Postcolonial Translation Research Articles

Postcolonial literary heteroglossia: a challenge for homogenizing translation

Postcolonial translation studies, has for the most part, been centered on the strategies employed by postcolonial subjects to subvert language, thus fashioning a counter-hegemonic anti-colonialist discourse. Research in this subfield of translation studies has closely followed trends in postcolonial studies which have been largely defined in terms of a dichotomous framework based on an oppositional discourse, pitting the West against the East, the colonized against the colonizer, the Global South versus the Global North, etc. Although this approach has enhanced knowledge in the area of multilingualism and the sociolinguistics of power relations, it has often overlooked those linguistic and cultural practices in the postcolony that are fairly autonomous and not subordinate to relations with the colonial métropole. This essay highlights the heterogeneity of language practice in the postcolony and the challenge it poses for normative translation theory, which often assumes a transfer or exchange between stable or monolithic linguistic or cultural entities. Early postcolonial literature featured a colonial language that could lend itself easily to monolingual translation practices, despite its local specificities. Today, we are dealing with a decidedly heterolingual literature, where several languages or language varieties interact, defying traditional monolingual translation principles and the enthnocentrism prevalent in homogenizing translation.

Riscritture appropriate e approprianti. Traduzione e revisione del testo letterario

Both the translation and the revised version of a literary text give rise to similar issues, for in both cases one can adopt a strategy of either appropriate rewriting or appropriating rewriting. In the former case, the tendency is to respect the properties and peculiar qualities of the Other; in the latter, the tendency is to manipulate and distort the text, to reduce the Other to the Self and not to contemplate the creative potentialities of contaminated language. Italian publishing houses seem to be afraid of hybridity: homologation, order, syntactical and lexical propriety appear more alluring. But it is the two elements of the foreign and the new enclosed in the concept of hybridity that allow the translator to challenge the cultural values of the publishing establishment. Even if liminal space is an unexplored area by the Italian publishing sector, the concept of in-betweeness is very useful for translation, in particular post-colonial translation. One of the fields in which the creative potential of liminal space can be fully explored by translators, revisers and publishers alike is the field of contact languages, for pidgins and creoles move freely in the interstitial zone. An example taken from Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), and its comparison with Adriana Motti’s translation, published by Adelphi in 1971, allow us to show what is meant by appropriate and appropriating rewriting.

Postcolonial Translation as Transformation

Like translation, postcolonial writing involves an act of mediating across languages and cultures. Texts written in English by bilingual anglophone writers often include strategies of transformation similar to those used by politically engaged translators to render the linguistic and cultural specificity of their source cultures. This paper examines this practice in the writing of the Egyptian novelist and cultural critic, Ahdaf Soueif (1950 - ). It discusses how in addressing a global audience of English speakers, Soueif avoids editorial intrusions and relies extensively on lexical borrowing, contextualization, historical and geographical references, colloquial conversational formulas, culture-distinct metaphors and idioms, relexification and grammatical deviation – all of which enable her English text to accommodate the Arabic language and culture. The paper argues that Soueif’s representation of the personal dilemmas of her female characters, including their physical embodiment, transgresses the dividing line between the private and the public and the sexual and the political in the Islamic-Arab world. In this way, Soueif’s delineation of female private experience in her semi-autobiographical fiction functions as a kind of cultural translation.

RACE, RESISTANCE AND TRANSLATION: THE CASE OF JOHN BUCHAN'S UPRESTER JOHN

In postcolonial translation studies, increasing attention is being given to the asymmetrical relationships between dominant and indigenous languages. This paper argues that John Francis Cele's UPrester John (1958) is not simply a subordinated and obeisant translation of John Buchan's adventure thriller Prester John (1910), but a more complex form of textuality that is both oppositional and complicit with the workings of apartheid. Although Cele's translation reproduces Buchan's story of a daring young Scotsman who single-handedly quells a black nationalist uprising, it also ameliorates the novel's racist language and assumptions. Cele's translation practice is examined in the context of apartheid publishing and Bantu education.

