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Translating minoritized cultures
Mukherjee, Arun Mukherjee, Alok Godard, Barbara
Mukherjee, Arun
Mukherjee, Alok
Godard, Barbara
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n501-2313-1-PB.pdf
Adobe PDF, 142.51 KB
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" Titles are signposts and ours introduces some of the key issues we will be addressing. Translating is a verbal form signalling an action or intervention involving movement not only between languages but also between contexts and cultures. Minoritized, unlike minority, emphasizes the process of minoritizing and insists that the relative prestige of languages and cultures and the conditions of their contact are constituted in social relations of ruling in both national and international arenas. The way translation participates in both producing and overcoming hierarchies is what we want to examine in some recent translations we have done. Cultures, the third word in our title, underscores how translators work not just with languages but with the often divergent values produced by languages in different socio-cultural contexts. With the so-called “cultural turn” in translation studies, translators have come to be perceived as mediators working in the contact zone to shape cultures. Depending on their translation practice, they may introduce the radically new and previously unthought into a culture or work to shore up established values. A shift in conceptualizing the translator’s activity has occurred away from a word-for-word or a sense-for-sense translation paradigm⎯two contending models for translation practice as far back as the fourth century C.E. when Jerome, the patron saint of translators, wrote a letter in defence of his translation practices in rendering the bible into Latin. He had been accused of not being literally faithful to the number of words in a sentence or the number of syllables in a sequence but had instead translated the sense or meaning of the Greek or Hebrew text. Debates between advocates of literal and figurative translation have persisted in different forms through the centuries. In the last decade or so, there has been an equally radical shift in translation theory away from a focus on both the letter and the spirit of a text to look instead at the socio-cultural context as the site in which meaning is made and to take into account the pertinent elements of this context in specific translation practices. Central to the differences between contexts are vectors of power, in the case of the texts we have translated which are by members of subaltern or marginalized groups, hierarchies of privilege organized around caste, class and gender."
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2006
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With permission of the license/copyright holder