Chapter I A Historical Survey of Translation Studies in...

Chapter I

A Historical Survey of Translation Studies in India and the West

Translation Studies (TS) has emerged as a much sought after discipline in the present

time. Teachers, scholars and students from various disciplines have contributed to its growth.

Most of the major universities and institutions around the world also have established TS

departments/centers to promote research in the field. According to one study, in 1960 there

were 49 university-level institutions that offered degrees in translation and/or interpreting;

that number increased to 108 in 1980 and to at least 250 in 1994 (Caminade and Pym 283).

As a result of these developments and improved global communication, many

national and international associations of translators have been formed. These associations

bring their members together to facilitate dialogue about translation.

Publishers, too, consider TS a blooming discipline. Mona Baker says that in May

1991, she received a phone call from Simon Bell, former Language Reference Editor at

Routledge who wanted to know whether she had any suggestion for a reference work on TS,

possibly a dictionary because he, “among many others, had begun to see translation studies as

an exciting new discipline” (xiv). Today, there is hardly any publisher that has not published

some book(s) on translation.

However, it is only after the 1970s that TS became an academic discipline. Before

that, TS existed in the form of translation views and theories (TVT). A brief historical survey

of these TTV and TS in India and the West is as follows:

Historical Survey of TVT and TS in India

From antiquity to the present, most translation in India has been a kind of “new writing,”

giving some creative liberties to the translator (Das 58). A translation may be considered fine

if it preserves the sense of the Source Language (SL) text. Therefore, at times, adaptation,

paraphrase and “transcreation” fall into the overall category of translation. From this

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standard, a translator should preserve linguistic features but primarily, he should go for the

soul (content and form/structure) of the SL text. If translation is performed carefully on these

parameters, translation will be creative and the translator will become “co-creator.”

Anuvaad (Anuvaada) is the accepted equivalent of the English word, “Translation,”

in Hindi. It comes from the Sanskrit word Anuvaadah which literally means “Repetition in

normal use; Repetition in order to support, exemplify or explain; Explanatory repetition or

mentioning of already said talk (message)” (Apte 41-42, my literal rendition).

Etymologically, the word Anuvaad is a combination of the root word “Vaad,” meaning a

statement or argument, and the prefix “Anu,” meaning “After; following” (Apte 35).

There can be one more theory about the word, Anuvaad. In religious and

philosophical tradition in India, scholars did intralingual and interlingual Teekaa [Hindi word

meaning interpretation/explanation] of Sanskrit works in two ways: as a commentary and as

an interpretation or paraphrase. For the latter, they used the term bhaashyaanuvaad where

bhaashya meant ‘linguistic.’ Perhaps it is from this word that scholars dropped the prefix

‘bhaashya’—maybe casually in the beginning and willingly later—since interpretation or

paraphrase is itself a linguistic activity.

Many Indian scholars believe that translation in India has been practiced “for a long

time without giving it such a name or style” (Mukherji 25). In this line, Lachman M.

Khubchandan considers Narada, a character from Hindu mythology, as the first example of a

transmitter of “the desired message” from one place to another without any distortion of the

meaning (46). For him, Narada highlights “a subjective input in the role of an interpreter in

intercultural settings” (ibid). Mr. Khubchandan also refers to another religious figure, i.e. “the

image of evercontented Buddha, rejoicing with raised arms, in his role as a transmitter of

message: ‘Yes, I know! It’s always a great feeling to have delivered the message one has

come to deliver!’” (ibid).

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Another Indian scholar, Sujeet Mukherji, believes that translation in India began from

the telling or writing of literary compositions from one language to another. Usually it was

from the master language, Sanskrit, to bhaashaas—modern languages like Hindi, Asamiya,

Bangala, and Gujrati. Unlike the Biblical translation tradition in the West [discussed later in

the chapter], SL texts were not primarily religious scriptures like the Vedas or the Upnishads,

but “Kavya [poetic] works such as the Ramayana, the Purana works such as the Srimad-

Bhagavat, and itihahasa-purana works such as the Mahabharata” (Mukherji 25-26). The

best example of this tradition can be seen in Tulasi Das’ Ramcharitmaanasa (1575-1577),

which is a poetic retelling/adaptation/translation of Valmiki’s Ramayana in Hindi from

Sanskrit.

Still this telling or writing “can only loosely be regarded as translation, because, while

the basic story remained same, some of it was left out and a lot of new writing [was] done to

fill it out again” (Mukherji 26). This view is also shared by K. Ayappa Panikar, another

Indian scholar, in his article, “The Anxiety of Authenticity: Reflections on Literary

Translation” (66-76).

During the Mughal period in India, translation practice shifted from Sanskrit-to-

bhaashaas towards Sanskrit-and-bhaashaas-to-Persian as Persian was “the ruler’s language”

(Mukherji 26). Akbar in the 16th century “set up a maktab khana or translation bureau in

order to make available the classics of Indian thought in Persian” and got translated the

Mahabharata, the Yogavasistha, the Harivamsa, the Srimad-Bhagavat, the Singhasan Battisi,

the Ramayana, and many works on Indian music into Persian (Behl 92). Badauni translated

the Ramayana into Persian in four years with much reluctance, but when the translation was

complete, it was so good that Akbar gave him, again against his will, another task of the

“complete Persian translation of the Atharvaveda” (Behl 93).