Thinking-Across, Infiltration, and Transculturation: José Martí's Theory and Practice of Post-Colonial Translation in New York

Thinking-Across, Infiltration, and Transculturation: José Martí's Theory and Practice of Post-Colonial Translation in New York

26. Semiotic encounters: text, image and trans-nation.

Introduction Theorising Textual and Visual Encounters Mary Orr: Intertextuality: Old Debates in New Contexts Harish Trivedi: Anglophone Transnation, Postcolonial Translation: The Book and the Film as Namesakes Renate Brosch: Migrating Images and Communal Experience Textual Encounters Caroline Lusin: Encountering Darkness: Intertextuality and Polyphony in J.M. Coetzee's Dusklands (1974) and Matthew Kneale's English Passengers (2000) Georgiana Banita: Affect, Kitsch and Transnational Literature: Azar Nafisi's Portable Worlds Walter Gobel: Washington Irving's Rip van Winkle, A Postcolonial Reading or: In Search of a Usable Past Irina Bauder-Begerow: Echoing Dickens: Three Rewritings of Great Expectations Sarah Sackel: What's in a Wodehouse? (Non-) Subversive Shakespearean Intertextualities in P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster Novels Ida M. Samperi: No Text Just Comes out Ex Nihilo, It Always Comes out of Other Texts: Christine Brooke-Rose's Thru Visual Encounters Nicola Glaubitz: Transcribing Images - Reassembling Cultures: Kazuo Ishiguro's Japan Joachim Frenk and Christian Krug: Handovers of Empire: Transatlantic Transmissions in Popular Culture Sonja Fielitz: Fish and Chips with Marshmallows? Possibilities and Limitations of Trans-Cultural Intermediality Susanne Gruss: Shakespeare in Bollywood? Vishal Bhardwaj's Omkara Amira Nowaira: Text and Pretext: Reading Cultural and Ideological Paradigms in the Hollywood and Egyptian Movie Adaptations of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina Noha Hamdy: Revisiting Transmediality: 9/11 Between Spectacle and Narrative Wolfram R. Keller: Long Live the New Flesh? David Cronenberg's Videodrome and the Limits of Ovidian Metamorphosis

Hermeneutic heresy: Rey Chow on translation in theory and the ‘fable’ of culture

Translation is a topic that seems to come and go with regularity on the literary theory scene. It has most recently enjoyed a vogue among comparatists, who have positioned translation as a way to renew—yet again—their discipline (see, for example, Emily Apter's The Translation Zone). Translation has also been discussed in the context of feminism, deconstruction, and postcolonial studies. With respect to the last grouping, the writings of Niranjana, Spivak, and Chow stand out. In this essay, I return to Chow's discussion of translation and national identity in Primitive Passions. I am particularly interested in showing how Chow, almost alone, attempts in that work to overcome the dominant hermeneutic paradigm that informs other theorists on translation, from the cultural conservatism of George Steiner to the declared radicalism of Spivak and of more recent works such as Bassnett and Trivedi's edited volume Postcolonial Translation Theory. I argue that none of these writers has taken up the challenge to hermeneutics that Chow posited and explored specifically with regard to ‘Fifth Generation’ Chinese filmmakers. Chow's challenge, I claim, resides in her focus on mediation as key to understanding both identity formation and the construction of ‘culture’ itself. Using theorists of media and social systems such as Friedrich Kittler and Niklas Luhmann, I go on to unfold Chow's discovery and demonstrate that hermeneutics and the translation theory derived from it are largely products of print and that the shift to film in the global marketplace has undermined the conceptual apparatus of both.

Postcolonial Translation: Encounters across Languages, Cultures, and Disciplines

Postcolonial Translation: Encounters across Languages, Cultures, and Disciplines

K problematiki prevajanja afriškega evrofonskega romana v slovenščino

This article opens with a brief consideration of the implications of Europhone writing in Africa: writing in a second, ex-colonial and still dominant language, and divergence between the language of writing and the (often plural) linguistic reality of the society addressed by the text. Such writing implies complex mediation between the source context and the language of the original, a grappling with language practices, representations, and norms in symbolic and political power relations, meaning that the language strategies of the text have an unavoidable political charge. The same is true of translation choices. The first part of the article analyzes some of the more radical textual strategies adopted by various African Europhone writers using a Bakhtinian approach, focusing on questions of language appropriation and literary representation of linguistic practices and, specifically, of social heteroglossia and its social and political implications in the postcolonial literary text in a European language. These strategies range from pidginization of the text (Ken Saro-Wiwa) to embedding untranslated material from indigenous languages (Amadou Hampâté Bâ) to syntactic and other transformations in which the language of writing is reorganized according to the patterns of an indigenous language, resulting in an already-translated original (Gabriel Okara, Ahmadou Kourouma). The second part explores possible translation strategies in the light of this analysis, taking into account the position of Slovenian in relation to relevant ex-colonial and African languages. Depending on the situation, these strategies can include constructing a new virtual register for the target language (in order to represent the original image of a pidgin language), transforming target-language patterns to represent the transformations at work in an already-translated original, and adapting the transliteration of embedded untranslated material. The discussion is partly based on some translations into Slovenian that already exist. The author argues for a translation approach based on consideration of the specific cultural and political location of each text as well as of the relative position of the source and target contexts and languages. Rather than a fluid, transparent translation that tends towards complicity in ethnocentric-masking-as-universal, the result of such strategies is a text that is explicitly a translation. Mediating between plural, shifting, and hybrid cultural locations, it reasserts the other’s “right to opacity” and demands active participation on the part of the reader as well as the translator. In this way, what is provisionally termed “postcolonial translation” accomplishes its own, double-voiced artistic, ethical, cultural, and political project.

