Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- Preface
- Chapter 1 Against translation, in defence of accent
- Chapter 2 There was this missing quotation mark
- Chapter 3 Njabulo Ndebele's ordinary address
- Chapter 4 Thembinkosi Goniwe's eyes
- Chapter 5 A history of translation and non-translation
- Chapter 6 The copy and the lost original
- Chapter 7 He places his chair against mine and translates
- Chapter 8 The multilingual scholar of the future
- Chapter 9 A book must be returned to the library from which it was borrowed
- Chapter 10 The surprisingly accented classroom
- Concluding remarks
- References
- Index
Chapter 1 - Against translation, in defence of accent
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2018
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- Preface
- Chapter 1 Against translation, in defence of accent
- Chapter 2 There was this missing quotation mark
- Chapter 3 Njabulo Ndebele's ordinary address
- Chapter 4 Thembinkosi Goniwe's eyes
- Chapter 5 A history of translation and non-translation
- Chapter 6 The copy and the lost original
- Chapter 7 He places his chair against mine and translates
- Chapter 8 The multilingual scholar of the future
- Chapter 9 A book must be returned to the library from which it was borrowed
- Chapter 10 The surprisingly accented classroom
- Concluding remarks
- References
- Index
Summary
AGAINST TRANSLATION
Translation would seem to offer much to someone imagining a future different from the apartheid past: it emphasises mutuality, is intent on contextualisation and demands of one to imagine the position of another. Yet in the following pages I make a number of arguments against translation. I show why I prefer accentedness to translation as a description of the activist work of the ending of apartheid, and argue that refusal to translate or resistance to being translated are forms of the activism this book analyses and theorises.
There is a growing literature from within translation studies that is suspicious of itself and of its own good intentions. Translation, Susan Bassnett has written, can be understood as ‘an effect of inequalities’ (2002: 4) rather than as a meeting of equals. In this version of translation work, it can be seen as a suspect activity in which inequalities (of economics, politics, gender, geography) are not only reflected but also reproduced in the mechanics of textual production. Bassnett summarises:
Perhaps the most exciting new trend of all is the expansion of the discipline of translation studies beyond the boundaries of Europe … More emphasis has been placed on the inequality of the translation relationship with writers such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Tejaswini Niranjana and Eric Cheyfitz arguing that translation was effectively used in the past as an instrument of colonial domination, a means of depriving the colonised peoples of a voice. For in the colonial model, one culture dominated and the others were subservient, hence translation reinforced that power hierarchy (Bassnett 2002: 4).
The insight that translation features in asymmetrical relations is not new. In a 1986 paper on ‘The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology’, Talal Asad had this to say on the inequality of languages: ‘I have proposed that the anthropological enterprise of cultural translation may be vitiated by the fact that there are asymmetrical tendencies and pressures in the languages of dominated and dominant societies. And I have suggested that anthropologists need to explore these processes in order to determine how far they go in defining the possibilities and the limits of effective translation’ (1986: 164).
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- Accented FuturesLanguage Activism and the Ending of Apartheid, pp. 1 - 16Publisher: Wits University PressPrint publication year: 2013