Preface Translation Studies? What Do You Mean?

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1 Translation Studies? What Do You Mean? Jeroen Vandaele What makes translation special among other interpretive acts of meaning to use Jerome Bruner s expression (1990) is its relative degree of explicitness. In translation, a written or spoken end-product bears testimony to the interpretation that has taken place. As such, a translation differs in at least one way from the inner thoughts when, for example, reading a book before going to sleep: while from a personal point of view the book on my night-table may turn out to have drastically changed some of my deepest beliefs overnight, for a researcher in cultural studies a translation has the tempting advantage of constituting a materialized trace of interpretation. 1 As scary as this thought may be for translators, cultural studies (defined as any scholarly area that wants to study cultural goods) would be quite unwise to turn down such a gift from the gods. The often-heard question about the justification of translation studies is thus out of order. For anyone who believes the study of cultures to be useful, translation is not merely a justified object but a forceful, compelling area of research, an exceptional and privileged phenomenon. It is cultural studies duty to focus on translations as rather explicit signs of cultural differences where culture is of course to be understood as belonging to any possible group sharing beliefs and values. Hence, no theme, no manifestation of cultural translation may a priori be excluded from research, however trivial, vile, marginal, boring or commercial it may be taken to be by certain scholarly and intellectual traditions. Like previous CETRA volumes, this book includes essays on topics as varied as journalism (Erkka Vuorinen and Sung Hee Kirk), documentaries (Eliana Franco), film (Alexandra Assis Rosa, Ilse Coppieters and Jeroen Vandaele), sociolects, dialects and new languages (Mette Rudvin, Alexandra Assis Rosa, Carmen Millán Varela, Lukasz Bogucki and Ieva Zauberga), children s literature (Mieke Desmet), emigrants literature (Nike Kocijančič) and administrative and technical language (Carmen Millán Varela). But this does not imply that more prestigious labels lose relevance it is only that they are often addressed through the more downmarket objects of study. Indeed, the present collection also deals with politics and ideology (Mette Rudvin, Luis 1 When I say translation is an explicit trace, I refer to the researcher s perspective. It is well known that, from a culture s or user s point of view, translation may try to function as a more/less hidden practice (see Robyns 1994b). 1

2 Translation Studies Located Pegenaute, Kate Sturge, Ieva Zauberga, Nike Kocijančič, Eliana Franco, Carmen Millán Varela); literature, canonization and normalization (Siobhan Brownlie, Mette Rudvin, Laurence Malingret, Martina Ožbot); and cognition, linguistics and pragmatics (Ernst-Norbert Kurth, Patrick Zabalbeascoa, Jürgen Gercken, Jeroen Vandaele, Francisco Javier Díaz, Sonia Colina). I see my classifications as being merely illustrative: many names could fall under many more labels. While justification is not an issue, credibility clearly is. Where does translation studies find the authority to rethink translation as an act creating cultural identity instead of seeing it, with the translator, as a purely pragmatic problem-solution activity? How can it lay claim to a view that is so ambitious and quasi-objectifying that it is spontaneously challenged by many translators? No single solution can be expected here, since the question actually concerns nothing less than the legitimization of academic research on translation. The answers to be found in the papers of this volume refer to different conceptions of scholarly behaviour, among which Gideon Toury s seminal thoughts seem even more incontournables since the publication of his Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond (1995). In the papers in this volume, his functional and descriptive view of the phenomenon (where, how and why do certain texts function as translations?) is often backed up by particular selective readings of Hermans, Lambert, Delabastita, Lefevere, Holmes, Bassnett. Yet I find it more stimulating to point out where distance has been taken from this implicit canon, this new common sense of the descriptive paradigm. 2 A first substantial deviation concerns the apparent need to evaluate in some way, in the face of the attempts by descriptive approaches to sideline the issue. Quite often, members of the very same descriptivist canon are less selectively quoted in their more appreciative moments as a way of overcoming the dangers of sterile positivism (e.g. Pegenaute s use of Lefevere s patronage notion or Rudvin s references to Hermans conception of norms as problem solvers ). Some contributions are more implicitly evaluative: the mere fact of pointing out certain phenomena rather than others hints at an appreciative move in Varela s, Desmet s and Malingret s papers. Still other contributors look for more explicitly value-oriented interpretations instead of apparently innocent, detached accounts: Robyns, von Flotow, Venuti, to name but a few politicized analysts, are referred to by Sturge, Kocijančič and Zauberga, although in very different ways. A second group of deviations seems to hint at places where the descriptivist canon is perceived as falling short. For instance, when Vuorinen, Zabalbeascoa and Franco give centre stage to translation s concrete social 2 Those doubting the existence of such a paradigm are referred to Hermans (1999), who conceives the descriptivists institutional setting in terms of Diana Crane s invisible college. 2

