Cultural Colonialism in the Translation of Season of Migration to the North

Abstract

Translations of non-Western works introduce other cultures to the Western world. Translation is understood to be an act of rewriting/creation, which plays a role in promoting the source language and culture. Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North is a Sudanese Arab-African novel, translated into English. From a postcolonial perspective, reading the novel in translation does not convey the qualities of the original work to the Western reader. The translation is rather a reconstitution of the text mediated by the differences in the culture of the target language and this determines the relationship between dominant and subordinate cultures through “transculturation.” This paper also addresses the question of whether the translation of literature conveys a true cultural presentation of the other, or whether the translator, in postcolonial discourse, acts as a colonizer of the text, a space open to colonization.