Translation and Globalization
With simultaneous interpretation and multilateral talks that simultaneously span continents and language groups, technology’s “linguistic marketplace” might appear to have silenced the demands and dangers of Babel. YouTube offers a subtitling service, and Google translates Web pages at the click of a mouse. Yet translation is far more than interpretation. Where interpretation makes its point and fades, the freed remainder, the trapped Other, and the domesticated foreign remain in translated texts.8 “We might say,” Eric Cheyfitz posits, “that at the heart of Links Of London Bracelets every imperial fiction (the heart of darkness) there is a fiction of a translation”. Translation has often served as a means of asserting national identity, especially, Cheyfitz notes, in the Elizabethan age an age in which the conquest of foreign domains, inclusive of their literatures, saw translation as a means of processing and emblematizing that conquest. Whether imperialistic, idealistic, or simply naive, an approach that teaches this fiction as fact wrongs students who aren’t taught to read translations as such. This “repression of translation,” Venuti argues, “makes ideas and forms appear to be free-floating, unmoored from history, transcending the linguistic and cultural differences that required not merely their translation in the first place, but also their interpretation in the classroom”.
We have come a long way since then, from conquering to all too often ignoring. Rather than usurping a nation’s literature wholesale, we often leave it in its native tongue, linguistically stranded. One of Hamar Evan-Zohar’s laws of literary interference holds that “a source language is selected by prestige,” and another that it is “selected by dominance” and that selection practice, like so many in the field of translation, and in education, is self-perpetuating . More prestige is to be found in Greek than in the linguistic nether lands of Frisian, and there is Links Of London Charms more economic sense in translating from English than from a language still struggling to develop a literature. Translation tends to follow a diffusive pattern, flowing from areas of high concentration to those of lower concentration, with the net result that English-language literature spreads throughout the world, but relatively little permeates the publishing bubble from the other direction.
Over the course of the semester, we also wondered to what extent literary translations into English conform to stylistic trends in contemporary domestic literature. Another of Evan-Zohar’s laws of literary interference, echoing Benjamin and Pound, asserts that” [interference occurs when a system is in need of items unavailable within itself; nevertheless, so many translations seem geared to support the mores of the target culture. Gunn maintains that various world literature texts widely taught and highly acclaimed, from “Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and his World to Octavio Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude would never have acquired the authority they still possess if they did not reflect interests widely shared in Anglo-American literary studies”. The works, of course, are still foreign, with elements that may expand English-language literature and the English language yet they are not chosen for these characteristics, but rather for their convergence.
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