Ideology What's in the name ?

Lecture7

Cultural turn - the move from translation as text to as culture and politics. (Mary Snell-Hornby 1990)

- Power in and on the publishing industry in pursuit of the ideologies;

- Translation as appropriation and rewriting including film rewrites;

- Translation and colonization vs post-colonization;

- Gender and translation.

 

Translation …

An act of communication permanently dealing with at least two languages along with a broad network of elements including cultural, historical, political and ideological differences. (Batik and Mason, 1997)

Rearing or manipulating original texts (Lefevere, 1992).

An ideological activity (definition of ideology in much broader than solely political sense).

 

Ideology What's in the name?

For Hatim and Mason ideology encompasses the tacit assumptions, believes and value systems which are shared collectively by social groups.

They make a distinction between

1. The ideology of translating i.e basic orientation chosen by a translator operating within a social a cultural context (the choice, for example, between Venuti’s domesticating and foreignizing translation)

2. The translation of ideology ( the extent of mediation supplied by a translator of sensitive texts, ‘mediation’ is defined as the “extent to which translators intervene in the transfer process, feeding their own knowledge and beliefs into processing the text”

 

Ideology as ‘the basis of the social representations’

by what means and to what extent

Transferring ideology is influenced by socio-cultural context (translating ideology)

but also what impact ideology has on choices made by translators (ideology of translation)

ideological intervention

- the most important thing is not how words are matched on the page, but why they are matched that way, what social, literary, ideological considerations let translators translate as they did (Hermans, 1994)

 

A case study: “by what means” & “to what extend”

· The imbalanced relations between Latin America and USA; the speech was given by President of Venezuela, at the UN in 2006. As an enemy of the US system, he condemned American politics as a form of imperialism.

Ideological shift (omission of “tyrant”, “imperialistic”, mocking)

· [ST]: El discurso del Presidente “tirano” mundial, lleno de cinismos… Yo tengo la impresion senor dictador imperialista

· [TT]: The world parent’s statement – cynical… I have the feeling, dear world dictator that you are…

· [Literal T]: The speech of President-tyrant of the world, full of cynicism…I have an impression, Mr.Imperialistic dictator that you are…

Questions on ideology to be answered…

§ The point of ideological discourse analysis is not merely to discover underlying ideologies, but to systematically link structures of discourse with structures of ideologies.

§ If ideologies are structured by group-schema categories, then we may expect that discourse meanings influenced by such ideologies typically feature information that answers the following questions:

- Who are We? Who do (do not) belong to Us?

- What do We do? What are Our activities? What is expected of Us?

- What are the goals of these activities?

- What norms and values do We respect in such activities?

- To which groups are We related: Who are Our friends and enemies?

- What are the resources We typically have or do not have (privileged) access to?

Cultural filter + Expectancy Norms

· With the use of a strategy called “ cultural filter ” the translator can make systematic allowances for accommodating differences in text production

(House, 2008: 153)

· The cultural filter employed by the translator can be justified in terms of, what Chesterman calls expectancy norms, when the text is adopted according to “expectancies of the readers of a translation (of a given type) concerning what translation (of this type) should be like.”

(Chesterman, 1997:64)

· “depriving ST producers of their voice and re-expressing foreign cultural values in terms of what is familiar (and therefore unchallenging) to the target readership”

(Hatim, 1997:145)

Accountability norm

· This translation […] was commissioned by the publishing house, which then was an instrument for the Communist propaganda, the dramatic ideological shift in the TT may be justified in terms of accountability norm, “which governed the practice of translation in terms of loyalty with regard to the commissioner of the translation, the translator himself or herself, the prospective readership and other relevant parties”

(Chesterman 1997:68)

 

Andre Lefevere: ideological tensions in the translated text

The motivations for rewriting are

· Ideological (conforming or rebelling against the dominant ideology)

· Poetological (-||- the dominant/preferred poetics)

Literary system in which translation functions is controlled by three main factors:

1. Professionals within the literary system

2. Patronage outside the literary system (the powers that can further or hinder the rewriting of literature: ideological, economic, status components, undifferentiated/differentiated)

3. The dominant poetics (literary devices, the concept of the role of literature)

An example given by Lefevere is of Edward Fitzgerald, the 19^th century translator (or ‘rewriter’) of the Persian poet Omar Khayyam.

