Course 3

CULTURAL AND IDEOLOGICAL TURNS IN TRANSLATION

STUDIES
 • What is text?

• Who is author?
CULTURAL AND
• Who has the Authority?
IDEOLOGICAL TURNS

Source Text (ST) Target Text (TT)

The original (valuable) The Copy (derivative, secondary)
Author(ity) the Translator
Source Culture Target Culture
ENGLISH TRANSLATION TURKISH
Cultural and Ideological Turns

• In their introduction to the collection of essays Translation, History and Culture, Susan
Bassnett and André Lefevere dismiss the kinds of linguistic theories of translation, which,
they say, ‘have moved from word to text as a unit, but not beyond’ (Bassnett and Lefevere
1990: 4).

• Also dismissed are ‘painstaking comparisons between originals and translations’ which do
not consider the text in its cultural environment. Instead, Bassnett and Lefevere focus on the
interaction between translation and culture, on the way in which culture impacts and
constrains translation and on ‘the larger issues of context, history and convention’ (ibid.: 11).

• They examine the image of literature that is created by forms such as anthologies,
commentaries, film adaptations and translations, and the institutions that are involved in that
process. Thus, the move from translation as text to translation as culture and politics is what
Mary Snell-Hornby (1990), in her paper in the same collection, terms ‘the cultural turn’.
Cultural and Ideological Turns

• These include studies of changing standards in translation over time, the power
exercised in and on the publishing industry in pursuit of specific ideologies, feminist
writing and translation, translation as ‘appropriation’, translation and colonization, and
translation as rewriting, including film rewrites.
• In this course, we consider three areas where cultural studies has influenced translation
studies: translation as rewriting, which is a development of systems theory;
• translation and gender,
• translation and postcolonialism.
• The ideology of the theorists themselves is discussed and other, more recent, work on
translation, ideology and power
Translation as rewriting

• Lefevere focuses particularly on the examination of ‘very concrete factors’ that systemically
govern the reception, acceptance or rejection of literary texts; that is, ‘issues such as power,
ideology, institution and manipulation’ (Lefevere 1992a: 2).

• The people involved in such power positions are the ones Lefevere sees as ‘rewriting’ literature
and governing its consumption by the general public. The motivation for such rewriting can be
ideological (conforming to or rebelling against the dominant ideology) or poetological
(conforming to or rebelling against the dominant/preferred poetics).

• The bringing together of studies of ‘original’ writing and translations shows translation being
incorporated into general literary criticism. However, it is translation that is central to
Lefevere’s book:

•
Translation is the most obviously recognizable type of rewriting, and . . . it is potentially the
most influential because it is able to project the image of an author and/or those works
beyond the boundaries of their culture of origin. (Lefevere 1992a: 9)
Translation as rewriting

• For Lefevere, the literary system in which translation functions is controlled by two main
factors, which are:

• (1) professionals within the literary system, who partly determine the dominant poetics;

• (2) patronage outside the literary system, which partly determines the ideology.

• Lefevere identifies three elements to this patronage:

(1) The ideological component: This constrains the choice of subject and the form of its
presentation.
(2) The economic component: This concerns the payment of writers and rewriters.
(3) The status component: This occurs in many forms. In return for economic payment from a
benefactor or literary press, the beneficiary is often expected to conform to the patron’s
expectations.
Translation as rewriting

• Patronage wields most power in the operation of ideology, while

the professionals have most influence in determining the poetics.
As far as the dominant poetics is concerned, Lefevere (ibid.:
26) analyses two components:
(1)Literary devices: These include the range of genres, symbols,
leitmotifs and narrative plot and characters, which may become
formalized as in the case of European fairytales (e.g. princesses,
princes, evil stepmothers) or Japanese manga comics.
(2)The concept of the role of literature: This is the relation of
literature to the social system in which it exists.
Poetics, ideology and translation in Lefevere’s
work

• The interaction between poetics, ideology and translation leads Lefevere to make a key
claim:

• On every level of the translation process, it can be shown that, if linguistic

considerations enter into conflict with considerations of an ideological and/or
poetological nature, the latter tend to win out. (Lefevere 1992a: 39)

For Lefevere, therefore, the most important consideration is the ideological one. In this
case, it refers to the translator’s ideology or the ideology imposed upon the translator by
patronage. The poetological consideration refers to the dominant poetics in the TL culture.
Together, ideology and poetics dictate the translation strategy and the solution to specific
problems.
Poetics, ideology and translation in Lefevere’s
work

• An example given by Lefevere is taken from the Classical Greek play

Lysistrata, by Aristophanes; there, Lysistrata asks the allegorical female
peace character to bring the Spartan emissary to her, adding En me– dido
te–n cheira, te–s sathe–s age [lit. ‘If he doesn’t give you his hand, take
him by the penis’]. Lefevere lists English translations over the years that
have rendered penis variously as membrum virile, nose, leg, handle, life-
line and anything else, often accompanied by justificatory footnotes.
According to Lefevere, such euphemistic translations are ‘to no small
extent indicative of the ideology dominant at a certain time in a certain
society’ (ibid.: 41)
Translation and gender

• The interest of cultural studies in translation inevitably took translation

studies away from purely linguistic analysis and brought it into contact
with other disciplines. Yet this ‘process of disciplinary hybridization’
(Simon 1996: ix) has not always been straightforward.
• Sherry Simon, in her Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the
Politics of Transmission (1996), criticizes translation studies for often
using the term culture ‘as if it referred to an obvious and unproblematic
reality’ (ibid.: ix).
• Lefevere (1985: 226), for example, had defined it as simply ‘the
environment of a literary system’. Simon approaches translation from a
gender-studies angle. She sees a language of sexism in translation
studies, with its images of dominance, fidelity, faithfulness and
betrayal.
Translation and gender

