Reading More Intimately: An Interrogation of
Translation Studies through Self-translation
Anil Joseph Pinto
Dept of English and Media Studies, Christ University,
Bangalore
(Published in Salesian Journal of Humanities and Social
Sciences, Vol 3, No 1, May 2012. Pp 66-73. ISSN 0976-1861.)
Abstract
While the poststructural turn has made the study of translation more
self-reflexive, it has not made translation studies scholars rethink the
fundamental assumptions of translation process, which poststructuralism should
have. As a result, many practices in the nature of ‘translation’ have not only
got marginalised but have got relegated to absence, within translation studies.
One such practice is self-translation. This paper tries to read the process of
self-translation closely and thereby raise critical questions on the
fundamental assumptions about translation. The paper will conclude by positing
self-translation as an important domain for scholarly engagement by drawing
attention to its potential to make translation studies more nuanced.
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Translation studies, since the post-structural turn, has evinced serious attention and concerns
from diverse set of domains, namely post-colonial studies, feminism, and cultural
studies, as against the old disciplines of biblical studies, linguistics,
anthropology, and philosophy. The turn not only weakened previous concerns and modes of inquiry which treated
the need for translation as granted and the process as a natural one, but also
began to question these very taken-for-granted positions. The whys and whats of
translation became more important than hows. Consequently the how of
translation found it extremely difficult to be a formula and got continuously problematised.
Self-reflexivity attained through poststructuralism showed that
translation was not merely a linguistic exercise but strongly embedded in the
political process of gender, colonialism, patriarchy, state and nation.
While postcolonial translation studies, post-theory, brought to the
fore the unequal relations of cultures and languages within which the process
of translations took place, feminists have looked at translations as not only
subduing and displacing women’s work but also inscribing patriarchal and
masculine agendas in them (Niranjana; Bassnett and Trivedi; Tharu and Lalita).
The cultural studies has not only taken both the post-colonial and feminist
concerns on board in the study of translations but also has looked at the role
translation is playing in shaping identities and enabling different ways in
which meanings are made.
Interestingly, most of the questions and concerns raised by these
newer domains have also in a sense been universal in nature, encompassing all
nations and races within their theorisation and marking the binaries, us and
they, into which all would include.
However, in the ambitious universal concerns of these different
domains only the model of translations across time and space became area of
inquiry leaving out multiple other practices of translation which might not
have been universal in nature. One such is self-translation.
The dominant imagination in translation studies is one of a second
person, a person other than the author, translating the work of a person living
or dead, in the same linguistic or national community or another linguistic or
national community. Postcolonial questions have largely been raised in the
context of a person from a colonising culture translating the works from the
colonised culture and looked at the assumption of the coloniser getting
embedded not only in the choice of texts but also in translating within the
framework of the worldview of the coloniser. Studies influenced by cultural
studies have taken the postcolonial interrogation further by showing how the
translations by the colonisers not only shape the worldview of the colonised
through the acts and products of translation but also the nature of reverse
translations, i.e. translations of texts from coloniser’s language to the
language of the colonised, and have shown the way these translation practices
get materialised within the discourse of the coloniser, thus aiding and
complementing the project of colonialism.
In the presumed model of translation in translation studies, because
a second person translates a text, a serious debate on the faithfulness of
translation emerges. In the case of self-translation, since the writers
themselves translate, the question of faithfulness seemingly becomes
irrelevant.
It needs to be noted that self translation also raises serious
questions on the notions of original as well. In case of the self-translation
what is original, the one written first or the one written later? If that is so then, the original gets defined
only in terms of chronology and not necessarily because of any inherent
properties.
An interesting phenomenon is that self-translations are normally
seen as original. For example Tagore’s Gitanjali
is seldom seen as translation of its Bengali version. Similarly, people are
hardly aware that all plays of Karnad were first written in Kannada, but for
two.
The postcolonial studies, and feminist studies now find it difficult
to engage with the phenomenon of self-translation as it does not easily lend
itself to the assumptions of enquiries borrowed from translation studies. Such
inability to engage with the phenomenon of self-translation also results in
then questioning and threatening the boundaries and more importantly the
legitimacy of the inquiries of these theoretical approaches in translation
studies.