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After Akbar, his great grandson Dara Shikoh continued this tradition of translating

Hindu works into Persian. Dara Shikoh got fifty Upnishads (entitled Sirr-i-Akbar), the

Bhagvad Gita, and the Yogavashishtha Ramayana translated into Persian with the help of a

team of translators. Aditya Behl notes that it is Sirr-i-Akbar that “became the basis of

Europe’s idealist philosophers’ discovery of the East after Anquetil-Duperron translated it

into Latin in 1801” (91).

But, it was with the coming of East India Company in India that translation from

Indian languages (especially Sanskrit) to European languages (especially English) began. At

first, Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General of East India Company in India from 1773

to 1785, had Indian Dharamashaastraas, which were originally written in Sanskrit and then

translated into Persian, translated into English. It was also with Hastings’ encouragement that

Charles Wilkins in 1785 translated the Bhagavad Gita first time into English; Hastings wrote

the Preface to this translation (reprinted in Allen and Trivedi 170-74). Later, in 1789, William

Jones translated Shakuntala directly from Sanskrit into English.

During the reign of the East India Company, this translation tradition also gave rise to

Indology. In 1800, Fort William College in Kolkata (earlier Calcutta) was set up to teach

Indian languages and culture to the East India Company writers. “The first round of language

to be cultivated included Hindi and Urdu, Bangala and Marathi” (Mukherji 27). Though the

purpose of this learning was not academic but business, it must have helped the bhaashaas-

to-English translation tradition. However, up until the late 18th and the 19th centuries, SL for

the translations of Indian literature into English still was mostly Sanskrit, and these

translations were usually accomplished by British and American scholars (Mukherji 28).

But by the latter part of the 19th century, many Indians had started translating from

Indian languages into English. Tagore’s 1913 Nobel Prize for Literature winner translation of

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his own Gitanjali into English from Bengali is one example. In 1910, India’s first book on

translation theory, The Art of Translation by R. Raghunath Rao, also appeared (Sinha 256).

Even after India gained Independence from British rule in 1947, English continued to

work as an official language (with Hindi) throughout India. Thus translation became more

important in the post-independence period, and scholars started taking it more seriously and

systematically. In the 1960s, things changed to the extent that translators and translation

theorists like P. Lal declared that they “strongly believe that, all other things being equal, an

Indian is better equipped to translate India’s sacred works than a foreigner” (Transcreation

29)1.

Lal also suggested a new translation method which he called “Transcreation.” By

Transcreation, he meant “recreating an SL text in the target language taking absolute liberty

with it and yet being fidel with it” (Das 62). In other words, transcreation advocated fidelity

to the SL text as far as the soul (meaning/sense/information) and form is concerned but it also

gave much space for the translator’s creative faculties. Das quotes four famous works which

further bear this testimony of transcreating: the translations of The Ramayana and The

Mahabharata into English by R.K. Narayan and Chakravarti Rajagopalachari respectively;

and the two anthologies, New Writing in India (1974) edited by Adil Jussawalla, and Another

India (1990) by Nissim Ezekiel and Meenakshi Mukherjee (eds.) (ibid). Lal especially

recommended this method when “the languages concerned are as distant as the Indian

languages and English” (Lal, “Preface” 5).

The 1980s was the first time that Sahitya Akademi, an Indian government

organization devoted to the development/preservation of languages and literatures in India,

felt a need to initiate a systematic dialogue among the various academic and non-academic

translators and translation theorists from all parts of India. To accomplish this project, it

1 Sujeet Mukherji not only agrees with P. Lal in this matter, but he also goes a little further and says that “Indians are better equipped to translate their profane texts as well” (Mukherji 28).

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organized four workshops from 1986 to 1988 on literary translation for Indian translators

across India. The proceedings of these workshops were later published in 2007 (Panikar,

Making of Indian Literature).

As translation theories developed in the West, especially in the last thirty years, they

also affected TVT/TS in India. It is during this period that TVT/TS in India and the West

came a little closer. Though no significant research on the linguistic level has been

accomplished in India, interdisciplinary research focusing on theoretical frameworks and

power relations in translation marks its presence. Two major figures that are known

internationally as translators and/or translation theorists in this phase are Gayatri Chakravorty

Spivak and Harish Trivedi.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has contributed to TS both as a translator and as a

theorist. As a translator, she has translated Jacques Derrida from French, and Mahasweta

Devi and some other writers from Bengali into English. Theoretically, she takes three stands

on translation, one of a feminist and others of a poststructuralist and a postcolonialist. Her

1992 essay “The Politics of Translation” is one essay in which her all these three stands

appear. In the essay, she explicitly “outlines a poststructuralist conception of language use”

and “argues that translators of Third World literatures need this linguistic model” (Venuti,

“1990s” 338). In the essay, she also talks about her translation practices (187-88) and

considers translation as “the most intimate act of reading” (Spivak 178).

