TRANSLATION AND POWER – MARIA TYMOCZKO

INTRODUCTION

 Interest in power and translation goes back to historical events in the second half of the
twentieth century and to their reflection in the emerging discipline of translation
studies.
 1950s and 1960s  Madison Avenue pioneered techniques for using mass
communications for cultural control. Practicing translators began consciously to
calibrate their translation techniques to achieve effects they wished to produce in their
audiences: translators began to realize how translated texts could manipulate readers
to achieve desired effects.
 HOLMES  showed that readers could dissect translations to discern the effects that
they would have on audiences and to determine the literary, but also the political,
commitments of their translators. He and POPOVIC compared different translations of
the same text and contrasted the different purposes and impacts that diverse
translation techniques would achieve.
 Result  realization that a normative approach was tantamount to an implicit allegiance
to a given but unspecified range of values commonly shared by those in power in any
given culture.
 Historical events deepened the understanding of power as a motivating factor in cultural
domains. Within virtually all cultures, disenchantment with dominant ideologies
resulted in reconceptualization of society and power.
 Motivated by Civil Rights movements, feminism worldwide among other things, there
was a growing consensus that however important materialist issues might be, more
fundamental were the structures of power in societies, both implicit and explicit, formal
and informal.
 Interest in power of Translation Studies field takes place within the political trajectories
during the 1960s. Many contributions of various important movement in TS since 1975,
when various scholars began to explore issues of power and translation, are situated
within this context.
 1985  THEO HERMANS, The Manipulation of Literature, together with many scholars
that participated, reached a new stage. They demonstrated that translations far from
being secondary and derivative were instead one of the primary literary tool that larger
social institutions had to manipulate a given society in order to construct the kind of
culture desired.
 1990  BASSNET AND LEFEVERE, Translation, History and Culture, redefined the object
of inquiry in descriptive translation studies as a text within the networks of literary and
extra literary signs, in both the source and target culture. They wanted to explain the
shifts that occur in translation, not only by poetic devices but by ideological forces as
well.
 After the cultural turn, publications in TS that dealt with questions of power increasingly
had a poststructuralist basis. VENUTI  Rethinking Translation. He insisted that study
of translations be submitted to the same rigorous interrogation that other cultural forms
and practices have recently undergone with the emergence of poststructuralism.
 Scholars have made their comparisons more to the long chains of multiple meanings
and the pluralities of language that lie behind any textual construct.
 Outside the realm of translation, scholars from many fields have articulated the central
importance of translation in establishing, maintaining and resisting imperialist power
structures.
 The key topic that has provided a new direction in TS since the cultural turn is POWER.
In poststructuralist and postcolonial fields, discussions focus on the question of agency,
given that we are always already formed by the discourses of the age in which we live,
how can anyone effect cultural challenge?  Translations, in spite of never being
completely homologous to the original, do import aspects of the Other to the receiving
culture.
 Some definitions of power: ‘ability to do or effect something…, or to act upon a person
or a thing’; to ‘possession of control or command over others; dominion, rule;
government, domination…; influence, authority’
 Translation is not simply associated with the possession of control or command over
others, and hence with colonization or oppression, but also with the ability to act upon
structures of command, such that translation becomes a means to resist that very
colonization or exploitation.
 Translation is a metonymic process as well as a metaphoric one.
 Translations are inevitably partial, meaning in a text is always overdetermined and the
information in a ST is therefore always come extensive than a translation can convey.
On the contrary, the receptor language and cultural entail obligatory features that shape
the possible interpretations of the translation, as well as extending the meanings of the
translation in directions other than those inherent in the ST.
 Translators must make choices regarding which part to transpose and emphasize. These
choices serve to create representations of their ST, representations that are also partial.
Indeed partiality is what enables translation to participate in the dialectic of power, the
process of political discourse and strategies for social change. Their partial nature is
what makes them also an exercise of power.
 They realise there were two possible situations regarding translation:
o Either the translator would collude with the status quo and produce fluent, self-
effacing translations
o Or oppose a particular hegemony and use foreignizing strategies to import new
and unfamiliar terms to the receiving culture.
 The process of translation is heterogeneous, with different issues addressed by different
translations and different translators at different times and different places, depending
on the specific historical and material moment. As a consequence, no single translation
strategy can be associated with the exercise of oppression or the struggle for resistance.
 Translation analysis is more difficult when we acknowledge the fragmentary nature of
discourses and the configuration of the power they exert. One must analyse not only
the presented parts of the source text and culture but also what is left out.
 VENUTI  the remainder: that part that exceeds the transparent use of language and
that may in fact impede communication. Contemporary scholars are increasingly open
to both parts, the translated and the leftovers including literal omissions and the
absence of translations in the historical record, and, contextualizing translation in its
historical moment.
 Scholars realized that knowledge does not necessarily precede the translation activity,
and that the act of translation is itself very much involved in the creation of knowledge.
It is not simply an act of faithful reproduction, but rather a deliberate act of selection
and fabrication.