THEORIES OF TRANSLATION
George Steiner characterized the history of translation until Jakobson/structuralism, as “a constant rehashing of the same formal versus free theoretical distinction. Early translation theories used concepts like “literariness”, “primary”, “secondary”, “estrangement”, which reveal the hierarchical nature of a culture. Thus, translation always has been a device in the hands of the canon and victimized by the canon for its own purposes (post colonial theory critiques in the same manner). It is imperative to remember that all theories of translation evolved reflected the political and social turmoil of the age. The ages have reflected theories of translation.
It was not until the 60’s that translation as a scientific activity was thought of. Translation was a marginal activity. But with the North American Translation Workshop, the practice of literary translation got recognition as alternate value systems. Scholars as Ted Hughes and Jonas Zydnas, the propagators of the workshop method, held that creative process, and translation, in effect, cannot be taught. Translation is a subjective activity, according to them, thereby reducing it to a mere exercise under the larger goal of interpreting literature.
I. A. Richards, in 1953, wrote “Toward a theory of Translating”, advocated ‘proper translation’ under the influence of unified reading, i.e. a precise recognition of the original author’s intention. While it is assumed that translation cannot be learnt, he argued that translators, with proper education and practice, can know the proper methodology to achieve the primary understanding of the text, trying hard to achieve the institutional hierarchy.
Ezra Pound’s theory of translation focused upon the precise rendering of details, of individual words, and of single even fragmented images. Words for him were sculpted images and the translator was seen as an artist, a calligrapher, as one who moulds words (influenced by Chinese handwriting, that he was). He emphasized on individual words, specific words, fragments, and luminous details. He believed in various combination of words releasing energy, and the translator as a catalyst, giving insight into the new combinations and new possibilities.
If the North American Translation Workshop has shown anything, it is that the translated text seems to have a life of its own, and an aesthetic of its own, responding not to the interpreter’s set of rules, but to laws that are unique to the mode of translation itself.
Eugene Nida’s ‘Message and
The translated text, according to Nida, should produce a response in a reader in today’s culture that is essentially like the response of the original receptors; if it does not do that, he suggests making changes in the text in order to solicit that initial response. This is the formal translation.
The emergence of the functionalist translation theory marks an important moment in the evolution of translation theory by breaking the two thousand year old chain of theory revolving around the faithful vs. free axis. Functionalist approaches can either be one or the other and still be true to theory, as long as the approach chosen is adequate to the aim of communication. The functionalist approach allows the translator the flexibility to decide the approach best suited to him. The translator thus enjoys the license to participate actively in the production of the translated text. The only thing that they stress on is that the received text must be coherent, fluent, and natural.
André Lefevre in “Translation: The Focus of the Growth of Literary Knowledge” (19780, argued that the antagonism between the two opposing factions- which he calls the hermeneutic and the neo positivistic-was based upon mutual misunderstanding. While these approaches have had their own vested interests, they have impeded the description of an adequate theory of translation. He suggested that translation studies shift the theoretical focus of the investigation and base their research on an evolutionary concept of metascience, not on the hermeneutic and the neo positivistic concept.
Now translation studies focused on how meaning traveled. Also this new field was open to interdisciplinary approaches: linguistics with philosophy with literature etc. Limiting distinctions like right/wrong, formal/dynamic, literal/free, art/science, theory/practice receded in importance. The object of the study was neither an absent core of ‘meaning’ nor ‘deep linguistic structure’, but the translated text itself, which, by definition is a mediation subject to theoretical manipulation and prevailing artistic norms, which in turn, might get reflected by the translations themselves.
These assumptions in turn gave rise to the ‘polysystem’ theory, with Itimar Even-Zohar who brought both high literary forms (serious literature) and low, non-canonized forms (children’s literature, and popular fiction) under one purview. The polysystem theory was a logical extension to the demands made by early theorists. The problem with the early theorists, the polsystemists thought that it attempted both to theorize the process of translation and to evaluate the success of the individual texts synchronically. These earlier theories failed to adequately describe the historical situation conditioning specific systems of representations. Now they focused on the process of translation production and change within the entire literary system. Influenced by the Russian Formalists, the advantage of this system was that it allows for its own augmentation and integrates the study of literature with the study of social and economic forces of history.
The eighties witnessed a shift from theory to descriptive work. Most discussions centered around improving methods for describing literary translation and translational normative behavior. This is the method of evolving a theory out of case studies and descriptive work, for example G. Gopinathan, and S. Kandaswamy (eds), “The problems of Translation”, in India. Thus the works in turn influenced theory. By looking for regularities in translational phenomena in real cultural situations, the very definitions of the phenomena being investigated changed, traditional concepts undermined: and a new theory evolved. So translations, initially not accepted as ones, like film adaptations, versions, imitations, were now included in research efforts. For the first time translation was recognized within the study of any individual literature.
