Translation as a field of study

The idea of translation has figured prominently from the very early periods of literary production. In recent times, it has begun to gather great momentum both as a topic and field of study. There are departments and sub-departments in many universities throughout the world devoted to the focused study of translation as a linguistic challenge. There are journals devoted to this subject and annually large numbers of books, monographs, and scholarly papers are produced that highlight the problems of translation. Numerous conferences are regularly held that address issues central to translators and academic interested in translation. The study of translation is becoming increasingly an interdisciplinary, and at times, transdisciplinary, attempt.

Basically, one can identify five main approaches to the study and evaluation of translations. First, the attempts of linguists, both structuralists and transformational grammarians, are important.

They were some of the earliest to grappling with several of the complex theoretical issues. Second, the work of philosophers is important. Here I include the writings of Anglo-American analytical philosophers as well as the more hermeneutically oriented European philosophers. For example, the American philosopher Quine, in his book "Word and Object", raised some pivotal issues related to translation and semantic synonymy.

Similarly, continental thinkers such as Hans-Georg Gadamer called attention to the linguistic basis of understanding and interpretation, fusion of horizons and so on opened up interesting pathways of inquiry into the field of translation. Third, the work of anthropologists, students of cultural studies and cultural historians is important.

They have succeeded in focusing on the importance of context as a determiner of meaning, and hence the importance of cultural contexts in the understanding of the nature and significance of translations. The work of scholars such as Andre Lefevre, Susan Bassnett, Anthony Pym, with their different points of emphases and vantage points, has underlined the importance of cultural contextualizations.

Fourth, scholars with a pronounced interest in post-colonial theory have added a new mode of apprehending the way translation functions and the way in which we need to approach and conceptualize the enterprise of translations.

For example, books like Eric Cheyfitz's "The Poetics of Imperialism" and Tejaswini Niranajana's "Siting Translation" exemplify the force and strength of this approach. Cheyfitz, for example, focuses on the idea of cultural translation and reads minority literatures within and against a post-colonial framework. Fifth, in recent years, drawing on these diverse approaches, the interdisciplinary efforts of translation pedagogy has assumed a great measure of significance.

George Steiner, the eminent cultural critic, in his preface to the Penguin book of verse translations and in his book "After Babel" dealt with some salient issues of translations as they have evolved over the past two thousand years in Western culture. Steiner adopts broadly a phenomenological approach, which highlights the idea that all human communication within and between languages is translation. Here, he focused on four important movements" trust, aggression, incorporation and retribution. The idea of trust focused on the interest generated in a given text, while aggression referred to the way a translator plunges boldly into the chosen text.

Incorporation alludes to the complexities associated with the assimilation into the target language the nuances of meaning of the source language and retribution highlighted the way meaning was secured in the host text.

However, Steiner does not quite succeed, in my judgment, in adjudicating between the competing demands of the letter and spirit of a text. In other words, George Steiner illuminates certain aspects of the problem of translation but does not offer a pathway of resolution.

One of the most important theorists of translation, to my mind, is the German cultural critic Walter Benjamin. He died in 1940, at the comparatively young age of forty eight; since his death he has emerged as a formidable voice in contemporary cultural studies and historical analyses.

His essay, "The Task of the Translator", which was written originally as the introduction to a work of poetry by Baudelaire, has become a seminal essay in translation studies. Benjamin, who has come to be regarded as an incisive critic and powerful analytical mind of the twentieth century, wrote, for the most part, in a compressed and aphoristic style, that at times sounded cryptic.

Benjamin's essay on translation has guided the thinking of such formidable commentators as Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man. The Task of the Translator, along with his other important essay, "Language as Such" has generated intense debate and discussion among scholars of translation.

Walter Benjamin was more interested in the metaphysics of translation than in the pragmatics of translation which constituted the centre of gravity for many scholars. His approach to translation is intertwined with theological thinking. He begins his essay with a controversial proposition; "in the appreciation of a work of art or an art form, consideration of the receiver never proves fruitful." He says that, "no poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener." This theme runs through the entirety of the essay; he says further that, any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information "hence, something inessential." This line of thinking goes against conventional wisdom.

Benjamin was more interested in the idea of translatability than the consequentiality of translations. He focused on the idea of a pure language; for him, language communicates the linguistic being of things. He says that, "the answer to the question what does language communicate is therefore all language communicates itself." This thought is central to Benjamin's understanding of language. His path of argument winds its way through a thicket of theology.

That is why I stated earlier that his interest in the problem of translation is more metaphysical than pragmatic. Benjamin's formulations of translation had a great impact on the thinking of Derrida who fully endorsed the idea that what language communicates is not some content but rather its own communicability. Benjamin's de-emphasis of the transmission of information and his pointed critique of linguistic representation held a great attraction for Derrida; it conformed to his fundamental approach to language. Derrida maintained that translation does not restore or re-produce an original text in view of the fact that original text constantly transforms itself. For him, texts are always in motion, they are open-ended, and hence the original text has always already established the impossibility of translation. His thinking is intricate, but I am sure the general drift of his argument is clear. In recent times, the writings of Derrida have inspired scholars of translation studies to pursue new and innovative lines of inquiry.

What Derrida's approach to textuality and translation, and that of like-mined thinkers did was to establish the fact that in translation, contrary to conventional wisdom, difference does not constitute defeat.

These theorists make the point that in translation, as in language itself, difference is inescapable and beneficent. Hence, the statement if Derrida that, "a notion of transformation must be substituted for the notion of translation; a regulated transformation of one language by another, one text by another," merits serious consideration.

As I stated earlier, in recent times, the thought-movements of post-colonial theorists interested in the problem of translation have opened up interesting territory for investigation. They argue that translation has been for a long period of time a site for the strengthening and continuation of asymmetrical relations among peoples, languages and races. They make the additional point that one has to re-imagine as a space of resistance and intervention. It is with these aims in mind that post-colonial explicators of translation like Tejasawini Niranjana have approached the field of translation and translation study.

As post-colonial theorists of translation have pointed out, traditionally translation is premised on the western philosophical concepts of reality representation and knowledge.

Reality is regarded as unproblematic and freely available; knowledge signifies the representation of this reality, while representation is conceived of as providing a direct and unmediated access to reality; it is seen as transparent.

Post-colonial theorists challenge these assumptions and have succeeded in putting into a play an alternative set of assumptions that should guide our understanding of the enterprise of translation.

What this new trend of thinking does, to my mind, is to focus on the idea of critical translation. Just as in Bertolt Brecht's epic theatre, the actor acts in such a way that he does not totally identify himself with the character that is being portrayed, instead establishing a critical distance between the actor and the character. Here a reflective distance is privileged. Analogously, the idea of critical translation encourages the translator to critical comment through the very act of translation; here, criticality trumps fidelity. Some of the translations by Gayatri Spivak of the Bengali author Mahasweta Devi illustrates this trend.

Translations and adaptations have played a central role in modern Sinhala literature. In the case of drama, translations and adaptations of foreign works were instrumental in shaping a dramatic culture.

In the early stage, apart from Shakespeare, Chekhov, Gogol, Moliere and so on were important; later well-known dramatists such as Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Brecht, Pirandello, Anouih, Beckett, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, began to play an important role on the local stage. Similarly, translations of the work of outstanding novelists such as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Camus, Lawrence and so on help fashion local fictional sensibility.

Hence, the project of translation deserves careful study and innovative theorization. Some of the newer advances in translation studies should enable us to undertake this task more productively.