Twentieth Century to the Present

With the dawn of the 20^th century we saw an expansion of literary horizons. Colonialist expansion drew the world together and the empires discovered hitherto unknown languages and literatures. This resulted in large scale translation activities. Well known writers and poets were attracted to foreign literature—an example being the American poet Ezra Pound. His work Cathay was a translation of Chinese poetry. In fact the American poetic movement called Imagism drew inspiration from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry. The Japanese poetic form of ‘haiku’ was the source for many Imagists who emphasized images rather than drawn out poetic language. Translation activity was undertaken on the other side of the Atlantic too. The Orientalist mission of discovering Asian texts was carried on and many early Indian and Arabic texts were translated into English.

However, there were many writers and translators who saw translation as a secondary activity, one that does not require much of creativity. Hilaire Belloc is one such example: “The art of translation is a subsidiary art and derivative,” he believed. There was much debate about how translation should be defined – as an art or as a craft.

Translation Studies as a discipline also started emerging in the latter half of the 20^th century. This was largely due to the influence of linguistics in the field of critical theory. This again was derived from a revived interest in the work of the Russian Formalists in the 1920s. They, and later the Prague Linguistic Circle, had concentrated their attention on the language of literature to the exclusion of all other features. The importance given to language also led to the rise in estimation of the activity of translation. It was no longer seen as a secondary activity that could be undertaken by anybody who had a decent knowledge of two different languages. For some reason translation studies took on a more concrete shape in East Europe and emerged in England only much later. J. C. Catford’s book published in 1965 set the stage for translation studies as a discipline in England.

Today Translation studies is a discipline by itself, drawing from various fields of study like linguistics, narratology and aesthetics. Andre Lefevere was one of the first to attempt a definition of the purpose of this field of enquiry: “to produce a comprehensive theory which can also be used as a guideline for the production of translations.” It is clear from this that the theoretical framework of translation studies is connected to the practice of translation. As Susan Bassnett points out, “To divorce the theory from the practice, to set the scholar against the practitioner as has happened in other disciplines, would be tragic indeed.” The theory of translation studies is informed by the experiences of translation and this makes the area vibrant and alive.

Assignments

1. Who are the major translators and translation theorists of the western world?
2. Identify the important events in the translation history of the west.

References

Bassnett, Susan. Translation Studies. 1980. Revised edition 1991. London: Routledge.
Lefevere, Andre. Translation History Culture: A Sourcebook. 1992. London: Routledge.