Secondhand China: Spain, the east, and the politics of translation

In an age of globalization that is characterized by pervasive use of various forms of translation within different political contexts, theorizing the politics of translation assumes considerable importance. Such theorization has to move beyond linguistic, textual, cultural and national boundaries – by way of re-examining lived and living experiences of the politics of translation –and must involve reconstructing and rewriting the history of translation. This article seeks to explain, from a Chinese point of view, the political impact of globalization on translation, and to identify the domestic and international challenges that Chinese translation theorists face in theorizing the politics of Chinese translation within a postmodern, postcolonial and globalized context. Finally, it explores whether this Chinese effort to politicize translation can open up a new space for a much-needed intercivilizational dialogue with the West.

Together with a Taiwanese working group, we have been producing a Chinese translation of Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies, a free and open source book first written by Winnie Soon and Geoff Cox in 2020, and released in English in a git repository, dynamic website, downloadable PDF and printed form. Apart from learning to code in p5.js, the book addresses the cultural and aesthetic dimensions of programming from its insides, as a means to think and act critically, and to understand the importance of programming as a cultural practice that can develop discussion of issues that are relatively under-acknowledged in technical subjects such as gender, race and sexuality. Importantly, the book is understood as a computational object, not released as a fixed and universal teaching resource, but rather a situated curriculum with the potential for extension and customization with other arts and coding communities. The use of Git has allowed the authors to formalize its production as an iterative process, allowing for reversioning and for others to fork a copy and customize with different references, examples, critical reflections and even new chapters. The interest is in forking a book like forking software, and incorporating local knowledge and examples, and how this resonates with a politics of cultural translation. This essay will elaborate on the process of running two open participatory workshops that were conducted in Taipei and London (in 2023) with the aim to challenge some of the normative social relations of production associated with translation, and explore other possibilities of collective practice. The politics of translation has been well-established in general, but what of the specifics of translating a book such as this? Aside from the technical and aesthetic challenges and implications, this raises the question of how the Chinese language model enforces particular hegemonic worldviews that occlude differences. With all the variants of Chinese language, how is this tied to expressions of colonial power that resonates with our use of English? Given the rich variations of Chinese and indigenous languages (not least in a Taiwanese context), we are curious how we might be sensitive to language diversity that challenges the Western-centrism of programming in English (and inherent nationalisms). We are also mindful of the way that “queer” politics has informed the way that terms can be appropriated/expropriated, as a means to “talk back” to the source codes of oppression. What are the implications of drawing the practices of forking and translating together?

Reviewed by: Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation Laura Levitt (bio) Naomi Seidman ; Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation (University of Chicago Press, 2006) Naomi Seidman opens her unusually lucid and compelling scholarly book, Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation, by telling a story about her father when he was a postwar translator. Through his labors as a kind of "double agent" working between the newly liberated French authorities and displaced European Jews who found themselves in France, his story, retold here, comes to enact the broader argument of the book. What Seidman argues here and throughout the book is that translation narratives should be "read not as transparent truth but rather as ideologically marked 'emplotment'" (p. 3). She does this by focusing on the relationship between Jews and Christians, from the Septuagint, the earliest Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, [End Page 171] to the Holocaust and beyond. In a sense, this longer history comes to flesh out the riddle that is her father's postwar story. In what follows, I want to share the bare outline of this family history in order to show how Seidman draws readers in, through the telling of this and other stories. What is striking is that the relationship between this Jewish feminist daughter, Naomi Seidman, and her father is so central to this important scholarly work. Thus I begin with the story. In her introduction, "The Translator as Double Agent," Seidman explains that her Polish Jewish father grew up in an affluent Hasidic home and studied French history as a Ph.D. student in Warsaw before the Second World War. Given this unusual background, he was uniquely suited to take on the role of unofficial liaison between the French authorities and the Jewish refugee community in Paris after the war. As she tells us, One morning, my father was called to the Gare de l'Est, where the police were holding a group of Jewish refugees who had managed to cross three or four borders without proper documents. The scene in the train station was chaotic, the refugees were upset and exhausted, and my father asked the police if he could speak with the group. pp. 1–2 Seidman goes on to explain that her father spoke to the refugees in Yiddish, telling them not to be afraid. He also made it clear to them that, while the French authorities were not Jews, they were not Nazis either, and would not mistreat them. He further assured them that the local Jewish community would help get them released. Of course after this long discussion in Yiddish the French police wanted to know what he had said to calm down the situation. In response, Seidman explains, Thinking fast, and thinking in French, my father "translated" his Yiddish words for the policemen: "I quoted them the words of a great Frenchman: 'Every free man has two homelands—his own, and France.' I assured them that they, who had suffered so much, had arrived at a safe haven, the birthplace of human liberty." As my father told it, the gendarmes wiped away patriotic tears at his speech. pp. 1–2 This ability to assess the situation and know what these different audiences needed to hear to make sure that everyone would emerge safely from what was already a charged and dangerous situation is the kind of political savvy Naomi Seidman sees at the heart of the labor of translation. This savvy is crucial to appreciating the role of translation in the long history of Jewish and Christian relations; in the rest of her book Seidman discusses how attention to the politics of translation itself becomes a mark of Jewish translation practices. As Seidman explains, acts of translation are bound up with whole sets of cultural and theological assumptions. This is especially so in the case of biblical translations. Here the notion of the spirit versus the letter of the law is played out in the very act of translation, with Christian commitments to the spirit and not the letter of the text. As Seidman shows, this very Christian preference for the spirit of the...

