Andrew Chesterman's “Reflections on Universalism in Translation Studies” is an articulate, thought-provoking and insightful statement engaging with questions that have been central to translation studies in recent years: can Europe be provincialized in TS? Should it be? How far can we go in seeking universal or general models of translation that would potentially allow us to claim a widely applicable theory of translation, and is such a search desirable? If translation, like other linguistic and cultural practices, is very much context-bound, is there a need to attempt its definition in standard terms?
Of the various conversations that could be had with Chesterman's piece I wish to engage in one on the question of place, and so I begin my response by quoting briefly from “Reflections” on where notions of translation originate. Chesterman writes:
The solution, in my view, is not to compare the Western notion of translation to non-Western ones because these others are non-Western, but because they are, quite simply, different. One tests the usefulness and applicability of a conceptualization (among other ways) by comparing it with competing conceptualizations. It matters not a hoot where these competing conceptualizations come from. (Emphasis in original)
I agree completely with the former part of the statement, but not the latter. Clearly the discourse of a Western versus non-Western dichotomy raises a host of issues that are beyond our scope here but that have plagued TS and related fields of study and often led to an unproductive essentialism. Thinking in terms of difference is much more useful, allowing us to see the internal diversity of translation traditions within a particular place, time or culture, as well as the differences in translation across spatial and temporal distances small and large. Comparing translation practices and approaches can indeed expose significant differences and also, in some cases, show that what seemed different at the start is in fact quite similar or represents a variation on a theme, a nuance.
So far so good. It is the final part of the excerpt cited above – that it matter “not a hoot” where translation conceptualizations derive from – that I am uneasy about, and which I wish to explore further. Chesterman certainly does not belittle the importance of context to understanding translation and I do not wish to take his words out of context for the sake of an argument. Yet I was struck by his claim that where a particular translation theory or practice emerged is of no importance whatsoever in its own right. Thus besides the quote above he also writes that “to claim that TS should be enriched by ideas, etc., that originate in non-Western cultures because they arise there, is a bad argument” and, further, that “there is no particular geographical virtue in privileging an idea because it comes from the West or non-West. To do so would take us back to Nazi or Stalinist science.” I can appreciate the claim that privileging certain world regions over others regardless of the idea, text or approach at stake is problematic, yet I think there is certainly a case to be made for the importance of particular places as we consider translation practices and theories.
As someone who has been working for many years now on literatures and translation theories and practices from present-day India, Indonesia and Sri Lanka, I am quite understandably averse to the catch-all but in many ways meaningless category of the “non-West”. From the vantage point of considering translation models that predate the above-mentioned nation states, all created after 1945, I also struggle against the link often assumed between language and state (i.e. Malay is the language of Malaysia, whereas in fact it was widely spoken and written across Southeast Asia for several centuries, and functioned as an Islamic lingua franca of trade and learning). Such postcolonial assumptions conceal much of the linguistic diversity and multiplicity that makes the study of literary and translation traditions in this part of the world so rewarding.
But to distance myself from the West/non-West division and wish to explore differences and similarities of translation in various societies and periods does not, to me, imply the insignificance of places, particular places. When I study how people in Java may have conceptualized translation – even if they did not leave us any manuals or explicit translation statements in their writings – I am doing so very much because of the interest that island, its society and history hold for me and, I hope, also for others. How translation was understood and practiced must have grown out of the particular circumstances in which people acquired or received texts from elsewhere, their capacity to engage with those texts and their ideas about storytelling, performance, communication and community.
