Response by von Flotow to “Betraying Empire: Translation and the Ideology of Conquest”

As Rafael suggests, the methods of domination and exploitation used by empires include translation. Translation appropriates the words and thoughts of those conquered. It works in tandem with the power structures of the imperium, or other types of power-holders or power-seekers (corporations, non-governmental organizations, religious organizations, and their respective spin doctors) to impose the new, and foreign, authority. These are, of course, tricks known to any good communications and marketing team. In postcolonial approaches to translation studies, such ideas about translation and empire date from the 1990s, when Tejaswini (1992) published work on the British “empire” translating Hindu texts into English and then recycling them in its English-language schools in India for the purposes of twisting young colonials into consumers of English tweed.

Such translation practices are well known, whether in the translation programmes of the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) – Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago was probably the most successful of the more than 2000 books that the CIA paid to translate and publish (Saunders 2000) – or the translation policies of the Canadian government in its efforts to deal with the demands of official bilingualism (Mossop 1990). Translation is used worldwide for cynical, political purposes.

Rafael ascribes such practices, and the belief in their efficacy, to “logocentrism”, ostensibly a Western frame of thought that views language as not only organizing thought, but endowing its producer with power, and the authority to disseminate that power. A recent document on the need for “cultural diplomacy” in the USA reiterates the idea that translation should and can serve political needs, arguing that the export via translation of nineteenth-century American literature (Whitman, Thoreau, Dickinson) into Arabic or Urdu or Farsi will improve the tarnished image of the country (Advisory Committee on Cultural Diplomacy 2005). In other words, logocentrism as a driving force is not confined to religious materials but underlies all kinds of marketing, promotion and international relations.

The other side of logocentrism – the distrust of language – enters into translation as well, as Rafael argues, in the methods of the imperial translators, which point to the instability, ambiguity and inherent weakness of the logos that maintains the imperium. Although they use native vernaculars for most of their work, important concepts such as “Dios” in Spanish or “Lamb” in English (Nida and Taber 1982) are left untranslated, their meanings controlled and free of contamination.

Intentionality has been theorized as an intrinsic aspect of translation (Vermeer 1996; Nord 1997), and not only on the part of empires. It is seen as the basis for the labour and effort, the skills and the resources required to move texts between languages and cultures. Few translate by accident, or without intention, though that intention may not always be easy to pinpoint. Largely, translation pursues communicative purposes, where the “client” or target audience are the first considerations. Indeed, theorists such as Vermeer (1996) go so far as to say that a translation is likely nothing more than that, its first impetus being to communicate in accordance with a specific brief.

From the perspective of postcolonialism, this intentional aspect of translation is viewed as dictatorial, cynical and manipulative. And yet, in translation studies, we know that manipulation (for more or less visible purposes) is a fact (Hermans 1985); this knowledge of the difference created by and through translation has driven the last 30 years of research in the field. And so, Rafael’s rather wistful question of whether translation cannot also share in “language’s protean capacity, its inhuman, or at least non-human, power to exceed and subvert human intentionality” comes as a bit of a surprise. Would not any deliberate attempt to “betray the intentions” of logocentric uses of translation be just as logocentric?

The quick answer to whether translation can subvert logocentrism is “No”, I think. But that belies the conceptual, or perhaps methodological, problem of describing translation. Translation and the uses of translation are dynamic, multifarious and often beyond control, and they can bristle with creativity – which is perhaps what is most subversive about translation. While the empire may deploy translation in certain ways to certain ends, it is a huge and messy place, and translation is active there in many other ways. Further, it is impossible to know if a translation ever really expresses the intentions of its imperial, or other, producer, or whether those intentions will be received by the audience, readers or clients. In police states, or military or theocratic dictatorships, translation may appear to fulfil such requirements, but there are always moments when words break out of these cages, intentionally. In what follows, I will briefly evoke three instances where the power of translation to create new meaning, to avoid the burden of ethics and to shatter systematicities becomes evident. Here, problems around logocentrism fade away.

In the past 20 to 30 years, feminist and gay interests in translation studies have documented to what extent translation and translators can participate in the subversion of the most imperial language of all, that of patriarchy (Harvey 2000; Simon 1996). They have documented the creation through translation of humour, wordplay, parody, nonsense or neologism – intentional moves on the part of politicized individuals or publishing initiatives, which set out, much like imperial translators, to formulate and promote a certain vision or change in perspectives by manipulating language. In feminist work with the paronomastic elements of language, which subvert traditional patriarchal meaning and propose new, disturbing meaning, mimetic translation was developed in order to deal with wordplay, and certain writers’ “sonorous plots” (von Flotow 2004, 104). This translation strategy follows the sound of the source text materials and does not necessarily deal with its semantics. It “reveals the workings” (Rafael) of language by privileging morphophonemic and syntactic relationships between words in different languages and not semantics. It radically alters but also enriches the text, making the translation sound foreign, and thus not reducing the foreign to the familiar. Mimetic translation riffs on the sounds of the source text, and in certain feminist works is seen to expand meaning, allowing the expression of “l’inédit” – the as yet unwritten – so far suppressed by patriarchal conditions. Here, translation creates new meaning.

