The outward turn in translation studies

Another turn in Translation Studies?

We do not intend to suggest a new direction, the need for yet another twist along the way. It is surely a mistake anyway to conceive of Translation Studies as somehow linear in its development, no matter how neat a trajectory some of its historiographers may have claimed to be able to trace. If anything, what marks TS as an increasingly open discipline is that it both offers and traffics in key concepts rooted in the discourse of difference, simultaneity, contingency, mobility and hospitality, concepts whose continuous interplay serves to deepen, no less than to extend, the scope of its enquiry and the value of its insights. If TS functions in any meaningful way, it is as the enriched palimpsest of the ideas and methods of writers and philosophers, of theorists and practitioners – from a range of disciplines – across time and space.

For scholars working across the breadth of the Humanities, this palimpsestic discourse, drawing upon and bringing into encounter so many of the underpinning concerns of their disciplines, is proving increasingly attractive. Considered from the perspective of the academy, TS can be seen in this regard as one of the great success stories of the last three decades. From minute beginnings, the basic assumption of the new discipline – that translation should be taken seriously as one of the major elements in the transmission of ideas, texts and cultural practices – has certainly gained in significance. A marginal field in the 1970s and 1980s, TS blossomed in the 1990s and is now taught all over the world, with hundreds of degree programmes, countless publications and figures recognised outside the parameters of the discipline itself. That said, despite some strong research in German and Finnish, to name but two other languages, the best-known work in Translation Studies tends to have come from the Anglophone world, thereby running the risk of instantiating a form of twenty-first century colonialism. There is something of a cultural contradiction here too in that, despite the comparatively low percentage of texts that are translated into English, there should be so much written in that recalcitrant language about translation as a practice.

In that sense, at one level what the idea of an Outward Turn entails must be the recognition of the need for an increasing plurality of voices from across the globe. The range and quality, of course, of collaborative international projects are still growing, but it is important that different traditions maintain their perspective and assert the value of their own anxieties and insights within the homogenising context of international student recruitment patterns, capacity building programmes, and the perceived prestige of Anglophone publishing. How specifically this might be achieved is not in any direct sense the principal concern of this volume, but it is still important to acknowledge here both the issue as well as the efforts of those who are working towards mitigating the impact of such absorption.

This growing worldwide academic consolidation of TS is the result of a number of interrelated factors. It is, in the broadest sense, in many ways an epistemological consequence not simply of the vast socio-political changes that have come in the wake of the rise of the new international order since the end of the Cold War – the opening up of China after Tiananmen, the fall of the Berlin wall and break up of the Soviet Union, and the end of apartheid in South Africa are key moments along that path (Bassnett, Mattana and Rossi, 2019) – but also of the ways in which attitudes and practices rooted in the local have proved resistant to the globalising tendencies of internationalism. So while these are changes that have resulted in millions more people being able to travel, in global movement becoming increasingly accessible as a lifestyle choice, any evidence of a new cosmopolitanism is offset by periodic lurches into political protectionism and radical nationalism in the context of our geopolitics, fuelled by a sense of invasion and erosion of the real within the contours of the local. It is striking, in this regard, how the discourse of the authentic is so often pressganged into service as a way of bulwarking the specificities of experience, cuisine, provenance, etc. against the blandly international. The resulting tensions between the poles of the notionally cosmopolitan and the yearning for an authenticity that is, in the final analysis, discernible only through the bottom of a glass darkly, between mobility and stasis, between hospitality and the pretensions of self-contained selfhood, find echoes in the pressure points of TS itself.

All of this seems to bestow on TS a veneer of social, political and cultural relevance that, at least in the United Kingdom and Ireland (from where we are writing), appears, unfortunately, to have evaporated from the mainstream teaching of Modern Languages (MLs). We might well ask whether in the English-speaking world the reluctance to learn languages is also impeding a broader recognition of translation and its multifacetedness. Language learning in British schools has declined rapidly since the Millennium, with devastating consequences for universities. This is a pattern that we can see across the Anglophone world, in stark contrast to those countries where English is studied as a foreign language. This means that there is relatively little understanding of the complexities of translation by those who have never learned another language, and the discourse around translations in English, even among those who have studied languages from a philological perspective, has tended to be and still remains predominantly negative. There is still a lot of uncertainty about how to assess the quality of a translation, and still widely held assumptions about the need for translations to ‘perfectly reproduce’ the original, as a theatre studies student put it recently to one of us.

