Documentation as Ethics in Postcolonial Translation
*
By
Dora Sales Salvador, Ph.D.,
Grupo
CRIT
Departamento de Traducción y Comunicación
Universidad Jaume I de Castellón,
Spain
dsales@trad.uji.es
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The
work of translation is above all a problem of documentation.
Roberto Mayoral (1994:
118)
Beliefs
and values, ideas and ideals, are perhaps the most
difficult aspects of culture to represent and to translate.
Maria Tymoczko (1999:
164)
*
Abstract
The
purpose of this paper is to reflect on the documentation
challengesmostly in cultural termsput forward
by the translation of postcolonial literature. The
new technologies on the documentary scene have been
a revolution mainly in relation to the accessibility
of diverse sources. Nonetheless, the translation of
postcolonial literature entails very specific documentary
needs, of ethical and political nature, for which
sometimes neither the libraries nor the new technologies
are ready. This is a thought-provoking challenge for
contemporary translation studies and also for the
key discipline of documentation. Above all, we intend
to focus our thoughts on the ethical responsibility
of documentary work, from a theoretical viewpoint
that will be illustrated with literary examples taken
from the work of some reputed translators. We will
see that a recurrent strategy used by these translators
is to prepare critical notes that accompany their
translations, and which also constitute valuable documentary
sources for other future translations.
Translating
postcolonial literature: Documentary competence and
challenges
The
phenomenon known to criticism as postcolonial literature
consists of the creative works produced in the former
European colonies, and presents a large number of
linguistic and cultural specificities. On the linguistic
level, it must be stressed that many authors in this
field choose to write in the European language which
arrived in their countries thanks to imperialism and
later became the official or global language or lingua
franca, a vehicle of communication, since they
know that this translinguistic option allows them
to become part of the transnational repertoire and
market: if they wrote in their native languages, which
have minority status in that global context, their
opportunities to disseminate their work would be reduced.
However, if it is true that the translinguistic option
is a sign of identity for many postcolonial writers,
it should above all be emphasized that what is being
transmitted in the language chosen is another culture,
a whole world of reference which those literatures
invite us to discover. Thus, a large part of postcolonial
literature, eminently hybrid in nature, entails the
translation of linguistic and cultural elements which
are specific to a culture that expresses itself in
literary terms in another language. By now there exists
a substantial corpus of such literatures, written
in languages such as English and French (the main
but not the only languages used), from such formerly
colonized locations as India, Pakistan, the Caribbean,
Morocco, Algeria, Senegal, Mali, Ghana, Kenya, and
many other places.
In
addition, the literary scene in Western societies
is increasingly marked by the presence of literature
written by immigrants of diverse origins, which may
(though it does not always) correspond to postcolonial
contexts. Examples here are the works of Emine Sevgi
Özdamar, Mahi Binebine and Fatou Diome, of, respectively,
Turkish, Moroccan and Senegalese origin. The hybrid
texture of this literature of immigration immediately
manifests features similar to those of postcolonial
literature. The European literary polysystems are
ever more strongly characterized by the presence of
artists from immigrant communities whose work is marked
by hybridity, métissage and fusion,
and who are contributing, all in all, to the creation
of a collective vision of immigration from a constructive
viewpoint.
In
this new space which is being created, translation
has played, and continues to play, a crucial role,
as it has throughout the development of human communication.
Today no-one doubts the relevance of translation as
a means for the construction of cultural representations.
In the words of Pilar Godayol (2004: 172): "ningún
discurso culturalincluido el traductológicose
puede mantener al margen de los efectos del poder
y fuera de su representación" [Gloss: 'no cultural
discourseincluding that of translationcan
stand outside the effects of power or outside its
representation']. It follows that, given this power
of representation and transmission of ideology attaching
to translation, it is important, in our ever more
multicultural Western societies, to learn how to rethink
the politics of translation which tends to construct
a simplified or stereotyped image of other cultures.
Thus, aware of the need to respect and encourage cultural
pluralism, we argue that in the field of the translation
of postcolonial literature it is necessary to reflect
on the ethical responsibility attaching to the task
of documentation, which will inevitably be interdisciplinary
in nature.