While there have been marginal interests in self-translation in some
counties in southern Europe mainly in Italy, and
parts of the United States
of America and Canada, in most other countries
there has hardly been any research activity in this domain. I have not come
across any study in India
on the self-translation questions other than an MPhil study done in one
university in the South of India. There has been no recorded information about
the publications in this area either.
Standard works on translation namely The Translation Studies Reader edited by Lawrence Venuti, Works of
Eugene Nida, Susan Bassnett, Tejaswni Niranjana, Harish Trivedi, GN Devi, have
no reference to this phenomenon. The only exception among standard works on
translation is Mona Baker’s Routledge
Encyclopaedia of Translation Studies
which has an entry by Rainier Grutman on self translation.
The name for the practice of self-translation has also been
contested. The first edition of Routledge
Encyclopaedia of Translation Studies published
in 1998 uses the term ‘auto-translation’ as against the 2009 edition which uses
the word ‘self-translation’. However, the recently held conference on
self-translation at Swansea
University from 28 June –
1 July 2010 chose
to title its conference ‘The Author-Translator in the European Literary
Tradition’, thereby throwing in yet another term for the phenomenon
‘Author-translation’.
Considering that most recent studies and research publications choose
to use the term self-translation, it is likely that the term self-translation
will become more accepted. Although a Google search provides nearly 42,000
results for ‘self-translation’ as against 98,600 for ‘auto-translation’ and 64,000
for, ‘author-translator’, since auto-translation also signifies automatic,
i.e., computer-mediated translation, and author-translator has overtones of
pre-structuralist understanding of the presumed relationship of the writer to
the text, self-translation seems a more suitable label.
Self-translation is a fairly common practice in non-literary
writings, especially academic writings where scholars do translate their works
to different languages for publication. While that is also an important area to
interrogate, this paper intends to concentrate only on literary translations as
it is this domain which has been much theorised by non-linguistics based
scholars.
The position of self-translation in India was no better. In India it got subsumed
within the broad term of bilingual translation.
Non-acknowledgement of self translations has perhaps been due to two
reasons. One, given the multilingual nature of the country, there was no much
opportunity of knowing whether the English version was an independent work or a
‘translation’ from the native language. The practice of most of the translator
of not mentioning whether the work was a translation also has contributed to
this silence.
The other way of arguing this point is by not insisting that they
should have done it but looking for reasons for such practice – of not
mentioning the self-translation as a translation.
In the case of Rabindranath Tagore he did not call his work a
translation, perhaps partly because there was a re-writing of the poems rather
than reproducing them faithfully from its Bangla version.
Down south Girish Karnad also does not mention that the plays in
English are the translations of their counterparts in Kannada.
The phenomenon of not treating self-translation as translation is
prevalent perhaps because even the publisher’s endorse of this view. If either
of the writer or publisher had insisted on calling the ‘second’ work as
translation, it would have been called so. Therefore, it can be concluded that
there is a consensus between both the writer and the publisher in not referring
to a successive work a translation.
One reason for this could be the dominant practice of calling
translation only that wherein a text of a writer is rendered into another
language only if it is done so by another person. This dominant imagination
perhaps has caused such a practice of not calling a translation by writers of
their own works not translation.
The second reason for the non-acknowledgement could be due to the prevalence
of self translation largely in multilingual countries as against monolingual and
economically dominant counties. The phenomenon of self-translation is seen in
countries such as India,
Canada,
Brazil,
and Italy
which are not in the league of ‘theory producing’ countries. Hence, the
practice then does not get the attention of theorists.
A third reason is predominance of bilingual writing. The idea of
bilingualism was so strong that the practice of self-translation got associated
with bilingual writing. Since most bilingual writers wrote in English and their
purported mother tongue, it was taken for granted that the works in English
were the ‘original’ works and not translations.
These points then beg the question what is self-translation? According
to Rainier Grutman, “the term ‘self-translation’ refers both to the act of
translating one’s own writings into another language and the result of such an
undertaking” (2009).
