TRANSLATION, LITERATURE AND CULTURAL STUDIES An anthology of secondary texts, with comments (in blue) for class use BA Thesis Module José María Pérez Fernández Facultad de Traducción e Interpretación Universidad de Granada * This is a work in progress. Last update 19/02/17 2 Translation, Literature and Cultural Studies INDEX # 1 Translation studies in the 1990s and beyond, p. 3 # 2 Cultural and Ideological Turns, p. 8 # 3 The role of the translator: visibility, ethics and sociology, p. 16 # 4 Translation between the local and the global, p. 36 # 5 Philosophical approaches to translation, p. 50 # 6 Intersemiotic translation, p. 63 # 7 New directions from the new media, p. 66 # 8 The Languages of Cinema, p. 69 # 9 Translation, Literary and Cultural Studies, p. 73 # 10 Cultural translation / the translation of cultures, p. 94 # 11 Translation and the Construction of Literary Canons, p. 112 # 12 REFERENCES, p. 171 José María Pérez Fernández – FTI – Universidad de Granada 3 Translation, Literature and Cultural Studies # 1 Translation studies in the 1990s and beyond “The conceptual paradigms that animate translation research are a diverse mix of the theories and methodologies that characterized the previous decade, continuing trends within the discipline (polysystem, skopos, poststructuralism, feminism), but also reflecting developments in linguistics (pragmatics, critical discourse analysis, computerized corpora) and in literary and cultural theory (postcolonialism, sexuality, globalization). Theoretical approaches to translation multiply, and research, which for much of the century was shaped by traditional academic specializations, now fragments into subspecialties within the growing discipline of translation studies” (Venuti ed., 2004, p. 325) Translation and Cultural Studies “At virtually the same time, another interdiscipline emerges, cultural studies, cross-fertilizing such fields as literary theory and criticism, film and anthropology. And this brings a renewed functionalism to translation theory, a concern with the social effects of translation and their ethical and political consequences. Culturally oriented research tends to be philosophically critical and politically engaged, so it inevitably questions the claim of scientific objectivity in empirically oriented work which focuses on forms of description and classification, whether linguistic, experimental, or historical. The decade sees provocative assessments of the competing paradigms. It also sees productive syntheses where theoretical and methodological differences are shown to be complementary, and precise descriptions of translated text and translation processes are linked to cultural and political issues. At the start of the new millennium, translation studies is an international network of scholarly communities who conduct research and debate across conceptual and disciplinary divisions.” (Venuti ed. 2004 pp. 325-6) Translation, linguistics and pragmatics “Varieties of linguistics continue to dominate the field because of their usefulness in training translators of technical, commercial and other kinds of nonfiction texts. Theoretical projects typically reflect the training situation by applying the findings of linguistics to articulate and solve translation problems. Leading theorists draw on text linguistics, discourse analysis, and pragmatics to conceptualize translation on the model of Gricean conversation (see Hatim and Mason 1990; Baker 1992; Neubert and Shreve 1992; cf. Robinson 2003). In these terms, translating means to communicating the foreign text by cooperating with the target reader according to four conversational ‘maxims’: ‘quantity’ of information, ‘quality’ of truthfulness, ‘relevance’ or consistency of context, and ‘manner’ or clarity (Grice 1975). A translation is seen as conveying a message with its ‘implicatures’ by exploiting the maxims of the target linguistic community. Pragmatics-based translation theories assume a communicative intention and a relation of equivalence, based on textual analysis. They also recognize that these factors are further constrained by the function of the translated text.” (Venuti, ed. 2004, p. 326) José María Pérez Fernández – FTI – Universidad de Granada 4 Translation, Literature and Cultural Studies “Other linguistics-oriented theorists [aim] to describe translated texts in finely discriminating analyses. The work of Basil Hatim and Ian Mason, alone and in collaboration, brings together an ambitious array of analytical concepts from different areas of linguistics. And their examples embrace a wide variety of text types, literary and religious, journalistic and political, legal and commercial. Their work shows how far linguistic approaches have advanced over the past three decades […] Hatim and Mason perform nuanced analyses of actual translations in terms of style, genre, discourse, pragmatics, and ideology. Their unit of analysis is the whole text, and their analytical method takes into account— but finally transcends—the differences between ‘literary’ and ‘nonliterary’ translation (see Hatim and Mason 1990 and 1997)” (Venutied. 