In
fact, in today's ramifyingly complex information society,
it is essential to stress the key importance of documentation
in the field of translation studies, as a tool existing
in relation to all the other disciplines involved
in the educational process. We may usefully point
out that in Europe all higher education courses in
translation and interpretation include, as compulsory
curricular elements, components intended to develop
documentation skills related to the information retrieval
and the evaluation of its quality, in the context
of a multiplicity of formats.
In
this connection and in the area of translation studies,
the group PACTE (based at the Universidad Autónoma
de Barcelona, Spain) has been stressing in its work
the importance of this instrumental skill in the process
of acquiring the general skill of translation (Hurtado
Albir 2001: 394-408). Authors such as Consuelo Gonzalo
García (2004) have defined this skill as documentary
competence. A succinct definition of what
we mean by this concept is provided by María
Pinto, who sees this competence as "basada en el manejo
de información, determinando necesidades, planificando
la búsqueda, usando estrategias para localizar
y obtener información, discriminando y valorando
la información para la toma de decisiones"
[Gloss: 'grounded in the handling of information,
defining needs, programming search, employing strategies
to locate and obtain information, sifting and evaluating
information with a view to decision-making.'] (Pinto
2005). In any process of transfer between a source
text and a target text, translators need to be competent
in documentation, as an essential part of translational
competence.
Following
the position of María Pinto (forthcoming),
we argue that it is ever more important that the translator
should acquire the skill of information literacy,
defining this process as the acquisition of skills,
competences, knowledge and values enabling the access
to, use of and communication of information in whatever
form, with the aim of producing competent professionals
and users, trained in the habit of identifying and
registering information sources in appropriate ways,
able to process and produce their own information,
able to sift and evaluate the information process,
and able to produce quality communication products
(American Library Association 2000). This is a 'generic
habit' which is of major importance in enabling people
to successfully tackle decision-making, problem-solving
or research. Information literacy comprises the whole
range of experience in all its forms, detecting what
forms and modes of information are relevant to different
situations.
In
her brief guide to documentation resources for translation
studies, Rocío Palomares Perraut (2000: 15-16)
stresses that the translator needs to use documentary
sources in order to acquire information on the content
of the source text, terminological information in
order to use specialist vocabulary correctly, and
phraseological information in order to employ the
style of the source text. The key is, then, to know
how to seek, locate and handle, in a contrastive fashion,
the documentation sources which are needed for the
translation activity. The appearance of tools such
as the Internet has brought about the transition from
an all but one-dimensional library-based model (based
on the printed text) to a compendium of different
information sources and means of acquiring, handling,
archiving and disseminating data. In the field of
documentation, the ability to adapt and a concept
of learning as an ongoing process are crucial. Certainly,
today's climate in information and documentation technologies
is very much technology-oriented, and this can create
confusion and encourage the a priori notion that we
can find any information we seek. Here a warning note
is sounded by Cerezo, Corpas and Leiva (2002: 149):
No
todo son ventajas en Internet. Consideran Palomares
Perraut (1999) y Gonzalo García (2000) que
los principales inconvenientes que presenta la red
son la gran dispersión de la información;
la mutabilidad de los contenidos que ofrece; la propia
estructuración de la red, lo que redunda en
una cierta ineficacia; y la dudosa fiabilidad de la
información que a través de ella se
proporciona, como consecuencia de la denominada democratización
informativa.
[Gloss: The Internet does not bring unmixed benefits.
Palomares Perraut (1999) and Gonzalo García
(2000) argue that the main disadvantages of the Internet
relate to the highly dispersed nature of the information,
the changing nature of the content, the structure
of the Internet as such, which tends towards inefficiency,
and the unreliability of the information offered by
it resulting from what is called information democracy].
In
other words, the Internet offers the translator an
invaluable and inexhaustible source of information,
a working medium and a means of communication which
modifies the constraints of time and space. But, in
view of what many critical voices have called infoxication
(Cornellà 2000) on the Internet, we need to
stress the importance of maintaining a critical perspective
when handling sources and evaluating their credibility.
