últimas corrientes teóricas en los estudios de traducción - Gredos ...

OVIDI CARBONELL–IDENTITY IN TRANSLATION
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IDENTITY IN TRANSLATION
OVIDI CARBONELL
University of Salamanca
Friends ask me why I don’t just drop my non-African names. It would be a good idea, but
not a practical one. In reality, my reason has nothing to do with practicality, it has to do with my
own identity. For better, for worse, my names locate me in time and in space. It gives me a sense of
my own history that I not only share specifically with a generation of people in Africa but also with
all Africans in the Diaspora.
I belong to a time. The twentieth century. A time of fragmentation, a time of rebirth.
I need to understand and know myself from that position. It is the only position I have, wherever
I am. In both my private and my public life. I’m also lucky. Naming myself differently to suit the
occasion allows me the space to experience all my subjective realities and identities (we all have
many) in a way that does not imply fragmentation, but coherence.
(Nkweto Simmonds 1998, apud Thornborrow 139)
Writing and talking about cultural appropriation, I reposition myself in a somewhat
precarious way within a society that seeks to deny how segregated it is; I go from being a “minority”
critic dutifully explaining Otherness to one who addresses whites as agents in an ongoing dynamic
of racialization. (…) Privileged women in Latin America have also relied through history on
subaltern cultures for signs they could appropriate as markers for their transgressiveness (Coco
Fusco 68-9).
“Identity” seems to be a commonplace in recent approaches to translation which
are more or less byproducts of a widespread cultural approach. The development of
“cultural studies” in the United States and European universities has aroused an interest in
several sociolinguistic issues such as translation and gender, translation and postcolonial
identities, translation and nation, ebonics and translation, etc. many of which are developing
into [part of] separate points of view, even disciplines.
But it is my contention that an excessive narrowing of these approaches, even
though they might be considered, as they in fact are, as the crossroads of essentially
multidisciplinary fields, might at least hinder the workings of language in the shaping of
identities and the role played by translation. According to Thornborrow, we establish
identity when we shape other’s views of who we are through the use of language, but also
when collectively social groups or communities use language as a means of identifying their
members, establish their boundaries and construct a social identity or identities for
themselves (Thornborrow 136). It is, no doubt, “a powerful means of exercising social
control”. Identity can be understood in psychological terms, in discursive (sociolinguistic or
pragmatic), sociological or even political terms. All of them are relevant to translation.
Translators are generally unaware of the fact that they are helping build identities which
perhaps are different (though perhaps complementary) to those in the original work. As a
rule of thumb, no re-creation of any identity in the target culture equals that of the source
culture −but that is an unnecessary truism, since every reading is an act of interpretation,