial perspectives, rejecting reductive appropriations of other cultures, may have been led to some sort of reification of difference, reflected in a rather pessimistic insistence on the inaccessibility of the position of the Other.
Translation as creation: the postcolonial influence
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.
This outstanding collection brings together eminent contributors to examine some crucial interconnections between post-colonial theory and translation studies.
BEYOND THE POSTCOLONIAL: THE CASE OF THE INDIAN NOVEL BETWEEN TRANSLATION AND WORLD LITERATURE
2018
Since their inception, postcolonial literary studies have been subjected to repeated contestation by their own practitioners, not least in their last correlated form as world literature. 1 To a certain extent, postcolonial theory can really be considered "a victim of its own success" (Bernard, Elmarsafy, and Murray 2016, 7), as its recurring crises seem to go hand in hand with its academic institutionalization and the increasingly pervasive viability of its critical insights. But if, on the one hand, this propensity to self-analysis might be ascribed to a sort of constitutive desire to uphold openness and self-interrogation as foundational working methods, on the other a number of recurrent problematical issues have in time turned into as many constitutive thorns in the side of theory. Besides well-rehearsed argumentations against a (repeatedly lamented) tendency to sacrifice cultural and historical specificities in favour of abstract theory, another charge is analogously directed at the predominantly Anglophone focus in the field of disciplinary application which, as a result, may be considered prone to producing homogenizing effects. 2