• Feminist theorists also see a parallel between the status of translation, which is often considered
to be derivative and inferior to original writing, and that of women, so often repressed in society
and literature. This is the core of feminist translation theory, which seeks to ‘identify and
critique the tangle of concepts which relegates both women and translation to the bottom of the
social and literary ladder’ (Simon 1996: 1). But Simon takes this further:

• For feminist translation, fidelity is to be directed toward neither the author nor the reader, but
toward the writing project – a project in which both writer and translator participate. (Simon
1996: 2)

• to emphasize their identity and ideological position that was part of the cultural dialogue

• Barbara Godard, theorist and translator, is openly assertive about the manipulation this
involved:

• The feminist translator, affirming her critical difference, her delight in interminable rereading
and re-writing, flaunts the signs of her manipulation of the text. (Godard 1990: 91)
Translation and gender

• One such strategy discussed by Simon is the treatment of

linguistic markers of gender. Examples quoted from de
Lotbinière-Harwood’s translations include using a bold ‘e’
in the word one to emphasize the feminine, capitalization of
M in HuMan Rights to show the implicit sexism, the
neologism auther (as opposed to author) to translate the
French neologism auteure, and the female personification
of nouns such as aube (dawn) with the English pronoun she
(Simon 1996: 21).
Postcolonial translation theory

• In Translation and Gender, Sherry Simon’s focus centres on underlining the importance of the cultural
turn in translation. In the conclusion, she insists on how ‘contemporary feminist translation has made
gender the site of a consciously transformative project, one which reframes conditions of textual
authority’ (1996: 167) and summarizes the contribution of cultural studies to translation as follows:

• Cultural studies brings to translation an understanding of the complexities of gender and culture. It
allows us to situate linguistic transfer within the multiple ‘post’ realities of today: poststructuralism,
postcolonialism and postmodernism. (Simon 1996: 136)

• In subsequent years it is in fact postcolonialism that has attracted the attention of many translation
studies researchers. Though its specific scope is sometimes undefined, postcolonialism is generally
used to cover studies of the history of the former colonies, studies of powerful European empires,
resistance to the colonialist powers and, more broadly, studies of the effect of the imbalance of power
relations between colonized and colonizer.
Postcolonial translation theory

• The ideological consequences of the translation of ‘Third World’ literature into English and the
distortion this entails western feminists who expect feminist writing from outside Europe to be
translated into the language of power, English. In Spivak’s view, such translation is often expressed in
‘translatese’, which eliminates the identity of individuals and cultures that are politically less powerful
and leads to a standardization of very different voices:

• In the act of wholesale translation into English there can be a betrayal of the democratic ideal into
the law of the strongest. This happens when all the literature of the Third World gets translated into a
sort of with-it translatese, so that the literature by a woman in Palestine begins to resemble, in the
feel of its prose, something by a man in Taiwan. (Spivak: 1993/2012: 314–16)

In Spivak’s opinion, the ‘politics of translation’ currently gives prominence to English and the other
‘hegemonic’ languages of the ex-colonizers. Translations into these languages from Bengali too often
fail to translate the difference of the Bengali view because the translator, although with good intentions,
over-assimilates it to make it accessible to the western readers.
Postcolonial translation theory

• The central intersection of translation studies and postcolonial theory is

that of power relations. Tejaswini Niranjana’s Siting Translation:
History, Poststructuralism, and the Colonial Context presents an image
of the postcolonial as ‘still scored through by an absentee colonialism’
(Niranjana 1992: 8).
• She sees literary translation as one of the discourses (the others being
education, theology, historiography and philosophy) which ‘inform the
hegemonic apparatuses that belong to the ideological structure of
colonial rule’ (ibid.: 33).
• Niranjana’s focus is on the way translation into English has generally
been used by the colonial power to construct a rewritten image of the
‘East’ that has then come to stand for the truth.
Postcolonial translation theory

• Furthermore, she goes on to criticize translation studies itself for its largely
western orientation and for three main failings that she sees resulting from this
(ibid.: 48–9):

(1) that translation studies has until recently not considered the question of power
imbalance between different languages;
(2) that the concepts underlying much of western translation theory are flawed
(‘its notions of text, author, and meaning are based on an unproblematic, naively
representational theory of language’);
(3) that the ‘humanistic enterprise’ of translation needs to be questioned, since
translation in the colonial context builds a conceptual image of colonial
domination into the discourse of western philosophy.
 • One consequence of this widening of the scope
of translation studies is that it has brought
together scholars from a wide range of
The backgrounds. Yet it is important to remember
that theorists themselves have their own
ideologies of ideologies and agendas that drive their own
criticisms. These are what Brownlie (2009: 79–
the theorists 81) calls ‘committed approaches’ to
translation studies.
 • The question of power in postcolonial translation studies,
and Lefevere’s work on the ideological component of
rewriting, has led to the examination of power and
ideology in other contexts where translation is involved.

Translation, • The concept of ideology itself varies enormously, from its

neutral coinage by Count Destutt de Tracy in 1796 to refer
ideology and to a new science of ideas to the negative Marxian use as
‘false consciousness’, or misguided thinking and even
manipulation. Much research from an ideological
power in perspective is interested in uncovering manipulations in
the TT that may be indicative of the translator’s conscious
‘ideology’ or produced by ‘ideological’ elements of the
other translation environment, such as pressure from a
commissioner, editor or institutional/governmental circles.

contexts • The harsh, macro-contextual constraints of censorship that

may exist in authoritarian regimes are perhaps the most
obvious example of ideological manipulation.