Translation scholars like Lefevre, Bassnett, Davis Lloyd, and others rejected the ‘polysystem’ theory, which they found very formalistic and restrictive. Adopting more of a cultural studies model, they focused both on the institutions of prestige and power within any culture and patterns in literary translation. Influenced by Eagleton’s theory on ‘ideology, Lefevre inspects into translation as the maintenance or interrogation of power structures central to a whole form of social and historical life, the increasing number of translators could not afford to go unrecognized.
Translation theories so far have always spoken on the notion of equivalence. To date they have made rigid distinctions between original texts and their translations, distinctions that determine subsequent claims about the nature of translation. Deconstructionists question the very basic issues: What if one theoretically reversed the direction of thought and posited the hypothesis that the original text is dependent on the translation? What if one suggests that, without translation, the original text ceased to exist, that the very survival of the original could also depend on the translation also?
Deconstruction challenges limits of the language, writing, and reading by questioning the definitions of the very terms. While not offering a specific ‘translation theory’ of its own, deconstruction does use translation to raise questions about language. Derrida himself suggests that deconstruction and translation are inexorably interconnected. In fact his philosophy is concerned with the notion of translation: “the origin of philosophy is translation or the thesis of translatability”. There is no deep structure or invariant of comparison, nothing that we may ever discern-let alone represent, translate or found a theory on. Different chains of signification exist (as do various translations of one original text), influencing the original and its translations in a symbiotic relationship, mutually supplementing each other, defining and redefining a phantasm of sameness, which will not be the same, fixed, known or understood as ever. Deconstruction resists systems of categorization that separate ‘source text’ from ‘target text’ or ‘language’ from ‘meaning’.
In terms of translation theory, which invariably posits some determinable meaning as that which must reconstituted in another language, the very separation of language from an identifiable meaning or deep structure becomes the target of deconstruction’s questions and thus a fruitful examination of translation theory in general.
They also argue that the translator creates the original and that original texts are being constantly rewritten in the present, and
Each reading/translation reconstructs the source text. While insisting on the above, Foucault breaks away with the traditional notion of a text, while claiming that every translation of an original involves violation of the original, thus creating the impossibility of a pure equivalent.
In translation, the possibility that nothing exists behind language except its own patterns of infinite regression can be confronted, and the mere play of language in and of itself can be revealed. This openness to absolute nothingness, to death, to finitude is characteristic of the thought of Heidegger.
Walter Benjamin in “The Task of the Translator” views translation as a ‘mode’ of its own, one that offers a way of ‘coming to terms with the foreignness of the language. His attempt in the essay is basically to define the laws specific to translation alone.
Nowhere has deconstruction had a larger impact upon practicing translators than in the area of postcolonial translation. Rather than using translation as a tool to support and extend a conceptual system based on Indian philosophy, postcolonial translators are seeking to reclaim translation and use it as a theory of resistance, one that disturbs and displaces the construction of images of non- Western cultures rather than reinterpret them using traditional, normalized concepts and language.
Arising from cultural anthropology, postcolonial translation theory is based on the idea that translation has served as an important channel of empire. This critical approach focuses on how translation is used to colonize, how colonial attitudes survive in the translation marketplace, and the utopian use of translation to decolonize the mind.
Octavia Paz maintains that translation is the principal means we have of understanding of the world we live in. Carlos Funtes goes on to say, “Originality is a sickness”. It has long been known that colonialism and translation went hand in hand, and that translation held different meanings for different groups in the colonization process. For the Spanish it was always a matter of reducing the native language and culture to accessible objects for and subjects of divine and imperial intervention, as also was the case with British in India. Whatever the way of subjugation, it is clear that translation served to employ the colonial/colonized hierarchy. The notion of a colony as a copy of the original of the great European original indicates the inferiority of translation in the canon of literature and the colony to its European counterpart.
In ‘Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism & The Colonial Context, Tejaswini Niranjana, drawing on Foucault and Derrida, calls translation as the site in which unequal relations among different cultures and languages have been most dramatically perpetrated. The traditional concepts of translation have enabled colonial powers to construct the exotic ‘other’, which affect the West’s understanding of the ‘Third World’ and the Third World itself. Translation, for her, is a two way process which effects both source and target cultures. Translation thus becomes a tool to ‘re-member’ (Homi Bhabha), a putting together of the dismembered past to make a sense of the trauma of the present.
Her main problem, which is the problem of postcolonial (and deconstruction) translation theory, is that if the present versions of the translation are inaccurate, then how does the translator produce a more accurate version? Are deconstructionist theories assisting translation in a productive or destructive manner? How does one rewrite texts, without falling into the same epistemological traps of truth, presence, and authority?
Gayatri Spivak is aware that the postcolonial subject already lives in translation at all levels. She argues that both post colonial and translation can combine to undo a ‘massive historical metalepsis’ and can resituate the colonial subject by showing the effect of the Western Discourse upon their understanding of themselves. She uses Derrida’s concept of affirmative deconstruction and Foucault’s concept of counter memory for her purposes.
Comments
Post a Comment