In
this connection, and in direct relation to the subject
of this paper, we may note that María Pinto
(1999: 100), in an interesting article on documentary
skills and the translator of literary texts, defines
translation as a content analysis operation, closely
linked to recent notions regarding channels and constraints
in the context of information flow, communication
processes and their functions and effects in society,
leading us to consider the unity of the text from
a strategic, pragmatic-documentary perspective. Pinto
stresses (1999: 106-107) that the translator's documentary
competence in the work environment needs to develop
in terms of three complementary aspects, i.e. the
translator is: a) a user of information resources
and sources; b) a processor and transformer of original
information; and c) a producer of new documents. At
the same time, the translator's documentary competence
has to evolve in three dimensions: the informational,
the methodological and the strategic (Pinto 1999:
108-110).
Certainly,
the translator's documentary activity is a vital instrumental
link in the chain of mediation and transfer of knowledge
that makes up translation, an indispensable part of
translational know-how. Documentary competence is
essential for the practice of translation, and, therefore,
for the translator's (ongoing) learning process.
Documentary
search throughout the translation process entails
learning how to locate, validate and correctly use
the information sources offered by the library and
the new technologies. Translators are faced with the
challenge and the responsibility of becoming acquainted
with and using the diverse means which now exist for
the location, recovery, handling and dissemination
of information, manipulating the new and extraordinary
resources which information and telecommunications
technology have made available for their work. In
other words, it remains up to the translator to find
the data, the information source; and the translator
is responsible for knowing how to use it. All in all,
to translate is to mediate between languages and cultures,
to operate a constant decision-making procedure, and,
most certainly, to know what documentation means.
Otherwise, decision-making cannot be based on proper
criteria. If one is to translate, acquiring the right
documentation means knowing how to identify the informational
requirements of the text to be translated, and knowing
how to find the right solutions:
...
no es posible que un especialista almacene en su memoria
toda la información que se produce sobre su
especialidad. Mucho menos podrá hacerlo sobre
temas que no se incluyen dentro de su mismo campo
de especialización. La perspectiva inicial
de la persona 'humanista' que 'lo sabe todo' hay que
sustituirla por la del humanista que sabe 'dónde'
y 'cómo' encontrarlo todo. ... Al traductor
o intérprete no se le exige que 'lo sepa todo',
sino que sepa 'cómo saberlo todo'.
[Gloss:
... specialists cannot memorize all the information
produced in their area of specialisation. Still less
can they do so on subjects not falling within their
specialist field. The earlier notion of the 'humanist'
who 'knows everything' needs to give way to that of
the humanist who knows 'where and how' to find everything.
... We do not ask the translator or interpreter to
'know everything', but to 'know how to find everything'.]
(Mayoral, Kelly and Gallardo 1985: 270)
Saber
documentarse implica siempre saber identificar problemas
de traducción y categorizarlos (culturales,
gramaticales, terminológicos, etc.) para
poder luego, en cada caso, elegir como consulta la
fuente o fuentes de información adecuadas para
su resolución.
[Gloss:
To find the right documentation always means to know
how to identify translation problems and categorize
them (as cultural, grammatical, terminological,
etc.), in order subsequently to be able to choose
in each case the most suitable information source(s)
for resolving them.] (Gonzalo García 2004:
281)
Beyond
all doubt, the field of documentation as applied to
translation is a notably transversal domain, in which
much research still needs to be done. Here, we wish
in this paper to stress how, in the case of the translation
of hybrid literatures (postcolonial literature, literature
of immigration), the documentation resources available
(both traditional resources and those provided by
the wide-open field of the Internet) are often insufficient
(Sales Salvador 2004). The main issue at stake is
how to deal with the documentary needs thrown up by
the translation of postcolonial literature, which
raises challenges that arise above all from various
cultural factors. What do we do, for instance, if
in the text we have to translate we find terms and
expressions from non-Western languages for which we
have no dictionaries to hand? What do we do if, once
we have, finally and after a labyrinthine search,
found a dictionary for one of the minority languages
we requiretaking into account that such dictionaries
tend to be published with a small print-run and little
guarantee of being reprinted in the countries where
those languages are spoken, not by Western publishers
with a wide distribution network-, we discover that
the terms we seek do not appear there because they
are colloquialisms or localisms or archaisms or terms
used only by a particular group? In the words of Roberto
Mayoral (1994: 118), "el trabajo de traducción
es en gran medida un problema de documentación"
[Gloss: 'the work of translation is above all a problem
of documentation'], and this is especially and complexly
so in the case of translating hybrid literatures.