Fitzgerald considered Persians inferior and felt he should ‘take liberties’ un the translation in order to ‘improve’ on the original, at the same time making it conform to the expected western literary conventions of his time.

Using a 15^th century Oxford manuscript, Fitzgerald recreated the poem in the mid-Victorian style that was loosely based on the original Persian text (11^th century).

Relying more on his intuitive guess than his knowledge of Persian in interpreting The Rubaiyyat, Fitzgerald was guilty of more paraphrasing, omission and addition.

Postcolonialism

Prefix ‘post’ – after colonialism

Colonialism: extension of a nations rule over the territory beyond its borders; a population is subjected to one’s domination.

Two sides of colonialism: militaristic & civilizational (conquest of minds of people)

Post-colonial criticism: to study the effects of imperialistic views in postcolonial societies (on the oppressed) and the counter-narrative (resistant literature)

Postcolonial theory: “ When third world intellectuals have arrived in the first world academe ”

Edward Said

· Moved colonial discourse into the first world academy and into literary and cultural theory

· Coined the term “ Orientalism ”

· Described the binary between the Orient and the Occident (West)

· Attempted to explain how European/Western colonizers looked upon the “Orient”

· A mystical plane that was stereotyped due to lack of knowledge and imagination

· Said redefined Orientalism as a conglomeration of false suppositions, derived not from facts, but from preconceived standards (Western depiction as an inferior world, a place of backwardness)

 

 

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Professor of Columbia University, US

Spivak (born 1942) is an Indian literary critic and theorist. She is best known for the article Can the Subaltern Speak?, considered a founding text of postcolonialism.

Seminal essay “ The politics of translation ” (1993)

English as a language of power translationese – eliminates the identity of politicaly less powerful individuals and cultures; overassimilating the work to make it accessible to the Western readers.

Homi Bhabha

Homi K. Bhabha (born 1949) is an Indian postcolonial theorist.

“The Location of Culture” (1994)

He constructs his theoretical tropes of mimicry and hybridity, third space, cultural ambivalence.

He examines how Indians responded to the assimilative projects of the British colonial rule.

 

Mimicry vs hybridity

What was required for them was some form of imitation of the British – their language, religion and customs. The strategy they used to evade these Eurocentric demands is the basis of what Bhabha defines as mimicry. It is, again, a repetition with a twist? An immitation which appropriates the colonial discourse and puts it in new contexts that virtually send it off track.

For Bhabha, hybridity is the process by which the colonial governing authority undertakes to translate the identity of the colonised (the Other) within a singular universal framework, but then fails producing something familiar but new.

Bhabha contends that a new hybrid identity or subject-position emerges from the interweaving of elements of the coloniser and colonised challenging the validity and euthenticity of any essentialist cultural identity.

Cultural hybridity is a in-between place, which brings together contradictory knowledges, practices and discourses: signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized, and read anew (c.f. remixing culture) is termed as the third space.

 

Third space

For me the importance of hybridity is not to be able to trace two original moments from which the third emerges, rather hybridity to me is the “Third space”, which enables other positions to emerge. (H. Bhabha)

According to Bhabha, this hybrid third space is an ambivalent site where cultural meaning and representation have no “primordial unity or fixity” (Bhabha 1994)

Example J

One of the most thought-provoking papers at the Warwick conference in 1988 wa presented by the Indian scholar Mahasweta Sengupta with the title ‘Translation, colonialism and poetics: Robindranath Tagore in two worlds’ (Sengupta 1990)

Her example is Tken from Tagore’s collextion of poems Gitanjali: Song Offering, for which in 1913 – as the first non- European – he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature. Sengupta first cited Tagore’s (prizewinning) English version (1990: 56), then gives her own literal translation from the original Bengali 1990:57).

One can notice clearly that Tagore changes not onle the style of the original, but also the imagery and the tone of the lyric, not to mention the register of language which is made to match the target language poetics of Edwardian English. These changes are conscious and deliberately adopted to suit the poetics of the target system. As a result, none of the lyrical qualities of the originals are carried over into the English translations. (Sengunta 1990:57)

Tagore’s contact zone

Sengupta assumes that the reason why Tagore made his own poems in English is so different from what they were in Bengali lay in his understanding of English language and literature as it was disseminated in India at the time. That was, in Pratt’s terminology, the contact zone, and he translated his own poems to suit the aesthetic ideology of the dominating culture.