Reviewed by: Reading Israel, Reading America: The Politics of Translation between Jews by Omri Asscher Anthony Wexler Omri Asscher . Reading Israel, Reading America: The Politics of Translation between Jews . Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press , 2020 . 256 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009420000732 Although they often share geographic and linguistic origins, Jewish communities in Israel and America have come to be divided not only by language and location, but also by divergent conceptions of Jewishness. It would be easy to assume that the translation of literary works between these centers of Jewish life has helped bridge the gaps separating them, encouraging each to see itself as an organ of Klal Yisra'el . Omri Asscher's fascinating and original study on [End Page 226] literary translation tells a different story, however. He considers the translation of Hebrew works into English for American Jewish readers, and vice versa, from the 1940s through the 1980s, focusing specifically on the ways that translations of texts between Diaspora and homeland perform ideological work, exposing a "subterranean struggle" (175) between "rival siblings" (back cover) with different conceptions of Jewish life and culture. To this end, Asscher looks at the reception of literary works in and across both countries; sometimes, he points out significant instances of outright manipulation of translations. Two luminous examples at the start of the book introduce the scope and shape of Asscher's project. David Shahar's Hebrew novel His Majesty's Agent features an American Jewish character named Abie Driesel, an obvious parody of Elie Wiesel. In the English translation, however, Driesel's name was changed to Jules Levi, and passages that openly critique Wiesel and his brand of Jewishness were removed. The second example focuses on a 1971 review of Saul Bellow's Herzog in which the Israeli critic Alexander Barzel invites Sha'ul Bellow and his peers to "come home, to the nation's homeland" (2). These two moments show that the mediation of literary works for Jewish readers in both countries promoted and protected the ideals, values, and identities of the target culture—what Asscher describes as "a conversation of sorts, or negotiation of ideas, between two platforms of Jewish identity" (3). The first three chapters consider the absorption of Hebrew literature in American Jewish culture between the 1950s and the 1980s, a period during which Israel became a cornerstone of Jewish American identity. Asscher identifies trends in translation practices during these decades, including an effort to highlight connections between "Hebrew literature's national underpinnings and American historical myths," which helped American Jews preserve a distinct sense of a Jewish and American national identity (45). Starting in the 1960s, Israeli writers, including Aharon Megged, A. B. Yehoshua, and Amos Oz, began reflecting on the moral implications of the war of independence and the treatment of the Palestinian population. Asscher identifies two trends in the ways that American Jewish cultural agents responded to these critical accounts of the Israeli state. On the one hand, he argues that American cultural agents tended to describe them as "ethical expressions of moral opposition," labeling Israeli writers as the "dissenting voice of the humanistic Left in the country" (58). On the other hand, he argues that these agents sought to "soften" and "blur" (59) expressions of moral criticism in these works. Such censorship extended from the choice of texts for translation to the ways those texts were translated and interpreted in mainstream venues. The second chapter features a fascinating discussion of the ways that combat soldiers and Palestinian perspectives in these works were routinely modified or removed in translation, which, in turn, helped preserve Israel's moral image for American Jews. Asscher also considers how Jewish cultural agents in America responded to Israeli representations of Jewishness and Judaism that challenged Jewish American identity. He describes how Hebrew works that stressed the boundaries between Jews and non-Jews, that openly denigrated Christians, or that highlighted the presence of antisemitic persecution were altered to help protect the standing of the Jewish community in America. These chapters, then, [End Page 227] can help us better understand the ways that the translation process helped mitigate the tension between Zionism and morality, ensuring Israel's function as a source of collective...

