Nation Language And The Ethics Of Translation

In recent years, scholarship on translation has moved well beyond the technicalities of converting one language into another and beyond conventional translation theory. With new technologies blurring distinctions between "the original" and its reproductions, and with globalization redefining national and cultural boundaries, "translation" is now emerging as a reformulated subject of lively, interdisciplinary debate. Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation enters the heart of this debate. It covers an exceptional range of topics, from simultaneous translation to legal theory, from the language of exile to the language of new nations, from the press to the cinema; and cultures and languages from contemporary Bengal to ancient Japan, from translations of Homer to the work of Don DeLillo. All twenty-two essays, by leading voices including Gayatri Spivak and the late Edward Said, are provocative and persuasive. The book's four sections--"Translation as Medium and across Media," "The Ethics of Translation," "Translation and Difference," and "Beyond the Nation"--together provide a comprehensive view of current thinking on nationality and translation, one that will be widely consulted for years to come. The contributors are Jonathan E. Abel, Emily Apter, Sandra Bermann, Vilashini Cooppan, Stanley Corngold, David Damrosch, Robert Eaglestone, Stathis Gourgouris, Pierre Legrand, Jacques Lezra, Françoise Lionnet, Sylvia Molloy, Yopie Prins, Edward Said, Azade Seyhan, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Henry Staten, Lawrence Venuti, Lynn Visson, Gauri Viswanathan, Samuel Weber, and Michael Wood.

Lawrence Venuti is one of the most important theorists in translation studies and his work has helped shape the development of this vibrant field. Translation Changes Everything brings together thirteen of his most significant articles.

Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject Interpreting / Translating , grade: 2,0, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, course: Seminar "The Ethics of Translation in Postmodernity", language: English, abstract: Postmodernity is a confusing term which has been extensively discussed over the last years. There is no standard definition of it but the three intertwined senses of the word ‘postmodern’ provide some clarity about the matter. Postmodernity is an era, it also incorporates postmodern philosophies attempting to grasp the peculiarities of that era and eventually corresponds to postmodernism, which includes expressions of the first two in the aesthetic realm. There is no postmodern school or single postmodern theory. The concept has received contributions from a pleiad of writers. Although it has first been broug regrouping term to name writers such as Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Kristeva, Irigaray, Cixous, Spivak, and de Man (Koskinen 2000). In this paper, I will adopt the latter view. I will also use the word ‘postmodernity’ as a synonym for our contemporary post-World War II era. Since the beginning of postmodernity, translation’s ideals have changed. The dream of a one hundred percent perfect translation has almost disappeared. The source text has lost a lot of its importance to now have barely as much price as the translator’s work technique. The translator is in most cases no more expected to be invisible but now has a claim to visibility. It did exist before and always has but was systematically denied for the sake of traditional ethics. The traditional translation ethics have also been reinvented. There has been a massive rejection of old principles and universal ethics. The translator has nowadays a larger wiggle room. Even an unusual translation can be considered as a masterpiece as far the translator remains consistent with his personal ethics and is able to justify them. In this paper I will portray the translator in three kinds of ethically problematic situations - asymmetric power relations, confidentiality and rudeness – in order to define his position and possible choices. After this reflection, I will eventually formulate my personal translator’s code of ethics.

Michael Cronin looks at how translation has played a crucial role in shaping debates about identity, language and cultural survival in the past and in the present. He explores how everything from the impact of migration on the curricula for national literature courses, to the way in which nations wage war in the modern era is bound up with urgent questions of translation and identity. Examining translation practices and experiences across continents to show how translation is an integral part of how cultures are evolving, the volume presents new perspectives on how translation can be a powerful tool in enhancing difference and promoting intercultural dialogue. Drawing on a wide range of materials from official government reports to Shakespearean drama and Hollywood films, Cronin demonstrates how translation is central to any proper understanding of how cultural identity has emerged in human history, and suggests an innovative and positive vision of how translation can be used to deal with one of the most salient issues in an increasingly borderless world.

Based on seminars originally given at the College International de Philosophie in Paris, this translation from French has been fully revised by the author and extended to include highly critical commentaries on activist translation theory, non-professional translation, interventionist practices, and the impact of new translation technologies.

What if meaning were the last thing that mattered in language? In this essay, Henri Meschonnic explains what it means to translate the sense of language and how to do it. In a radical stand against a hermeneutical approach based on the dualistic view of the linguistic sign and against its separation into a meaningful signified and a meaningless signifier, Henri Meschonnic argues for a poetics of translating. Because texts generate meaning through their power of expression, to translate ethically involves listening to the various rhythms that characterize them: prosodic, consonantal or vocalic patterns, syntactical structures, sentence length and punctuation, among other discursive means. However, as the book illustrates, such an endeavour goes against the grain and, more precisely, against a 2500-year-old tradition in the case of biblical translation. The inability of translators to give ear to rhythm in language results from a culturally transmitted deafness. Henri Meschonnic decries the generalized unwillingness to remedy this cultural condition and discusses the political implications for the subject of discourse.

Over the last 30 years there has been a substantial increase in the study of the history of translation. Both well-known and lesser-known specialists in translation studies have worked tirelessly to give the history of translation its rightful place. Clearly, progress has been made, and the history of translation has become a viable independent research area. This book aims at claiming such autonomy for the field with a renewed vigour. It seeks to explore issues related to methodology as well as a variety of discourses on history with a view to laying the groundwork for new avenues, new models, new methods. It aspires to challenge existing theoretical and ideological frameworks. It looks toward the future of history. It is an attempt to address shortcomings that have prevented translation history from reaching its full disciplinary potential. From microhistory, archaeology, periodization, to issues of subjectivity and postmodernism, methodological lacunae are being filled. Contributors to this volume go far beyond the text to uncover the role translation has played in many different times and settings such as Europe, Africa, Latin America, the Middle-east and Asia from the 6th century to the 20th. These contributions, which deal variously with the discourses on methodology and history, recast the discipline of translation history in a new light and pave the way to the future of research and teaching in the field.

Ethics and Aesthetics of Translation engages with translation, in both theory and practice, as part of an interrogation of ethical as well as political thought in the work of three bilingual European authors: Bernardo Atxaga, Milan Kundera and Jorge Semprún. In approaching the work of these authors, the book draws upon the approaches to translation offered by Benjamin, Derrida, Ricœur and Deleuze to highlight a broad set of ethical questions, focused upon the limitations of the monolingual and the democratic possibilities of linguistic plurality; upon our innate desire to translate difference into similarity; and upon the ways in which translation responds to the challenges of individual and collective remembrance. Each chapter explores these interlingual but also intercultural, interrelational and interdisciplinary issues, mapping a journey of translation that begins in the impact of translation upon the work of each author, continues into moments of linguistic translation, untranslatability and mistranslation within their texts and ultimately becomes an exploration of social, political and affective (un)translatability. In these journeys, the creative and critical potential of translation emerges as a potent, often violent, but always illuminating, vision of the possibilities of differentiation and connection, generation and memory, in temporal, linguistic, cultural and political terms.