In
fact, many practising translators in the field of
postcolonial literature recognize that their most
valuable source and point of reference is the author
of the book they are translating. Writing in the area
of intercultural communication studies, H. Ned Seelye
(1994: 28) makes the extremely valid point that someone
who lives in or has lived in the cultures concerned
is one of the best sources of information. Thus, Miguel
Sáenz, the Spanish translator of Salman Rushdie
and Emine Sevgi Özdamar, who recognizes that
his best resource has always been to contact the two
authors, speaks of his experience translating Emine
Sevgi Özdamar, a Turkish author writing in German,
and states (Sáenz 1999: 176), recalling the
problems he has encountered: "En primer lugar, conocer
el contexto cultural del autor, lo que comprende tanto
la cultura de su país natal como la del ambiente
en que ha vivido en el país de acogida" [Gloss:
'The first is that of being aware of the author's
cultural context, including both the culture of his
native country and that of the environment in which
he has lived in the host country'.]
The
translation of intercultural literatures points up
the need to open up translation and documentation
paths that take full account of linguistic hybridity
and cultural diversity. It is known that translation
takes place not (only) between languages but (also)
between cultures, and the information needed by the
translator therefore always goes beyond the linguistic.
The work that has been carried out in translation
studies within the (poly)systemic or descriptive paradigm
should alert us to the importance of reflecting on
the responsibility of the translator, as one who has
the power to construct the image of a literature and
a culture, which will then be observed or consumed
by readers from another culture. As has been pointed
out by África Vidal Claramonte (1995), this
critical broadening which impelled translation studies
to move beyond (though not to oppose themselves to)
linguistic approaches had much to do with the polysystem
theory (Even-Zohar 1990) and with what has been termed
the 'manipulation school' (Hermans 1985). These two
critical approaches, in many ways convergent, have
encouraged this repositioning, endowing translation
with the role of an essential shaping force in literary
history and cultural dynamics, since they view it
as above all part of a socio-cultural context. Translation
always entails an unstable relationship in terms of
the power which one culture may exercise over another.
By means of the translation process, which is more
than anything an entire information process of enormous
magnitude and influence, what is produced is not textual
equivalents, but rewritings the nature of whose representation
will depend on the pen that signs them, the context,
and the cultural (poly)system in which they are located.
Translation is a discursive operation which is ideological
and political in nature. The activity of the translator
is never confined to translation alone: translators
are social agents who communicate differences and
negotiate limits. Above all, this line of translation
research should remind us that the translator is never
neutral and cannot be exempted from the need to take
a position. Indeed, any translator is constantly obliged
to do just that.
Precisely
in this sense, Maria Tymoczko (2003) has recently
put forward reflections on the ideological positioning
of the translator. Applying a multidisciplinary theoretical
approach from which self-criticism is not absent,
Tymoczko examines the fashionable metaphor of the
'space between' in the translation field, and, avoiding
all complacency, helps us engage in a critical (re)conceptualisation
of that image, which is, indeed, often employed in
the postcolonial area with which we are dealing here.
Tymoczko's work postulates that, in the final analysis,
the discourse of the 'space between' is not only misleading
but actually retrograde with respect to the translator's
understanding process and the notion of ideological
engagement as such. The ideology of a translation
lies not only in the text translated, but also, and
to a major extent, in the position adopted by the
translator. This position is, inevitably, ideological,
and immerses the translator in an unending process
of decision-making which configures the space of enunciation
from which one translates. As Tymoczko lucidly puts
it (2003: 201):
Finally,
from the point of view of the ideology of translation,
the discourse of translation as a space between is
problematic because it is misleading about the nature
of engagement per se. Whether translation is
initiated for political purposes from a source culture,
from a receptor culture, or from some other third
culture, translation is a successful means of engagement
and social changelike most political actionsrequires
affiliation and collective action. ... Effective calls
for translators to act as ethical agents of social
change must intersect with models of engagement and
collective action. This the discourse of translation
as a space between abandons. ... the translator is
in fact all too committed to a cultural framework,
whether that framework is the source culture, the
receptor culture, a third culture, or an international
cultural framework that includes both source and receptor
societies. ... The ideology of translation is indeed
a result of the translator's position, but that position
is not a space between.
