Post structuralist and Postcolonial Influences
One significant impact of poststructuralist theories was that translation was no longer viewed as an innocent re-rendering of one text into another language. The influence of poststructuralist theories of language and the Derridean concepts of shifting meaning complicated the activity of translation. Derrida did not believe in a stable text or meaning; if this is true, then what does a translation convey? In the Derridean sense, a translation is an original text; rather, both the translation and original texts are derivative and hence ‘unoriginal’. A translation, because it uses the treacherous medium of language, rather than ‘carrying over’ the text successfully, might deconstruct it. Understandably, equivalence becomes a highly debatable concept according to this view. The poststructuralist concept of the indeterminacy of language undermined the concept of translatability and equivalence.
Postcolonial theory also influences the perspective on much of translation theory. The western attitude to translation was interrogated by the multi-lingual cultures of the former colonies, especially countries like India and Nigeria. The inherently unequal power dynamics behind the translation process in a country like India was highlighted by a postcolonial consciousness. The tendency even today to translate from an Indian language into English rather than another Indian language has been examined in this light. It is pointed out that this is dictated by the economy of the marketplace where translations in English sell better, indicative of a mindset that prefers the colonizer’s language. Tejaswini Niranjana's Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism and the Colonial Context (1992) was an important work that discussed the politics of translation that was undertaken in colonial India.
Michael Cronin’s works like Translation and Identity (2006), and Translation and Globalization (2003) focus our attention on the process of translation in a world that is facing the challenges of globalization. He examines the position of translation in a world that is brought closer by economic and commercial compulsions; where globalization becomes a euphemism for ‘americanization’ and much of translation activity is to the advantage of the English-speaking world. Translation is seen as a politically loaded activity which reflects the power hierarchy in an increasingly unequal world.
The technologically sophisticated contemporary world has also seen advances in machine translation. Although the basic premise for this goes back to Descartes’s concept of a universal language, the idea of using computers to facilitate the translation process gained currency since the 1950s. It is said to be based on Descartes’ concept because this also works on the premise that there are certain universal structures that underlie most languages. Based on these broad frameworks computers translate texts from one natural language into another. The drawback is that this can be done only with formulaic rather than literary texts; the language has to be standardized to facilitate machine translation. However this area is of great interest to computer scientists who are investigating human cognitive processes and language recognition. |