It is also the case that there is still a divide in the academy between language and literature, with the study of literature ranked above that of language. André Lefevere pointed this out over thirty years ago, while Bassnett and Lefevere (1996) argued that TS should be seen as spanning the study of language, literature, history and culture. When, in the 1990s, Bassnett and Lefevere began editing a series of books in Translation Studies for Routledge, they tried to insist (vainly, as it turned out) that the publishing house should promote the books across disciplines, rather than relegating them to the linguistics section. Today, Translation Studies publications still appear to be viewed by many as primarily related to linguistics.

A good example of the powerful tradition of Anglophone resistance to translation can be seen in the antagonism in some quarters to the Latin American boom of the 1960s and ’70s. The arrival on the literary scene of writers such as Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa and others had a considerable impact on Anglophone writers, notably with regard to the spread of magical realism. The Latin American boom, which started in the United States and arrived slightly later in the UK, was fed by translation, though as has been the case with so many other non-English-language novelists, translations were often first made into French and other European languages, and then only later in English, once a market had been established. The impact of such writing, particularly on post-colonial writers such as Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Ben Okri and Toni Morrison has been immense, though it has never been fully recognised. Writing in The Observer in May 1985, the radical, multilingual writer Anthony Burgess dismissed the new Latin American writing as a freakshow and lamented the possibility of such writing starting to lay down rules (Burgess 1985). Despite Itamar Even-Zohar’s argument that translation has so often been a force for innovation in literature and culture (Even-Zohar 1978/2000), here we have an example of a refusal to acknowledge the potential innovatory force of writing coming into English through translation. The paradox is clear: translation is either expected to provide the miracle of perfect reproduction, or it must be dismissed out of hand as treacherous and fraudulent, writing manqué.

Academic disciplines such as literary studies, globalisation studies, media and cultural studies still tend to ignore translation. The Catalan sociologist Esperanza Bielsa notes that translation has been neglected in discussions about globalisation, despite the fact that it is ‘key to understanding current processes of cultural globalisation, which are characterised by inequality and asymmetry’ (Bielsa and Hughes 2009, 14). This is a view echoed by Michael Cronin in his book, Eco-Translation. Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene (2017), where he argues that there can be no connectivity without translation, pointing out that although in the digital age information can be delivered around the globe in seconds, if the languages are different they are meaningless without translation. Cronin is one of a tiny handful of translation experts calling for a broader interpretation not only of the role and function of translation, but of the very definition of translation. He argues that we need to focus on the issues with which we are increasingly surrounded and suggests that uniformity, whether imposed by governments pursuing a policy of assimilation, or through the destruction of the natural world (e.g. by huge international mining companies, or the exploitation of palm oil) damages us all, both in the short term and in the longer term. This is where translation becomes so important – a political ecology of translation sees languages in their connectedness, not in isolation (Cronin 2017, 152). Through translation we can become more aware of and take responsibility for our own surroundings, asserting our right to diversity but recognising the fundamental importance of communication within and between communities.

Another related question that TS needs to answer today concerns what the impact might be of research on translation on people outside the pool of students and academics who label themselves TS scholars. For much of what happens under the umbrella term of ‘Translation Studies’ takes the form of practical training programmes for translators, with minimal theoretical input and a decided shift away from research into the history of translation practice. As already noted, the basic assumption of the new field as it emerged was that translation ought to be taken seriously as one of the major shaping elements in the processes of transmission of ideas, texts and cultural practices, but significantly much research in these areas today is more often being undertaken under the aegis of comparative or world literature, with little or no recognition that TS even exists. Far less of this kind of research is happening under the aegis of Translation Studies, despite the proposition voiced in the late 1970s by the founders of the discipline that this was precisely what was needed if the status of translation were ever to be raised.

One of the strongest calls for translation to be more widely acknowledged has come from the world literature scholar David Damrosch. He points out that the circulation of literature is inevitably bound up with translation, suggesting that world literature is ‘writing that gains in translation’, by which he means that it is through translation that works can be read in languages other than the original and consequently acquire new layers of meaning (Damrosch 2003, 288). As texts travel across linguistic and cultural frontiers, so do interpretations of what is read, resulting in what Damrosch has called a ‘heightening’ of the creative interaction between text and readers (Damrosch 2003, 292). Damrosch’s call for translation to be seen as fundamental to the study of world literature is particularly apposite in the Anglophone world, where translation has had such a low profile; but the question for TS is why should an important call for the recognition of the engagements of translation in literary studies be coming from a renowned world literature scholar rather than from those who claim to be experts in the study of translation itself.

