post-colonial_translation

Introduction 3
Octavio Paz claims that translation is the principal means we have
of understanding the world we live in. The world, he says, is presented
to us as a growing heap of texts,
each slightly different from the one that came before it: translations
of translations of translations. Each text is unique, yet at the same
time it is the translation of another text. No text can be completely
original because language itself, in its very essence, is already a
translation – first from the nonverbal world, and then, because
each sign and each phrase is a translation of another sign, another
phrase.
(Paz 1992: 154)
This is a radical view of translation, which sees it not as a marginal
activity but as a primary one, and it fits in with similar comments made
by writers such as Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luís Borges and Carlos
Fuentes. Indeed, Fuentes has gone so far as to say that ‘originality is a
sickness’, the sickness of a modernity that is always aspiring to see itself
as something new (Fuentes 1990: 70). It is fair to say that a great many
Latin American writers today have strong views about translation, and
equally strong views about the relationship between writer/reader and
translator. To understand something of this change of emphasis, we
need to think again about the history of translation, and about how it
was used in the early period of colonization.
Vicente Rafael describes the different significance translation had
for the Spanish colonizers and the Tagalog people of the Philippines:
For the Spaniards, translation was always a matter of reducing
the native language and culture to accessible objects for and
subjects of divine and imperial intervention. For the Tagalogs,
translation was a process less of internalizing colonial-Christian
conventions than of evading their totalizing grip by repeatedly
marking the differences between their language and interests and
those of the Spaniards.
(Rafael 1988: 213)
He pinpoints the profoundly different meaning that translation held
for different groups in the colonization process. For it is, of course, now
recognized that colonialism and translation went hand in hand. Eric
Cheyfitz has argued that translation was ‘the central act of European
colonization and imperialism in America’ (Cheyfitz 1991: 104 ).