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后殖民翻译


• Spivak‟s own translation strategy necessitates the translator intimately understanding the language and situation of the original. It draws on poststructuralist concepts of rhetoric,logic and the social.

Spivak‟s critique of Western feminism and publishing is most biting when she suggests that feminists from the hegemonic countries should show real solidarity with women in postcolonial contexts by learning the language in which those women speak and write.

Asymmetrical power relations are the refrain of translation in a postcolonial context. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak‟s essay “The Politics of Translation” (1992/2000)and Tejaswini Niranjana‟s Siting Translation:history,poststructuralism and the colonial context (1992 ) are among the seminal works in the interface between translation and postcolonialism.

According to Spivak,“in the act of wholesale translation into English there can be a betrayal of the democratic ideal into the law of the strongest. This happens when all the literature of the Third World gets translated into a sort of with-it translationese,so that the literature by a woman in Palestine begins to resemble,in the feel of its prose, something by a man in Taiwan.”
• 术语“后殖民主义”是斯皮瓦克在1990年 出版的访谈与会议及《后殖民批评家》中 提出来的;后殖民翻译研究是美国学者罗 宾逊1997年提出来的。

While translation may facilitate cultural contact,it is generated by difference and deals with difference. Traditionally, translation has been viewed as representing the other,yet “these representations will shift as they are constructed by different groups with their own senses of identity,groups both internal and external to a nation.” In addition,a difference “is often established by translations. Thus,the process of translation is powerful,and it is not innocent.” Tymoczko provides examples of how the history of the English colonization and oppression of Ireland can be traced in `translation practices.
• Asymmetrical power relations in a postcolonial context also form the thread of the important collection of essays entitled Postcolonial Translation: theory and practice(1999),edited by Susan Bassnett and HarishTrivedi. Spivak‟s essay brings together feminist, postcolonialist and poststructuralist approaches.
• Just as we saw a parallel which feminist theorists have drawn between the conventional male-driven depiction of translations and of women, so has the metaphor been used of the colony as an imitative and inferior translational copy whose suppressed identity has been over written by the colonizer. Translation's role in disseminating such ideological images has led Bassnett and Trivedi to referring to the „shameful history of translation‟.

For Niranjana,the most-part contemporary translation theories are based on Western examples and are influenced by the eternal opposition between fidelity or betrayal and a focus on target or source. Such theories do not view translation from the point of view of power or history. Writing from a poststructuralist perspective,Niranjana sees the following as the failings of translation studies because of its tern orientation.
Postcolonial Approaches
“后殖民”这一术语有不同涵义。美国翻译理 论家罗宾逊(Douglas Robinson)在给“后殖 民翻译研究”(Postcolonial Translation Studies)下定义时,列出了“后殖民”的三个 时间段:一、殖民地独立以后;二、殖民地开 始以后;三、以权力关系为参照的后殖民主 义视角———全部人类历史。
failings of translation studies because of its
Western orientation
• • 1)that translation studies has until recently not recognized the question of power imbalance between different languages; 2)that the concepts underlying much of western translation theory are flawed as „its notions of text, author,and meaning are based on an unproblematic, naively representational theory of language‟; 3) that the „humanistic enterprise‟ of translation needs to be questioned since translation in the colonial context builds a conceptual image of colonial domination into the discourse of Western philosophy.

In her book Siting Translation(1992), Indian scholar Niranjana takes a fresh look at accepted translation theory. She discusses the inequalities between languages,linguistic and cultural domination and the manipulative power of translation. She also sheds new light on the role that translation plays in establishing representations of the colonial or post-colonial subject within postcolonial criticism.
• Spivak‟s work indicates how cultural studies, and especially postcolonialism,has over the past decade focused on “issues of translation, the transnational[sic]and colonization.” • The linking of colonization and translation is accompanied by the argument that translation has played an active role in the colonization process and in spreading an ideologically motivated image of colonized peoples.
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