For example, in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Javanese manuscripts the verb njawakaké is sometimes employed to indicate translation. This verb (from Jawa: Java) means literally “to Javanize, to render Javanese”, implying a stress not on the source language nor on the process of carrying a story across, but on the language in which it is being rendered anew and, perhaps even more emphatically, on the place where the text is being reformulated. The Java-centric focus of the resulting text, which becomes a defining feature, is telling. It often implied that in a range of domains – food, landscapes, musical instruments, dress, climate – Java and its physical and cultural realities were inserted into the text so that it was localized in concrete and metaphorical ways. Another notion exemplifying the particular attitude found in Javanese translation terminology that is tied to place is that of making a foreign story not just accessible because it has been linguistically converted but also poetically Javanese: most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts in Java were written to be sung according to metrical verse known as macapat. These dictated the form verses took (number of lines, syllables, etc.), and also set the mood and tone of poetic sections with certain meters deemed appropriate to convey longing, depict battle scenes or introduce didactic material. Such classical verse is referred to as tembang. The derived verb nembangaké – to sing a classical song, to sing for one's pleasure – was employed by translators to indicate the production of a work in which a source was rewritten in Javanese verse. In such instances, a central component of the Javanese writing tradition was selected to define and frame a process of translation that was inextricably linked to the poetic and musical traditions of a particular place.
Malay and Javanese terminologies for translation often blur the line between translating, composing, writing, narrating and additional activities that have elsewhere been considered more distinct. Thus for example the Malay terms terkarang (written, composed), terkutip (quoted, copied) and dituturkan (arranged) were used in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Malay manuscript tradition in ways almost synonymous with translation. Here I consider the site where such understandings of translation took hold important because the overlap between translation and writing more generally – viewing both as inhabiting a continuum – has implications not just for TS but for our understanding of literary and historical developments in the societies that adopted such a perspective.
I have also come to appreciate the importance of place when studying Malay manuscripts produced in Sri Lanka. The Malay community in that country is descended from eighteenth-century royal exiles from the Dutch East Indies, soldiers from across the Indonesian archipelago who served in Dutch and British colonial regiments, convicts, servants and others who were transported to colonial Ceylon and sustained a sense of communal identity in large part derived from their ongoing use of the Malay language in new surroundings. Local Malay manuscripts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries often include an Arabic text with a Malay translation. Sometimes it is an interlinear, word-for-word translation while at others it constitutes more of a summary or adaptation. But such translations will occasionally also include sections in Tamil – the language of the majority of (non-Malay) Muslims in Sri Lanka – as well as Javanese, an ancestral language for some community members. This kind of multilingual volume reflects a very particular history of place, as well as displacement, and testifies to the particular linguistic, cultural and religious landscape of colonial Ceylon. Similarly, multilingual translated volumes all over the Indonesian archipelago attest to contacts and connections that tell us more than how a text was rendered in another language but also, beyond that, about the complex links, routes, and networks of intellectual genealogies, persons and ideas that were both rooted in certain places and transcended them.
So place does matter, not in that one place or site of production of a translation or translation theory is by definition better or worthier than another (a claim Chesterman argues against, and I concur), but because of the value that that place, with all its particularity, can bring to our conversations, pushing us to expand our ways of viewing translation and, beyond it, human expression and creativity. Although theories aspire to generalize and universalize, the particularities of language and place that produce distinct translation theories, practices and histories make it difficult to imagine how they can be “tested anywhere”, as Chesterman suggests. The challenges and ongoing tensions between the specific and the general, however, do not mean we cannot and should not compare, search for frameworks that explain multiple and variegated practices and continue to seek a vocabulary that will more easily allow us to debate, connect and distinguish the languages and translations we study. Yet those challenges are a constant reminder of the beauty and insight that may come from exploring a translation produced in a particular place and moment that were like no other.
Note on Contributor
Ronit Ricci is a senior lecturer at the Australian National University's School of Culture, History and Language. Her research engages with Islamic literary traditions in Javanese and Malay, script histories, exile in colonial South and Southeast Asia, and the literary culture of the Sri Lankan Malays. Her book, Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia (2011) won the American Academy of Religion's 2012 award for Best First Book in the History of Religions and the Association of Asian Studies’ 2013 Benda Prize in Southeast Asian Studies.