post-colonial_translation

Srikantaiah and Kannada translation 175
configurations of cultural difference. It is not the fabric of textual
engagement which is comparable, but rather the way in which the
translational encounter moves through stagings of difference. In
both cases, there is continuity established through a long-term
dialogue between cultural ‘partners’, but the terms of this exchange
are affected by the often conflictual nature of political and
economic relations.
Most of literary translation undertaken in Canada is
‘intranational’. If we look at translations of novels from French
into English, that is from the ‘major minority language’ in
Canada into the dominant language, 21 it becomes clear that
translation practice has been shaped by dramatic changes in
conceptualizations of cultural difference. The literature of
Quebec has been transmitted to English Canada through a series
of frames which have provided the motivation and the manner
for translation. These frames could be called ethnographic,
emergent and pluralistic. In the first case, translation negotiates
between cultural entities which are different by nature, separate
historical worlds, between which only relations of cordial
tolerance could be envisaged. In the second, difference is a result
of a conscious political effort of self-fashioning, corresponding
to a movement of political nationalism. And the third refers to
the complex realities of the present (always more difficult to
encapsulate) in which many micro-identities circulate across the
barriers of national culture, making translation a reflection of
the dramas of hybridity and self-doubt characteristic of much
cultural expression today. Examples of translations which
correspond to these frames are: W.H. Blake’s translation of
Maria Chapdelaine by Louis Hémon (the novel written in 1916,
the translation published in 1921); the translations by David
Homel, Betty Bednarski, Ray Ellenwood and Kathy Mezei of
novels in ‘joual’ in the 1970s; and the contemporary translation
of novels such as Mauve Desert by Nicole Brossard. Without
attempting to present any of these episodes in detail (see Simon
1992, 1997), we can see, both through the prefatory material
furnished by translators and the strategies of translation
themselves, that competing conceptions of Quebec culture are
at work. 22 These examples demonstrate that translation practice
is always grounded in a theory of culture, in a set of assumptions
about the ways in which linguistic forms carry cultural
meanings. This implicit theory of culture is necessarily a