Betraying empire: Translation and the ideology of conquest

Abstract

In a bid to prompt discussion of the engagement of translation studies with issues of politics and language ideologies, this article compares the practice of translation between the Spanish Habsburg and contemporary US empires. It focuses on what they have in common – an enduring attachment to logocentrism, or a metaphysics of the sign – and shows how the practice of translation alternately enables and disables this metaphysic from functioning in such disparate areas as Christian conversion, counter-insurgent warfare and the work of the Summer Institute of Linguistics.

Keywords:

• empire
• translation
• Spain
• United States
• Summer Institute of Linguistics

Nietzsche once wrote about the violence of translation in relation to the Roman Empire's expropriation of ancient Greek texts:

[H]ow forcibly and at the same time how naively they took hold of everything good and lofty of Greek antiquity … How they replaced it with the present, with what was contemporary and what was Roman! They seem to ask us: “Should we not make new for ourselves what is old and find ourselves in it? Should we not have the right to breathe our own soul into this dead body? For it is dead after all, how ugly is everything dead!” They did not know the delights of the historical sense; what was past and alien was an embarrassment for them; and being Romans, they saw it as an incentive for Roman conquest. 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 it with one's own – not with any sense of theft, but with the very best confidence of the imperium Romanum. (Quoted in Venuti 2012, 67)

This passage points to an important facet of what has arguably been the dominant approach to translation in the Western world, as well as in many other places colonized by the West. It is one that regards translation as a kind of conquest: of meaning as it is transported triumphantly from one language to another; of entire cultural traditions as these are extracted from their original context and inserted into a foreign one; of literary legacies as these are rewritten and paraphrased to reflect and augment the authority and order of the translator's world. It also assumes a radically reductive attitude towards language: that it is merely an instrument for the transparent conveyance of power. This includes the power to make meaning and to make present the subject and object of that meaning. Anything that interferes with that power is to be regarded as mere noise, subject to modulation, suppression and eventual elimination.

To illustrate the workings of these ideas about translation and language in the context of conquest, I want to turn to two of the imperial histories with which I am most familiar: that of Habsburg Spain and the modern United States. Despite the differences in their respective histories, it is not difficult to see some of the similarities between the two. Both share an ideology of conquest that sees imperialism as synonymous with the imposition of a kind of global order that repels social chaos. Empire is thus regarded as not a regime of inequality founded on violence and legislated injustice, but rather the triumph of universal civilization over the particularizing destructiveness of barbarism in whatever religious, political or cultural guise it takes.

Take the case of the Spanish Empire.¹ It held to the belief, derived from the Reconquista, that conquest was necessary for the sake of promoting Christian conversion. Colonization was criminal unless it facilitated evangelization, and the Imperial State existed not only to enrich itself, but also to provide the means for the salvation of its subjects. Imperialism thus came across as a moral imperative. It was designed to bring order out of chaos, saving souls lost to sin. What emerged was the profound entanglement of state policies with an evangelizing mission to produce a kind of political theology.

Significant strains of the political theology of empire can also be seen in the case of the United States.² Founded by religious insurgents fleeing persecution from Europe, the United States of America has long held on to a tradition of religious pluralism, primarily with regard to Christian sects, and the uneven and limited toleration of non-Christian beliefs. Nonetheless, there is a current of Christian messianism that runs through US ideologies of empire. We can see this, for example, in the notion of Manifest Destiny, coined in the midst of the US–Mexican war in the 1840s, that situated the massive and rapid expansion of the US as nothing less than the realization of a divine plan. In a similar vein, President William McKinley famously characterized the occupation of the Philippines in 1898 as an act of “benevolent assimilation” (Rafael 2000, 26). Asserting that the US had the obligation to “Christianize” and “civilize” the natives, McKinley claimed that US intervention was needed to save the people from the corrupting influence of Spanish Catholicism, the imperial designs of the Germans and the Japanese, and the self-serving ambitions of their mixed-race leaders. Indeed, for much of US history, imperial expansion was often viewed in providential terms. It has been seen as the work of men carrying out a mission from God who had chosen the US to be the city on the hill, the universal model of and for human freedom.