Harish Trivedi’s position on translation, on the other hand, is that of a theorist. He

judges translation primarily on the scale of postcolonial theory. For him, translation is a site

for postcolonial experiment. His first such experiment is his 1999 book (co-edited with Susan

Bassnett), Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice, which contains nine essays by

theorists and translators from around the world. Kate Sturge notes that in his 2005 study

“Translating Culture vs. Cultural Translation,” he moves some more steps ahead in this

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experiment. Here, he not only accuses Homi Bhabha, another critic of postcolonial theory,

“of marginalizing bilingualism and translation as specifically interlingual practices, the

precondition for polylingual cultural diversity,” but also warns against the notion of cultural

translation (Sturge 69).

While theorists hail the interdisciplinary development of TS, Harish Trivedi, in his

2007 article, sees this particular development as somewhat threatening to TS. He argues that

Given the usurpation that has taken place, it may be time for all good men and true, and of course women, who have ever practiced literary translation, or even read a translation with any awareness of it being translation, to unite and take out a patent on the word “translation”, if it is not already too late to do so (Trivedi 285; Baker and Saldanha xxi).

His warning is legitimate, especially when TS has entered a phase of a kind of

“Indeterminism” where TS has no single direction (Pym 1).

Apart from Spivak and Trivedi, there are two other translators/translation theorists

who have also shown their presence internationally with their translation research/books.

They are Tejaswini Niranjana and Rita Kothari.

Tejaswini Niranjana is both a translator and a translation theorist. She translates from

Kannad into English, and her Siting Translation: History, Poststructuralism, and the Colonial

Context (1992) is a much appreciated poststructuralist and postcolonial intervention in the

field of TS. In the last chapter of this book, she also opposes the translation theory of A. K.

Ramanujan, another well known translator from India, in his approach to translate a poem’s

“inner and outer forms” faithfully as he thinks it impossible to translate the syntax of one

language into the other (Viswanatha and Simon 173; Dharwadker 114). For Ramanujan,

translation means being a creative and well crafted piece while Tejaswini Niranjana, like a

poststructuralist and postcolonialist, believes that the translated text should disrupt the text to

show “the contemporary difficulty ... in modes of cultural exchange” (Noor 607; Viswanatha

and Simon 173).

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Like Ms. Niranjana, Rita Kothari is also a translator and a translation theorist. As a

translator, her translation of a novel by Joseph Macwan entitled The Stepchild: Angaliyat into

English was short-listed for the Crossword-Hutch Prize.

Her theoretical approach to translation, however, is multidisciplinary, and it is perhaps

because of this kind of critical approach that one reviewer in Meta expressed about her 2003

book, Translating India: the Cultural Politics of English, that “it is the most impressive book

on translation in India I have [he has] ever read” (Jianzhong 173). In its innovative approach,

the book uses both written documents and oral interviews to discuss TS in India.

Furthermore, it not only talks about translation history and translation in academia but also

gives a voice to the publishers and many regional translators. In fact, it addresses many new

questions about TS in India—production, reception and marketability; TS courses and class

room teaching; and the issues of adaptation and transcreation are some of them2.

Thus, to conclude this historical survey of TVT and TS in India, it can be said that

TVT and TS in India has come a long way. As more and more scholars from different fields

of studies are taking scholarly interest in it, chances are that in future it may hike to a new

peak.

Historical Survey of TVT and TS in the West

Whereas India’s consciousness in translation has been dominated by a positive and creative

output of the SL text, the West’s consciousness in translation, in most cases, has been

dominated by the Hebraic story of the Tower of Babel where linguistic diversity is seen as “a

divine punishment and the translator is burdened with the task of reversing this curse”

(Khubchandan 46). In this consciousness, translation is seen as next to impossible and

always causing some distortion and/or loss of meaning—in the words of Susan Bassnett,

translation is “a low occupation” (3). It is perhaps because of this fear of “constraint” (Briggs 2 Her many papers on TS and 2009 co-edited book (with Judy Wakabayashi) Decentering translation studies: India and beyond bear this testimony further.

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43) and loss in translation that “definitions of proper translating [in the West] are almost as

numerous and varied as the persons who have undertaken to discuss the subject” (Nida,

“Principles of Correspondence” 131).

The word “Translation” in English comes either from Old French, or from the Latin

translatio (noun) meaning “transportation/transference; transfer to another; change of venue”

(OED) and has been used interchangeably with the word “Interpretation” for a long time.

