Writing the Wrongs of Literature: The Figure of the Feminist and Post-Colonialist Translator

Abstract

While recent decades have seen a proliferation of theorizing in the field of Translation Studies and all of its related disciplines, few treatises have taken an in-depth look at the figure of the translator him/herself, choosing instead to focus on descriptions or prescriptions-how-to missives that essentially cast translators in the roles of unskilled wage slaves, spiteful traitors, or anonymous ghost writers. In spite of the fact that the figure of the translator has been rendered virtually invisible in literary and academic spheres, it can be highly enlightening to seek to glean, or extrapolate, the characteristics and even the ideological agendas that this figure embodies through the looking glass of two of recent history's most prominent (certainly in Europe and the Americas) schools: those of feminist translation theorists and post-colonialist translation theorists. The use of the word extrapolate is correct precisely because, as mentioned, the figure of the translator is rarely directly addressed or described in scholarly or trade publications. In fact, so highly valued is the imperceptibility of the translator's mark, in today's literary world, that literary translations are praised by reviewers precisely for how invisible the translator manages to remain. Instead, scholars prefer to describe the translator's goals, objectives, methods, patrons, constraints, shortcomings, influences, resources, work conditions, etc. For this reason, this paper will seek to construct and define the surprising figure of the literary translator by means of the criteria upheld by each of the two translation schools of thought under examination: feminists and post-colonialists. As a logical point of departure, then, a few brief comments on the Polysystems Schooll and the changes, in some way revolutionary, that it has wrought within Translation Studies and critical thought since the 1970s will illustrate the reason why its status as the precursor to the feminists and post-colonialists is especially relevant. While the innovation wrought by Polysystems theorists cannot be easily summarized nor easily quantified, many speculate that it, along with its Anglo-American branch of theorists, constitute the strongest body of critical thinkers in the area of Translation Studies within the context of our brief history of modern, organized translation theory. For the