TS scholars seem increasingly to talk only to one another and there is little sign that there is very much new thinking about translation that could find its way into other disciplines. We might ask whether the discipline has become mired in its own polemics, since the lack of original thinking evidenced in many conferences dedicated to translation appears to reinforce that view. In some UK universities, indeed, TS programmes have become a way of rebranding ML studies, a commercial response on the part of income-conscious institutions to sharply falling numbers of students, whose view of the hegemony of global English is complemented, in the UK, by a peculiarly British sense that the mastery of a foreign language is somehow especially difficult when compared to acquiring the sorts of skills required by other subjects. It is, of course, in the interests of no one that this collapse of interest in the study of languages should go unchecked, but in spite of the efforts of research associations and of the cross-cutting work of a number of languages-based translation scholars, there has been an ongoing general disconnect between TS and MLs that has effectively served to reinforce the perception, inside and outside the academy, of languages in crisis.

Traditional philology has tended to shelter behind the old nation-based divides, perpetuating fames of reference normally centred on cultural or linguistic nationalism. Its principal appeal to relevance is that any society with diminished demonstrable foreign language competence – as they argue the UK is destined to become – is stymied in terms of the benefits notionally offered by engagement with globalisation, a neoliberal emphasis on the commercial that some might feel is belied by the very limited range of languages actually taught, the language enrichment that immigration brings in practice, and the general assumptions around which the MLs curriculum normally tends to be constructed. There is an issue of commodification here that ought also to concern TS, even while as a discipline it continues to appear to thrive. There can be no doubt that in the context, for example, of current debates concerning issues of social organisation in times increasingly characterised by multi-ethnicity, the concerns of TS with the causes and effects of inclusivity and exclusion retain singular resonance. But that does not mean that those key terms belonging to what we might think about as the intellectual and ethical constellation of the discipline are not similarly open to commodification. The claims of cosmopolitanism and the assertion of the rightness of mobility, for example, need to be re-understood and re-defined within the context of global migration routes forged by the movement of millions of people displaced by wars, famine and natural disasters. In that way, TS is necessarily situated in the context of the concerns and tensions of what is very often and very loosely termed the ‘real’ world – as though there were one somewhere that is ‘unreal’ – that is, the issues alive in the perceptions and relationships of our world today. But – again in a manner radically different to the mainstream literary and cultural positions of MLs, where the contextualisation of an artefact or a moment or a writer very often implies the decontextualization of the critical gaze – TS straddles by design. Its methods are inherently dialectical and its perceptions, at the very least, dyadic. The tracing of flows and acts of translation across time and space serve to deepen our understanding of themes and forces and processes of our world today, while, in good translation, self and other are brought in and out of moments of created relation, so that the discursive authority of the spaces of origin and of reception alike is challenged. Translation, in that way, aims towards re-imagining.

The risk inherent to any ideas-based discipline is that it lurches into ultimate self-referentiality, especially in the global academic marketplace where reference and citation are perceived as valuable ends in themselves. TS scholars may have more and more opportunities to talk to one another but there is little sign that any new thinking about translation is either seeping out into the arenas in which translations are used, or refining the areas of overlap with other disciplines. Much of the work of Performance Studies scholars that is linked to the translation of plays, for example, continues to debate the reductionist binary of domesticating or foreignising approaches to translated plays in performance, traducing Venuti in the process, and leading us inevitably to question, in turn, just how much current work in TS itself is so self-referential that it contributes, in consequence, to the ossification of these perceived binaries.

Central to this is the relationship between theory and practice. Both of the editors of this special issue, of course, currently work in TS, but their very different starting points and career paths have jointly coalesced around their awareness of and commitment to the imperatives of practice-led research. Neither has a background in Linguistics and both view practice rather than theory as the point of departure in any meaningful thinking about translation. Susan Bassnett was one of the founding members of the TS group comprising Itamar Even Zohar, Gideon Toury, James Holmes, André Lefevere and José Lambert, and is interested primarily as a translator and as a theorist in literary translation, concerned with tracing the ways that texts move and are transferred across cultural and linguistic boundaries. David Johnston is a multi-award winning translator for the theatre, and his experience of the inevitable doubleness of gaze, text-inwards and text-outwards, that is intrinsic to the work of the actor no less than that of the stage translator, has prompted his interest in the complex relationship between interpretation and representation which together configure the act of translation. None of this is to say that research in TS should be necessarily always referenced to textual encounter, to the production of target-language writing emanating from a source-language point of origin. We do always need to remember, nonetheless, that translation itself, in another example of its straddling scope, brings together modes of doing/making and thinking, whose separation is one (among a number) of the underlying causes of the crisis of perception (and, therefore, of funding) that is currently making itself felt in the Humanities and humanistic studies generally in many countries across the world. Practice, in that regard, is not the underpinning substratum of TS; rather, within its itinerary of creative struggle, ethical interrogation, cultural negotiation, and transformation of embodied subject and contextual domain alike, it both sustains and defines the parameters of theoretical enquiry. Moreover, it is apparent that the practice of translation, broadly conceived as the outworking of translational processes, operates in terrains beyond the textual – whether in translational medicine, processes of memorialisation, or identity politics, to name but three instances in order to exemplify a wide range of professional, cultural, social, individual and political activities.

