Translation and solidarity in the century with no future: prefiguration vs. aspirational translation

Mona Baker

doi:10.1057/s41599-020-0400-0

Abstract

The future and how we envision and anticipate it has been the subject of scholarly attention for some time, especially from political theorists, scholars of human geography, and anthropologists. This article draws on some of this literature, but particularly the work of Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, the Italian Marxist theorist and activist, to explore the implications of two activist strategies that have recently received some attention from translation scholars: prefiguration and aspirational translation. It reflects on the different orientations to the future implied in these two strategies and suggests that their relative appeal is impacted by the rise of semiocapitalism in what Berardi refers to as ‘the century with no future’, and by varying experiences of activists located in different regions of the world. The work of translation and how translators orient themselves to the future, it is argued, can play an important role in arresting if not reversing the ongoing erosion of those possibilities still inscribed in the present despite semiocapitalism’s growing control over every area of human life.

Highlights

The starting point of this article is that all aspects of our experience of the world are mediated, including our experience of time and of space
While the argument presented here is not directly based on empirical research, in the sense of collecting and analysing new data, it is informed by the findings of earlier research on the role played by translation in enhancing or undercutting the political objectives of activist groups during the Egyptian revolution (Baker, 2016a, 2016b)
For activists living in and attempting to respond to such harsh realities, experimentation is a luxury they cannot afford to indulge in. This is evident in the difference between the kind of strategies Gaber advocates for aspirational translation, his emphasis on using the language of laypeople, and the type of highly marked prefigurative strategies adopted by Words of Women from the Egyptian Revolution in their Spanish subtitling of gender-marked language (Fig. 1 above)

Summary

Introduction

The starting point of this article is that all aspects of our experience of the world are mediated, including our experience of time and of space. Beyond specific moments and specific spaces such as the post revolution period in Egypt, the subjective experience of time relates to how we orient ourselves towards the three temporal domains that define our existence: the past, the present and the future.

Results

Conclusion