The outer limits of otherness: Ideologies of human translation in speculative fiction

Abstract

This work considers the ways in which human translation and human translators are depicted as interacting with unknown languages in classic works of speculative fiction. The objective is to reveal the range of underlying conceptions entertained about language and consciousness. Some of the philosophies on which these linguistic fictions are built are benign, but some use translation for expansionist ends. Almost all the fictional scenarios posit a colonial encounter, hence the potential interest of these works to translators, especially as they form a vexed image of translating, showing translating to be a primary intercultural contact skill on which political realities, and existential identities characterized by ethnocentricity – or, less commonly, ethno-relativity – depend. Resistances to translation – untranslatabilities – emerge as a common denominator of depictions of otherness, whether for reasons of distance, for thought manipulation or as a defense against cultural appropriation from colonizers.

Keywords:

• science fiction
• speculative fiction
• translation
• linguistics
• linguistic science fiction
• untranslatability

Note on contributor

Kelly Washbourne teaches translation at Kent State University in the United States. His works include An Anthology of Spanish American Modernismo (edited; MLA Texts and Translations, 2007) and Autoepitaph: Selected Poems of Reinaldo Arenas (2014). He won a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship (2010) for his translation of Nobel Laureate Miguel Ángel Asturias' Leyendas de Guatemala (Legends of Guatemala) and is co-editor of the series Translation Practices Explained (Routledge).

Notes

1. Beebee (2012, 78–80) notes that Charles Cros proposed in 1869 an interplanetary signaling system using base 3. Gallun was surely aware of this project.

2. In 1877, Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli (1835–1910) described the streaks he saw on the surface of Mars as “canali”, which, under the ideological sway of canal-building at the time of the Suez Canal, was then translated as “canals” (“All About Mars”). Science fiction writers have seized upon the translation error; in “Old Faithful” (Gallun 1974, 604), the narrator observes: “Twice they crossed deep, twenty-mile-wide artificial gorges, which on Earth have earned the not entirely correct name of ‘canals’.”

3. Babel-17 is treated amply in Cronin (2000) and thus my observations here will be brief.