Voices from the periphery: further reflections on relativism in translation studies

ABSTRACT

This paper critiques the relativist and post-colonialist view that blames the under-representation from peripheral cultures in international translation studies on Eurocentric biases. Western scholars who propound such a view underestimate the difficulties faced by scholars working in peripheral cultures, where freedom of information and of speech is often limited, non-conformity is discouraged, and the Western academic repertoire is not entirely available or acceptable. Their accusation that non-Western scholars who accept Western repertoires have drifted away from their cultural predecessors shows a lack of understanding of peripheral cultures. While Western relativists think that they are speaking on behalf of peripheral cultures, many scholars in peripheral cultures reject cultural relativism as a selfish, reactionary theory that justifies the refusal to help the weak, and see it as their duty to become cultural and academic dissidents striving to create new traditions. Radical relativists and post-colonialists in Western translation studies are Eurocentric in their criticisms of non-Western scholars. They are also guilty of ‘discipline-centrism’, by borrowing theories simplistically from central disciplines to edge out theories indigenous to translation studies itself, thus leading the discipline back to normativism and perpetuating its peripheral position in the humanities.

KEYWORDS:

• cultural relativism
• Eurocentrism
• post-colonialism
• discipline-centrism
• polysystem theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Nam Fung Chang is a professor in the Department of Translation, Lingnan University, Hong Kong. He has translated into Chinese Oscar Wilde's four comedies, and Jonathan Lynn and Antony Jay's Yes Prime Minister. His academic works include three monographs, and a number of articles published in journals such as Target, The Translator, Perspectives, Babel, Translation and Interpreting Studies and Across Languages and Cultures.

Notes

1 I lived in mainland China for nine years before returning at the age of 21 to Hong Kong, which, having been a British colony for over a century, is presently a Special Administrative Region of China, supposedly with a high degree of autonomy.

2 I was invited by the editorial staff of Translation Studies in 2012 to respond to Chesterman's position piece, but I was in a dilemma at that time. My article on the issue of Eurocentrism, ‘A Polysystemist's Response to Prescriptive Cultural Relativism and Postcolonialism’ (Chang, 2017) had just been rejected by Translation Studies, and I was writing another article: ‘Does “Translation” Reflect a Narrower Concept Than “fanyi”? On the Impact of Western Theories on China and the Concern about Eurocentrism’ (Chang, 2015). I could not repeat what I had said in the two articles because I still hoped that they would be accepted by other journals, but on the other hand I could not say anything new without referring to these unpublished articles. Now that the two articles have been published, I am free to provide a response on top of what I said previously.

3 Outside scholars who publish in mainland China may enjoy a certain degree of immunity in this respect. However, a whole chapter of my book (Chang, 2004) on Chinese translation tradition has been taken out by the editor of the prestigious Tsinghua University Press because it contains contemporary examples of ideological manipulation in translation. I put the chapter in another book (Chang, 2012), and the whole book was rejected by another prestigious press (Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press) on the ground that it contains politically sensitive contents, before it was accepted by another press for a book series launched by the Centre of Translation, Hong Kong Baptist University.

4 I sent a letter in 2012 to ask CASS to confirm or deny the existence of this regulation, but have received no reply so far.

5 A recent example is Shi Jiepeng (史傑鵬), an associate professor of Beijing Normal University, who was fired for ‘regularly making erroneous comments on the Internet […] that are out of accord with mainstream values’ (‘Zhongguo yi yan zhizui,’ 2017).

6 Such as Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波, 1955–2017), a former lecturer of Beijing Normal University, the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate of 2010, who was found guilty of ‘inciting subversion of state power’ and sentenced to 11 years’ imprisonment in 2009 (Human Rights Watch, 2018).

7 These cultural differences in academic norms have been discussed in more detail in a Chinese article (Chang, 2010).

8 Such as those making claims that certain traditional Chinese translation theories are as good as Nida's theory or polysystem theory, or are even ‘the most advanced in the world of the 20th century’ (see Chang, 2009, p. 314).

9 According to Li Hongman (2014, p. 23), all the six ‘Chinese scholars’ (by which she actually means ‘scholars of Chinese descent’) who published more than one article in top international journals on translation and interpreting studies between 2008 and 2012 are based in Hong Kong.

10 One of the referee's’ reports contains racism- and America-centrism-sounding remarks, accusing me, a non-white and non-American, of ‘suffering from “white anxiety”’, and suggesting that I should ‘begin the “Tea Party” of Translation Studies’.

11 The referee's reports say that the article ‘represents a healthy dose of antidote to some of the ideology-driven translation theories that have been gaining currency in Translation Studies’, and that it ‘should be […] read by all translation scholars’.

12 The two conferences were organized, respectively, by the International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies and the European Society for Translation Studies. In the meantime, I was invited to present the paper on a lecture tour and in a plenary session of a conference in the non-West.

13 Such as the ‘Transferring Translation Studies’ conference held in November 2013 in Antwerp and Utrecht, the ‘Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies: East and West in Dialogue’ conference held in London in May 2014, the ‘East Asian Translation Studies Conference’ held in Norwich in July 2014, and the ‘Fourth Asia-Pacific Forum On Translation And Intercultural Studies’ held in Durham in October 2015.

14 Susam-Sarajeva (2014, pp. 336–337) criticized Andrew Chesterman, and Chesterman (2014, 350) has apologized, for talking about ‘we in the West’ in a journal with a global distribution and readership, but it sounds equally odd for one to say ‘our discipline’ in the same journal when one actually means ‘our discipline in the West’.