Alexander F. Chamberlain says that the word “translation” also has some connection with

English word—“talk.” Furthermore, he explains:

Our English word talk harks back to a translation-word. We borrowed it from the Icelandic túlka (Swedish tolka, Danish tolke), “to interpret, to explain, to plead one’s case.” This Icelandic word, in its substantial form túlkr (Swedish tolk), “an interpreter,” is of Slavonic origin, —Lithuanian tulkas, Lettic tulks, “interpreter;” Lithuanian tulkoti, Lettic tulkot, “to interpret.” To the same stock belong also Russian tolkovat, “to interpret, to explain, to talk, to speak of,” and tolk, “sense, meaning, doctrine.”

The English interpret comes, through the French interpréter, from the Latin interpretari, the source of which last word is interpres, “an agent, broker, factor, go-between,” perhaps originally “a speaker between.” Besides translation and interpretation we speak of rendering, and we have yet another term, version. To render is properly “to give back, to restore,” and a version is “a change, a turning,” as the Latin original of the word shows. (166)

It is perhaps because of these meanings of this term, “translation,” that early in the 20th

century Bennedecto Croce, as if paraphrasing the old Italian saying traduttori tradittori

(“Translators are Traitors”), declared that falsification in translation is inevitable (Kelly 216).

Though the first traces of translation appear in the East “in 3000 BC, during the

Egyptian Old Kingdom, in the area of the First Cataract, Elephantine” (Newmark,

Approaches to Translation 3), TVT in the West have been more systematic than in the East

(India) (Khubchandani 47). In the West, it began in ancient Rome where it appeared in “the

academic discipline of rhetoric” (Venuti, “Foundational” 13). Cicero, Pliny the Younger,

Quintilian—the distinguished Roman orators—and the poets Horace and Virgil were its first

influential commentators.

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Since Cicero, Pliny the Younger, and Quintilian were all orators, for rhetorical

purposes they favored sense for sense (SS) or free and paraphrastic translations. Cicero, who

himself translated “Plato’s Protagoras and Xenophon’s Oeconomicus and the two most

beautiful orations that Aeschines and Demosthenes delivered against each other” (Jerome

23), wrote in De optimo genere oratorum (46 BC):

I did not translate them as an interpreter [nec converti ut interpres] but as an orator, keeping the same ideas and the forms, but in language which conforms to our usage. And in so doing I did not hold it necessary to render word for word, but I preserved the general style and force of the language. (Cicero 365, Venuti, “Foundational” 13)

But at the same time in Rome, there were also grammarians who favored word for word

(WW) renderings. Horace was aware of this rivalry. Still, in his Ars Poetica, he advised a

good translator (interpretati) not to “strive to render word for word like a faithful translator

[interpres]’” (Jerome 23-24).

Virgil, too, belonged to the tradition of SS translation, but he also permitted a

translator’s creativity in it. He said that a “translator should be allowed to say what should be

said, or what he wants to say than what the source author intends” (d’Ablancourt, “Preface to

Lucian” 36).

Following the path set out by these Roman rhetoricians and grammarians, this debate

between SS and WW translation continued down to the 4th century, and it was first in St.

Jerome that a reaction to this rivalry in writing was found. Though Jerome advocated for SS

translation in “Preface to Chronical of Eusebius of Caesarea,” “Preface to a life of St.

Anthony,” “Preface to the book of Job,” and “Letter to Pammachius,” he also made an

exception for WW renderings for “the ‘mysterious order of words’ (ver-borumordom

ysterium) in the Bible” (Derrida, “What is” 180).

However, he mostly favored SS translation; in “Letter to Pammachius” he declared,

“[L]et others chase after syllables and letters, you seek the meaning” (24). His advocacy for

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SS was later fully expressed in his translation of the Hebrew Bible into Latin titled Vulgate,

which replaced the Old Latin Bible and became the Church’s official version. Though

Vulgate was later replaced by Martin Luther’s version of the Bible (1522, 1532), today

Jerome is remembered with Luther as “one of the fathers of a certain translation ethics,” i.e.

sense-for-sense (Derrida, “What is” 180).

What Jerome advocated in the 4th century continued through the Middle Ages and into

the Renaissance till the 16th century (Venuti, “Foundational” 15). In the 10th century, Aelfric

of Eynsham borrowed Jerome’s theory of translation in “Preface to Genesis” (c.955-c.1010)

and Preface to Pastoral Care (Minkoff 31-32). In the 14th century, the Prologue of the

Wycliffite Bible (c.1395) asserted that “the beste translating is, out of Latyn into English, to

translate aftir the sentence and not oneli aftir the wordis, so that the sentence be as opin either

openere in English as in Latyn” (Hudson 68; Venuti, “Foundational” 15).

In the 16th century, two stands evolved—one in Britain and the other in France. In

Britain, scholars started to see translation as a tool with which to build the national culture,

and thus favored domesticating the foreign text. Works translated by Sir Thomas Wyatt,

Henry Howard, Thomas Hoby and Philemon Holland were guided by this instinct. In France,

on the other hand, scholars like Nicolas Perrot d’Ablancourt adopted a slightly better

position. Nicolas Perrot d’Ablancourt focused on two things in translation; adequacy and a

kind of bowdlerizing. In his “Preface to Tacitus,” he said that it was very hard to translate a

writer who committed mistakes, therefore one should add to make meaning clear. In the

“Preface to Lucian,” he suggested to change what was obscene and lose, what was not

pleasant or was boring.