This providential understanding of imperial history has come to be known as the doctrine of “American exceptionalism”. It combines two ideas: one, that Americans by virtue of being a chosen people are exempted from the laws that govern other, presumably lesser nations; and two, that with this privilege comes the great responsibility to spread the universal virtues of liberty and democracy. In its various liberal or conservative inflections, the doctrine of American exceptionalism has long informed American national identity just as it frames American imperial thought. It served, for example, as the moral foundation for George Bush's justification for the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan in the wake of the attacks of 9/11 (see Rafael 2009). Bush intoned against the “axis of evil” that threatened the United States as he held wavering or dissenting European nations in contempt for their moral weakness. He also characterized US actions as missionary efforts to spread freedom – especially capitalism freed from regulation – to all parts of the world. Indeed, even in the seemingly more rational foreign policy pronouncements of more liberal American administrations, the United States had been regarded as the “indispensable nation” (Albright 1998), using its massive military force to intervene against religious and political insurgents, spreading the “universal values” of human rights and global security in what often seems like a kind of humanitarian imperialism reminiscent of Fray Bartolome de las Casas' sixteenth-century defense of Indian rights (De las Casas 1992).

Given the structural convergence between Spanish and US styles of imperial ideologies – a convergence signaled by the insistent association of empire with a civilizing order; of native societies with disorderly, threatening barbarism; of conquest with salvation; and of colonial occupation or military interventions with the evangelical spread of universal truths – it stands to reason that there would be certain similarities in their approach to realizing these ideas. Both empires, for example, have relied on an extensive state apparatus to govern and exploit their colonial holdings, including an ever-growing military machine, the maintenance of which required vast sums of money. Bureaucracies and militaries, however, have never been sufficient to hold onto occupied territories. The use of force has always had to be supplemented in and through securing the consent and collaboration of the occupied. Thus, it has always been not only necessary to subjugate territories, but also imperative to co-opt and appropriate the very way of life of their inhabitants: their language, their beliefs, their desires. Such an appropriation has entailed a double process. On the one hand, there is conversion from below – that is, colonization as a process of making the life world of the occupied receptive to and dependent upon a power at once above and beyond them. On the other hand, there is also conversion from above – that is, the transformation of imperial power from a foreign into a familiar thing; into an everyday, but no less awesome, even transcendent force in the lives of the colonized. How has this double conversion, which is of course a kind of translation, taken place?

Both the Spanish and American empires come equipped with complex infrastructures and technologies designed to expropriate not only the bodies of colonized subjects, but also their souls; not just their lives, but also their afterlives. In churches or schoolhouses, in printed catechisms or Hollywood movies, through the spread of Catholicism or elections or capitalist markets or human rights, both regimes have sought to enforce among subject peoples the sense that their interests lie with the interests of empire, that their desires are legitimate and normal only so long as these coincide with the desires of those above them. Among the mechanisms for extracting consent and establishing hegemony, translation has come to play an extremely important role. How exactly has translation been recruited to serve the needs of empire?

Spain and the US have both relied on various media of communication to reach colonized populations and turn them on, in all senses of that phrase, to the imperatives of imperial control. But communication could work only if it were in a language that could be understood by both colonizer and colonized. Communication in an imperial context is thus inseparable from translation insofar as each moment of the encounter between and among occupiers and occupied entails the mediation of signs, intentions and meanings from one or several languages into a commonly shared one. Put differently, imperialism brings into startling and often violent contact different languages and the various life worlds they imply. Responding to the sudden and recurring emergence of cultural and linguistic differences, translation seeks to parry the shocks of strange signs and unintelligible speech. It attempts to render the foreign into the familiar even as it tries to make the familiar available to the foreign. It therefore assumes the power of mediation vital to the commerce between rulers and ruled.

