Southward Ho, or How to Become a Translator Engag é in Our Time LIU Yameng

1. Southward Ho, or How to Become a Translator Engagé in Our Time LIU Yameng Fujian Normal University Fujian, China

2. Introductory Remarks: Translation & Intervention 0.1. Translation always intervenes. The world has been “translated” into what it is. 0.2. Translation has not been intervening in a way we like: 0.2.1. gap between the global haves & have-nots; 0.2.2. imperial order v. democratization; 0.2.3. “global village” v. increasingly estranged in a progressively monochromic world; 0.2.4. translation’s role in causing and sustaining the state of affairs

3. 1. “Centripetal/Northward Translation” and Its Manifestations 1.1. The kind of translation we have been practicing: 1.1.1. oriented toward the global center; 1.1.2. of the North, for the North, if not entirely by the North. 1.2. The self-absorbed, self-affirming, and self-serving nature of translational practices in the North: “a sophisticated form of assimilative cannibalism in which post-colonial works are appropriated or swallowed whole into hegemonic canons of world literature”– M. Tymoczko

4. 1. “Centripetal/Northern Translation” and Its Manifestations (cont.) 1.3. The other-directed, other-affirming, to a significant other-serving tendency of Southern translation: -- functioning in which “magnetic field” or “gravitational sphere”? -- in a separate but equal signifying system, or a hegemonic formation of world translation?

5. 1. “Centripetal/Northward Translation” and Its Manifestations (cont.) 1.4. Two symptoms of the Northward Translation: 1.4.1. Contemporary Chinese translational practices: a lopsided selection of source texts -- a statistical breakdown of the contents of the magazine Yi Lin/Translations 2000-2004: novels: 38/0; poems & essays: 50/10; novellas and short stories 142/42 -- a close look at one 2005 issue of Yi Lin: table of contents letters to the editor

6. 1. “Centripetal/Northward Translation” and Its Manifestations (cont.) 1.4.2. contemporary Chinese translation studies: a determined effort to relocate Western theories to a Chinese setting? -- tendency to look to the North for interests, topics and problematics that would structure their thinking about translation; -- indigenous concerns/problems not attracting much attention; -- consumed with an interest in Western issues and models.

7. 2. Toward a Global “Public Sphere of Translation” 2.1. Consequence of centripetal translation: no genuinely international discourse on translation. 2.2. The solution: active participation by Southern scholars as independent participants and cultivation of a “private” Southern understanding of translation. 2.3. The way toward theoretical independence: To de-sublime Western theories by rhetoricizing and instrumentalizing them.

8. 2. Toward a “Global Public Sphere of Translation” (cont.) 2.3.1. Western theories as as an on-going internal debate, and as a collection of conceptual resources and discursive tools: -- juxtaposing translation theories of postmodern persuasion with critiques such as “postmodernism has sprung from the U.S. . . . And reflects some of that country’s most intractable political problems. It is then perhaps a little etbnocentric of [the U.S.) to project its own political backyard onto the world at large” (Eagleton 1996: 122)

9. 2. Toward a “Global Public Sphere of Translation” (cont.) -- juxtaposing postcolonial theories of translation with critiques such as: “I have yet to feel the impact of post-colonial studies on Coca Cola, Mercedes Benz, Mitsubishi, or the IMF. Where in postcolonial studies is the relation of history to morality theorized in realistic, not simply idealistic or bombastic terms?” (Hassan 1998: 332) -- before getting ready to apply Western theories in general as a body of knowledge, remember what Bourdieu says of “symbolic violence”: “the coercion . . . set up only through the consent that the dominated cannot fail to give to the dominator (and therefore to the domination) when their understanding of the situation and relation can only use instruments of knowledge that they have in common with the dominator, which, being merely the incorporated form of the structure of the relation of domination, make this relation appear as natural” (2000: 170)

10. 3. Cultivating a Southern Perspective Salutary effects of desubliming Western theories: By “listening in” to this internal debate among Western scholars and becoming intimately acquainted with conflicting perspectives on each issue, Southern scholars gain the necessary distance and space for formulating individualized and differing perspectives on the basis of their own experiences, interests and concerns. 3.1. Taking issue with the concept of “foreignizing” in South-to-North or South-North translation: -- Out of a concern for the source culture or for the target language? -- Serving domestic interests or taking care of the foreign? -- How is “foreignizing translation” to affect the reading public’s attitude toward the source culture?

11. 3. Cultivating a Southern Perspective (cont.) 3.2. Laying emphasis on rhetorical effects of translation “Translation never concerns just the target audience or culture. Rather, it provides its audience with a representation of the people, nation, culture and civilization with which the source text is associated, and it is the only means by which the target audience come to understand the outside world. How source texts from one nation are selected and translated has a way of determining the target audience’s perception of that nation, shaping their attitude toward its people and, more consequentially, pre-structuring the action which they are likely to take in dealing with the nation in question.”

12. 3. Cultivating a Southern Perspective (cont.) 3.3. Translation could have serious consequences for source cultures without much power -- the “translation” of “New World originals” into “the ‘savage’, ‘barbarian’, or ‘semi-civilized’ regions of the earth” the better to justify their subsequent “invasion, appropriation, and subjugation by the representatives of ‘civilization’”(Stocking 1991: 4) -- in being represented as outrageously or scarily different from the North, a Southern nation risks facing serious intervention from the powerful-cum-the holy: the “impatient triumphalism of human rights” is often “expressed as politico-economic blackmail leading to military intervention; or to ‘the suppression of the savage’ as in non-governmental organization ‘gender training’” (Spivak 2000: 333)

13. 4. From Difference to Representational Justice What should be the key term for conceptualizing translation in our time, or the key value with which to ground contemporary practices of translation? 4.1. “Difference” in itself has no moral/political valences. 4.2. Given the historical conditions, the central value for translation in our time ought to be representational justice: “To uphold representational justice is to translate in good faith. It is to show respect to the source discourse community in the interpretation of the source text. It is to take into consideration how the source culture and its members could be affected by our translation of their texts and to take responsibility for whatever consequences may come out of the way the source culture is represented in our translation.”

14. 4. From Difference to Representational Justice (cont.) 4.3. What the Southern practitioners expect of their Northern colleagues: -- in translation, to balance one’s responsibilities for the target and for the source culture, to induce a deepening sense of shared humanity, of identification with and solidarity for the source culture and its members; -- in thinking and talking about translation, to avoid theoretical avant-gardism complicitous with the power base of translation it has never disturbed, and to foster a truly international and participant discourse on translation

15. 4. From Difference to RepresentationalJustice (cont.) 4.4. What the Southern practitioners should be doing in promoting representational justice: -- to restore a balance in what they translate: “when the literary works of our host country made available to the reading public of another Southern country consists of no more than a few titles by Gordimer and Coetzee, not as South African authors, but as Nobel laureates, when Coetzee’s Disgrace has become the de facto basis for reading publics in other Southern countries to imagine the post-apartheid South Africa, Southern translators have not upheld representational justice for the South” -- to generate theoretical interests on the basis of their own translational practices, to do justice to their own experiences, but to the development of a global discourse on translation.

16. Coda: Southward Ho! “It is no accident that the current conference of ours should be held on the southernmost tip of the most Southern of continents. In this doubly Southern location, we have a physical correlate for the need to redouble our efforts to turn the South into another fundamental point of reference for translation in our time.”