This is the realm that we believe an Outward Turn should target. We are not seeking to identify new theoretical concerns within the discipline of TS, but rather to reinforce TS both as a hub interdiscipline within the academy and as the conjoined theoretical wing of a practice that spans the key human processes of becoming and being, of change and cognition.

The core question that needs to be tackled is: who actually uses translation theories and methods outside the pool of TS scholars? The denomination ‘scholar’ is deliberate because, although there are practitioners who work under the aegis of TS (as we have already noted), there are also many practicing translators who would declare themselves as having no truck with bodies of theory that they see as arcane, self-regarding and bearing little or no practical relevance. That is not a position that we support or believe to be valid, but we draw attention to it, as we do also to the disconnect between MLs and TS, in the belief that those of us working in TS need to address issues of relevance, in terms of how practitioners see the inescapably interwoven and mutually sustaining relationship of theory and practice, of how users of translations understand both the limitations and the potentials of translation as a writing practice, and of how scholars across a wide range of disciplines perceive the significant points of contact between TS and their subject areas.

Both Sherry Simon and Edwin Gentzler are two voices calling for a redefinition of what we understand by translation. In his Translation and Rewriting in the Age of Post-Translation Studies (2017), Gentzler points out that since TS scholars have not come up with a discourse with which to analyse new forms of intersemiotic translation, literary and cultural studies scholars have filled the gap. Gentzler is calling for a rethinking of translation, ‘not as a short-term product or a process, but as a cultural condition underlying communication’, wherein the distinction between originals and translations, home and foreign would dissolve (Gentzler 2017, 7). Similarly, Sherry Simon in her Cities in Translation: Intersections of Language and Memory (2012) sees the city as a site of multilingual modernity, where languages and cultures come into contact and where translation becomes a fundamental state of existence. Stuart Hall’s call for a ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’ as a core skill of citizenship (2003), in an attempt to de-commodify multiculturalism itself translates, in this sense, into a key objective for translation in practice.

One of the most powerful statements about translation in recent years has come from another comparative literature scholar, Bella Brodzki. In her book, Can These Bones Live?, subtitled Translation, Survival and Cultural Memory, Brodzki makes an impassioned plea for the importance of translation in the world today. Translation, she argues can no longer be seen as ‘involving only narrowly circumscribed technical procedures of specialised or local interest’ (Brodzki 2007, 2). Instead, she argues, we need to think of translation as underwriting all cultural transactions, from the simplest to the most complex, or, as she puts it, ‘from the most benign to the most venal’ (Brodzki 2007, 2).

The world has changed radically since TS first came into being nearly half a century ago. What we have today is a world in which not only are there sophisticated global communications systems undreamt of just a few years ago, but a planet where political, cultural, economic and ethical issues transcend national boundaries and affect us all. Today translation is essential, for without translation we cannot communicate in a world where interconnectedness is vital, nor can we access the world inhabited by our ancestors. We need to expand our ideas about translation beyond the linguistic and to seek a redefinition of what translation actually is. We also need to understand how translation has functioned in the past, and how attitudes to translation in some contexts have come to be. Is translation a mechanical process that takes place between languages, or is it something that happens all the time, underpinning every discursive field? The message to all of us who work in TS is that the field needs to expand outwards, to improve communication with other disciplines, to move beyond binaries, to engage with the idea of translation as a global activity and to configure the planetary into all our thinking. Then maybe this can feed back into the training of a more enlightened generation of translators, better fitted for the future.

The essays in this volume address in different ways various aspects of this need for the expanding of horizons within and beyond the contours of the discipline. Even taken together, this special issue cannot claim to do anything other than broach a key concern of our times and provide a set of compelling illustrations both of the scale of what remains to be done and of how we might begin thinking about doing it. It is customary at this juncture of the introduction of a special issue such as this one for the guest editors to guide their putative readers into the themes and methods of that issue’s constituent essays, and to relate them to the agglutinating topic at play. But not in this case. Our umbrella topic is vast and, by definition, deserves to avoid being tidied by editorial niceties. And, in the final analysis, these essays and their authors are more than capable of speaking for themselves.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.