Tymoczko's
reflections are, we believe, of major interest for
our consideration of the prospects for the translation
of postcolonial literatures. The act of translating
postcolonial literatures faces us with the challenge
of assuming an ethical engagement in favour of the
cultural diversity which feeds into the source text,
recalling that translation has an active, and extremely
powerful, potential in the shaping of a cultural politics
open to the plurality which ever more visibly surrounds
us. In the face of texts that are formally and conceptually
hybrid, translators assume full awareness that they
are translating not from one language to another,
but from an intersection point (linguistic, cultural,
symbolic) to a system which is largely unaware of
the linguistic and cultural specificities implied
in the source text. With literatures of this kind,
the question, and the challenge, may be expressed
thus: What do we do with these differential elements?
How do we transpose them to the target language and
system? The challenge posed by translations of this
nature, with their ethical dimensions, is above all
one of documentation.
At
this point we would like to pose that the ethical
dimension is, in a sense, context-specific rather
than universal: by ethics we mean not a source of
values but the way in which people relate to those
values, to use the formulation of Iris Zavala (1996:
26). The relationship involved here is, like any other,
dynamic and in constant evolution: there are no magic
formulas which can be applied to every case of translation
of hybrid literature. Each text calls for an approach
of its own, an attentive reflection and a rigorous
consideration of the possible alternatives. What should
in all circumstances be defended is the need for the
translator to take an ethical attitude: one that is
open to dialogue, to awareness of the particularities
of each texta willingness to relate to the
values of others. Above all, however, it is necessary
to learn about those values, to document oneself.
For this purpose, we need to develop an intercultural
awareness, the 'contextual sensitivity' which María
Pinto (1999: 104) identifies as a particularly useful
element for the literary translator. This awareness
or sensitivity is in line with the positions of Gayatri
Spivak (2003), who takes a firm stand against the
erasure of differences and uniformisation. The alternative
propounded by Spivak is to practice a cultural translation
which resists appropriation by the dominant power
and is committed to the specificity of the writing
that comes from subaltern locations. Such a project,
obviously, requires the development of linguistic
and instrumental skills of a specialized nature, open
to the understanding of difference.
We
should recall that, to a large extent, the reactions
to and reception of manifestations of other cultures
are conditioned by the images we have of themby
the translations which already exist and to which
the target culture is historically accustomed. These
are translations which are unlikely to favour cultural
multiplicity, being grounded in translation models
that typically tend to domesticate and homogenize
and do not encourage the habit of adopting translation
decisions that will heed the call of cultural diversity.
The fact is that the translation models which currently
dominate in our Western cultural system tend, in general,
to subordinate content and formal experimentation
to the rules of the target language, thus testifying
to the strong association of translation in our society
with traditionalist publishing policies that are unwilling
to confront the intercultural challenge head-on.
Fortunately,
however, there do exist valuable exceptions. Thus,
as a stimulus to reflection offering possible routes
for translation studies which could help question
this immobility, we will now proceed to the brief
enumeration of the contributions of a number of women
translators of postcolonial literature, whose practice
is to affirm their own visibility and to position
themselves under the banner of their translation projects,
while also becoming sources of documentation. These
are: Gayatri Spivak, Liliana Valenzuela and Malika
Embarek López.
The
translator of postcolonial literature as a producer
of documentary sources: The cases of Spivak, Valenzuela
and Embarek
Gayatri
Spivak, who is well known for her theoretical and
critical work in the postcolonial field, is an interesting
case of a translator who assumes her visibility and
is engaged with issues of cultural subalternity. Spivak
always accompanies her translations with a full critical
apparatus, which, in the two texts which we have examined
for this articleboth translations from Bengali
into English of the Indian activist Mahasweta Devi
(1980; 1995)is embodied in: a translator's preface;
an interview between translator and author; a translator's
afterword; and a collection of notes, here taking
the form of an end-of-book glossary providing specific
documentation on the terms and references (political,
cultural and literary) which appear in the interviews
with the author and in her fictions. Spivak stresses
that her concern as a translator has always been to
maintain the tone of the subaltern discourse that
is manifested with great dignity by Devi in her prose.