English scholars like Abraham Cowley, Sir John Denham and Sir Richard Franshawe

during the 17th century followed d’Ablancourt’s critical position in their translations (Venuti,

“Foundational” 17). But at the same time, John Dryden, another English scholar, deviated

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from them and engaged in the old “classical distinction between rhetorical and grammatical

translation” (ibid). In this process, he divided translation, as in “The Preface to Ovid’s

Epistles” (1680), in three heads—Metaphrase, Paraphrase, and Imitation—and favored

“paraphrase with latitude” over Imitation (Dryden 40). Thus, he not only rejected WW

renderings as “lacking fluency or easy readability,” but also imitations that “adapt the foreign

text so as to serve the translator’s own literary ambitions” (Venuti, “Foundational” 18).

During the 18th and early 19th centuries, many German commentators presented “a

striking alternative to the French and English traditions” (Venuti, “Foundational” 19). These

commentators—which include Johann Gottfried Herder, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Friedrich

Nietzsche and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe—encouraged foreignness in translation.

Friedrich Schleiermacher, in his 1813 lecture to the British Academy of Sciences, said that in

translation, one could either make one’s language foreign or make the foreign language

familiar. In a final note, he suggested picking up the first choice as it would enrich both the

TL and TL readers with new concepts (61-62). Nietzsche, on the other hand, agreed with

Schleiermacher’s choice because he believed this to be beneficial in inferring out “the

historical sense of any age (67).

Around the same time in the 19th century, an independent translation tradition in the

US began with Margaret Fuller’s translations and TVT (Boggs). A proponent of universalism

and multilingualism, Fuller favored the paraphrastic method in her translations of Bettina von

Arnim’s Günderode (1842), Goethe’s Tasso Toquato and some articles from the New Yorker

Staats-Zeitung for the New York Tribune (Boggs 51). In this respect, she seemed to be

influenced by British translator Sarah Austin and French novelist Germaine de Stael’s

translation theories (ibid).

A little later in 1861, all these above Western approaches gave rise to an interesting

but serious debate (1861-62) in Britain over choosing a domesticating or foreignizing method

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in translation. This debate was between Matthew Arnold and Francis Newman. Newman

championed “the literal mode, the retention of all verbal singularities” in the translations of

the works of Homer to preserve his foreignness while Arnold advocated for “the severe

elimination of details that distract or detain” (Borges 36)3.

With all these theoretical developments in the West, TVT, now TS, finally entered in

the 20th century4, a century that Jumpelt calls “the age of translation” (qtd. in Newmark,

Approaches to Translation 3). In fact, it was the beginning of a systematic dialogue among

translators and translation theorists. However, it did not just become systematic out of wish;

there were some external forces which worked behind it.

TS in the 1910s-1930s

One of these external forces was the need for a global understanding. Sigmund Freud, writing

in 1915, some six months after the start of World War I, expressed that the loss of common

cultural understanding made the world ripe for war (Apter 16). He also stated that a unity

among people who could “feel at home in other nations and in other languages because of a

common culture” was needed to establish international peace (Freud5 277; Apter 16).

Translation was seen as a powerful tool in this direction. This is evidenced by the following

four Western writers who, in one way or another, advocate for the accommodation of source

language and culture in translation.

In Germany, Walter Benjamin tried to revive Schleiermacher’s concept of

foreignizing translation. He implied that translation was autonomous (Benjamin 18).

Straightforwardly, he rejected those translations that either just provided information or were

3 See Venuti 1995: 118-47 for a comprehensive discussion of this debate. 4 For the sake of the clarity of understanding, development of TS in 20th century, taking the idea from Lawrence Venuti’s 2004 book The Translation Studies Reader, has been grouped in sub-headings, each sub-heading representing one or more decades. Venuti’s 2004 book also serve as a key text for this section. 5 Freud himself was a prolific translator translating rapidly with his “photographic memory” (Jones 55 qtd. in Mahony 837). As a translation theorist, he is one of the modern translation theorists who gave translation “a scope and depth unprecedented in history” and made it “a unified field concept that encompasses the interaction of intrasystemic, intersystemic, and interpsychic phenomena” (Mahony 837).

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not able to provide something that was other than information (ibid 15-16). For him, the task

of the translator was mainly to preserve the echo of the source language in translation (ibid

19-20).

Ezra Pound in Britain, Jorge Luis Borges in Argentina and Jose Ortega y Gasset in

France also shared Benjamin’s idea of translation. Pound believed that translation should

always provide something other than information. For him, this something was stylistic

equivalence, “a verbal weight about equal to that of the original” (Pound 32). Borges, on the

other hand, took a milder path and advocated for the “the retention [or suppression] of certain

particularities” and “the movement of the syntax” of the SL text in translation (37)

And Gasset, the strongest advocate of the three, considered translation to be mainly “a

distinctive linguistic practice” (Venuti, “1900s-1930s” 14), “a literary genre apart, different

from the rest, with its own norms and its own ends” (Gasset 61). He even defended the

translator against Italian proverb Traduttore, traditore by saying “Long live translation!”