To the extent that translation is conscripted to play an enabling role in consolidating empire, its practice grows out of specific ideas about language and what it means to communicate, what it means to mean, and who gets to decide when something is meaningful or not. Briefly, translation in colonial contexts (as in other social situations) is predicated on dominant signifying conventions. It is in this sense that we can think of translation not only as a mediating power, but also as that which bears an ideological form. The workings of translation are shaped by ideas regarding the nature of language and its role in conveying the structures of social power. However, to say that translation is ideological means that it bears a certain relationship to reality. Ideology refracts the very reality it seeks to control. It thus presumes a relationship of power whereby the ideal is made to rule and regulate the real. In this way, the enforcement of ideology on reality, such as the ideology of translation, entails the exercise of power as the passage above from Nietzsche indicated. It is an attempt to command conformity between what is given and what is idealized. But is this ever possible? Can the ideological ever fully command the real? Can an ideology of translation, which brings with it certain assumptions about the instrumental role of language and communication, succeed in its mission? Or does it also necessarily broach a gap between the real and ideal? Can we think of this broaching, this opening of a gap, as the ongoing effect of seeking to enforce the ideological? Is the ideology of translation necessarily at odds with its practice? And can we think of this being at odds as the politics of translation that intrudes and insists upon its idealized workings from the very start? How then can we understand the constitutive role of the political in the ideological workings of translation, especially in the imperial contexts we have been tracing?

Translation is political to the extent that it betrays its ideological context in both senses of that word. As a practical act that arises from the contingent and fluid encounter with different languages and their speakers, the work of translation tends to exceed, if not undercut, dominant assumptions about the proper exchange of meanings and the transport of intentions. As we all know, there can never be such a thing as a perfect translation that establishes exact equivalents between and within languages. In its very imperfection and errancy, translation can take on a political significance. Its shortcomings and excesses vis-à-vis the original potentially put in crisis the interpretation and circulation of meaning as well as the authority of the original and its author.

But translation also remains tied to the ideological. To the extent that translation can be marshaled to reproduce conventions of signification that tend to domesticate otherness, it sutures rather than dwells on differences. It reduces – this is a common synonym for translation – the foreign into the familiar, establishing the rule of the original over its copies, of the singular word of those above over the varied, multiple words of those below. Translation hence is Janus-faced. It is divided not only between a faithful and free rendition of the original, but also between the tendencies to reproduce and at the same time to resist the dominant conventions of meaning and signification. Nowhere is this tension between the ideology and the politics of translation more apparent than in the history of empire.

The Spanish and US empires share an approach to translation shaped by an idealized view of language that regards it as a sheer instrument, a means to an end: for expressing, delivering, making plain and transparent the meaning, intention and will of the speaker to those he or she addresses. In this view of translation, the will to meaning is predicated on the will to power. Language is meant to establish the full presence of the speaking self in command of its speech and in command of the world it speaks of. This logocentric view entails a belief in the existence of a signifying hierarchy, with language subordinated to thought and thought originating from a thinking subject.³ It regards thought to be distinct from language, closer to the soul, and thus of a higher order than its linguistic representation. Indeed, logocentrism regards this hierarchy between thought and language to be analogous to that between the spiritual and the material. Just as the spiritual is bound to survive the death of the body, so thought is believed to transcend the corruption of language. At the same time, the materiality of language is regarded as necessary to the transport and exchange of thought, to its existence and subsistence in the world, in the same way that the body is seen as a necessary vehicle for ensuring the salvation of the soul. Language and the body are thus essential supplements to thought and the soul: at once vital and disposable, they are the material conditions of possibility for the emergence of a living, thinking subject even as they are seen as external and extrinsic to it.