Communication between author (Devi) and translator
(Spivak) is an aspect on which Gayatri Spivak places
enormous value, as a form of dialogue which has provided
her with feedback in her practice of both translation
and literary criticism.
In
her afterword to Devi (1995), Spivak emphasizes the
role of visibility in her translational project, whose
aim is, above all, to contest hegemonic notions while
refusing at all moments to be confined by a 'space
between'positioning herself, rather, in clear
and manifest fashion, in favour of Devi's cultural
specificity and the values her work transmits. Those
are also the values which she, as translator, wishes
to transfer to the target system (international and
anglophone). Following the line earlier set out in
her "The Politics of Translation" (Spivak 1993), Spivak
here declares: "Since the general tendency in reading
and teaching so-called 'Third World' literature is
toward an uninstructed cultural relativism, I have
always written companion essays with each of my translations,
attempting to intervene and transform this tendency"
(Spivak, in Devi 1995: 197).
Liliana
Valenzuela, in her translation of the most recent
book by the Chicana author Sandra Cisneros, the novel
Caramelo (2002), adds a substantial note at
the end setting out her project and her relationship
with the translated text. In addition, on the credits
page there appears a "Nota del Editor" ("Publisher's
note") which states: "La presente edición reproduce
la forma en que los habitantes de las comunidades
fronterizas sintetizan un lenguaje formado de palabras
en inglés y español, el llamado 'lenguaje
de la frontera'. Véase nota de la traductora
al final del libro" [Gloss: 'This edition reproduces
the form in which the inhabitants of the border communities
synthesize a language out of English and Spanish words,
known as 'border language'. See Translator's note
at end of book'.] The publisher has thus not only
allowed the inclusion of a translator's note (already
an achievement in itself in the context of popular,
not academic publishing houses), but has clearly expressed
his open support for this critical contribution accompanying
the published translation. The continual dialogue
between Valenzuela and Cisneros, who were in permanent
contact during the translation process, is also stressed
by Valenzuela. Both Cisneros and her translator are
bilingual and bicultural, as Chicanas leading their
lives between English and Spanish, the US and Mexico.
They share a complex contextcultural, linguistic
and socialin which the characters of the fiction
translated move. Valenzuela also speaks of the very
specific labour of documentation needed to translate
this novel, in the following terms:
...
muchas personas me ayudaron a encontrar palabras y
expresiones que no se encuentran en los diccionarios.
Pues así como la autora realizó un gran
trabajo de investigación y hasta podría
decirse de etnología al rescatar de la tradición
oral la manera de hacer rebozos, al igual que las
costumbres y dichos mexicanos, yo también tuve
que investigar los términos más apropiados
hablando con la gente.
[Gloss:
... a lot of people helped me find words and expressions
which weren't in the dictionaries. The author herself
carried out a huge labour of research, if not ethnology,
rescuing techniques for making shawls from the oral
tradition, alongside Mexican customs and sayings,
and in the same way, I too had to research the most
appropriate terms by talking to people] (Valenzuela
2002: 543).
Malika
Embarek López, for her part, has specialized
in the translation into Spanish of French-language
literature from Maghreb. She is above all known as
the translator of the Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun,
and has also translated (among others) Edmond Amran
El Maleh, Mohamed Chukri, Abdellah Larui, Haim Zafrani
and Mouloud Feraoun. In cases such as theseof
literature characterized by métissage
and profoundly hybrid in linguistic and referential
termsit is not sufficient to have a good knowledge
of the language of writing and the target culture:
even more important is knowledge of the source culture
and all it entails. Embarek is herself a translator
of mixed racial and cultural origins, whose life is
itself a source of documentation: she thus finds herself
in a position which is both complex and privileged,
thanks to which she endeavours in her translations
to reproduce "the passionate embrace" (Embarek López
1999: 208) of her two languages: the dialectal Moroccan
Arabic of her father (excluded from the written word)
and her mother's Spanish. The aim of her translation
project is to reconstitute in Spanish the Arab voices
which are more or less latent in the French in which
Ben Jelloun chooses to write from the postcolonial
vantage-point, making good use of the inheritance
of Arabic terms which the Spanish language possesses,
while also providing glossaries or explanatory notes
where she finds this the most effective (and ethical)
means of rendering the text.
