Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
forme
Francesca Billiani
Working definitions
My definition of translation, or my
understanding of the act of
translation, is not that of a merely
act of linguistic transposition (with all
the sophisticated discussion one
could have about it) but of
translation as discourse through
which symbolic and economic capital
is traded and exchanged within a
given literary field.
Translation
Is an aesthetic and linguistic
discourse which generates cultural
plurality and movement within and
across a geographical and
geopolitical space.
Translation in this instance is seen as
a force producing movement.
Metaphor
Translation is therefore a metonimyc
process, and translators make choices,
setting priorities for their translations in
decision-making processes that have
ideological implications. Translators’
choices also establish a place of
enunciation and a context of affiliation for
the translator and the translation
(Tymoczko, 2010, p. 8)
Aims
What is censorship?
How does censorship work?
Key factors: Power structures and
ideology.
Examples from different media and
national contexts.
Role of the translator: the case of
self-censorship.
Transnational
as the analytical effort of tracing
flows of meaning across and within
national variations, following the
leading trajectory delineated by any
given paradigm and by any shared
social design.
Histoire croisée
From the perspective of an histoire
croisée,the translational is not to be
seen as a level above, but something
which interacts with the georgraphy
of the national level to design a
history “à géométrie variable”.
Censorship-Research trajectory
Investigate the apparent paradox between
the idea of culture as a national product
and the key position translations have
always occupied within a literary and
cultural field.
In other words, the research asked how
did culture negotiate through translation
its relationship with the State and its
institutions and to what extent it did
conform with the necessity both of
adapting and of preserving its
independence?
Research questions
How to tell/portray a national
history by listening to/ and
incorporating its foreign voices?
And how to tell the intricate
narratives of translations?
Research questions
How to theorise the relationship they
necessarily establish between modes
of cultural production and modes of
political repression and control over
elite/popular culture in order to
create a transnational space?
Shift
‘away from technical questions about
how to translate per se towards
larger ethical and political
perspectives on the activity of
translating, on the functions of
translation products in relation to
power, and on the agency of
translators. (Tymoczko, 2010, p. 5)
Censorship
“Censorship may be either
preventive or punitive, according to
whether it is exercised before or
after the expression has been made
public.”
It exercise power over the
transmission of a certain message.
It usually occurs in an heavily
ideologically loaded context.
Censorship is a coercive and forceful act
that blocks, manipulates and controls
crosscultural interaction in various ways.
It must be understood as one of the
discourses, and often the dominant one,
articulated by a given society at a given
time and expressed through repressive
cultural, aesthetic, linguistic and economic
practices.
Ideology
FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS-dominant
beliefs
‘system of thought which popagates
systemic falsehood in the selfish
interest of the powerful and malign
forces dominating a particular
historical era’ (Hawkes 1996: 12).
e.g. capitalism, socialism, fascism as
systems of ideas
Censorship usually operates in an
ideologically loaded context; however, the
assumption must be that
Ideology is not simply a ‘false
consciousness’, an illusory representation
of reality, it is reality itself;
‘ideological is not the ‘false consciousness
of a social being’ but this being in so far
as it is supported by ‘false consciousness’.
Censorship to reveal
Intracultural functions of the
products and processes of
translation;
Perception of difference and self-
reflexivity about perspective in
relation to the nature of translation
in diverse cultural contexts.
(Tymoczko, 2010, p. 5)
Visibility and Invisibility
It is the degree of exposure of the
symbolic capital of the artefact, the
discourses on in or the materiality of art
that determines its relationship with the
censor and the processes whereby it
becomes part of the totalitarian machine.
both censorship and translation
influence the visibility and invisibility,
as well as the accessibility and
inaccessibility, of the cultural capital
enjoyed or produced by a given text
or body of texts.
Institutional and individual.
Foucault (1975) argues that the
production and representation of
knowledge depend on the ways in
which any social system articulates a
set of rules.
Panoption power.
Hegemony
‘results from the specific dialectic
between what we call logistics of
difference and of equivalence. Social
actors occupy differential positions
within the discourse that constitute
the social fabric. […] It becomes
necessary however to represent the
totality of the chain’ (Laclau-Mouffe,
2001, p. xiii)
Antagonism
Antagonism is fundamental to the
existence of democratic politics.
Censorship reduces antagonism and
democracy.
Inertia
Because of their size and invisibility,
THEIR INERTIA, the censorial
apparatus could largely ignore
translations at the beginning, by
implicitly labelling them peripheral
cultural enterprises.
Communicative System
“translation can no longer be
analyzed in isolation, but…should be
studied as part of a whole system of
texts and the people who produce,
support, propagate, oppose, censor
them” (Lefevere in Hermans
1999:44)
Power structure-selective choices
Institutional censorship
Market strategies
Cultural conventions
Aesthetic conventions
Social conventions
Self-censorship
Cultural spaces between Familiar and Alien
Micro-history
By concentrating not exclusively on how
an organisation functions but on how it
imagines it ought to function, narrate, and
represent itself as well as on the interplay
between micro and grand narratives, we
can illustrate how the structures producing
translations (publishing houses or literary
magazines), the narratives they unfold,
and the discourses about them (political
propaganda) form a transnational
‘aesthetics of polylingualism in literary
production’ (Bandia 2008: 139).
Micro-history