Research Article| June 01 2003 Sexual Poetics and the Politics of Translation in the Tale of Griselda EMMA CAMPBELL EMMA CAMPBELL Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Literature (2003) 55 (3): 191–216. https://doi.org/10.1215/-55-3-191 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation EMMA CAMPBELL; Sexual Poetics and the Politics of Translation in the Tale of Griselda. Comparative Literature 1 June 2003; 55 (3): 191–216. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/-55-3-191 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsComparative Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. University of Oregon2003 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

This chapter studies Omri Asscher's Reading America, Reading Israel: The Politics of Translation between Jews (2020). This book employs translation to think about how two groups — American and Israeli Jews — understand and relate to one another. It stresses how adoption of different everyday languages and residence in distinct territories produced two collectives possessing divergent modern Jewish identities: when Jewish people and institutions came to mediate, manage, and regulate the social meanings of translated texts in the United States and Israel, they employed translations to define their center in contradistinction to its perceived antipode. Asscher also convincingly demonstrates how Israeli critics of the 1950s through the 1980s took pride in the literary successes of American Jewish writers, while dismissing the contents of their writing on ideological grounds. In contrast with his points about American Jewish translations of Israeli literature and Israeli translations of American Jewish literature from the 1950s to the 1980s, Asscher's broader claim about translation lacks effective substantiation.

This article investigates the politics of translation at work in contemporary theories of secularism. It turns to the thought of Jacques Derrida in order to challenge liberal and more critical perspectives. Without a complex analysis of translation and its ethico-political effects, the revisitation of secularism remains deficient, leaving the liberal politics of translation exclusionary and that of their critics ineffective. Pointing to the resources Derrida offers for a deeper understanding of the nature, political stakes, and implications of translation, this article illuminates an understudied and yet crucial dimension of the relationship between religion and politics, and more generally of public life.

The status of Cebuano literature in the Philippine literary field has been relegated to a marginalized position due to the outbreak of the Second World War and the implementation of English and Filipino as “Mediums of Instruction.” As a consequence, the development of Cebuano literature was thwarted. However, prominent Cebuano scholars exerted valuable effort to overcome the marginalized status of Cebuano literature through translation. Through translation, Cebuano literature started to be recognized in the Philippine literary field as translation projects of Cebuano literature were published and canonized. This study looks at the politics of translation and how it influences the production and canon formation of translated Cebuano literature. In doing so, this study traces the historical events from the 1970s to the 2010s to situate the narrative of the production process of Cebuano literature translation projects. Using the postcolonial translation theory of Andre Lefevere, this study identifies the constituencies that control the production process and investigates the agenda behind the production of Cebuano literature translation projects. Lastly, this study utilizes John Guillory’s theory of the canon, Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s contentions of “value/evaluation,” and Lawrence Venuti’s translation and canonization theory to elaborate how translation has influenced the formation of an alternative canon of Cebuano literature. Finally, this study draws its overall analysis on the material examination of Cebuano literature translation projects and on interviews with the constituencies (translators and publishers) to present the political issues in the production and canon formation of translated Cebuano literature.

This article deals with various aspects of the ‘politics of translation’ in connection with the book When the Cage Keeps Falling (subtitle The Mutual Correspondence of Antonin Přidal and Jan Zabrana, 1963–1984). The political dimension concerns translation in the narrowest sense of the word, but also the choice of text and its reception in the cultural feld, communication with the publisher, number of copies and distribution, as well as (during the period of normalization) translation under foreign names, cancellation of contracts, and the relationship between the book market and samizdat. With this aim, the author works through various examples of Zabrana’s translations from Russian in the broader context of political phenomena and strategies. These examples, in the fnal analysis, appear exceptional insofar as Russian literature was the subject of increased ideological interest during the period under review.