Logocentrism as a style of thinking regards language with extreme ambivalence. On the one hand, it sees language as a necessary aid, an essential supplement for the formulation and expression of thought and, with it, the person who thinks, who wills and who desires. In other words, language is required to bring about the presence of the person as the origin and guarantor of his or her thoughts. On the other hand, precisely because it is inescapable and essential, language is seen as a threat. Why? Because its intractable materiality and mechanical workings suggest an agency that is neither fully human nor indisputably divine. Where do we see this non-human agency? In the rules of grammar and syntax, for example, which seem to operate outside the control and the will of their users; in the play of tropes and figures of speech which invariably give rise to the undecidability of meanings, to multiple interpretations and to the conflicted understanding of words and phrases and sentences; and finally, in its disseminative power – that is, in the capacity of language to spread, to be cut off from its users, to exist before and outside of them and in place of them in their absence, especially after their death, and to be at once repeatable and singular.

Take, for instance, the exemplary example of the signature (Derrida 1988). My signature is meant to represent me. I am its privileged and sole referent as the self who is not only capable of saying “I”, but, more importantly, who presumably exists apart from and above the first-person pronoun. My signature is mine, or so we think, because it points to me insofar as it is supposed to be a mere extension of myself and therefore subservient to my intentions. I am its master. Yet a signature works only to the extent that it can stand in lieu of me. By standing in my place, it thereby displaces me. It can – indeed, it must – be able to exist in my absence, and survive my death. Otherwise, it wouldn't be a valid signature. So when I affix my signature to a check or to my last will and testament, I expect it to refer to me even and especially when I am not present. It is meant to convey my presence in my absence. In this sense, my signature begins to take on a life of its own, independent of me. But even more paradoxically, my signature is genuine, and therefore “mine” alone only if it is repeatable. Its singularity comes across only through its reproducibility. When I sign, I always have to sign in the same way every time, again and again, to indicate that it is the same me. But by being repeatable it also opens itself up to being copied and counterfeited. A genuine signature, therefore, becomes so only if it can be faked. Its authenticity is predicated on its iterability and thus its forgery.

All of this gives us a sense of how precarious and fragile is the claim of logocentrism that language is merely a means for safeguarding thought and bringing about the self-presencing of the person who thinks, writes and speaks. In view of the inherent instability – and we might even say inhumanity – of language, logocentrism seeks to control its movements and regulate its uses in such a way that it remains a mere instrument for bringing about the meaning and intentions of the thinker. Seeking to establish the mastery of the user over what it uses, logocentrism colonizes language. At the same time, it disavows the real relationship of thought to language as one of dependency rather than mastery, and thereby conceals the way by which the self is inescapably constituted by its speech.

In the case of the Spanish Empire, we can see the workings of this linguistic ideology among its chief agents: the missionary priests. As the advance guards of a global empire that drew its legitimacy from God, Spanish missionaries went about evangelizing native peoples not in Castilian, the dominant language of the Spanish Crown, but in the vernacular languages of native peoples. This might at the outset seem rather unusual: that the language of conversion should not be the same as the language of the colonizing power (see Rafael 1993).

Historically, however, such a practice is understandable for the following reasons. First, Castilian as the language of the Spanish Crown existed as one among several other regional languages such as Basque, Catalan, Aragonese, Galician and others in the Iberian Peninsula. The Spanish Empire was profoundly multilingual, and readily acknowledged this fact. There was little attempt to impose Castilian as the sole imperial language – rather, the reverse. In the colonies, native languages were codified and used to translate the Gospel (though of course not the Bible, which, even in Spain, was prohibited from being translated into the vernacular). At the same time, this linguistic pluralism existed within a single religion, Catholicism, and a single monarch, the Spanish king. To put it differently, linguistic pluralism was tolerated insofar as it promoted native conversion and submission to Church and king (see Lodares 2007).

