Response Paper on Part 3 of Douglas Robinson's Translation and Empire.

Translation as Empire: The Theoretical Record

In part three of his book Translation and Empire, Douglas Robinson traces back roots of postcolonial approaches in the history of translation theory in order to get a grasp of the imperial themes that have been pushed into the periphery or kept underground all along. For Robinson, translation’s relation with political issues of domination and submission came to be neglected for so long due to scholar’s great emphasis on treating it solely as a technical and linguistic entity. (1997:50) Then he sets out to draw the rather fuzzy contours of backgrounding of empire through an analysis of Cicero and Horace’s quotes, the tradition of translatio studii the imperii in ancient and medieval world, and the metaphor of ‘taking the original captive’. (1997:50)

Although Cicero and Horace came to be seen as the first theorists of translation, Robinson does not think that this designation is appropriate since Cicero “was only to formulate something that most people today consider the right approach to translation” (1997:47) Robinson goes onto argue that Cicero’s notion of sense-for-sense, coined by Jerome, along with Horace’s warning against word-for-word have almost always been taken out of context and misread as theories. When read between the lines, Robinson thinks that Horace’s writings give the first clues of imperial line of thought, in which he does not actually refer to the translator but to the writer, in other words the translator as a rewriter. Taking Horace’s advice on appropriating the tale of Troy for the Roman culture as an example, Robinson maintains that “Horace is calling upon Roman writers not only to establish their originality vis-à-vis the original text …. but to appropriate Greek culture for Imperial Rome” (1997:51), concluding that the main agenda here was not to achieve an ideal in terms of translation but to “conquer”. The notion of conquest, Robinson argues, also underlines the implicit imperial contexts in the translations of other ancient writers. By drawing largely upon the widespread medieval trope of translato studii et imperii (translation of learning and empire), which entertains the idea that both knowledge and imperial control of the world move in a westerly direction, the Christian idealization of transforming the “pagan” into a “believer of God” could justify the assimilative translations of great classics of prechristian era. Here, Robinson gives the example of Ovid transformed into a Christian author with a concern of “medieval Christian reader’s doctrinal needs” (1997: 53), which also meant that Ovid was now a property of the Christian world.

Robinson also draws attention to the “captivity metaphor” in translation, quoting Jerome , 'like some conqueror, he marched the original text, a captive into his native language’ (1997:55) In a way, the translator turns into a captivator while the original text, thus its author turns into his captive, which puts the translation into the realm of power struggle. Robinson also relates this thinking to the imperialistic tendency to regard the target culture to be superior over the source culture or feeling threatened by the rich cultural hegemony of the source culture. Just like in German Romantics case, where the German resisted to the growing French hegemony and resorted to realizing their, in Robinson’s words, “imperial dreams” (1997: 60) through keeping their texts foreign in order to feed the cultural veins of the German literary field. Robinson’s conclusion shows that as opposed to the assimilative translations, foreignization in literary works, as advocated by German Romantics like Schegel or Scheleimarcher, were not actually elevated for the sake of giving a “taste of the foreign” but conquering/capturing the foreign’s best qualities to create an ideal nation state.

As a final thought, I think that Robinson's quote from Nietzsche makes up the essence of Robinson's main argument in this chapter and throughout the book. Nietzsche says that “Indeed, translation was a form of conquest. Not only did one omit what was historical, one also added allusions to the present and, above all, struck out the name of the poet and replaced with one’s own – not with any sense of theft but with best conscience of the imperium Romanum.”(1997:62). In the light of these words, I think it is relevant to conclude that the idea of “conquest” becomes the leitmotif in the evolution of post colonial approaches, with the language being its most important weapon.

References

Robinson, D., Translation and Empire, St.Jerome, Manchester:1997

Response Paper on Translation and The Trials of the Foreign by Anton Berman

In his article, Translation and The Trials of the Foreign, Antoine Berman is mainly concerned with what he calls “textual deformation” embedded in the nature of translation that results in prevention of the reader from experiencing the foreign, in other words “trial of the foreign”. His departure point for this analytic of translation is mainly the domain of literary prose, the novel and the essay. However, he sets out from a somewhat negative point of view as regards to prose, stating that it had been traditional to deem prose writing “shapeless” in the sense that it “mobilizes and activates the totality of languages that coexist in any language”, thus creating a huge linguistic mass, which leaves the author helpless to control its texture. Though he likens masterworks of prose to examples of “bad writing”, he thinks they are rich in texture due to their polylingual value.

Berman sets out to determine several deforming tendencies in terms of translation of literary works, which are too many to cover in this response paper, so I will refer to four of them, which I think are intermingled with one another. The first tendency that Berman focuses is rationalization, which he explains as “recomposing sentences and the sequence of sentences, rearranging them according to a certain idea of discursive order.” While Berman thinks that rationalization deforms the original and reverses its basic tendency and thus attributes a negative value to the act, Anton Popovic prefers to call such changes in semantic properties of the text as “shifts of expression”. For Popovic the translator resorts or has to resort to making shifts to preserve the norm of the “original” but the result does not always have to be the destruction of the strata, the depths and the polylogism of the text as Berman suggests. As Popovic maintains incorporation of the linguistic impression of the original cannot be accomplished directly but via appropriate shifts.