2004 p. 327) Pros and cons of corpus-based approaches to translation “Scholars engaged in corpus-based studies have pointed to theoretical problems raised by the search for universals of translated language. Because the computerized analysis is governed by ‘abstract, global notions,’ it may emphasize norms over innovative translation strategies; and since these notions are constructions derived from ‘various manifestations on the surface’ of a text, they exclude the various interpretations a text may have in different contexts (Baker 1997: 179, 185). Computerized translation analysis is focused on text production to the exclusion of reception— except by the computer programmed to identify and quantify the abstract textual categories” (Venuti, ed. 2004, p. 327) “Nonetheless, computer analysis can elucidate significant translation patterns in a parallel corpus of foreign texts and their translations, especially if the patterns are evaluated against large ‘reference’ corpora in the source and target languages. For example, unusual collocations of words can be uncovered in a foreign text so as to evaluate their handling in a translation. And this kind of description might be brought to bear on cultural and social considerations. Dorothy Kenny interestingly suggests that ‘a careful study of collocational patterns in a translated text can shed light on the cultural forces at play in the literary marketplace, and vice versa’ (Kenny 1998: 519; see also Kenny 2001). Computer-discovered regularities in translation strategies can support historical studies, confirming or questioning hypotheses about translation in specific periods and locales” (Venuti, ed. 2004 p. 328) Translation, cultural studies and the formation of identities “Culturally oriented research suspects regularities and universals and emphasizes the social and historical differences of translation. This approach stems partly from the decisive influence of poststructuralism, the doubt it casts on abstract formalizations, metaphysical concepts, timeless and universal essences, which might have been emancipatory in the Enlightenment, but now appear totalizing and repressive of local differences. Poststructuralist translation theory, in turn, calls attention to the exclusions and hierarchies that are masked by the realist illusion of transparent language, the fluent translating that seems untranslated. And this enables an incisive interrogation of cultural and political effects, the role played by translation in the creation and functioning of social movements and institutions.” (Venuti, ed. 2004 pp. 328-9) “In an exemplary project that combines theoretical sophistication and political awareness, linguistic analysis and historical detail, Annie Brisset (1990/1996) studies recent Québécois drama translations that were designed to form a cultural identity in the service of a nationalist agenda. The extract included here relies on Henri Gobard’s concept of linguistic functions to describe the ideological force of Québécois French as a translating language. In the politicized post-1968 era, as José María Pérez Fernández – FTI – Universidad de Granada 5 Translation, Literature and Cultural Studies Brisset demonstrates, nationalist writers fashioned Québécois French into what Gobard calls a ‘vernacular’, a native or mother tongue, a language of community. Between 1968 and 1988 Québécois translators worked to turn this vernacular into a ‘referential’ language, the support of a national literature, by using it to render canonical worlds dramatists, notably Shakespeare, Strindberg, Chekhov, and Brecht. In these translations, Québécois French acquired cultural authority and challenged its subordination to North American English and Parisian French. Yet a struggle against one set of linguistic and cultural hierarchies might install others that are equally exclusionary. Sharing Antoine Berman’s concern with ethno-centrism in translation, Brisset points out that the Québécois versions, even when they used a heterogeneous language like the working-class dialect joual, ultimately cultivated a sameness, a homogeneous identity, in the mirror of foreign texts and cultures whose differences were thereby reduced. ‘Doing away with any ‘ambiguity’ of identity’, as she puts it, ‘means getting rid of the Other’. Brisset’s work illuminates the cultural and political risks taken by minor languages and cultures who resort to translation for self-preservation