POWER DIFFERENTIALS- ROBINSON DOUGLAS

The role of translation in postcolonial studies is threefold:

 A channel of colonization, connected with education and the control of institutions

 A lightning-rod for cultural inequalities continuing after colonialism.
 A channel of decolonization.

Translating across power differentials

Jacquemond (1992) offers a good introduction to the problems of translating across power
differentials and translational inequalities. He develops four broad hypotheses

1. A dominated culture will invariably translate far more of a hegemonic culture than the
latter will of the former.
2. When this happens, the works translated will be presented ad difficult and for
intellectuals to interpret them, while a dominated culture will translate a hegemonic
culture’s works accessibly for the masses.
3. A hegemonic culture will only translate those works by authors in a dominated culture
that fit the former’s preconceived notions of the latter.
4. Authors in a dominated culture will comply with stereotypes in order to achieve a large
audience.

Disproportionate translations

Jacquemond approaches the global cultural inequality using the terms “languages of the North”
and “languages of the South”  Works from the South are only 1 or 2 percent of the market for
tranlations in the North which are only for a small circle of specialist readers and are translated
as such. Works from the North are widely read in the South ether with or without translation.

VENUTI  Hegemonic role of English as the international language. Even Europe’s former
imperial powers translate more from English than USA or UK translate from other languages.

 This is a neat illustration of the imbalances of cultural power in today’s world.

Inscrutable texts

Texts from a dominated culture translated by a dominating culture will be seen as mysterious,
esoteric (only for a small group), literal and difficult or loaded with annotations (imposing an
academic interpretation of it).

Jacquemond observes that this annotated mode is absorbed by young Orientalists as part of
their training. This has two problems:

a) The readers learn to trust the Orientalist’s comments instead, the image of the
“complicated Orient” is reinforced and the translator is seen as the authoritative meditator.

b) The reader is taken as a totally ignorant one, incapable of understanding the new
world to which he is confronted without the guidance of the translator.
Stereotypes

Hegemonic culture will typically select for translation works from that culture that fit prevailing
stereotypes of it. Texts selected for translation will be those that satisfy the hegemonic culture’s
expectation of a panoramic vision of the dominated culture.

Writing for translation

The dominated culture wants to be translated into English because English is by far the best
language for the international dissemination of ideas.

These cultural realities have been shaped by colonial and postcolonial relations. English is the
lingua franca because of a century of American and British dominance. English is not only spoken
by many more people but also carries an unconscious power-charge, a sense that those who
speak it know more and control more that those who don’t.

The international power status of English or French will make a postcolonial writer write
specifically for translation into those languages which requires a thorough knowledge of this
cultures’ literature and the willingness to adapt their writing to this cultures’ expectations,
conventions, norms and genre.

Theorizing across power differentials

Jacquemond offers a dual schematization of those power differentials

1. Colonial moment
Translators working into the dominated language are mediators who integrate foreign
objects without questions.
Translator working into the hegemonic language-culture are authoritative figures who
keep the other culture at a non-contaminating distance at the same time as they make
it acceptably comprehensible.

2. Postcolonial moment
It questions both sides of this paradigm. Resistance to Western values allows
translations into the dominated culture to be seen as part of a knowledge-controlling
apparatus that imposes Western ideologies.
The development of cultural minorities within Western cultures raises similar questions
from within those cultures.

Lambert offers a more elaborate tabulation of this power differentials and traces its
impor/export rules to work done by Even-Zohar (1978). These are the rules:

 Exporting systems are in a power position from the point of view of the importing
systems.
 Important differences in power relationships are normally correlated with major
differences in stages of development.
 The more imported text, the more unstable the society will be.
 The more exported texts, the more stable the society will be.
  Any kind of the explicit discourse on the importation phenomenon is likely to be
produced on the side of the exporter rather than on the receiving end

Carol Boyce Davies argues that postcolonial theory is written by member of the former
colonizing nations. The voice of the subaltern is being heard more than ever before, but the
legacy of colonialism survives in the uneasy fact that translation theory is writer by first world
scholars.

Niranjana  (addresses the twin disciplines of literary criticism and ethnography) Questions the
traditional view of intercultural translation as a humanistic bridge between peoples, a view that
merely confirmed the intercultural translation used by anthropologists when providing Western
audiences with knowledge about ‘unknown’ cultures.

Postcolonial questions  to what extent is the humanism of Western studies of translation

complicit in various colonial projects? Is there anything in the very nature of the problems posed
in translation studies and ethnography that authorizes the discourse of colonization that
underwrites the project of imperialism?

Niranjana  notes that translation studies seem unaware that an attempt should be made to
account for the relationship between ‘unequal’ languanges.

[Her book is part of a growing movement within translation studies to account for sun
unequal relationships.]  [Increasingly untrue, her critiques of pre postcolonial translation
theory nevertheless identify the specific point into which postcolonial translation theorists
attempt to insert their insights.

NIRANJANA  ethnographic approaches. She goes back to a Derrida’s quotation which presents
a three-step argument:

1) The European disciplines of ethnograpy, ethnology and anthropology were born out
of the discovery of cultural differences in the colonial peripheries.

2) This produced a European ethnocentry: European norms are more natura, universal
and culturally superior than other norm systems.

3) This remained ethnocentric in its presumption that a European self seeks to

incorporate non-European others.

[LIENHARDT  The problem of describing to others how members of a remote tribe

think… begins to appear as one of translation, of making the coherence primitive thought has
in the language it really lives in, as clear as possible in our own.]

According to Niranjana this is a critique to some anthropologists who dismiss the ‘primitive
mentality’. Here ‘the primitive’ becomes the anthropologist’s civilizational other.

The main goal for translation in ethnography is to know the other, this means that the ‘primitive
thought’ can only be known by Western ethnographers, which as a consequence means that
‘primitives’ can really only speak through the ethnographers mouth.

TEOLOGICAL CONCEPTION OF HISTORY  Everything in the world that is unlike the European
viewer is the “past” of the human race.
For Niranjana, translation masks the inequalities between cultures, feeding into assumptions of
a universal human history leading us all in the same direction from childhood to adulthood.

This is a Eurocentric view which makes certain cultures to appear as symbolic representatives of
humanity’s childhood  they are not merely different, they are more primitive.

Cultural translation in ethnography is the process of not only translating specific cultural texts
but of consolidating a wide variety of cultural discourses into a target text that in some sense
has no original, no source text –at least no single source text.

According to this view, the ‘natives’ are thought of as unable to articulate their own culture in a
way that might be conductive to more traditional translation and the ‘meaning’ in the ‘native’
culture as unconscious and therefore as unavailable to self-understanding (that is, only available
for the ethnographer’