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Translation and the Construction of Identity: Abstracts
Date: 12-14 August 2004
Venue: Sookmyung Women's University, Seoul, Korea
Mahasweta Sengupta This paper analyzes a dominant paradigm of
Translation Studies and suggests some alternate ways of dealing with the
problem that scholars encounter when they do not look at the world from the
Anglo-American point of view.
Panel 1: Disciplinary Identity: Redefining Translation in the
21st Century
Interrogating the ‘inter’ in Culture: Translation and the ‘Foreign’ in
Texts
Central Institute of English & Foreign Languages, Hyderabad, India
Translation Studies has been singularly dominated by the work of Bible
translation in the world. Our understanding of the transfer of meaning from
one culture to another has followed the desire of making a text accessible
to readers so that the programme of conversion was supported and people
actually accepted the text as their own, as something that they needed to
read and follow.
One of the major assumptions of the work of Bible translators, the idea of
“readability”, was and is the paradigm by which most translators in the
world produce their texts; the intention is to make it accessible to the
reader in the target culture, to persuade her to read it. This effort to
accommodate a foreign text within the domestic has been challenged by
Antoine Berman, Lawrence Venuti and others who feel that it is time we
discard this habit and keep the translated text as “foreign”, embedded
within the cultural world that produced it originally.
This paper continues a similar line of argument and advocates the necessity
of unshackling the need to contain the translated text within the frame of
the target culture, thereby almost redefining its identity as a text. Since
our understanding of the nature of a text and its location within a culture
has radically changed in the last thirty years, it is time we reconsider our
view regarding the existence of a “translated text” within a culture.
This paper will look at the scene from the Indian context, in its
transaction with the Anglo-American world in English. It seems to be
absolutely necessary that we redefine our positions in relation to the
“identity” of the translated text and in the process alter the framework of
the discipline in a significant way. This shift towards understanding and
accepting the values and structures of the source culture as it actually is
will result in the reorientation of our goals in translation, it will also
grant the text its valid identity in the world.
© IATIS 2003