Critical discourse analysis

· Norman Fairclough

· Teun van Dijk

· CDA can be applied to defining ideological and power implicitness in various discourses.

· “a type of discourse analytical research that primarily studies the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context” (Ivan Dejk)

CDA as a research tool

Main tenets of CDA

- Discourse is a form of social action or social practice

- Discourse does ideological work

- Power relations are created and maintained through discourse

- Discourse is a intertextual and historical

- Discourse must always be analysed in context

- The link between the text and society is mediated through a range of institutional practices

- CDA is interpretative and explanatory

- CDA is a form of social action. CD analysts are socially-committed

 

Acc. To Fairclough: СDA

Norman Fairclough developed a three-dimensional framework for studying discourse:

1. Analysis of language of the texts – MICROLEVEL

2. Analysis of discourse practice (processes of text production, distribution and consumption) – MESOLEVEL

3. Analysis of discursive events as instances of sociocultural practice MACROLEVEL

-at the micro-level, the analysts considers various aspects of textual/ linguistic analysis, for examples syntactic analysis, use of metaphor and rhetoric devices

-the meso-level or “level of discursive practice” involves studying issues of production and consumption, for instance, which institution produced a text, who is the target audience, etc”

- at the macro-level, the analyst is concerned with intertextual and interdiscursive elements and tries to take into account the broad societal currents that are affecting the text being studied

Gender

With the rise of the feminist movement, the notion of gender evolved, extending upon the simple definition limited to biological sexual difference.
1970s: the feminist theory embraced the concept of a distinction between biological sex and the social construct of gender.

John Money introduced the terminological distinction between biological sex and gender as a role in 1955.

Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to, and differentiating between and from masculinity and femininity.

Gender identity refers to a personal identification with a particular gender and gender role in society.

4 LINES OF INQUIRY IN FEMININE TS
I. Uncovering female translators and their role in history. Women by and large were not meant to participate in in public discourse but sometimes they could translate, as a form of secondary speaking. Some women even felt more comfortable translating then writing their own name.

II. The historical and ideological construction of translation and its remarkable correlation with traditional gender constructions.

III. The translation of gendered language. At first the issues centered on the translator’s responsibility when confronted with gender bias in texts, subsequently attention shifted from ethical to technical questions, as translators struggled to cope with the explosion of experimental writing by feminist authors seeking to forge a language of their own.

IV. The practice of feminist translation and criticism.
• Translation as demonstrative rewriting.

 

Virginia Wolf

Novel “A Room of One’s Own” (1919)

1) Declares men have and continue to treat women as inferiors;

2) The male defines what means to be female and controls the political, economic, social and literary structures.

“A feminist is any woman that tells the truth about her life”.

Toril Moi “Feminist, Female, Feminine”

She distinguishes between

• Feminism as a political position
• Femaleness as a matter of biology
• Femininity as a set of culturally defined characteristics.

“Femininity” is a cultural construct: one isn’t born a woman, one becomes one, as Simone de Beauvoir puts it.

Framework

Gender questions apply to research on translation in different ways:

• By focusing on gender as a sociopolitical category in macro-analyses of translation – phenomena, such as the production, criticism, exchange, and fame of works, authors and translators;
• By examining gender issues as the site of political or literary/aesthetic engagement – through micro-analyses of translated texts.

L. Chamberlain’s example

Suzanne Jill Levine, the translator of a novel by the Cuban exile Cabrera Infante which is ideologically offemsive to women, “mocks” and “manipulates” “women and their words”.

“Where does this leave a woman as translator of such a book? Is she not a double betrayal, to repeat the archetype once again?” asks Levine

The answer she offers us is the conviction that her only alternative is to become a traduttora traditora, “because of what is lost and can be gained in crossing the language barrier, because all the inevitable rereading that occurs in transposing a text from one context to another, a translation must subvert the original”

Chamberlain shows how, instead of rejecting the translation commission, Levine chooses instead to subvert the text, to play infidelity. And to follow out the text’s parodic logic. She does this first my choosing to translate the text and second by challenging the reader linguistically with new puns, forcing the reader to question the status of the original. As Levine herself describes it:

Translation should be a critical act, however, creating doubt, posing questions to its reader, recontextualizing the ideology of the original text. Since a good translation, as with all rhetoric, aims to (re)produce an effect, to persuade a reader, it is, in the broadest terms, a political act.

