THE SCANDALS OF TRANSLATION

HETEROGENEITYshrewdly aims to counter the fragmentation of the field by assigning thecommissioning responsibilities to the linguistics editor, who is pursuingmore interdisciplinary projects. Yet this international publisher, at onceacademic and commercial, remains unique. In English, and no doubt inother languages, translation studies tend to be published by small presses,whether trade or university, for a limited, primarily academic readership,with most sales made to research libraries. Splintered into narrowconstituencies by disciplinary boundaries, translation is hardly starting newtrends in scholarly publishing or setting agendas in scholarly debate.This current predicament embarrasses translation studies by suggestingthat it is suffering, to some extent, from a self-inflicted marginality. Withrare exceptions, scholars have been reluctant to negotiate areas ofagreement and to engage more deeply with the cultural, political, andinstitutional problems posed by translation (for an exception see Hatimand Mason 1997). And so a critical assessment of the competing theoreticalorientations, an account of their advances and limitations, seems in order.As a translator and student of translation, I can evaluate them only as aninterested party, one who has found cultural studies a most productiveapproach, but who remains unwilling to abandon the archive and thecollection of empirical data (how could studies be cultural without them?).My main interest in the theories lies in their impact on themethodological fragmentation that characterizes translation research andkeeps translation in the margins of cultural discourse, both in and out ofthe academy. The question that most concerns me is whether theorists arecapable of bringing translation to the attention of a larger audience—larger, that is, than the relatively limited ones to which the competingtheories seem addressed. This question of audience in fact guides my owntheory and practice of translation, which are premised on the irreducibleheterogeneity of linguistic and cultural situations. To assess the currentstate of the discipline, then, and to make intelligible my assessment, I mustbegin with a manifesto of sorts, a statement of why and how I translate.Writing a minor literatureAs an American translator of literary texts I devise and execute my projects witha distinctive set of theoretical assumptions about language and textuality. Perhapsthe most crucial is that language is never simply an instrument ofcommunication employed by an individual according to a system of rules—evenif communication is undoubtedly among the functions that language canperform. Following Deleuze and Guattari (1987), I rather see language as acollective force, an assemblage of forms that constitute a semiotic regime.Circulating among diverse cultural constituencies and social institutions, theseforms are positioned hierarchically, with the standard dialect in dominance but9