Another tendency that Berman postulates is clarification which basically involves explicitation, which he either relates to the literary language of the target culture or to the goal of rendering clear what the author wishes to keep ambiguous in the original. Berman connects this tendency to another one; expansion that he thinks stems from rationalization and clarification processes. He uses the term overtranslation and makes a generalization that every translation tends to be longer than the original. For Berman, expansion stretches and impedes with the rhythm of the text.

Ennoblement, as Berman puts it, is another tendency which is a type of “rewriting” , a “stylistic exercise” at the expense of the original. He draws attention to how this procedure of making texts “readable” so as to enhance the meaning is very common in the literary field. I inevitably find this tendency relevant to Andre Lefevere’s notion of rewriting which feeds mainly from the disciplines such as translation, historiography, anthologization, criticism and editing. As Lefevere puts it, the non-professional reader reads literature as written by its rewriters and it has always been that way. Berman calls this act of rewriting as “banalizing” in order to assign those texts a predominant place.

In my opinion, while the presence of the source-text’s linguistic and semantic values in his comparative approach puts Berman in a source-oriented realm, his insistence on the translator’s role in rendering the true meaning as well as preserving the foreignness of the text shows that he actually seeks to emphasize the source-culture elements inherent in the text and to let the reader have a taste of the foreign.

Response Paper on “The Nature and Role of Norms in Literary Translation” by Gideon Toury

In an attempt to develop his idea of translation as a norm-governed activity in “The Nature and Role of Norms in Literary Translation”, Gideon Toury first sets out to draw a picture of the translator as a “social practitioner” and the translational activity s/he carries out as culturally significant. In that respect, the translator who is inevitably bound by cultural constraints, in other words, Norms, acts in accordance with them.

Toury postulates that there are at least two sets of norm-systems, which derive from two sources, that of the source and the target culture. While on one level, occupying a position in a certain culture and language is required for a text to of value, on the other level, constituting a representation in another culture and language is a must. The gap between both levels is often a consequence of great incompatibility but thanks to regulating mission of norms, it is reduced to the lowest possible degree. For Toury, it is up to the translator to determine her/his “initial norm” in pursuit of adequacy or acceptability, comprising two poles of a continuum. While adherence to norms of the source text characterizes an adequate translation, subscribing to the target culture norms determines acceptability. Although still norm-governed, both strategies require shifts from source texts. However, deviation from norms, thus the lack of appropriate shifts, may result in an idiosyncratic product, which is considered to be too unusual to be accepted by the society.

In an overview of translational norms, Toury distinguishes two types of norms, namely preliminary and operational. Preliminary norms firstly concern translation policy whereby human agents govern the choice of text-types, e.g. literary vs. non-literary. In that respect, Itamar Even-Zohar’s postulate regarding the position of translated literature within a literary polysystem of target culture is to be observed. The choices made in accordance with the translation policy is non-random, an idea which he later elaborates on in his article “Translation as a Means of Planning and the Planning of Translation”. What is to be translated and when and how are the questions to be taken into consideration as well as considerations concerning directness of translation, which is mainly about whether translating from languages other than the ultimate source language is permitted.

Operational norms, on the other hand, marks the importance of translation as a decision making process and the translator as a decision maker. Toury divides operational norms into two groups; matricial norms that govern the existence of target language material to serve as a substitute for the source language material as well as its location and segmentation in the target text. The second group, textual linguistic norms, controls the selection of material to replace the original textual and linguistic material.

Toury moves the attention from source-orientedness to target-orientedness while placing the notion of equivalence in a dynamic context. According to Toury, “it is norms that determine the (type and extent of) equivalence manifested by actual translations.” Equivalence, then, turns into a “functional – relational” notion, realized by a thorough study of norms through which Toury expects to reach a conclusion that position of translation in the target culture determines the translational norms. As to be expected, there is a multiplicity of norms that may be abided by the translator while working on a certain text of a certain culture. They are either socio-culturally specific, which means that they do not necessarily apply to the society as a whole but may be relevant to subsystems within a society; and they are also unstable in nature. Toury maintains that norms are not directly observable but the products of norm-governed behavior can shed a light on them. Translational norms have to be reconstructed by the analysis of their effects, textual and extratextual. While target texts compose textual sources, semi-theoretical or critical formulations make up the extratextual materials.

However, in my opinion, Toury’s claim that there are different sets of norms for each individual text within their respective cultures and even their subsystems, makes the identification of translational norms even harder since it requires a diligent work specific to each product as well as an analysis of its diachronic and synchronic study with regards to its assumed position in a literary polysystem. Actually, Toury seems to be aware of this problematic too and suggests resorting to “our intuitions” based on knowledge and experience in dealing with norms but this also makes “the formulation of general laws of translational behavior”, which he aspires to reach, improbable any time soon.