Towards a Nomadic Ethics in Translation Praxis

Abstract

In this article I examine how translation practitioners might begin to develop a praxis that is informed by a nomadic ethics which is not reliant on a normative or regularizing ethics/morality, but rather constitutes an orientation founded on heterogeneity and the repudiation of universality. In order for such a praxis to be effectuated, I argue that translations have to take into consideration the historicity of master narratives so that meaning becomes disentangled from the semantics and grounded in a materialist philosophy. Because translation does not occur in a vacuum; it is influenced by myriad material flows, some apparent and some not which, in turn, are linked to certain forms of knowledge and power. To support my argument, I refer to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and apply it to the use of a number of stylistic and linguistic devices in the oeuvre of Ingrid Winterbach.

Keywords:

• nomadic ethics
• historicity
• master narratives
• Engfrikaans
• Deleuze and Guattari
• Ingrid Winterbach

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by funding that was awarded to me by the Graduate School of Arts and Social Sciences to pursue my doctoral studies full-time at Stellenbosch University.

Notes

1 The term ‘assemblage’ is used by Deleuze and Guattari to refer to ‘the play of contingency and structure, organization and change’ (Macgregor Wise 77) and thus denotes arrangements of processes and relations between structures. It is interesting to note, however, that the original French term used by Deleuze and Guattari – agencement – translated and accepted as ‘assemblage’ in English, not only connotes the ‘relations’ in and between assemblages in French, but also ‘the agency of becomings’, though both of these inferences are lost in the English translation of agencement to ‘assemblage’.