With simultaneous
interpretation and multilateral talks that simultaneously span continents and
language groups, technology's "linguistic marketplace" might appear
to have silenced the demands and dangers of Babel.
YouTube offers a subtitling service, and Google translates Web pages at the
click of a mouse. Yet translation is far more than interpretation. Where
interpretation makes its point and fades, the freed remainder, the trapped
Other, and the domesticated foreign remain in translated texts.8 "We might
say," Eric Cheyfitz posits, "that at the heart of Links Of London
Bracelets every imperial fiction (the heart of darkness) there is a fiction
of a translation". Translation has often served as a means of asserting
national identity, especially, Cheyfitz notes, in the Elizabethan age an age in
which the conquest of foreign domains, inclusive of their literatures, saw
translation as a means of processing and emblematizing that conquest. Whether
imperialistic, idealistic, or simply naive, an approach that teaches this
fiction as fact wrongs students who aren't taught to read translations as such.
This "repression of translation," Venuti argues, "makes ideas
and forms appear to be free-floating, unmoored from history, transcending the
linguistic and cultural differences that required not merely their translation
in the first place, but also their interpretation in the classroom".
We have come a
long way since then, from conquering to all too often ignoring. Rather than
usurping a nation's literature wholesale, we often leave it in its native
tongue, linguistically stranded. One of Hamar Evan-Zohar's laws of literary
interference holds that "a source language is selected by prestige,"
and another that it is "selected by dominance" and that selection
practice, like so many in the field of translation, and in education, is
self-perpetuating . More prestige is to be found in Greek than in the
linguistic nether lands of Frisian, and there is Links Of LondonCharms
more economic sense in translating from English than from a language still
struggling to develop a literature. Translation tends to follow a diffusive
pattern, flowing from areas of high concentration to those of lower
concentration, with the net result that English-language literature spreads
throughout the world, but relatively little permeates the publishing bubble
from the other direction.
Over the course
of the semester, we also wondered to what extent literary translations into
English conform to stylistic trends in contemporary domestic literature.
Another of Evan-Zohar's laws of literary interference, echoing Benjamin and
Pound, asserts that" [interference occurs when a system is in need of
items unavailable within itself; nevertheless, so many translations seem geared
to support the mores of the target culture. Gunn maintains that various world
literature texts widely taught and highly acclaimed, from "Mikhail
Bakhtin's Rabelais and his World to Octavio Paz's The Labyrinth of Solitude
would never have acquired the authority they still possess if they did not
reflect interests widely shared in Anglo-American literary studies". The
works, of course, are still foreign, with elements that may expand
English-language literature and the English language yet they are not chosen
for these characteristics, but rather for their convergence.