For native vernaculars to become instruments for spreading the Word of God, they had first to be reconstructed and codified (see Rafael 1993). Missionaries wrote grammar books, resituating the local language within the grid of Latin grammatical terms, and explaining their workings and their referents via Castilian discourse. In the process of being mobilized for evangelization, vernacular languages were transformed, their grammar grasped by recourse to an alien set of categories. They were positioned as structural derivatives of Latin, the language of the Catholic Church and thus of those deemed closest to God; and they were made comprehensible through the mediation of Castilian, the language of the state, and thus closest to the king. In the Spanish Empire, linguistic pluralism was reworked into a linguistic hierarchy, with native languages seen to exist at the bottom of a chain that was thought to originate from God's Word, Christ, to Latin, the sacred language of the Church, then Castilian, the language of imperial authority.

The subordinate and inferior position of the native vernaculars became even more apparent in the fact that missionary writers insisted on maintaining key Christian terms in their Latin or Castilian original. Along with translation, the missionaries also subscribed to a notion of untranslatability with which to contain the subversive potential of language to ascribe meanings and intentions beyond what they were conscripted to bear. They were keenly aware of the dangers that lay in using vernacular terms for sacred names and concepts. To translate Dios into the Tagalog bathala, for example, or the Nahuatl teolt, risked the possibility of confusing and corrupting “God” with pagan associations. Thus did the vernacular languages offer both promise and curse, providing the instruments not only to transmit the Gospel to native peoples, but also to disrupt that transmission and fatally compromise native conversion. It was precisely in the interest of containing this deconstructive potential of vernaculars that missionaries insisted on retaining key Christian names and concepts untranslated, believing that no adequate equivalents existed in the local languages. Translation, as the process and product of exploiting the native languages for foreign ends, intensified the risk of native languages subverting those ends. It conveyed the contradictions of logocentrism by exposing the tension between Spanish ideas about language and their practical and political applications.

Let me now turn to the contemporary United States. In the US, the logocentric regard for language is seen most clearly in relation to English and the policies surrounding the teaching of foreign languages in the context of US national security, which as we saw is inseparable from its imperial interests.⁴ As with its Spanish predecessor, the US empire has always been a polyglot country populated by immigrants, both free and enslaved, as well as by native peoples speaking numerous languages. But unlike Spain, there exists in the US an enduring belief that America is, has always been and must always be a monolingual country, where English is enshrined not only as the official language of the state, but as the sole lingua franca of its citizens. English, however, exists in many different forms and is spoken with many different accents depending on the regional location and the racial and class position of its speakers. American monolingualism is an ideological artifact precisely because it imagines the existence of a unified, standard English to exist over and above these different regional forms, just as it subsumes all the different languages spoken by its immigrant populations.

The ideology of American monolingualism is a manifestation of US logocentrism. It entails a belief in the necessary existence of a linguistic hierarchy – that is, the sense that amid the plurality of languages, there exists one that is superior to all because capable of fully expressing, and making fully present, the will and intentions of its speakers. We can see the workings of this monolingual ideology in the use of translation to shore up national security. Since the Cold War, there has been a tendency to see foreign languages as vital supplements to English. Referred to as “critical languages”, they are thought to be transparent and transportable instruments for the insinuation and imposition of America's will to power.

The systematic instrumentalization of foreign languages to serve nationalist ends runs far and deep in American thinking. It is evident, for example, in the discourse of the Department of Defense. Documents such as the 2005 Defense Language Transformation Roadmap describe knowledge of foreign languages as “an emerging core competency of our twenty-first century Total Force” (see Rafael 2009, 7). The ability to translate is deemed “an essential war fighting skill”, part of the “vital force capabilities for mission accomplishment” (ibid.). Translation is weaponized for the sake of projecting American power abroad while ensuring security at home. Such sentiments circulate as common sense in official circles regardless of political affiliations.