(ibid 52).


During the 1940s and 1950s, the issue of accommodating SL in translation deepened and

most theorists started considering whether translation could “reconcile the differences that

separate languages and cultures” (Venuti, “1940s-1950s” 66). In their speculations, they

divided themselves into two groups: one group thought that it could not; and the other that it

could.

Vladimir Nabokov and Willard Van Orman Quine were two influential figures in the

period who belonged to the first group. They saw the act of translation as almost impossible.

Nabokov believed that since any masterpiece was a result of many international influences,

these influences made an “ideal version” of translation almost impossible (Nabokov, “Art of

Translation” 161; Venuti, “1940s-1950s” 68). He believed that even if a translator put forth

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his best efforts in translation, he could only get an imitated, adapted or parodied form of the

SL text (Nabokov, “Problems of Translation” 71-77). Quine went a little further than

Nabokov and, in his 1959 article, even questioned the empirical foundations of translation

(94-112).

Roman Jakobson, Jean-Paul Vinay and Jean Darbelnet, on the other hand, were three

other influential figures of the period who belonged to the second group. They believed that

translation was possible and that it could be achieved if a translator understood the linguistic

problems in translation. For Jakobson, translation meant a transfer of signs or signifieds

within one language or from one language to another. This transfer might also be among

“nonverbal system of symbols” (Jakobson 114). He named these three transfers intralingual,

interlingual and intersemiotic transfers. However, poetry, for him, remained untranslatable

(ibid 118). Vinay and Darbelnet not only advocated for the possibility of translation but in

their book, Comparative Stylistics of French and English: A Methodology for Translation

(1958; trans. 1995), also discussed seven types of direct and oblique methods through which

translation could be achieved.


In the 1960s-1970s, TS witnessed a new development as translation theorists and scholars

started exploring specifically the problems in and methods/techniques to achieve the nearly

exact transfer of SL into TL. This equivalence was studied in two ways: pragmatically and

formally (Venuti, “1960s-1970s” 121). Eugene Nida, Peter Newmark, Julian House, J.C.

Catford, Jiri Levy, Katharine Reiss, James S. Holmes, Jacques Derrida, George Steiner,

Itamar Even-Zohar, and Gideon Toury were the major theorists of the period who talked

about translation equivalence. Out of these, Nida, Newmark, House and Catford studied

translation equivalence respectively in binaries: dynamic/functional and formal (1964, 1969);

communicative and semantic (1977, 1988a, 1988b, 1991); overt and covert (1977a, 1977b,

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1997), and level and category shifts (1965). Each of these binaries divided translation in folds

and, depending on the type of fold, defined methods and techniques to achieve translation

equivalence in each.

Levy, Reiss, Holmes, Even-Zohar and Toury, on the other hand, focused on

translation processes. Most times, these processes connected themselves to the process of

proper decision making in translation in order to obtain the desired results. Among these

decisions, a translator might need to choose a level of meaning—general or specific—in

order to translate properly (Levy), or might need to decide text type of the text first and then

mode of translation accordingly to accomplish his task (Reiss). The decision might also

involve making different choices in translation depending on the “polysystem” of interrelated

meanings and forms found in the SL text (Even-Zohar; Toury).

Nevertheless, Jacques Derrida and George Steiner’s position on translation was a bit

different from their contemporaries. Derrida, being the pioneer poststructuralist, applied

poststructuralist parameters to TS and saw translation as being in a complex position, a dual

position— translatable and untranslatable both (“Freud” 90; “Living On” 82). For him,

translation took place in “the open-ended conversation between texts, beginning now,

extending indefinitely” (Hayes 454). And therefore, he considered a good translation to be

“neither the life nor the death of the [SL] text, only or already its living on, its life after life,

its life after death” (“Living On” 82). Steiner, on the other hand, believed that translation

started with “an act of trust” but at the same time, this “trust can never be final. It is betrayed

[…] by the discovery that ‘there is nothing there’ to elicit and translate” (312). However, like

Derrida, he also believed that genuine and authentic translation was possible but only if a

translator made “the autonomous virtues of the original more precisely visible” (Steiner 318).

17

TS in the 1980s

The 1980s is a major contributing period for TS. It is in this period that many new

perspectives to TS are added rapidly. On the one hand, it comes under the influence of

postmodern theories like semiotics, discourse analysis, and post-structuralism. On the other

hand, other theories like feminism and postcolonial theory also dominate. All of these

together give a new shape to TS, unprecedented in its history. Postmodern theories free

translation from its dependence on the SL text while feminist and postcolonial theories

strengthen and widen its scope as these use it as a medium to explore the voices of oppressed

and discriminated persons.