A more recent study of sound as the focus in translation (Fraser 2012), based on the translation entitled Mots d’Heures: Gousses, Rames (1967) by Luis d’Antin van Rooten, also engages with questions around the effects of translating the sound of a language. But Fraser goes further: he explains that while this surprising, nonsense translation of Mother Goose Rhymes may undermine the intention of rendering sense or meaning in translation, especially as the attached footnotes are equally silly, it also suggests “a satire of what Derrida has termed ‘the epistemic intention’ that is present in every effort to ‘frame the mark,’ and most pronounced ‘among those who contextualize for a living: academics and theorists’” (ibid., 76). Mots d’Heures: Gousses, Rames is a singular “triumph of structure over context” (ibid., 77), which evades being roped into any particular explanatory system by being multiple. It can be read in many ways: as an obvious, bilingual fraud, which the author invites the reader to enjoy with him, accompanied by explanatory, equally fraudulent but amusing footnotes that satirize academia; or as a “dialect” of English in “buttery French” (ibid.). It can be read seriously as if there were really some cohesive grammatical logic, as the author claims; and finally, it can be read as “pure Dada without the sound translational element” (ibid.). Here, translation cannot be seen to work “for a system”; it confounds any attempt to frame it. The “intention” of the translation is potentially multiple, and playful, and cannot be burdened with ethical (or scholarly) responsibilities.

A third example of more diverse and multiple ways of seeing translation and its influences comes from a new publication: Translation Effects: The Shaping of Modern Canadian Culture, co-edited by Kathy Mezei, Sherry Simon, and von Flotow (2014). Compiled in a context that offers ample room for postcolonial critiques of translation in regard to indigenous cultures, it addresses these, but in other ways. Here, the methodology is different. The editors opt for multiple and “thick” perspectives on translation, recognizing the impossibility of a coherent narrative of history, or of influence. Instead, the focus is on the ubiquitous nature of translation, and the fact that translation has played a vital role in the development of a contemporary culture – and not only in the area of literature or the arts. The often random events that trigger translations, and the subsequent effects of these translations as books, performances, films, political speeches, oral histories or concepts enter into the life of a culture, are the focus. Each essay in the volume provides a snapshot of translation in action, sometimes in quite unexpected ways. The point is that translation is everywhere, operating within the boundaries of any one nation, and also deployed for national politics, but it also frays those boundaries and undermines their hold. For example, studies of acts of translation in venues such as protest movements or indigenous land claim trials reveal the broad social effects of translation. In “1974: The Weimar Republic Comes to Gay Toronto”, Brian Mossop discusses the pivotal moment of translation that saw the first era of sexual liberation in Germany become the second era in North America. The translation of a German phrase from 1921 appeared on the masthead of the Toronto gay rights activist magazine, The Body Politic, recalling a history that had been suppressed, and internationalizing it. In the contribution “1997: The Supreme Court of Canada Rules that the Laws of Evidence Must Be Adapted to Accommodate Aboriginal Oral Histories”, Sophie McCall points to a significant shift in legal precedent with profound translation effects. In 1997 a crucial legal decision now referred to as the Delgamuukw case gave legal weight to the testimonies of First Nations people based on oral traditions, thus allowing oral narratives to be considered as evidence in land claims trials. For McCall, the judge’s decision introduced a new possibility of equivalence between First Nations oral forms and “hard evidence” (Mezei, Simon, and von Flotow 2014, 21). At the same time, however, it caused a situation in which previously neglected cultural materials are “adapted” to suit “laws of evidence” (ibid.), which, in turn, must be bent to allow the translations/adaptations.

The direction that research and knowledge on translation takes is determined by researchers’ perspectives: one option is to examine the multifarious nature of translated linguistic productions percolating below the surfaces of visible empire.

Note on contributor

Luise von Flotow is a professor of translation studies, and currently director of the School of Translation and Interpretation, University of Ottawa. She is also a literary translator, working from German (Christa Wolf, They Divided the Sky, 2013) and French (France Theoret, The Stalinist’s Wife, 2013) into English. Her most recent academic publications include Translation Effects (2014) and Translating Women (2011). Translating Women 2 is in preparation. Research interests include translation and gender, audiovisual translation, and translation in public/cultural diplomacy.