A nationalist imperative linked to an ongoing imperial project has governed the US state's interest in foreign languages. Translation can be useful to the extent that it responds to this imperative. It is possible, then, to begin to see an American notion of translation that turns on at least four assumptions. First, there is the belief that language is no more than a malleable medium for conveying human ideas and intentions, as if ideas and intentions could exist outside their material constitution in writing and speech. Second, that languages are inherently unequal in their ability to communicate and, as such, can be arranged into a hierarchy, depending on their utility and reach. In the US context, American English is deemed exceptionally suited above all other languages for conveying all things exceptionally American to the citizens of the country and to the rest of the world. Third, that given the exceptional qualities of American English as a kind of universal lingua franca, all other languages ought to be reducible to its terms and thereby assimilable into the national linguistic hierarchy. And fourth, that this process of reduction is precisely the task of translation. In times of emergency, translation is pressed to mobilize foreign languages as parts of a “complex weapons system” with which to secure America's borders even as it globalizes the nation's influence.

The US state thus sees the relative value of foreign languages in relation to their usefulness in the defense of the nation. Their translation is meant to inoculate American citizens from foreign threats. Through translation, foreign languages are tools with which to understand and domesticate what is alien and unfamiliar. In this way, they are charged with the job of keeping America at home in the world. In the official as well as the popular imaginary, the foreign can only be recognized when it is subordinate to the domestic. It follows that the apprehension of alien tongues can only amount to their conversion into appendages of a common national speech, English.

But what about American non-state actors, such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or Protestant missionaries who, even if they are not directly part of empire-building, nonetheless indirectly benefit from and contribute to its spread and maintenance? Can we also see a version of this logocentric regard for language and translation at work among them?

One example we can take is the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL).⁵ The SIL is, of course, independent of the American state and only tangentially linked to empire building. Yet its linguistic ideology bears comparison with that of the state. Emerging in the era of post-Second World War decolonization and the Cold War, SIL has arguably played an important role in spreading and consolidating American influence in the Third World, initially in Central and Latin America and more pronouncedly in the Pacific Islands. Historically located between a burgeoning American evangelical movement and the emergence of scientific approaches in American linguistics in the early twentieth century, the SIL has been dedicated to translating the Bible in all the languages of the world, especially those of indigenous peoples who have yet to attain literacy.

Central to the work of SIL translators is the recuperation of what they call the “heart language” or the “mother tongue” of the native peoples. The heart language is regarded as that which is closest to the authentic self of the native speaker, one that is capable of producing the affective response required for a “true” conversion by the individual. The great importance of the heart language is reflected in the oft-quoted statement of George Cowan, former president of Wycliffe, which is associated with SIL: “When a person speaks in his mother tongue, it isn't just his intellect that is involved, but his whole self, including his emotions and will” (Svelmoe 2009, 632). The heart language thus is valued precisely for what SIL translators regard as its ability to represent the unified person, conveying his or her full presence in his or her speech. As such, it is endowed with the capacity to generate not simply an intellectual response but, even more important, an emotional one. In the heart language, there ceases to be a gap between the speaker and his or her speech.

The specificity of the heart language comes through when distinguished from pidgin or Creole languages spoken by different populations. SIL translators see such “trade languages” (Handman 2010) as inherently corrupt for containing numerous foreign borrowings and grammatical “violations” of their European source languages. While heart languages are associated with the intimate spaces of home and family, trade languages are linked to the promiscuous contacts and indiscriminate solicitations of the marketplace. Dismissed for their impoverished vocabularies, pidgin languages are regarded as inherently inadequate for conveying serious ideas and bringing about affective responses. While there have been pidgin translations of the Bible, SIL translators worry that these lead not to genuine but to unstable and tragically syncretic conversions. In focusing on the putatively pure and unadulterated heart language, SIL translators can avoid the adulteration of Christian beliefs. In doing so, the conversion of individual natives can take place without having to Westernize them – that is, without making them any less native. The evangelical ideal of conversion is thus to incorporate natives into a larger Christian order without having to assimilate them into Western institutions, consigning them ever more securely to the site of their ethnolinguistic group.

