UTF-8__0415396417Translation

TRANSLATION, ETHICS, POLITICSterminology and for making a number of cuts, especially in the lists of women’shistorical achievements in the sciences (Simons 1999). No doubt the errorsand omissions are there, and they affect the book’s tenor. The criticismhowever tends to ignore evidence in favour of the translator. Parshley greatlyimproved the accuracy of Beauvoir’s cavalier referencing, he tried his best toseek clarification from an unresponsive author, he obtained her permissionfor the cuts he made, and anyway it was the publisher who suggested that thebook’s numerous repetitions be reduced (Bair 1990). At issue in a case like thisis the fairness of the criticism and the danger of double standards, as indeedRosemary Arrojo (1994) has charged. Feminist translators can manipulatetexts, but other translators cannot? What determines whether reconfiguringa text’s tenor qualifies as an objectionable distortion or as an act of politicaldefiance?Part of the feminist answer has been that, for them, translation is reparation.In a world of power imbalances, the violence that resists patriarchaloppression is not to be equated with the violence exercised by the system.It is this awareness of power differentials that links feminist work most closelywith postcolonial approaches. Both approaches also share an interest in questionsof social inclusion and exclusion (who can or must translate, on whoseterms, and who benefits?), and in the deployment of translation both as partof a knowledge-controlling apparatus and as a vehicle of either complicity orresistance. The postcolonial view of translation has, in addition, delved intonotions of hybridity and made translation into a cipher for something muchlarger than interlingual traffic.One area of postcolonial research deals with the role of translation incolonial and postcolonial contexts (Bassnett and Trivedi 1999; Cheyfitz 1991;Niranjana 1992; Rafael 1993, 2005; Simon and St-Pierre 2000; Tymoczko1999). Richard Jacquemond (1992), for instance, comments on the significantdifferences between translation from and into dominant and dominatedlanguages respectively, both during and after periods of colonial rule. Forthe colonizer, translation into the hegemonic language amounts to bringinghome an anthropological exhibit which adds to the centre’s knowledge ofthe colonies, and knowledge is power. For the colonized, translation from themaster tongue introduces the high-prestige commodities which symbolize theassimilation process they are meant to aspire to; or, more routinely, it serves asan instrument to increase the local efficiency of colonial control. Jacquemondalso shows why in each case the postcolonial world presents the more complexpicture, as the legacy of colonialism lingers among the ex-colonizers as wellas the ex-colonized.As we saw above, earlier work, not indebted to the postcolonialparadigm, had edged already towards the recognition of not just asymmetriesbut inequalities between cultures, and had developed an interest in thetranslator as a cultural agent positioned in institutional and other networks.Postcolonial theory, however, has vastly accelerated these developments,101