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

OVIDI CARBONELL–IDENTITY IN TRANSLATION
and identity is constructed through conventions that obviously vary as audiences and their
experience and world view do vary too.
In this paper I would like to make a call for the integration of identity issues in
translation that are usually treated separately – and whose integration and/or separation is
largely a source of controversy, as pointed out by Baker (2001):
a) sociocultural: the historical, geopolitical concept characteristic of cultural
criticism and postcolonial writing, related to issues such as the question of
value [McGee], linguistic identity [Cano, Martines, Martines and Ponsoda],
transculturation [Pratt, Mallafrè], margin, dissemination [Bhabha], hybridation
(Bakhtin, Papastergiadis, Spivak) and cross-cultural fertilization [Clifford], to
name a few.
b) discursive: the textual, cognitive and linguistic concept characteristic of critical
discourse analysis that is on the basis of the social construction of the first
sociocultural perspective I have just mentioned, related to polyphony
(Bakhtin, Ducrot), intertextuality (so in vogue today), deixis and enunciation
tokens of reported speech, for example.
I take ideologies and social representations to be anchored in discourse. In short, I
am interested in the relocation of the subjects of enunciation that allow people to interact
while managing and defining their position in social and cultural categories. Identity is a
crucial part in the cognitive and social management of group relations, such as dominance,
conflict and resistance. It is part and parcel of the ideologies that legitimate or resist power
abuse and inequality (van Dijk 1997: 64). It is moreover fundamental to the legitimation of
difference and definition of a group, and therefore it is “not just a matter of using one dialect
or code rather than another” (Thornborrow 1999: 137).
My aim here is to make only some suggestions, not to develop or make an account
of any theory. I think that the application of identity issues to translation is still very
tentative: many questions are raised but little of the puzzle is solved. I shall try to approach
in a very superficial way a couple of texts that may shed some light in this.
FUZZY IDENTITIES
Identity is part of a social ideology system that “serve[s] as an interface between
collective group interests and individual social practices” (van Dijk 1997: 27). But let me
first acknowledge that ideology systems are usually blurred. In poststructuralist cultural
criticism it is often argued that there is a constant semiosis (following Sebeok), or that we
witness the insistence of the signifier, in Lacanian terms (McGee 1992: 107). In any case, there is
the sense of some lost meaning, and many authors such as Benjamin and Woolf
acknowledged it. So is Woolf’s “third voice”, according to McGee (ibid.):
The third voice would appear to be that dimension of language that resists
meaning and signification, that exceeds the intention of the addresser and escapes the
decoding of the addresee. No code can master its message. The third voice would be the
voice of language as language, its material dimension, which comes into play, for example,
in the act of translation. Walter Benjamin writes, “In all language and linguistic creations
there remains in addition to what can be conveyed something that cannot be
communicated; depending on the context in which it appears, it is something that
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