The irony, of course, is that in the process of reconstructing the grammar of the heart language and reducing speech to writing, SIL translators tend to standardize its many dialectical variations. They end up canonizing, as it were, one of potentially numerous variations of the native speech and elevating this as the medium for translating the Bible. By trying to be faithful to the heart language, they turn it into a second language ruling over other dialectical variations. Such a move is reminiscent of the standardization of English in the US, which has historically entailed the repression of other regional variations. Just as the logocentrism of the US state positions American English as the privileged linguistic tool, indeed as a weapon, from which to domesticate and weaponize other foreign languages to serve the imperatives of national security, so the logocentrism of American non-state actors, such as the SIL, reifies the heart language of the native people, idealizing it as the most immediate, most effective instrument for translating the Bible and promoting individual conversion. In all cases a hierarchy of languages is created: Latin/Castilian/vernacular in the case of Spanish missionaries; English/other Englishes/foreign languages in the case of the US state; source language (which till recently was English, and more recently Hebrew and Greek)/heart language/pidgin in the case of non-state actors such as SIL. This linguistic hierarchy is assumed to be ordered in such a way as to allow for the efficient, genuine and full presencing of the self that speaks, whether human or divine, and the unconditional reception and submission of the other who hears and is spoken to.

To sum up: despite their widely divergent historical paths, the empires of Spain and the United States share a common orientation towards language. They see language as distinct from and subordinate to the meaning, will and intention of its speaker. It is thus regarded in logocentric fashion as a mere instrument of expression and communication. At the same time, language as an essential supplement to the authority of the speaking self – whether God, king, bureaucrat or soldier – is also regarded with deep suspicion for its capacity to delay, derail and displace the very meanings and intentions it is charged to harbor and deliver. It is this logocentrism that, as we saw, informs the ideologies of translation on the part of the Spanish missionary, on the one hand, and the missionizing impulses of the American national security state on the other. Translation has historically been deployed as a means – as a tool or as a weapon – to tame the instability and unreliability of language. In the missionary recuperation of native vernaculars as derivatives of Latin and Castilian in the case of Spain, or the recuperation of the heart language as the pure instrument for translating scripture in the case of the SIL, or in the US privileging of American English as the norm from which to render legible and assimilable other languages, including varieties of English itself, we see the same impulse to deploy translation as a way of reducing, framing, governing and conducting the movement of language so as to reproduce and safeguard a hierarchy of languages. And it is this hierarchy of languages that, as far back as the Roman Empire, is thought to enable the rule of the speaker over the instruments of his or her speech and the speech of others.

But we might ask: does this ideology of translation always work? Once put into practice, can it remain faithful to the logocentric aim to convert and reduce language into a sheer medium for thought and thus a kind of equipment for imposing the will of its speaker? Insofar as translation exists only within and between languages, does it not also share in language's protean capacity, its inhuman, or at least non-human, power to exceed and subvert human intentionality? Can translation be faithful to empire, or does it betray empire in the double sense of that word: revealing its workings but also frustrating its ends? It's precisely this other possibility that points to a different politics of translation that deserve to be the subject of another, even longer article.

Note on contributor

Vicente L. Rafael is a professor of history at the University of Washington. He has written several works on the politics of translation in the Spanish and US-occupied Philippines as well on the uses of translation in the US “war on terror”.

Notes

1. The following remarks on the Spanish Empire are largely taken from my earlier work, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society Under Early Spanish Rule (Rafael 1993).

2. My remarks on the US empire are taken largely from my earlier book, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History. See Rafael (2000), especially chapters 1–3; see also the bibliography, which has a fuller treatment of other sources for understanding US imperial history.

3. The notion of logocentrism owes much, of course, to the work of Jacques Derrida, especially Of Grammatology (1998), translated by Gayatri Spivak; Writing and Difference (1978), translated by Alan Bass; and Limited, Inc. (1988), translated by Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman.

4. The following section is from Rafael (2009).

5. For very helpful discussions of the SIL, see Handman (2007, 2010). See also the articles in the 2009 special issue of Language 85 (3), especially Dorbin and Good, and Svelmoe.