-
TRANSLATION, ETHICS, POLITICS
THEO HERMANS
[In
Munday,
Jeremy.(ed.)The
Routledge
Companion
to
Translation
Studies
Routledge
Companions. Routledge,2009, pp. 93-105]
6.0 INTRODUCTION
In his opening address to the post-
apartheid South African parliament in 1994,
President Nelson
Mandela
said
that
a
word
like
‘kaffir’
should
no
longer
be
part
of
our
vocabulary.
Its
use
was
subsequently outlawed in South Africa.
Imagine you are asked to translate, for
publication in that
country, an
historical document from the pre-apartheid era
which contains the word. Should you
write
it,
gloss
it,
omit
it
or
replace
it
with
something
else
–
and
if
so,
with
what,
with
another
derogatory
word
or
some
blander
superordinate
term?
Are
you
not
duty-bound
to
respect
the
authenticity
of
the
historical
record?
Would
you
have
any
qualms
about
using
the
word
if
the
translation was meant for publication
outside South Africa?
In
Germany
and
Austria,
denying
the
Holocaust
is
forbidden
by
law.
In
November
1991,
in
Germany,
Gü
nter Deckert provided a simultaneous
German interpretation of a lecture in which the
American
Frederic
Leuchter
denied
the
existence
of
gas
chambers
in
Auschwitz.
Deckert
was
taken to court and
eventually convicted. Was this morally right? Was
Deckert not merely relaying
i
nto
German
someone
else’s
words,
without
having
to
assume
responsibility
for
them?
Is
it
relevant that Deckert is a well-known
neo-
Nazi, and that he expressed
agreement with Leuchter’s
claims? If
Deckert’s conviction was morally justified, should
we not al
so accept that Muslims who
agreed with Ayatollah Khomeiny’s 1989
fatwa against Salman Rushdie were right to regard
the
translators of
The
Satanic Verses
as guilty of blasphemy
too?
The examples (from Kruger 1997 and
Pym 1997) are real enough, and they involve, apart
from
legal issues, moral and political
choices that translators and interpreters make.
While translators
and interpreters have
always had to make such choices, sustained
reflection about this aspect of
their
work is of relatively recent date. It has come as
a result of growing interest in such things as
1
the
political
and
ideological
role
of
translation,
the
figure
of
the
translator
as
a
mediator,
and
various disciplinary agendas that have
injected their particular concerns into
translation studies.
Making
choices
presupposes
first
the
possibility
of
choice,
and
then
agency,
values
and
accountability.
Traditional
work
on
translation
was
not
particularly
interested
in
these
issues.
It
tended to focus on
textual matters, primarily the relation between a
translation and its original, or
was
of
the
applied
kind,
concerned
with
training
and
practical
criticism,
more
often
than
not
within
a
linguistic
or
a
literary
framework.
A
broadening
of
the
perspective
became
noticeable
from
roughly
the
1980s
onwards.
It
resulted
in
the
contextualization
of
translation,
prompted
a
reconsideration of the
translator as a social and ethical agent, and
eventually led to a self-reflexive
turn
in translation studies.
To get an idea
of the kind of change that is involved, a quick
look at interpreting will help. Early
studies
were
almost
exclusively
concerned
with
cognitive
aspects
of
conference
interpreting,
investigating
such
things
as
interpreters’
information
processing
ability
and
memory
capacity
(P?
chhacker and Shlesinger
2002; see also this volume, Chapter 8). However, a
study of the Iraqi
interpreter’s
behaviour in the highly charged atmosphere of
Saddam Hussein being interviewed by
a
British television journalist on the eve of the
1991 Gulf War showed very different constraints at
work;
they
were
directly
related
to
questions
of
power
and
control,
as
Saddam
repeatedly
corrected a desperately nervous
interpreter (Baker 1997). Over the last ten years
or so interpreting
studies have been
transformed by the growing importance of community
interpreting, which, in
contrast to
conference interpreting, usually takes place in
informal settings and sometimes in an
atmosphere
of
suspicion,
and
is
often
emotionally
charged.
As
a
rule,
these
exchanges
involve
stark power differentials, with on one
side an establishment figure, say a customs
official, a police
officer or a doctor,
and on the other a migrant worker or an asylum
seeker, perhaps illiterate and
probably
unused
to
the
format
of
an
interpreted
interview.
The
interpreter
in
such
an
exchange
may
well
be
untrained,
and
have
personal,
ideological
or
ethnic
loyalties.
Situations
like
these
cannot be understood
by looking at technicalities only; they require
full contextualization and an
appreciation of the stakes involved.
6.1 DECISIONS, DECISIONS
2
To put
developments like these into perspective, we
should recall the functionalist and descriptive
approaches
that
emerged
in
the
1970s
and
1980s.
If
traditional
translation
criticism
rarely
went
beyond pronouncing judgement on the
quality of a particular version, functionalist
studies (Nord
1997) pursued questions
such as who commissioned a translation or what
purpose the translated
text was meant
to serve in its new environment (see Chapter 3).
Descriptivism (Hermans 1985,
1999;
Lambert
2006;
Lefevere
1992;
Toury
1995)
worked
along
similar
lines
but
showed
an
interest in historical poetics and in
the role of (especially literary) translation in
particular periods.
Within the
descriptive paradigm, André
Lefevere,
in particular, went further and began to explore
the embedding of translations in social
and ideological as well as cultural contexts. His
keyword
was ‘patronage’, which he
understood in a broad sense as any person or
institution able to exert
significant
control
over
the
translat
or’s
work.
Since
patrons
were
generally
driven
by
larger
economic
or
political
rather
than
by
purely
cultural
concerns,
Lefevere
claimed
that
what
determined translation was firstly
ideology and then poetics, with language coming in
third place
only.
In th
is vein he studied the
ideological, generic and textual ‘grids’, as he
called them, that
shaped, for instance,
nineteenth-century English translations of Virgil.
Individual translators could
differentiate themselves from their
colleagues and predecessors by manipulating these
grids and, if
they did so successfully,
acquire cultural prestige or, with a term derived
from Pierre Bourdieu,
symbolic capital
(Bassnett and Lefevere
1998:41
–
56).
More
recent
studies
have
taken
this
line
a
step
further
and
show,
for
example,
how
translation
from Latin and
Greek in Victorian Britain, the use of classical
allusions in novels of the period,
and
even
debates
concerning
metrical
translation
of
ancient
verse,
contributed
to
class-consciousness
and
the
idea
of
a
national
culture
(Osborne
2001;
Prins
2005).
Still
in
the
Victorian
era,
translators
contributed
substantially
to
the
definition
of
the
modern
concept
of
democracy (Lianeri 2002).
Lefevere’s early work had been steeped
in literary criticism but he ended up delving
int
o questions
of patronage
and ideology. The trajectory is in many ways
symptomatic for the field as a whole.
The collection
Translation,
History and Culture
, edited by Susan
Bassnett and Lefevere in 1990,
confirmed
the
extent
to
which
translation
was now
approached
from
a
cultural
studies
angle.
It
3