The Translation Turn

Translations Studies had, by the turn of the century, managed to make a dent on disciplinary boundaries, mainly due to the pioneering efforts by André Lefevere and Susan Bassnett with their book Translation, History, and Culture in 1978. They co-authored another book in 1998 titled Constructing Cultures. In this book they demonstrated how far translation has come since the beginnings and how today it is perceived more as an interaction of cultures. They argued for critical tools that were borrowed from Cultural Studies, especially the work of Pierre Bourdieu. The socio-cultural contexts of translation, the choice of text to be translated, and the impact of translations on a receptor culture were aspects that gained prominence in their approach. In her final essay in the collection “The Translation Turn in Cultural Studies”, Susan Bassnett argues for more collaboration between translation theorists and cultural studies scholars, because for her “translations are the performative aspect of intercultural communication” (Gentzler, 194).     
                     
This collaboration became a reality in the first decade of the present century with more scholars turning to intersemiotic studies like film and musical adaptations. More importantly, it has opened up the field to non-western discourses especially from the developing countries like India. Postcolonial studies has joined hands with translation theory resulting in seminal insights into the process of translation from and into relatively minor languages and literatures. Non-western discourses brought in complexities that had not been thought of before. For example, the existence of multilingual ‘originals’ in certain postcolonial societies like North Africa poses a problem for the translator. The text is already translated in a certain sense because it constantly shifts among Arabic, French, Berber and occasionally Spanish. Samia Mehrez highlights this aspect in her essay “Translation and the Postcolonial Experience: The Francophone North African Text”. The de Campos brothers in Brazil, Haroldo and Augusto, developed the cannibalistic approach to translation, where the act of translation is compared to the cannibalistic act. Here “cannibalism is to be understood not in the Western sense of capturing, dismembering, mutilating, and devouring, but in a sense which shows respect, a symbolic act of taking back out of love, of absorbing the virtues of a body through a transfusion of blood” (Gentzler, 196). To them we owe a lot of innovative terms for translation: “transcreation, transtextualization, transillumination, transluciferation…” (Gentzler, 196). A group of feminist scholars in Quebec (Luise von Flotow, Sherry Simon etc) used translation to highlight their double oppression as women in a minority community.

The result, as Gentzler and Tymoczko point out, has been a “realization that a normative approach was tantamount to an implicit allegiance to a given but unspecified range of values commonly shared by those in power in any given culture” (Translation and Power, xii). They argue that the cultural turn has led to an analysis of power as it is manifested in the practice of translation.