It
is clear that the market and institutions of the target
culture do not always permit or support new approaches
that are creatively and interculturally aware and
may (indeed will) challenge readers' expectations
of fluency and formal homogeneity in the body of the
text. Nonetheless, such is the challenge for those
who translate. It is here that we locate the potential
latent in projects such as those we have descriptively
summarized (Gayatri Spivak, Liliana Valenzuela, Malika
Embarek), which we see as concrete examples of the
translation ethics and documentation which are needed
in our world of cultural diversity, in which it is
vital to understand the other if we are to avoid creating
barriers of separation and intolerance. In other words,
this position, which is grounded in a real social
need, is the responsibility not only of publishers
but alsoand above allthat of the translator
community, whose members are in a position to act
on the status quo and take the plunge of truly developing
the "models of engagement and collective action" demanded
by Tymoczko (2003: 201). It is up to us, those who
translate, to deconstruct homogenising and risk-averse
translation policies and trace out new paths. In our
view this should, to a large extent, be grounded in
the labour of documentation which accompanies and
sustains the process of transfer. The intercultural
challenge is by now an ineluctable part of our societies.
Today more than ever, translation, as a constant process
of negotiation, impels us to engage in dialogue with
what is different. While it is true that, as Tahar
Ben Jelloun poses (2002: 46), translation is often
a sign of a curiosity for knowledge, what we need
to do is to test just how far that desire to know
other cultures goes, to find these things out in a
prejudice-free and ethical manner. We are talking
about a project aimed at stimulating the development
of intercultural competence in a context of dialogue.
Concluding
points: Documentation, the way forward
What,
then, should we do if things are the way they are?
In the context of an open-ended project, we would
here like to make two proposals, which we believe
would yield results and which need to be impelled
by the translators themselves, following the philosophy
of engagement and collective action that we have outlined
above, following Tymoczko (2003).
Our
first proposal is that translations of hybrid literature
should better contain a critical apparatus. This could
consist of an afterword and, if necessary, a glossary,
giving visibility to the sources used and enabling
their further handling. We are talking about a means
of enhancing the translator's visibility and, at the
same time, placing a source of documentation at the
service of the reader (whether professional or not).
It is true that the publishing establishment could
prove hostile to the idea of including extra material
in this way, but one can but try. Let us engage in
dialogue with our publishers and explain to them,
on reasoned grounds, the nature and implications of
our translational project. We need to have firm faith
in this translational project based on glossaries
and afterwordson tools which should be made available
to translators to serve as a link between cultures,
though without simplifying the reality of one or other
side, respecting the idiosyncrasy of the original
and opening up paths for understanding for the reading
public. In other words, in this three-term exchange
of information, it is for the translator, as mediator,
to be aware of the two areas that are being placed
in contact.
Our
second proposal concerns the creation of an open-access
virtual area (e.g. database or portal) which would,
on an ongoing basis, store the documentation (explicitly
contextualized) drawn on by translators in the translation
process. This would facilitate the availability, for
those who need it, of the kind of information which
those who translate literature of this type sometimes
track down only after long and arduous search: how
to contact the authors themselves, or else specialists
in areas related to the documentation requirements
of the work being translated; location and use of
hard-to-find dictionaries; background material (anthropology,
mythology, popular culture, and so on). The aim would
be to consolidate the already highly positive experience
derived from the use of technological resources.
All
in alland there is no going backthe translation
of hybrid literatures (postcolonial literature, literature
of immigration) brings us face to face, on both theoretical
and practical levels, with the need for reflection
on intercultural matters. These narratives, which
throw up documentary challenges and force us to re-evaluate
our translational assumptions, impel us to become
part, as translators, of the learning of diversity.
If we rise to the challenge of cultural documentation
that is implicit in the translation of these literatures,
we should be able to launch translational projects
which can contribute to the creation of a documentation
store based on the experience acquired with each and
every translation. Fortunately, the library is already
under way, and we as translators can contribute to
its growth, documenting ourselves with a sense of
responsibility and on the basis of intercultural awareness,
and sharing the results of our research.
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