RESPONSE TO POST-COLONIAL TRANSLATION: THEORY AND PRACTICE

“Octavio Paz claims that translation is the principal means we have of understanding the world we live in. The world, he says, is presented to us as a growing heap of texts, each slightly different from the one that came before it: translations of translations of translations. Each text is unique, yet at the same time it is the translation of another text. No text can be completely original because language of itself, in its very essence, is already a translation – first from the nonverbal world, and then, because each sign and each phrase is a translation of another sign, another phrase.” (Bassnett and Trivedi 1999: 2-3)

Life is a constant (re)production. Birth can be seen as the beginning of life. What is (re)produced by birth is the baby, the baby takes after her/his parents and grandparents and grandparents and all her/his ancestors to a certain extent. The extent of the resemblance, however, is birth-specific; baby A from parents B and C might have many similarities with them, whereas baby Ç from parents D and F might have less. Nevertheless, however the extent of the similarities might be, the baby is a reproduced form of her/his parents.
As soon as the baby comes into existence, s/he begins to think. And most children make their first translation as of the moment they are borne: their first cry. The cry is in fact the signifier of the pain they are suffering from, as a result of the first meeting of their lungs with oxygen. As they grow up, they make more and more translations, they translate their happiness into laughs and smiles, whereas they translate their pain and suffering into cries and screams. Thanks to these translations, they communicate, and make others know how they are feeling, what they are thinking, and make others know if they need something. In most cases, the mother is the most efficient reader of the simple language the baby translator uses in her/his target language, and she helps her/him learn a more complex language so that in the future s/he can communicate with other people to express her/his needs.
Some mothers and parents make their children learn more than one language at an early age, because they believe, as multilinguals they can become more successful in life. Some parents prefer sending their children to schools where they can learn a second and even a third language. The last two are the cases generally observed in countries where the natural language used in everyday life or the official language is not English, which is the most dominant (even if not the most spoken) language of our time.
“The passion for English knowledge” penetrates almost every part of these countries (cited by Arrojo, 1999:141). People with different social backgrounds can be observed using English words in their sentences, and this might be seen as a result of English’s being “the language of prestige and power” (Prasad 1999: 47). On a chat program over the internet, even a letter of the alphabet of the natural language can be substituted by “w” which is a letter of the English alphabet, for the one who uses “w” instead of “v” in her/his sentence is deemed more “trendy”. S/he signals that s/he belongs to a class which is capable of using (at least some) elements of the language of prestige (Prasad 1999:47). This kind of usage certainly does not stem from a need to ease the language, because, as Dyson argues “a true bilingual would have perfect control over two or more linguistic systems and manage to keep them separate from each other” (cited by Prasad 1999:46). Then it can be seen as another kind of need, which is psychological: the “dominated” people’s desire to turn into the dominant. By way of using the elements of the dominant language, they might be unintentionally attempting to gain the prestige of the people who belong to and/or own the most dominant culture of their time, or they might be unintentionally feeling as if they were one of the people of the “dominant” culture. The dominant culture, then, can argued to be the dominated culture’s “subject presumed to know” (Arrojo 1999: 142, 152). “The person in whom” one presumes “knowledge to exist thereby acquires” one’s “love” (cited by Arrojo, 1999: 143). It can be argued that the child who is subject to “the alluring foreignness of the dominant English” (Arrojo 1999:142) translates his admiration for this language into sentences in her/his mother tongue which include English elements.
On the other hand, from the viewpoint of the “dominant”, the dominated needs to be explored and explained, otherwise it cannot be known and understood: the explanation of the dominated is dependent on the dominant. Commenting on Lispector, Cixous says: “I would never have another seminar if I knew that enough people read Clarice Lispector... So I continue to accompany her with a reading that watches over her” (cited by Arrojo 1999:153). In a sense, what Cixous does not tell about her relationship with Lispector here is the fact that she is Lispector’s “subject presumed to know”, and Lispector can be “read” by “enough people” only if Cixous expresses in her own words what Lispector tells. Lispector is only reachable through Cixous’s translation, which she deems produced as result of “a careful word for word translation strategy...” (Arrojo 1999:148). The powerful one here is not Lispector, but Cixous (ibid 1999:153), and Lispector “has to be ‘saying’ precisely that which Cixous needs and wants to hear” (Arrojo 1999:153).
Every writing including translation is rewriting (Tymoczko 1999:41), and every rewriting tacitly includes information inter alia about the relationship it establishes with its predecessor. A writing which is used as a point of departure in another writing can mean something not at all/slightly/completely different from what is being retold, and the choice is made for a specific purpose. In most cases, asymmetrical relations of power can help determine what the purpose is.
References:
1- Bassnett and Trivedi (1999) “Introduction: of colonies, cannibals and vernaculars” in Post-colonial translation: theory & practice, ed. Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi, Routledge.
2- G. J. V Prasad (1999) “Writing translation: the strange case of the Indian English novel” in Post-colonial translation: theory & practice, ed. Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi, Routledge.
3- Rosemary Arrojo (1999) “Interpretation as possesive love: Helene Cixous, Clarice Lispector and the ambivalence of fidelity” in Post-colonial translation: theory & practice, ed. Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi, Routledge.
4- Maria Tymoczko (1999) “The Metonymics of Translation” in Translation in a Post-colonial Context, St. Jerome.