Grutman makes a distinction between bilingual writers and
self-translators. He notes that unlike the bilingual writers, self-translators
make a conscious choice of creation in two languages. In the case of bilingual
writers, the context determines their choice. In the case of self-translators
in India,
most importantly Tagore and Karnad, the primary work is in the native language,
Bangla and Kannada respectively, and the successive recreation is in English, a
language that allows communicating to readers in other languages and those from
outside the country. It is also important to note that in both their cases the
only ‘literary’ works would be written first in the native languages but that does
not apply to non-literary’ prose
writing.
It cannot be overlooked that both Tagore and Karnad were part of the
global academic community with significant exposure to the Euro-American life, language
and academics, which may have shaped this phenomenon.
Old questions of faithfulness or new questions of unequal positions
within which translations take place, which is otherwise called politics of
translation, that have defined the scope of translation studies, are based on
the premise that a translation is always done by a second person other than the
writer of the source text. But if this assumption were to be disputed, one
would then have challenged translation studies from within.
Consideration of self-translations therefore either will have to be seen
as a separate domain of inquiry, independent of translation studies or as part
of translation studies. The problem of considering it part of translation
studies is that then translation studies will have to undo all the work that
defined it. But considering self-translation as a separate domain will then
raise questions about translation studies itself.
A more productive approach then would be to consider the questions
being raised by the study of self-translations and reinvent the domain of
translation studies leading to more fruitful insights into human societies.
What kind of questions can self-translation raise? The primary
question it can raise is regarding the relationship of translation studies to text.
Text for translation studies is the material text. The rendering of that
material text in another language by a person other than the writer of the
first text, constitutes translation for translation studies. This in turn draws
attention to two features of translation, one the source text comes before the
second text hence sourceness of the text is marked by chronology and not by something
inherent in it. Two, that translation is only that which is done by the second
person. This assumes that the first text has fixity. This fixity of the text can
be challenged by a different kind of literary practice where Karnad writers a
text in Kannada and then a similar one in English which of these would now
constitute the source text. If one were to produce a Marathi version, and were
to argue that an understanding derived from both the Kannada and English texts
was considered for translation, then, the argument is already outside the scope
of present translation studies. For then, the person is not translating the
text but a particular reading.
The secondary and subsidiary question it can raise is regarding the
idea of the original. The idea of the original is posited only in relation tot
its inferior re-production by a ‘non-creator’. By the same principle if the
creator were to create two works in two different languages of similar
structure and content, which one of these is inferior, or which one of these is
the original. If one were to apply this thought to translation studies then the
idea of the source text/or original text assumes the translation by a person
other than writer. Therefore, the originality is determined by not text but by
presence of non-writer translator.
These questions that arise from considering self-translation within
the domain of translation studies draw attention to the fundamental assumptions
formed by translation studies by not considering all activities in the nature
of ‘translation’ to be translation. This bypassing of such translation
activities contributes fresh question for the stagnating domain of translation
studies.
Works Cited
Bassnett, Susan, and Harish Trivedi, eds. Post-colonial Translation: Theory and
Practice. London:
Routledge, 1999. Print.
Bassnett, Susan. Translation
Studies, London:
Routledge, 1991. Print.
Grutman, Rainier.
‘Self-transaltion.’ Routledge Encyclopaedia
of Translation Studies. Ed.. Mona
Baker. London:
Routledge, 1998, 2009. Web. 2
July 2010.
Mukherjee, Sujit. Translation as Recovery. Delhi:
Pencraft, 2004. Print.
Munday, Jeremy. Introducing Translation Studies: Theories and Applications. London/New York: Routledge, 2001. Print.
Nida, Eugene A. The Theory and Practice of Translation. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1982. Print.
Nirajana, Tejaswini. Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism, and the Colonial
Context. Hyderabad:
Orient Longman, 1992. Print.
Tharu, Susie, and K. Lalitha..
‘Introduction.’Women Writing in India from 600
BC to the Present. Vol. 1. New
Delhi: OUP, 1992. Print.
Venuti, Lawrence, ed. The Translation Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 2001. Print.