3 embedding (actors, institutions, events, material conditions), they do so by referring to other language-oriented paradigms: Fairclough, Hatim and Mason, Holz-Mänttäri, Snell-Hornby, etc. Similarly, some papers have considered it necessary to draw on insights from other fields of research: Brownlie (sociology), Rudvin (folklore studies), Kurth (metaphor theory), Vandaele (humour studies), Coppieters (film studies). Further, Colina shows how a careful experiment can engage as many parameters as one can handle and thus seems to teach a lesson in explanatory modesty. A final group of dissident voices quite simply refuse to take up parts or the totality of the canon. They do not seem to acknowledge the credibility of a detached research programme, limiting themselves instead to increasing the scope of what is seen to happen at the translator s pragmatic level. Gercken largely silences the canon by using other references such as Koller and Gerzymisch-Arbogast; Ožbot refuses to step outside normativity for reasons she explains; Bogucki s paper ironizes the rhetorics of description; Zabalbeascoa works on a terminological middle way that would move from detached perception to attached preception. Finally, Brownlie seems to suggest the relative pointlessness of terminological digressions on norms in translation studies terminology should emerge from the specific corpus under study and her paper could thus be read as a critical comment on both Zabalbeascoa s and the canon s technical projects. It seems, then, that the next generation (Robyns 1994a) is once again not too bothered to take a clear ( pure ) stance in old and purist battles. But would this mean that the articles collected in this volume find no positively definable common ground? Let us give it a try. Generally speaking, and irrespective of the paradigms and perspectives mentioned, the essays in this volume testify to the fact that translation is seen as a relocation of meaning in the sense that a relocation automatically implies a change at the core of meaning itself since cultural studies does not usually want to contemplate anything as abstract and impoverished as decontextualized meaning. All meaning is specific and located; it occurs in one subject through one text (in its largest sense), in one moment in time and in one specific code. Changing one of these elements (subject, text, moment, place or code) means changing the meaning altogether. When we know that translation changes all of those elements, we may feel compelled to see it as creating difference rather than identity. Whether they aim simply to observe this alteration or assess it in evaluative terms, all papers accept the relevance of relocated meaning for cultural dynamics. Colina shows how deficient translation between languages (Spanish and English) may involve interference at the most basic syntactic level, and she indicates which forces stand firm against this temptation; Ožbot displays the consequences of deficiently translated literary history (from Italian into Slovene); Kirk tells the story of 3