Between French and Breton: The Politics of Translation

This article explores the political implications of different types of translation between French and Breton. The bilingual parallel text publication practice of militant poets active in 1960s and 1970s Brittany is discussed in relation to their perception of Brittany as an 'internal colony', and against the French State's attitude towards regional languages. I argue that the Breton versions of these poems that appear alongside the French function as a synecdoche for racial and cultural oppression and injustice across the world. Translations into Breton from other minority cultures are shown to allow the mapping of political allegiances, and a sense of solidarity. The literature produced in the wake of Gwalarn, a periodical which was characterized by its enthusiasm for translation into Breton, is contrasted with the basically Romantic literature produced by nineteenth-century Breton enthusiasts. For Gwalarnistes translation into Breton from world literature was a key in escaping the cliché-ridden Brittany that had become familiar in Breton literature. The article concludes by considering the implications of translation out of a minority language and into the politically dominant language. Drawing on work in postcolonial translation studies, as well as comments by Welsh writers and critics on the issue of translation, I suggest that translation can be complex and indeed dangerous in the case of a minority culture such as Brittany's, and conclude that there can therefore be no all-encompassing theory of translation.

Romance in the Age of Cybernetic Conviviality: Hsia Yü's Pink Noise and the Poetics of Postcolonial Translation

In 2007, acclaimed Taiwanese postmodern poet Hsia Yü published a transparent book of bilingual poems generated mostly from weblogs (in English) and from a computer translation program (in Chinese). The book, Pink Noise (now available on Amazon), has ignited enthusiastic responses among Hsia Yü's "lay readers" in Taiwan, but like many other postmodernist works from a postcolonial context, has not yet received much critical attention. The essay begins with the question of locating or localizing Hsia Yü's postmodernism in postcolonial, post-Martial-Law Taiwan, reading the form of layered transparency and the play with (artificial) language and (machinic) translation not as a free play of signifiers or equivalent of concrete or conceptual art but as a realistic representation of digital (uneven) globalization. Reading Hsia Yü's bilingual poems closely through Lacan's theory of alienation and Wittgenstein's ideas on nonsense, the essay shows that the English/Weblish and the Chinese/Translationese can be read as different kinds of language games which are signposts to the questions concerning the status of English as a global language, the loss and love of translation in a postcolonial context, the return from narratology to a musicology of poetry, and the tremendously rich "nonsense" that happens when two heterogeneous and disparagingly hegemonic national languages meet. In conclusion, Pink Noise , unlike modernism with its implicit claim to whiteness, trans-lates negative dialogics into a convivial romance of poetry.

Le butin de guerre et la tunique de Nessus: traduire le rapport au français chez Malika Mokeddem et Assia Djebar.

Migratory movements in the world have led to the formation of diasporas and immigrants cultures that transform both societies and immigrants themselves, while contributing to global or transnational identities and cultures. The development of these globalized cultures erodes concepts of culture and identity based on binary oppositions. This article shows the point of view of a translator from French into Dutch confronted with plural identity in postcolonial translation. The textual hybridism in the work of Francophone Algerian writers Assia Djebar and Malika Mokeddem can be contextualized with the help of the concept of Ricoeurs “l’étranger”. I want to show that the “strangeness” in style that has to find its way in translation, is linked to a specific relation to French as a result of colonialism. Mokeddem thinks of French as a spoil of war, or a “butin de guerre” as a result of 130 years of French colonisation and the Independence War (1954-1962). Djebar on the other hand considers French as a poisonous gift, as “la tunique de Nessus”.

