UTF-8__0415396417Translation

TRANSLATION, ETHICS, POLITICStranslator’s subjectivity, generating a complex message in which severalspeaking voices and perspectives intermingle. The assumption, incidentally,that the translator’s ‘differential voice’ (Folkart’s term) will necessarily haveits own timbre and ambience was later vindicated with the help of forensicstylistics: a study analysing a computerized corpus of translations by twodifferent translators found that each left their linguistically idiosyncraticsignature on their translations, regardless of the nature of the original text(Baker 2000). The relevance of such data does not lie in the mere recognitionof the translator’s linguistic tics being strewn around a text. As MikhailBakhtin had already suggested (1981, 1986) in his discussions of dialogismand heteroglossia, the translator’s own position and ideology are ineluctablywritten into the texts he or she translates. At the same time, the translatoras re-enunciator and discursive subject in the text also brings on questions ofresponsibility and accountability, and hence ethics.A decisive shift of emphasis in translation studies may be discerned fromthis. For Toury, norms guided the translator’s textual decision making andhence determined the shape of the resulting translation; since he took itas axiomatic that the relation between translation and original was one ofequivalence, norms determined equivalence, and there the matter ended.Seeing the translator as re-enunciator still has him or her making textualchoices, but the relevance of these choices is now that they are read as profilinga subject-position which is primarily ideological. As a result, translatorsacquire agency in the evolving social, political and cultural configurationsthat make up society. A number of recent studies have focused on the role oftranslators in the context of cultural change, political discourse and identityformation in a variety of contexts (for a sampling: Bermann and Wood 2005;Calzada Pérez 2003; Cronin 2006; Ellis and Oakley-Brown 2001; House et al.2005; Tymoczko 2000; Tymoczko and Gentzler 2002; Venuti 1998b, 2005a).Considering in particular the role of interpreters and translators in contemporarysituations of military and ideological conflict, Mona Baker (2006) hasturned towards the theory of social narrative to frame her analyses. JeremyMunday (2008) has harnessed critical discourse analysis and the linguistics ofM.A.K. Halliday to analyse the ideological load of translated texts.6.3 REPRESENTATION 1A ‘return’ to ethics suggests that the question of ethics has been raisedbefore, as indeed it has, but from a different angle. As early as the 1980sAntoine Berman linked literary translation with ethnocentrism and otherness.In his study of German Romanticism (1992), he traced Herder’s ideas onthe intimate link between language and culture, Wilhelm von Humboldt’sinsistence on the need for translations to retain the foreignness of theforeign original, Schleiermacher’s call on translators to take the reader to theforeign author rather than vice versa, and the uncompromising literalness of97