Tag: Translation Theory

Sociologies of Translation

This week’s Penn Humanities seminar stepped away from the usual format (a presentation by a forum fellow followed by a response from another fellow) networkand paused for a bit to consider two important texts for translation theory: Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” and Bruno Latour’s “How to Resume the Task of Tracing Associations.”  Elsewhere, I’ve reflected on the ways the Global Chaucers project realizes some of the claims of Benjamin’s essay, the most important being the way a translation “must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s way of meaning, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel.”[1]  Extending this concept (without necessarily buying into his transcendental inclinations), we can see how multiple translations might provide more fragments of the vessel, and we can expect that studying these multiple translations together will provide a more complex sense of the original than could the study of a single translation.

Latour, too, is interested in making connections among fragments. The associations he looks for would initially seem to be based on similarities; however, as his extensive citations of Gabriel Tarde suggest, the more significant associations are marked by differences.[2] From a sociological perspective, this difference means that in order to make those associations we must translate. Translation, in one form or another, therefore saturates our interactions and structures our relationships.  When we begin to examine multiple translations of The Canterbury Tales, a likely place to start will be at moments of difference, those places where translators found different solutions to a linguistic dilemma.  These points of apparent incommensurability guide us to places where meaning (in both Chaucer’s text and in the translation) threatens (or perhaps even does) fall apart; the translation, then shows us one possible way to re-associate the terms and thereby create meaning. When the translations are separated by significant temporal lengths or geographical spaces, the results can be an especially rich set of associations allowing us also to observe how meanings shift across time and space.

Latour also reassures that there is no urgency, no need to bring all the translations together in one grand Chaucerian vessel.  Instead, the sociologist’s networks of association allow us to consider the numerous combinations and unexpected hybrids, thereby allowing us to trace connections that make visible what is otherwise hidden to the monolingual reader.

My brief reflections touch only tangentially today’s fascinating conversation that explored the associations animating these two essays.

 

[1] Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” trans. Harry Zohn, in Selected Writings, vol 1, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Harvard University Press, 1997), 260.

[2] Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford University Press, 2005), 14-16.

Faux Translation

silica

Susie Hatmaker’s “The Radical Abundance of Silica: Potential for a Digital Ethics” is concerned with translation as movement: movement of a natural resource from one locale to another, movement of minerals from their raw state to economic value.  In many ways, though, the story she tells is one of misrepresentation through faux translation (my term). That is, the histories of Silicon Valley and the computer chip industries housed there are not simple stories of taking an abundant resource–sand–and transforming it into abundant forms of digital information with nothing wasted, nothing extracted.  (Nor is it the case with Silicon Valley’s closely related industry, the manufacture and distribution of solar power panels, an industry which claims to transform sunlight into clean, abundant energy.) As Susie’s paper reminds us, the silicon chip and the resulting electronic data industries have never been a pure translation of a natural resource into uncontaminated digital bytes.  In order to see those impurities, Susie suggests we listen to the silica, heed its geologic and economic history. Only in this way, we can begin to approach a digital ethics.

Similarly for literary translations. Because all translations are impure, the only false translations are those that deny their impurity or imperfections.  However, because there seems to be a universal desire for pure translations, these modes of willful (perhaps, sometimes, naïve) misrepresentation are seductive.  Repeatedly, we see Chaucer and his translators resisting the lure of faux translation and importing impurities that mark the ethical integrity of their task.

Translation, ReTranslation

hatoum

Among the many images Christine Poggi shared in her 27 September presentation, the most arresting for me was this reproduction of Mona Hatoum’s Projection (2006, cotton and abaca paper).  Although Poggi was primarily concerned with translation in its most literal sense, as carrying something over a boundary line, I was struck by how this example of Hatoum’s work queries the process of translation. Through the process of erasure, the artwork exposes the ways maps transmit their prejudices when translating three-dimensional geographical features into two-dimensional representations.  Whereas a map’s standard cartographic images project borders, languages, and landmarks as suitable for understanding geography, Hatoum’s translation of a map removes identifying features that would associate a locale with any agenda, people, or language. By stripping away all those features that would link the map to one purpose or another, Projection reminds us that customary maps are filled with the prejudices of those who make them, the powers that support them, and the eyes that read them. Delivering a washed out recreation that seems to bear little resemblance to the original, Hatoum’s art work would initially seem to declare the impossibility, even undesirability, of translation—whether cartographic or any other mode of translation—without prejudice.

If, however, we think about her projections as translations of translations, then she shows how a translation can sometimes return us to the source text’s original purity, a purity visible only from a distance.  Projection reminds me of the Apollo 17 photos of the earth taken 45,000 km away, the famous “Blue Marble” images. bluemarbleArtificial political demarcations are naturally absent, but also missing are many topographical features that have traditionally established boundaries. Instead, we have the broad outlines of continents and oceans. Hatoum’s image approximates this borderless, god’s-eye view that the Apollo photograph seems to capture, returning us thereby to a cartographic vision unavailable to most us.

When we study Chaucerian translations, either Chaucer’s own translations or subsequent translations of Chaucer’s texts, it can often feel that we’ve moved so far away from the original that we’ve lost sight of what counts.  Perhaps, only perhaps, these translations can bring into relief what we might otherwise miss, those broad outlines obscured by the text’s natural details and the false demarcations we’ve inherited from previous generations of readers.

Traveling Chaucer

by Candace Barrington

Paper doll Chaucer goes from counting his beads to riding his horse.
Paper doll Chaucer goes from counting his beads to riding his horse.

From the beginning of the Global Chaucers project, our various collaborators, Jonathan Hsy, and I have faced the issue of how to theorize our methodological practice.  I had the opportunity to think non-stop about that issue last summer when I attended an NEH Institute, “The Centrality of Translation to the Humanities: New Interdisciplinary Scholarship,” at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.  At the invitation of one of the institute leaders, Chris Higgins, a group of us wrote essays for a special issue of Educational Theory, “Translation and Cosmopolitan Humanism.”

My article, “Traveling Chaucer: Comparative Translation and Cosmopolitan Humanism,” presents a theorized methodology for how we approach the highly collaborative process of studying non-Anglophone translations of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.

Equally important, this article effectively demonstrates the highly collaborative nature of the Global Chaucers project.  In addition to the usual panoply of readers and auditors providing advice and reactions that writing any article entails, “Traveling Chaucer” depended upon extensive help from Nazmi Ağil (Chaucer’s Turkish translator) and Leyla Zidani-Eroglu (a colleague fluent in Turkish).  Without their good will and expertise, the article would have been impossible.  Furthermore, without similar good will and expertise from other translators and readers, the entire project would flounder. Thank you for all who have supported this project!

You can read the article here. Please remember that this is an electronic version of an article published in Educational Theory. Complete citation information for the final version of the paper, as published in the print edition of Educational Theory, is available on the Blackwell Synergy online delivery service, accessible via the journal’s website at http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/edth or http://www.blackwell-synergy.com.