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Translation and the Construction of Identity: Abstracts
Date: 12-14 August 2004
Venue: Sookmyung Women's University, Seoul, Korea
Kim Wallmach
Department of Linguistics (Translation Studies), University of South Africa
Panel 2: The Politics of Interdisciplinary Research
"Recognising the ‘little perpetrator’ in each of us”: Complicity, responsibility
and translation under apartheid
One of the key metaphors used by translation theorists in exploring the ideology
of translation and the position of the translator or interpreter is a spatial
one, that of being “in between”, a detached onlooker located somewhere, in time
and space, between source and target listener or reader. Tymoczko (2003:192-194)
identifies a number of reasons why the notion of translation as a space between
has positive ideological connotations, including our awareness of the
connotations of between associated with words pertaining to translation in
certain Western languages, as well as the use of between in poststructuralist
thought to undermine the binary conceptualisations of structuralism, oppose the
idea of absolute origin and allow poststructuralists to separate themselves from
the polarised dominant political alternatives of the Cold War. However, Tymoczko
(2003:192) also points out the danger of accepting these old associations
uncritically, despite their attractiveness, not only because they may cease to
be relevant in time, but also because “it is dangerous to claim as universal a
theoretical assertion that is based on the particularities and histories of a
few Western European languages”.
Accordingly, in this paper I will examine a related spatial metaphor and its
influence on translation discourse and the intellectual in South Africa, namely
apartheid, the concept of enforced racial separation officially known as the
policy of ‘separate development’. I argue that, for the translation
intellectual, the obsession of apartheid with separateness means that the notion
of between cannot be neutral and tends to give rise to competing discourses of
jointedness and complicity. According to Mark Sanders (2002:1), the question of
complicity is unavoidable in South Africa after apartheid - not simply because
it is necessary to know whose resources gave apartheid life, nourished and
defended it, but also because apartheid, by its very nature, occasions a
questioning of and thinking about complicity itself. As a variegated set of
policies and practices, apartheid may have been, and may still be, exemplary for
provoking a response from the intellectual that could not simply be one of
opposition.
I use the concept of complicity in the sense that Sanders (2002) uses it, namely
as a way of thinking of resistance and collaboration as interrelated, enabling
complicity to be viewed not as a problem exclusively for supporters of the
apartheid regime and its policies but also for its opponents.
List of sources:
Sanders, M. (2002) Complicities: The intellectual and apartheid.
Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, South Africa.
Tymoczko, M. (2003) “Ideology and the position of the translator” In: Calzada
Pérez, M. (ed.) Apropos of Ideology: Translation Studies on Ideology -
Ideologies in Translation Studies. Manchester: St Jerome.
© IATIS 2003