Translations in a globalised context

This week's Cultural Scene is devoted to examine some academic frameworks relating to translations in a globalised context. In this regard, we will identify a few key issues outlined by a German academic Doris Bachmann-Medick in one of her academic papers entitled "Cultural Misunderstanding in Translation: Multicultural Coexistence and Multicultural Conceptions of World Literature" drawing a few more examples by two of their prominent literary theorists. Bachmann-Medick's paper examines some pertinent issues that help to broaden our understanding on the role of translations in global and local contexts.

Doris Bachmann-Medick argues that in a globalised context, the concept of translation has, in fact, been replaced by "deterritorialization" and "displacement." These terminologies no longer assumed the meaning of mere translation of texts from one language into another. This process takes place by transferring, blending and shifting local experiences towards new multiple ethnic social identities.

Bachmann-Medick also points out that Indian born Arjun Appadurai, ethnologist and sociologist has postulated this landmark tendency of post-national globalisation. According to Appadurai that "The concept of the nation as the 'container' of world literatures and the source and target of translations has become questionable when considering phenomena such as migration, exile, and diaspora.

Instead, "post-national" experience originates from a collective imagination of ethnic groups dispersed throughout the world as "imagined communities" whose principal means of communication are literature, texts, books, newspapers and films." It is relevance to state here that the concept and terminology concerning imagined communities was first developed by US academic Benedict Anderson who presented the view that a nation is a social constructed community. He argued that a community is imagined by the people as articulated in Anderson's book, 'Imagined Communities' published in 1983.

World literature

Anderson's argument could be extended to say that even the concept of "world literature" is a socially constructed concept. However, despite the growth of "world literature," which sheds light on other processes of worldwide exchange, inequalities and differences remain a significant issue between the west and the east. This has occurred against the backdrop of increasing technological and economic standardisation, despite the claims of multicultural pluralism. In a way, this process leads to the assumption that translations are redundant.

However, the pertinent question here is the representation of these cultural differences especially from a 'marginalised perspectives' which may go unnoticed in the process of globalisation. The fact that absence of 'free cultural trade' (freier geistiger Handelsverkehr) as defined by Goethe, has been highlighted though there are 'free trade zones' in the post-national world. The important point to highlight here is that 'culture' has still not been a free-trading commodity.

The process of globalisation does not provide a common ground for 'negotiation' of cultural differences focusing on diversity in global consumer goods, production and exchange.

One of the main theorists of post-colonialism, Homi K Bhabha, an Indian born postcolonial theorist has developed a critical approach to an internationalised modern world of marketing and media with references to Goethe who claims that there is a dimension of alterity and even a conflict in Goethe's conception of world literature. Bhabha says that Goethe too, had developed his concept of world literature out of a consciousness of unfamiliarity and conflict, out of the experience of war and cultural dissension, and not on the assumption of a general human consensus.

World literature, consequently, is that intercultural category in which "non-consensual terms of affiliation may be established on the grounds of historical trauma." Research on world literature would then imply which cultures gain self-knowledge by their very projection of otherness.

The pertinent question in this context is the role of translations and translators. One of the challenges that the modern translators face is to confront with cultural misunderstanding. However, this cultural misunderstanding may be productive. Among other things, cultural misunderstanding can bring up restrictions caused by cultural 'position'.

"World literature would then appear not as a universal 'archive' but as an area for representation and conflict, which demonstrates and comes to terms with the shifting and colliding with regional 'locations' and cultural 'positions'. Examples of world literature could be found in texts which are situated in worldwide relations and where cultural positions are reflected upon (e.g. the works of Rushdie, Naipaul, Achebe and Ondaatje etc.). Their basis is the real experience of alterity and cultural conflict, which far surpasses mere literary imagination of strange worlds and an imaginary, museum-like 'archive' of world literature."

Idea of hybridity

Although it is necessary to maintain the differences in multicultural coexistence and multicultural conception of world literature, it should not be a transitory phase. It is also important not consider these differences as 'fixed barriers of ethnocentrisms' but as driving forces for cultural interaction.

The term hybridity which is a key concept in post-colonial theory arises from discontinuous translation and negotiation beyond fixed cultural (ethnic, gender and class-related) identities. It has been pointed out that new hybrid identities arise in the course of political and cultural reorientation of former colonial societies. For instance, it can be argued that the present identity of Sri Lanka is not that of it in pre-colonial monarchic era. It is the identity formed by translating native traditions and negotiation with the political and cultural reorientation that took place in post-colonial Sri Lanka. In another context, a diasporic writer writing from London, Sydney, Perth or from Toronto could define Sri Lankan identity in a different context taking it away from a fixated nationhood and geographical terrain.

According to Doris Bachmann-Medick, hybridity marks a sphere in which the cultural other is confronted within network of cultures and in which different traditions often clash.

According to Homi Bhabha, the new positions in the discussion on world literature emphasise the ambivalence and transitory function of synchronised cultural spaces. They regard translation as part of the field of cultural and social practice, not only as belonging to the sphere of the text.

Complex process of translation

In a globalised milieu, the translators should not confine the process of translation to mere expressway leading from the sources text to the target text. But they must work on the assumption of 'the multitracked non-synchronous nature of "cultural hybridities".

As a result, one can discover not only a sphere of 'new internationalism' but also complex practice and poetics of world-wide migration, and cultural symbolism that could be analysed using historical processes of transformation of the (post-colonial) societies where global multiculture is (re-)translated into specific cultural and historical localities.

Post-colonial translation postulates the decentralization and location of (hybrid) cultures across the traditional axis of the translation between separate advanced cultures and literatures.

Some of these issues go beyond the scope of traditional views of a pre-defined common (Western) language of a universal culture and literature.

They require permanent mutual processes of translation by way of negotiation of cultural differences, as they are carried out in and are provoked by the literatures themselves as highlights by Doris Bachmann-Medick.

Plight of Sri Lankan translation industry

How will these literary theories help us to look at the translation industry and process of translations in Sri Lanka? The plight of the current Sri Lankan translation industry is its inability to grasp global realities.

It seems that the idea of translation entertained by even so-called 'translators' of the present milieu, is confined to word to word translation principally from Sinhala to English and 'vice versa'.

With regard to English translations of Sinhala texts, most of the works have been rendered into English with scant regard for basic tenents of language, thus, unfortunately, reducing them to distorted English versions of the original text. The condition is worse in Sinhalese translation of English works; in some instances, the original texts have been butchered into one third of it, so that they can hardly be considered as Sinhalese version of the original or source text. Of course, there are simple reasons for poor translations including an accreditation to recognised qualified translators in Sri Lanka.

What is important is not to translate cultural differences in terms of linguistic differences rather than translating those differences into English in a subtle manner, so as the translated work should stand as a sound piece of literature on its own.