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Translation and the Construction of Identity: Abstracts
Date: 12-14 August 2004
Venue: Sookmyung Women's University, Seoul, Korea
Damir Arsenijević Literary texts have a double ideological content:
they convey ideas and values from their writer/culture whilst validating the
latter as capable of producing artefacts of general human worth. Literary
translators are crucial mediators of this double content. Though their own
discourses and ideologies cannot fail to inform their translations, it would
be over-reductionist to see translators as inevitably “manipulating” or
“violating” source-culture values and discourses in favour of their
target-culture counterparts, even when the target language is a
geopolitically powerful lingua franca such as English (Zauberga
2000). Translators’ prime allegiances may equally well be to the source
culture, with translation aiming both to convey source-culture discourses
and values to a world readership, and to validate these in the eyes of
source readers. Moreover, the translating style adopted is almost certainly
less important here than the motivations and ideological positions of actors
in the writing-translating-publishing process – which affect, for example,
who gets published in translation, where, and how. Mahmutćehajić, Rusmir (2000) The Denial of Bosnia.
Translated by Marina Bowder and Francis R. Jones. University Park, PA: Penn
State University Press.
Panel 5: Translation and the (De-)construction of National/Cultural Identities
(Re)constructing Bosnia: Ideologies and Agents in Poetry Writing,
Translating and Publishing
De Montfort University, UK
Francis R. Jones
Newcastle University, UK
We examine these issues with respect to the break-up of Yugoslavia, where
cultural and ideological allegiances have been of often murderous
importance, and where communication with the wider world has played a key
role in both exacerbating and resolving conflict. Our paper focuses on
English translations of poetry written in Bosnia before, during and after
the war of 1992-1995. We analyse how Bosnian and non-Bosnian translators’
and translation commissioners’ decisions have participated in the dialogue
between two wider discourses within and outside the region – the
nationalist, which constructs Bosnia as an irredeemable “dark province”
where self and other are absolute and irreconcilable, and the pluralist,
which constructs Bosnia as a “unity in diversity” (Mahmutćehajić 2000) based
on the interdependence and constant reinvention of self and other, majority
and marginalised, within an emerging civic society.References
Zauberga, Ieva (2000) ‘Rethinking Power Relations in Translation’, Across
Languages and Cultures 1/1: 49-56.
© IATIS 2003