Rather than regret translation’s shortcomings, Levine stresses how translation is itself a creative act, unearthing a version lying dormant beneath an original text, and animating it, like some mad scientist, in order to create a text illuminated and motivated by the original.

 

Lecture7

Cultural turn - the move from translation as text to as culture and politics. (Mary Snell-Hornby 1990)

- Power in and on the publishing industry in pursuit of the ideologies;

- Translation as appropriation and rewriting including film rewrites;

- Translation and colonization vs post-colonization;

- Gender and translation.

 

Translation …

An act of communication permanently dealing with at least two languages along with a broad network of elements including cultural, historical, political and ideological differences. (Batik and Mason, 1997)

Rearing or manipulating original texts (Lefevere, 1992).

An ideological activity (definition of ideology in much broader than solely political sense).

 

Ideology What's in the name?

For Hatim and Mason ideology encompasses the tacit assumptions, believes and value systems which are shared collectively by social groups.

They make a distinction between

1. The ideology of translating i.e basic orientation chosen by a translator operating within a social a cultural context (the choice, for example, between Venuti’s domesticating and foreignizing translation)

2. The translation of ideology ( the extent of mediation supplied by a translator of sensitive texts, ‘mediation’ is defined as the “extent to which translators intervene in the transfer process, feeding their own knowledge and beliefs into processing the text”

 

Ideology as ‘the basis of the social representations’

by what means and to what extent

Transferring ideology is influenced by socio-cultural context (translating ideology)

but also what impact ideology has on choices made by translators (ideology of translation)

ideological intervention

- the most important thing is not how words are matched on the page, but why they are matched that way, what social, literary, ideological considerations let translators translate as they did (Hermans, 1994)

 

A case study: “by what means” & “to what extend”

· The imbalanced relations between Latin America and USA; the speech was given by President of Venezuela, at the UN in 2006. As an enemy of the US system, he condemned American politics as a form of imperialism.

Ideological shift (omission of “tyrant”, “imperialistic”, mocking)

· [ST]: El discurso del Presidente “tirano” mundial, lleno de cinismos… Yo tengo la impresion senor dictador imperialista

· [TT]: The world parent’s statement – cynical… I have the feeling, dear world dictator that you are…

· [Literal T]: The speech of President-tyrant of the world, full of cynicism…I have an impression, Mr.Imperialistic dictator that you are…

Questions on ideology to be answered…

§ The point of ideological discourse analysis is not merely to discover underlying ideologies, but to systematically link structures of discourse with structures of ideologies.

§ If ideologies are structured by group-schema categories, then we may expect that discourse meanings influenced by such ideologies typically feature information that answers the following questions:

- Who are We? Who do (do not) belong to Us?

- What do We do? What are Our activities? What is expected of Us?

- What are the goals of these activities?

- What norms and values do We respect in such activities?

- To which groups are We related: Who are Our friends and enemies?

- What are the resources We typically have or do not have (privileged) access to?

Cultural filter + Expectancy Norms

· With the use of a strategy called “ cultural filter ” the translator can make systematic allowances for accommodating differences in text production

(House, 2008: 153)

· The cultural filter employed by the translator can be justified in terms of, what Chesterman calls expectancy norms, when the text is adopted according to “expectancies of the readers of a translation (of a given type) concerning what translation (of this type) should be like.”

(Chesterman, 1997:64)

· “depriving ST producers of their voice and re-expressing foreign cultural values in terms of what is familiar (and therefore unchallenging) to the target readership”

(Hatim, 1997:145)

Accountability norm

· This translation […] was commissioned by the publishing house, which then was an instrument for the Communist propaganda, the dramatic ideological shift in the TT may be justified in terms of accountability norm, “which governed the practice of translation in terms of loyalty with regard to the commissioner of the translation, the translator himself or herself, the prospective readership and other relevant parties”

(Chesterman 1997:68)