These postmodern translation theories as a whole further span themselves mainly in

two directions. One direction studies translation as a site of linguistic transfers. William

Frawley (and also Shoshana Blum-Kulka6) is one theorist who may represent this direction.

Frawley considers translation purely “a unique sign-producing act” and expounds the idea

that when a source code is translated into a target code, it is not the source code translated

into target code but a new third code which is independent of both matrix and target codes

(261). Therefore, for him, no translation is good or bad; it is just “either a moderate

innovation or a radical innovation” (ibid).

The second direction of these postmodern translation theories, however, sees

translation mainly as a site involving effects of many externalities like political agendas,

cultural influences, commissioning agencies and readership. Hans Vermeer, Andre Lefevere

and Antoine Berman may represent this direction in TS. Vermeer believes that a translation is

not only a linguistic transfer of SL into TL, but it is also affected by external forces like the

type of readership for which translation is being done and the agency which commissions a

translation (222).

6 As in Blum-Kulka, Shoshana. “Shifts of Cohesion and Coherence in Translation.” The Translation Studies Reader. Ed. Lawrence Venuti. London: Routledge, 2000. 298-313. Print.

18

Lefevere agrees with Vermeer in this case. In one of his articles, he says that

translation is not a pure linguistic act; rather it is affected by patronage and the poetics of the

time (4-6). Similar is the position of Antoine Berman. He sees “translation as the trial of the

foreign” (Berman 284). The phrase ‘trial of the foreign’ clearly resound cultural and political

overtones involved in this act. In fact, he implies that since translation uproots both SL and

TL before it gets accomplished, many factors in this process should affect it. He also posits

that a translator cannot be free of them “merely by becoming aware of them” (ibid 286).

What is slightly hinted by postmodern translation theorists like Vermeer, Lefevere

and Berman becomes the main focus for feminist and postcolonial theorists in translation7.

Feminist theorists like Lori Chamberlain mainly see translation as a site canvassing women’s

plight and/or compare women’s plight to the condition of translation or translators. Either

way, translation becomes a way to give a voice to the weak—woman or translation itself—

since in the patriarchal society both are judged inferior to their counterpart; woman to man,

and translator to the original author (Chamberlain, Lori 456).

Postcolonial translation theorists like Vicente Rafael and Talat Asad, on the other

hand, try to provide a “postcolonial reflection on translation in anthropology, area studies and

literary theory and criticism” (Venuti, “1980s” 219). They, like Rafael (1988), either expose

translation “to be the agent (or subverter) of empire” (ibid 220) or like Asad, try to find out

“asymmetrical tendencies and pressures in the languages of dominated and dominant

societies” (Asad 164).

TS in the 1990s

As a result of all the above theoretical developments in the previous decades, TS in the 1990s

becomes an autonomous field. It also deviates into two directions: academic and theoretical.

Academically, major universities and institutions around the world show genuine interest in 7 Though ‘postmodern theories’ is a wide concept which includes all theories of the time including feminist and postcolonial theories, they [feminist and postcolonial theories] have been discussed independently of postmodern theories here to make the point more clear.

19

and need for the field and start having translation degree and translator training programs in

their campuses on either regular basis or through correspondence. The press in these

universities and institutions, like the commercial publishing houses, also publish works on

TS, which include training manuals, encyclopedias, journals, conference proceedings,

collections of research articles, monographs, primers of theory, and readers to name some

(Venuti, “1990s and Beyond” 325). Researchers in these universities and institutions also

start exploring the possibilities of the use of machine in translation. They, relying on Noam

Chomsky’s concept of Universal grammar, also believe that a universal machine program for

translation between languages is possible. Thus, academically, TS becomes “an institution

authority” (ibid).

And theoretically also, TS achieves a new height as theorists from various disciplines

bring new concepts and translation techniques to the field. These theorists mainly apply three

approaches to translation: 1. linguistic 2. culturally oriented under the influence of post-

structuralism and 3. politically inscripted approach (Venuti, “1990s and Beyond” 326-29).

Among these, theorists approaching translation from the linguistic point of view apply new or

already existed but never applied theories on translation. For instance, Ernst-August Gutt

takes a cognitive approach to translation and applies criteria of relevance theory to it (Venuti,

“1990s and Beyond” 326; Gutt). Similar is the approach of Basil Hatim and Ian Mason when

they, in the fifth chapter of their 1997 book, The Translator as Communicator, use politeness

theory to analyze film subtitling.

As opposed to the linguistic approach, the culturally oriented approach under the

influence of poststructuralism uses already existing norms but for a different outcome. It

“suspects universals,” “emphasizes precisely the social and historical differences of

translation,” and initiates “an incisive interrogation of cultural and political effects, the role

played by translation in the creation and functioning of social movements and institutions”

20

(Venuti, “1990s and Beyond” 328-329). Annie Brisset, Lawrence Venuti and Jacques Derrida

are three major theorists who may be named to represent this stream in the period.