The captivity of translation: the legacy of William Barrett Marshall's Personal Narrative

In A Personal Narrative of Two Visits to New Zealand, in His Majesty's Ship Alligator, A.D. 1834, William Barrett Marshall draws upon his experiences in New Zealand, specifically his participation in a rescue expedition, to formulate a vigorous critique of military force and irresponsible colonialism, while simultaneously constructing an impassioned argument for the benefits of missionary efforts, both in New Zealand and throughout the British Empire. This paper examines Marshall's narrative in light of postcolonial translation theory, exploring the ways in which the text is itself a selective translation even as Marshall critiques the translations of others, and the ways in which it, and other accounts of the same events, have translated the figure of Betty Guard, a female captive among Maori, in creating colonial narratives of British hegemony and control. As Marshall's text has been translated and re-translated, captured and recaptured, the didactic, seemingly linear tale that it relates has become as multivalent as the voices that Marshall himself translates and has spawned a network of telling that problematizes the very notion of translation that Marshall takes up.

Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation (review)

Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation, by Naomi Seidman. Afterlives of the Bible Series. University of Chicago Press, 2006. 333 pp. $22.00. In the six meticulously researched chapters of Naomi Seidman's Faithful Renderings, published by the University of Chicago Press as part of its Afterlives of the Bible Series, Seidman argues that the history of translations of Hebrew and Yiddish texts - from the Septuagint to Isaac Bashevis Singer - offers insight into questions of Jewish-Christian identity and difference. She reads translations with an eye to the contexts in which they were produced and circulated, rejecting the notion that Jewish translation is an essential phenomenon. Each chapter of Faithful Renderings probes specific challenges posed throughout history for translators of Jewish material for non-Jewish audiences. The first four chapters, which detail the effects of Christian genealogical anxieties on the translation of Jewish texts, ground Seidman's thesis that translation discourse mirrors Jewish-Christian tensions and polemics. The first chapter investigates the misinterpretations that permitted the patristic appropriation of Jewish sources for Christian purposes. But Seidman also invokes Jewish counter-accounts of the origins of the Septuagint to demonstrate that mistranslation can function as a tool of cultural and religious survival. Her argument is further developed in the second chapter, where she examines the fascinating figure of Aquila of Sinope, the second-century Jewish convert whose word-for-word rending of the Bible earned him the reputation as one of history's worst translators. Aquilas literalist, source-oriented approach contrasted with Christian preference for sense-for-sense translations, leading, Seidman maintains, to the association of literalism with Judaism and its consequent marginalization as a translational approach. The third chapter examines Martin Luther's reader-oriented approach to the Bible. Seidman argues that Luthet s naturalization of the Hebrew Bible as a German text made it a foundational text for modern translation practices and their ethnocentric approach. The fourth chapter investigates Jewish translations of the Bible into German through a comparison of Moses Mendelssohn's Bible to the Buber- Rosenzweig Bible. Seidman is critical of Mendelssohn's attempts to create a Jewish Enlightenment, but she also emphatically rejects the notion that the Buber- Rosenzweig Bible represents a true Jewish-German dialogue, arguing instead that it is the careful self-presentation of a minority group. Her argument here is indebted to postcolonial theory and postcolonial translation studies, in particular Homi Bhaba's work on hybridity and colonial mimicry. These tools are quite effective, although she might have justified her use of them with reference to Jewish experience in the European diaspora. In the fifth and perhaps most controversial chapter, Seidman revisits earlier work in Holocaust Studies to buttress her claim that the contemporary understanding of the Holocaust as an internationally recognizable event is a late creation that acquired its distinctive shape long after the event itself. …

Nationalism in exotic clothes? Postcolonial thinking, gender and translation in the field day anthology of irish writing