This paper will critically consider the ethical responsibilities and positionality of the translator of Witness Poetry (poetry written in response to mass social trauma), primarily through engagement with the work of Dale Tracy in With the Witness: Poetry, Compassion and Claimed Experience (2017), and Gayatri Spivak’s ‘The Politics of Translation’ (2000), and through interdisciplinary considerations of trauma theory, testimony, and poetics. Translation engenders fluctuating movement into, and out of, the text; it requires thorough exploration ‘inside’, considering the micro levels of language, and a frequent moving ‘out of’, in order to remain aware of one’s own position and linguistic context (Slavitt 2010: 509). The ‘frustrations’ of translation, that a shift across languages will always create changes in weight or meaning, reminds the translator of their limited position: limited, in terms of distance from the original event via systems of language. Translation affords intense, prolonged attention to the original poem, and imbedded reminders of distance and refracted positionality. Crucially to Witness Poetry, translation provides opportunity for participation in the continuation of testimony, in the act of remembering (Slavitt 2010; Deanne–Cox 2013). I argue that the position, responsibilities, and possibilities of the translator to Witness Poetry can be (re)imagined through the transdisciplinary, trans–epistemic lenses of compassion, trauma theory, ethical readership and response.

Following the critical acclaim of Sino-French literature in recent years, an increasing number of Chinese presses have solicited translations of prize-winning novels written in French by authors of Chinese descent. Yet as the work of authors like François Cheng, Shan Sa, Ya Ding and Dai Sijie travels from French into Chinese, it also undergoes a transformation via the politics of translation and publication in China. This essay exposes the inner workings of translation between French and Chinese, as well as the politics that colour its publication and reception between France and China. The act of translating these works back into their authors’ native tongue signals a return to the national paradigms the writers initially sought to evade by writing in French. Translation here functions as a form of aggression, a forced return home that ultimately breaks with the poetic ethos that animates the original creative works.

This paper argues that translation can be an effective method of learning and teaching English. It explores various translation theories and methods to show how the act of translation may enhance the learning and teaching of English Walter Benjamin's essay "The Task of the Translator" is analyzed in reference to how translation recreates the values that accrue to a foreign text over time. Vladimir Nabokov's essay "Problems of Translation Onegin in English" is analyzed for its emphasis on the value of literal translation Eugene Nida's essay "Principles of Correspondence" is analyzed for the different types of equivalence it proposes. Itamar Even-Zohar and Gideon Toury's ideas of translation are analyzed and their argument that literary translations are facts of the target system is investigated George Steiner's essay "The Hermeneutic Motion" is analyzed for its view that translation is an interpretation of the foreign text that is profoundly sympathetic, exploitive, and ethically restorative. I analyze Steiner's argument that language is not instrumental in communicating meaning but is constitutive in reconstructing meaning Hans J Vermeer's essay "Skopos and Commission in Translational ction" is analyzed for its idea of the translators skopos or aim as a decisive factor in translation Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's essay "The Politics of Translation" is analyzed for its advocacy of literalism in postcolonial translation issues By exploring and understanding the various relevant translation theories and methods, I will show how the learning and teaching of English may be done through translation.

Faithful Renderings: Jewish‐Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation – By Naomi Seidman

The present research paper is an endeavour to examine the representation of hybridity, language, and politics of translation in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novel titled Afterlives. Through close textual analysis of the novel, it is noticed that Gurnah has portrayed hybridity not as a passive colonial condition but as an active process of identity formation that challenges binary frameworks. The study systematically analyzes various important scenes from the novel where characters are engaged in a multilingual scenario, and languages like Kiswahili, German, Arabic, and English are used for interaction. It is the reflection of colonial power structures. The strategic translation practices of Hamza about his deliberate “pretence of struggling to understand” documents written in German while working as an interpreter reveal translation as a medium of resistance rather than neutral communication. The research discusses Gurnah’s depiction of language acquisition as both a tool of colonial domination and a means of personal connection, as seen in the translation of Schiller’s poetry for Afiya by Hamza. The present research shows that Afterlives is the representation of hybrid identities and linguistic interactions as continuous processes through which colonized people assert their power within oppressive systems. It offers vital insights into postcolonial identity formation that remain relevant in our globalized world.

As the World Service’s first foray into foreign-language broadcasting (Guardian, 1938) and its first initiative to branch out into non-English-language television (1994—96; 2008 to present), BBC Arabic has played a central role for the Corporation. Distrust of its claims to impartiality, however, persists. To assess both claims and critiques, we examine its politics of translation under four headings: transporting data from the field to the broadcaster; translating from one language into another; transposing data and message by inflexions of tone; and transmitting the result to selected audiences at selected times. We do so from both an etic (‘outsiders’) analysis of BBC output and an emic (‘insiders’) analysis of what audiences perceive and react to by way of critical receptions and reactions.