Brisset in her 1990 book, A Sociocritique of Translation, presents a social and

ideological critique of translation in Quebec and explores how translation of the major

authors (dramatists) from dominant languages into Quebecois French helped it acquire a

cultural authority against North American English and Parisian French, and how translation

helped a “vernacular” becoming a “referential” language (140). Similarly Venuti in his 1995

and 1998 books studies translation historically to highlight how English translation, which

appears quite privileged to general readers, has been marginalized culturally, socially and

ideologically. Derrida, mainly a poststructuralist translation theorist, also assigns cultural and

social roles to translation in this period, as is the case in his lecture, “What is Relevant in

Translation?” In the lecture, he suggests that “when relevant translation occurs within an

institution like the state, then, it can become the instrument of legal interdiction, economic

sanction, and political repression, motivated here by racism” (Venuti, “Translating Derrida”

252).

In the third theoretical approach, theorists synthesize “various theoretical and political

discourses, including Marxism and feminism, poststructuralism and postcolonial theory” in

their study and show “how the identities constructed by translation are variously determined

by ethnicity and race, gender and sexuality, class and nation” (Venuti, “1990s and Beyond”

328). In this way, translation “goes beyond the communication of foreign meanings to

encompass a political inscription” (ibid).

For instance, Eric Cheyfitz, in his 1991 study The Poetics of Imperialism “argues that

strongly ethnocentric translating has underwritten Anglo-American imperialism, from the

English colonization of the New World in the early modern period to US expansion into

Indian [Native American] lands during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to current US

21

foreign policy in the Third World and elsewhere” (Venuti, “1990s and Beyond” 328). Similar

is the position of Kwame Anthony Appiah and Keith Harvey. Appiah, in his essay “Thick

Translation,” imagines a “frankly political” role for literary translation and advocates for the

need of annotations and glossaries with literary translation to highlight this role (818). Harvey

in his 1998 article “Translating Camp Talk: Gay identities and cultural transfer,” on the other

hand, “calls on the explanatory power of linguistics to analyze a particular literary discourse,

‘camp,’ and its homosexual coding in recent French and Anglo-American fiction” (Venuti,

“1990s and Beyond” 333). For him, translation is not “just about texts: nor is it only about

cultures and power. It is about the relation of the one to the other” (Harvey 466).

TS in the first decade of 21st Century

As a result of multi-dimensional development of TVT and TS in the 18 and 19th centuries,

one major change which comes to TS in the 21st century is in the perspective of scholars and

common people towards the role of the translator in translation, and the place of translation in

the field of language and literature. That said, today, most scholars sympathize with the

translators and realize that “the problem is not just that they are badly paid” and “their

contribution to culture is constantly slighted or overlooked” but that “their creative identity”

is often ignored (Ree 223).

And the reason that translator’s creative identity is being respected in recent

academics brings a different approach to TS too. Perhaps it is because of this that recent

research does not worry more about defining good or bad translations but about having better

translation technique(s) to transfer maximum meaning from SL text to the translated text. In

other words, TS in the present times is more concerned about either discussing those

approaches, techniques and methods (traditional or innovative; old or new) through which a

translator—experienced or amateur; literary or non-literary—can best perform his task and

loose minimal meaning, or locating those problems or linguistic variances between SL and

22

TL which can possibly cause loss of meaning. In turn, it is also trying to find a possible

solution for them.

For example, Chantal Wright in his 2010 article takes the problem of Exophony in

translation which can cause loss of meaning. He also provides possible solutions for the

problem. Similarly, another theorist, Krisztina Karoly, in the same issue of the journal that

publishes Wright’s above quoted article takes the issue of repetition in translation. He

discusses how repetition distorts stylistic effects in translation and how a careful translator

can best handle the situation.

Apart from these theoretical developments in TS about human translation, another

field, of TS, MT, which sprouted only in the 1990s, has also developed a lot and is still

developing. In fact, today, theoretical developments in the field have made translation,

especially day-to-day and conversational translation, so easy that one can translate, though

not always accurately, most of the languages—even entire websites and documents—with

just one click through machine programs. One such program changing the lives of people

around the world is Google Translate. The program can translate in seconds to and from

among 64 major languages. MT has also given rise to the ‘crowd-sourcing’ in translation.

*****

Thus, the above analysis of the translation tradition in India and the West shows that

TS in both cultures has experienced a great continuum of development. Indian translators and

translation theorists have come to the realization that translation is not just a Teeka or

paraphrase but an uphill task, that “it is probably much easier to rewrite the text in the other

language than to translate it” (Woolsey 166). Western translators and translation theorists,

following Noam Chomsky’s and M.A.K. Halliday’s theories, realize that translation is not

impossible, nor is it a curse on humanity as depicted in the story of Babel; rather, it is just

23

difficult. And since it is difficult, a translator should be given proper credit for his efforts and

creativity. In this way, the wide gap of the old time between the TVTs and TS of India and

the West has been decreased and TS in both cultures have come closer. This must be a good

sign for Translation Studies.

24

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