Field Day has been the most important collective cultural initiative in Ireland since Yeats and Lady Gregory’s National Theatre movement in the early twentieth century. Founded in 1980 to articulate a cultural intervention into the crisis in Northern Ireland, it brought together some of the most important cultural figures in Ireland, such as the playwright Brian Friel, the actor Stephen Rea, and the poet Seamus Heaney. While it was originally conceived of as a touring theatre company, the enterprise also became a publishing imprint, and has produced some of the most challenging scholarly work on Irish culture and history. Its most ambitious project was The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, a massive undertaking that looked to compile and rethink 1,500 years of Irish writing. When the first three volumes of the Anthology were published in 1991 the egregious lack of women’s writing in their 4,044 double-columned pages, and the fact that not one of the editors of the 44 different sections was a woman, were immediately noted. In an embarrassed response, the editors commissioned a second instalment, which was entirely edited by women and devoted to women’s writing, and was published in 2002 in two volumes. The focus of this article is on the modes of postcolonial thinking that informed these two instalments. The first three volumes were clearly influenced by thinkers such as Said, who published a pamphlet with the group, and considered Field Day an archetypal postcolonial enterprise. Indeed, Field Day is credited with having introduced postcolonial thinking into Irish Studies, a move that was by no means uncontroversial. For many critics, theories emanating from African, Caribbean and Indian colonial experiences had no relevance in an Irish context, and they strongly suspected that Field Day’s interest in postcolonial thinking was little more than an attempt by the group to re-dress nationalism in exotic clothes. The blindness to gender evidenced in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing was taken as confirmation of this, as it showed that Field Day was a group that could not see beyond the ‘national’ question and engage with other urgent issues. In many ways, then, attention to gender and to women was construed in these, at times fiery, debates about the first three volumes as a symbol of progress and modernisation. Particularly in the Republic of Ireland, Field Day was characterised as a group of middle-ged, patriarchal Northern Irish men, who would drag the whole island backwards; who could not provide a viable narrative for it at the end of the twentieth century. However, volumes IV and V of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, (those devoted to women’s experiences), are, in fact, even more vertly postcolonial in their outlook than the first three volumes. But rather than looking towards Said, Fanon and Memmi, this second instalment was indebted to Subaltern Studies. Through giving an account of this episode in contemporary Irish cultural history, this article thinks about the problems and possibilities that attended upon this translation of postcolonial thinking from a non-European to a European setting.

Cultural Translation and the DoubleMovement of Difference in Learning 'English as a Second Identity'

This article pursues two main lines of inquiry: How might postcolonial theory, feminist and postcolonial translation studies sharpen our critical understandings of the micro- and geopolitics of English language learning? What kinds of pedagogical practice might such new developments ground in order to foster our learners' critical ways of knowing and being? From a survey of postcolonial perspectives on TESOL, I introduce several key concepts from postcolonial translation studies: the principles of time and progress in discourses of coloniality/modernity; resistant practices of cultural translation and double translation. These concepts allow me to trace the identity- and knowledge-based stakes and negotiations by high school immigrant English language learners within unique spaces created by the transformative pedagogy of a Freirean-style antiracism leadership camp in Toronto, Canada. I conclude by drawing out the implications of this analysis for a pedagogy of critical translational awareness.

Proprioception of the body politic: "Translation as phantom limb" revisited

Revising the author's 1996 argument in "Translation as Phantom Limb," the article argues that the proprioceptive system, a proprioception of the body politic, which controls the phantom limb phenomenon, has a collective extension that organizes group behavior--and that translation is in essence an extremely complex social activity involving the alignment of two collective proprioceptive systems (source-cultural and target-cultural) in order to produce a single text. Through close readings of Viktor Shklovsky's essays on estrangement, the author shows that postcolonial translation theories from the early nineties, like those offered by Venuti, Niranjana, and Cheyfitz, are essentially talking about the enlivening effect temporal and cultural estrangement can have on the readers of a translation. A version of this article was delivered at the 2006 ATA Conference in New Orleans as the Marilyn Gaddis Rose Lecture.

Postcolonial translation theory: A case study

Using the translations of Chinese classics into German by the missionary Richard Wilhelm (1877–1930) as a case study, the author of the article argues that translation in colonial periods does not necessarily exclusively serve the colonial power, as argued by some scholars in colonial studies. The article applies Andre Lefeyere's framework of ‘re‐writing’ for its methodological analysis. The analysis consists of three parts: patronage (ideology, economic and state), poetic, and language.

Migrant multitudes, western transcendence and the politics of creativity

This essay undertakes an immanent critique of Hardt and Negri's theoretical articulation in Empire. Their evasion of postcolonial translation and ethnographic description results in a specific blindness inseparable from their theoretical insight. Empire seeks to establish the case for a direct confrontation with global capital. Is not Hardt and Negri's distrust of local struggles, their inability to conceive how the defense of the local or even of national sovereignty might in specific circumstances itself be a route to “democratic globalization” only a consequence of a retreat into transcendence which surreptitiously privileges the conditions of struggle in the United States?

Bassnett, Susan & Harish Trivedi, eds. 1999. Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice

Bassnett, Susan & Harish Trivedi, eds. 1999. Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice