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ABSTRACT
This article critically examines the oft-cited historical narrative of Translation Studies that situates its birth in the post-war West. This narrative is referred to as the mythistory of Translation Studies, as its validity derives more from its circulation than from a knowledge of other traditions. The narrative in its various iterations is first analysed as an imperial myth, positing a unitary point of origin, following a developmental trajectory, and presenting its local history as world history. The article then demonstrates the ways in which this Western mythistory contributes to the consolidation of a neocolonial geo-politics of the field, as reflected in the leading Anglophone anthologies, which present Western theory as universal while erasing or delegitimizing knowledge from the global South. The Western mythistory of the field is then provincialised by comparing it to the systematic and sustained interest in translation that arose in the Soviet Union in the nineteen twenties and thirties. This critical treatment of the mythistory is meant to open a space for heterogeneity in the field and to ensure that attempts to enlarge the field are not merely expansions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. I use the term ‘the West’ as it is the preferred term of the scholars who put forward this history. I place it in quotation marks, however, in recognition of the critique that has been levelled at the term for reinforcing a deeply problematic oppositional mapping of the world that reproduces imperial asymmetries while presenting cultures as coherent wholes (see Baker and Saldanha Citation2020, xxvi), presenting global relations in terms of a clash of civilisations. In light of these critiques, one can consider ‘the West’ as a cultural construct promoted by the global North to mystify the foundation of its dominance in capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy (see Santos Citation2018, 1).
2. Although I will be citing mostly English sources, the same mythistory is evident elsewhere. As Larisa Schippel notes, ‘When historical surveys on the development of translation studies – whether Erich Prunč’s Entwicklungslinien (2010), Edward Gentzler’s Contemporary Translation Theories (2001), or the bibliography in Heidemari Salevsky’s Translationswissenschaft (2002) – give a date to the birth of an independent discipline of translation studies, they generally locate that moment in the 1970s, and trace its roots back to the 1950s’ (Citation2017, 247).
3. Bruno Perreau makes a similar point, associating institutional histories explicitly with processes of mythification: ‘The foundations of a given political authority are largely invented retrospectively, through processes of mythification of constituent factors (the rhetoric of “founding fathers,” the valorization of philosophical ideals and patriotic symbols), even when the main players were not necessarily aware of the changes they were effecting’ (Citation2016, 148).
4. As Hardt and Negri explain: ‘The birth of the United Nations at the end of the Second World War merely reinitiated, consolidated, and extended this developing international juridical order that was first European but progressively became completely global’ (Citation2000, 4). This is not to say that human rights are bad; rather, the critique is aimed at exposing the Western bias in their formulation and in their enforcement so as ‘to challenge the legitimacy and egalitarian imaginary of human rights, and to publicize the discrepancy between their universalist rhetoric and actual practice’ (see Slaughter Citation2007, 13).
5. Many of the critiques of Western writings on translation provincialise western concepts of translation, pointing to their culture-specific nature. See, for example, Tymoczko’s comparative analysis of the English word translation in relation to the terminology used in other languages (Citation2007, 68–77) and Ganesh Devy’s discussion of the construal of translation as exile, a fall from origin, as specific to Western metaphysics (Citation1999, 182).
6. Larisa Schippel makes a similar point, although without referencing the colonial asymmetries characterising the modern geopolitics of knowledge: ‘If we assume that the space of science is a transcultural one, then national developments should at the very least be compared and interrogated with regard to the possible intersections and transfers between them’ (Citation2017, 248).
7. Steiner’s focus on the German foundations of this current stage is echoed in Snell-Hornby’s reading of the history of the field, which, unlike Bassnett, Tymoczko and Rose who situate it mostly in the Anglophone West, locates it in the Germanophone world, also in the post-war period: ‘The combined impact of these developments facilitated the emergence of a linguistically-oriented translation theory, which, particularly in Germany – with the integration of translator training institutes into the universities – established itself as the new academic subject of Übersetzungswissenschaft, or translatology’ (Citation1995, 8). Although British, Snell-Hornby spent most of her professional life at the University of Vienna.
8. Actually, Bassnett offers a more nuanced timeline in her earlier overview of the field, noting ‘it would be wrong to see the first half of the twentieth century as the Waste Land of English translation theory, with here or there the fortresses of great individual translators approaching the issues pragmatically’ (Bassnett-McGuire Citation1988, 74). She then concludes, ‘The history of Translation Studies should therefore be seen as an essential field of study for the contemporary theorist, but should not be approached from a narrowly fixed position’ (75). Throughout this volume Bassnett resists generalising, referencing specific traditions, such as ‘the powerful Anglo-Saxon anti-theoretical tradition’ (3).
9. I should note that a fourth edition of the reader is scheduled to come out in 2021 and attempts to redress the imbalance. It includes four texts translated from the Chinese.
10. This lends credence to a related observation by Santos (Citation2018, 191), that ‘acknowledging the increasing numbers of women philosophers or of Black or African or indidgenous philosophers is not the same thing as acknowledging feminist, Black, African, or indigenous philosophies.’
11. The politics of Translation Studies anthologies produced in Eastern Europe is even more complicated. Consider, for example, Piotr Bukowski and Magda Heydel’s Antologia teorii przekładu literackiego [Anthology of literary translation theory] (Citation2009), which contains twenty-one texts, all in translation; six of the authors are from Eastern Europe, but there is not a single Russian text.
12. On the translation activity of Marx, Engels and Lenin, see Fedorov (Citation1953, 63–82) and for Gramsci, see Ives and Lacorte (Citation2010). In fact, the Marxist philosophy of language gave a decidedly sociolinguistic orientation to Soviet linguistics and related fields as early as the 1920s (Krysin Citation1977), which is evident in the translation-related writings of Andrei Fedorov and Rosaliia Shor.
13. Pym and Ayvazyan (Citation2015, 321) also appear to blame the Soviets, writing, ‘formalist theories of Retsker, Sobolev and Fedorov were associated with the final years of Stalinism and were thus strangely cut off from the development of Translation Studies in most other languages’ – most other Western European languages, perhaps.
14. The term internationalisation has become increasingly associated with these post-war processes of economic globalisation, leading many scholars to avoid the term in favour of transnational. For many today, the term ‘international’ underscores the role of states as corporate actors (Hannerz Citation1996, 6), assuming “orderly, almost diplomatic processes of give-and-take among well-defined units (Foster Citation2013, 2), and, as such, is deeply implicated in what Wimmer and Glick Schiller describe as methodological nationalism, which ‘naturalizes the global regime of nation states’ (Wimmer and Schiller Citation2003, 576). All this makes the continued use of internationalisation, as here in Delabatista or in Tymoczko’s ‘The History of Internationalization in Translation Studies and Its Impact on Translation Theory,’ in that same volume, as an unqualified good appear somewhat anachronistic if not naïve. It reminds me of a statement by W.H. Auden from a 1950 review of a collection of Greek poetry: ‘Every translator is an international agent of good-will’ (Auden Citation1950, 183). Tymoczko ends her chapter by presenting both internationalisation and globalisation as positive developments and the opposing positions as anachronistic: ‘As the field of translation studies becomes increasingly internationalised, however, and as globalisation becomes the norm driving the practice of translation, these forms of resistance to the internationalisation of the discipline will become ever more identified as limiting, discriminatory, and anachronistic’ (Citation2018, 168).
15. Clifford, for example, posits a different historical ‘turning point’: 1900. As he argues: ‘[The present book] is concerned with diverse practices of crossing, tactics of translation, experiences of double or multiple attachments. These instances of crossing reflect complex regional and transregional histories which, since 1900, have been powerfully inflected by three connected global forces: the continuing legacies of empire, the effects of unprecedented world wars, and the global consequences of industrial capitalism’s disruptive, restructuring activity’ (Citation1997, 6–7).
16. We see in Custine’s remarks the emergence of a tri-partite developmental model that presents the West (first world) as the source of knowledge, the second world, as the translators of that knowledge, and the third world, as the passive recipients of those translations.
17. Consider, for example, Lawrence Venuti’s 2017 collected volume Teaching Translation: Programs, Courses, Pedagogy. I was initially excited to see two non-Western scholars cited as theorists: the Chinese writer and translator Lu Xun and the Soviet translation theorist Andrei Fedorov. A moment later, however, I was discouraged that a mere two non-Western names could have made me so happy. Moreover, neither author is represented in our current Translation Studies anthologies. Lu Xun was cited by the article’s author, Shaden Tageldin, from a collection of his writings, mostly on literature. Fedorov was cited from a French translation, as no English translations of his major works exist.
18. Indeed, some of the early Anglophone scholarship on translation in the post-war period could be described from the point of view of ecotranslatology as ‘extractivist,’ extracting content from form. As A. H. Smith (Booth and Smith Citation1958, vii) writes in the preface to the 1958 volume Aspects of Translation: ‘To translate is, as Dr. Johnson defined it, “to change into another language, retaining sense”. It would, perhaps, be wiser to qualify this definition, and suggest that to translate is to change into another language, retaining as much of the sense as one can; for some of the original effect is almost always lost.’ This privileging of sense is reiterated in the introduction by Leonard Forster (Booth and Smith Citation1958, 1): ‘I want to consider translation as the transference of the content of a text from one language to another, bearing in mind that we cannot always dissociate the content from the form.’ In 1959 Roman Jakobson would present the inextricability of form and content as the exception to the rule; the extraction of content from form would canonized in the concept of deverbalization (Seleskovitch and Lederer Citation1984).
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Brian James Baer
Brian James Baer is Professor of Russian and Translation Studies at Kent State University and Leading Research Fellow at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow.