post-colonial_translation

2 Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi
Tupinambà concept of eating and taboo came from very different
sources.
Now what, we may ask, does this narrative have to do with
A great deal, in fact, but before considering the question
more fully, it is important to establish certain premises. First, and very
obviously: translation does not happen in a vacuum, but in a continuum;
it is not an isolated act, it is part of an ongoing process of intercultural
transfer. Moreover, translation is a highly manipulative activity that
involves all kinds of stages in that process of transfer across linguistic
and cultural boundaries. Translation is not an innocent, transparent
activity but is highly charged with significance at every stage; it rarely,
if ever, involves a relationship of equality between texts, authors or
systems.
Recent work in translation studies had challenged the long-standing
notion of the translation as inferior to the original. In this respect,
translation studies research has followed a similar path to other radical
movements within literary and cultural studies, calling into question
the politics of canonization and moving resolutely away from ideas of
universal literary greatness. This is not to deny that some texts are valued
more highly than others, but simply to affirm that systems of evaluation
vary from time to time and from culture to culture and are not consistent.
One problem that anyone working in the field of translation studies
has to confront is the relationship between the text termed the ‘original’,
or the source, and the translation of that original. There was a time
when the original was perceived as being de facto superior to the
translation, which was relegated to the position of being merely a copy,
albeit in another language. But research into the history of translation
has shown that the concept of the high-status original is a relatively
recent phenomenon. Medieval writers and / or translators were not
troubled by this phantasm. It arose as a result of the invention of printing
and the spread of literacy, linked to the emergence of the idea of an
author as ‘owner’ of his or her text. For if a printer or author owned a
text, what rights did the translator have This discrepancy has been
encoded into our thinking about the relationship between translation
and so-called originals. It is also significant that the invention of the
idea of the original coincides with the period of early colonial expansion,
when Europe began to reach outside its own boundaries for territory
to appropriate. Today, increasingly, assumptions about the powerful
original are being questioned, and a major source of that challenge comes
from the domains of the fearsome cannibals, from outside the safety of
the hedges and neat brick walls of Europe.