4 Translation Studies Located langue-as-culture in translational operations between very different societies (the United States and Korea); in Coppieters we see how the needs of commercial film impose themselves on screenplay and novel (all in English); Díaz informs us about successful pun translation in two competing cultures (Galician and Spanish), for one of which Varela sketches the general role of translation in the nation-building process (Galicia); Assis Rosa s account of dialect/sociolect translation demonstrates the point of located meaning to the full (what is to Portuguese what Cockney and Received Pronunciation are to English?); Franco invests meaning in both cultural and institutional locations (Europe and the Church), whether these semantic effects were intended or not; Vandaele s essay attempts to indicate how heterogeneous a phenomenon humour is, also when translated from English into French and Spanish; Gercken discovers the existence of pseudo-transparent cultural items: Norwegians and Germans may understand the same literary signifiers in different ways; Desmet holds that children s literature might be treated differently in different places (Britain, the Netherlands, France); Kocijančič is disturbed by modalities of relocalization found in an American version of a Slovene classic; and neither does Zauberga hide her concern about translations from English that desacralize the Latvian tongue by reactivating taboo expressions; in his essayistic contribution, Bogucki relocates all sorts of local speech to show the humorous new effects this creates; for the translator s sake, Zabalbeascoa would like to see the possible factors of relocation inventorized and has already engaged in this mind-wrecking activity; Malingret tries to make sense of what exactly is relocalized from the Hispanic literatures into the Francophone ones; Sturge and Pegenaute rather reflect on what according to certain sources was not to be imported under Hitler and Franco respectively; Kurth s piece on metaphor clearly shows on how many levels a German metaphor translation is not the exact equivalent of its English original; in his project proposal, Vuorinen warns against taking international news at face value since local stories, after being centralized by agencies, may be relocalized in very different ways; from Rudvin we learn that the relocation of folk literature in a new sociolect and genre may have huge political implications; and finally, Brownlie predicts that terminology will gain meaning only when it is located. Would this focus on the location of meaning be a way of thematizing how CETRA conceives translation? Or would this merely be my personal inference? Now, how about the (re)location of CETRA itself? First of all, if CETRA is locatable at all, it would be found in a collection of people rather than in one institution or geographical position. Further, if this group of people can be said to stand for some sort of CETRA language, it is hopefully a pidgin arising from various languages (still largely to be traced) and out of which new languages could be born when intersecting with new situations. The fourth 4

5 volume ( ) might tell us if the move of our summer seminar to Misano (Italy) has meant anything in this respect. And who knows what will happen if the pidgin moves from Leuven to other universities? In any case, as long as the different speakers move with it, books like this one will continue to be brought out. For now, I would like to thank the following people for speaking whatever language after refereeing whichever paper in this volume: José Lambert, Theo Hermans, Lieven D hulst, Dirk Delabastita, Yves Gambier, Daniel Gile, Gideon Toury, Anthony Pym, Lawrence Venuti, Dirk De Geest, Stef Slembrouck, Hugo Marquant, Joris De Rooy and Clem Robyns. Others offered feedback on more detailed issues which it would take too long to specify here: Joy Sisley, Abdulla Al-Harrasi, Koenraad Du Pont, Roger Janssens, Kate Sturge, Katrijn Hillewaere, Nathalie Masy and Peter Jansen. I further thank José Lambert for being as unprejudiced as one can dream a supervisor to be and Clem Robyns for telling me how to behave under such unprejudiced supervision. Finally, my greatest thanks go to Kate Sturge, for her sense of perfection during the final stylistic corrections. References Bruner, Jerome 1990 Acts of Meaning, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Hermans, Theo 1999 Translation in Systems. Descriptive and System-Oriented Approaches Explained, Manchester: St Jerome. Robyns, Clem 1994a Preface to Translation and the (Re)production of Culture, edited by Clem Robyns, Leuven: the CERA Chair for Translation, Communication and Cultures, pp b Translation and Discursive Identity, Poetics Today 15:1, pp Toury, Gideon 1995 Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond, Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 5

Also known as the Polysystem Approach, the Manipulation School, the Tel- Aviv Leuven Axis, the Descriptive, Empirical or Systemic School, or the

Also known as the Polysystem Approach, the Manipulation School, the Tel- Aviv Leuven Axis, the Descriptive, Empirical or Systemic School, or the Reference: Rosa, Alexandra Assis. 2010/2016d. Descriptive Translation Studies - DTS (revised version). In Handbook of Translation Studies. Ed. Yves Gambier and Luc van Doorslaer. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.