Table Of ContentTranslating Others
Volume I
Edited by
Theo Hermans
First published 2006 by St. Jerome Publishing
Published 2014 by Routledge
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Translating others / edited by Theo Hermans.
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ISBN 1-900650-84-3 (pbk. : v. 1 : alk. paper) -- ISBN 1-900650-85-1
(pbk. : v. 2 : alk. paper)
1. Translating and interpreting. 2. Language and culture. 3. Intercul-
tural communication. I. Hermans, Theo.
P306.T6795 2006
418’.02--dc22
2006012443
Contents
Volume 1
Acknowledgements
Introduction ......................................................................................................9
Theo Hermans
1 Grounding Theory
Reconceptualizing Western Translation Theory ...............................................13
Integrating Non-Western Thought about Translation
Maria Tymoczko
Meanings of Translation in Cultural Anthropology ...........................................33
Doris Bachmann-Medick
Misquoted Others ..............................................................................................43
Locating Newness and Authority in Cultural Translation
Ovidi Carbonell Cortés
2 Mapping Concepts
Translation and the Language(s) of Historiography ..........................................67
Understanding Ancient Greek and Chinese Ideas of History
Alexandra Lianeri
From ‘Theory’ to ‘Discourse’ ...........................................................................87
The Making of a Translation Anthology
Martha Cheung
In Our Own Time, On Our Own Terms ...........................................................102
‘Translation’ in India
Harish Trivedi
Translation into Arabic in the ‘Classical Age’ ................................................120
When the Pandora’s Box of Transmission Opens …
Myriam Salama-Carr
Gained in Translation ......................................................................................132
Tibetan Science between Dharamsala and Lhasa
Audrey Prost
‘And the Translator Is – ’ .................................................................................145
Translators in Chinese History
Eva Hung
3 Reflexive Praxis
The Translator as Theôros ..............................................................................163
Thoughts on Cogitation, Figuration and Current Creative Writing
Carol Maier
Pseudotranslations, Authorship and Novelists in Eighteenth-Century Italy ....181
Paolo Rambelli
To Be or Not to Be a Gutter Flea .....................................................................211
Writing from Beyond the Edge
Christi Ann Merrill
English-Chinese, Chinese-Chinese .................................................................219
On Reading Literature through Translation
Cosima Bruno
Translation, Transcreation and Culture ............................................................236
Theories of Translation in Indian Languages
G. Gopinathan
Translation, Transcreation, Travesty ................................................................247
Two Models of Translation in Bengali Literature
Sukanta Chaudhuri
Volume 2
4 Memory and Emergence
Translation Choices across Five Thousand Years ............................................265
Egyptian, Greek and Arabic Libraries in a Land of Many Languages
Stephen Quirke
Invisible Translation ........................................................................................283
Reading Chinese Texts in Ancient Japan
Yukino Semizu
Vulgar Eloquence? ..........................................................................................296
Cultural Models and Practices of Translation in Late Medieval Europe
Ruth Evans
Translation and the Creation of Genre .............................................................314
The Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Egypt
Myriam Salama-Carr
Ottoman Conceptions of Translation and its Practice .....................................325
The 1897 ‘Classics Debate’ as a Focus for Examining Change
Saliha Paker
African Europhone Literature and Writing as Translation .............................349
Some Ethical Issues
Paul Bandia
5 Hearing Voices
Towards a Folkloristic Theory of Translation .................................................365
Ibrahim Muhawi
Retranslating Ireland ........................................................................................380
Orality and Authenticity in French and German Translations of
Blasket Island Autobiography
Carol O’Sullivan
The Hoe As We Know It ..................................................................................392
Translating a Contemporary Swahili Poet
Annmarie Drury
On Translating Somali Poetry .........................................................................402
Martin Orwin
The Uselessness of Translation in the Bengali Dharma-puja ........................414
The Shift from Ritual Texts to Living Cult
Fabrizio Ferrari
6 Image and Agency
The Other on Display ......................................................................................431
Translation in the Ethnographic Museum
Kate Sturge
Translating the Bible in Nineteenth-Century India .........................................441
Protestant Missionary Translation and the Standard Tamil Version
Hephzibah Israel
Christian Tracts in Chinese Costume .............................................................460
The Missionary Strategies in Translating The Peep of Day
John Tsz-Pang Lai
Measuring Distance .........................................................................................483
Tsubouchi Shōyō and the Myth of Shakespeare Translation in Modern Japan
Daniel Gallimore
Translation and Cultural Exportation ..............................................................493
A Case Study of Huang Chunming’s Short Stories
Kenneth Liu
Notes on Contributors ..............................................................................................516
Index ..............................................................................................................521
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Acknowledgements
Thanks are due to the following:
The Arts and Humanities Research Board (since renamed the Arts and Humanities
Research Council, AHRC), for generously supporting the project ‘Translations and
Translation Theories East and West’, one of a basket of eight projects under the aegis
of the ‘AHRB Centre for Asian and African Literatures’ run jointly within the Univer-
sity of London by the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and University
College London (UCL), 2001-2005.
Mwinyihatibu Mohamed (Tanga), for permission to quote his poems ‘Jembe’.
Cambridge University Press, for permission to print a slightly amended version of
Martha Cheung’s ‘From “Theory” to “Discourse”: The Making of a Translation An-
thology’, first published in the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies
66 (2003), 3.
The Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies, University of Manchester, for
permission to print amended versions of the essays by Carol Maier and Yukino Semizu
first published in CTIS Occasional Papers 1 (2001) and 3 (2005).
Rebecca Masterton, for editorial assistance.
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Introduction
THEO HERMANS
University College London (UCL), UK
Translation negotiates difference. It can be hard work. The larger the difference, the
harder the work of translation. Difference, moreover, comes in many guises. The
study of translation faces the same logic. Yet the academic field of study known in
English as translation studies is only beginning to realize the implications of radical
difference.
Historically, the study of translation in the Western world owes its key categories
and protocols to particular concepts of language and culture and an association with
a limited set of canonical written texts. These alliances explain the field’s traditional
preoccupation with identity and preservation, its pervasive metaphors of transport
and transference and its assumption of discrete, bounded entities, whether linguistic,
social, political, historical or disciplinary.
They have proved a narrow basis for an encounter with the complexities and
inequities of an unstable, postmodern, postcolonial, globalizing world. Even as
communication across continents and time zones increases, diversity leaps to the
fore. However intercultural a field of study translation studies might want to be, its
disciplinary history poorly prepared it for radical difference, the particularity of the
local, the sheer variety of phenomena coming within its purview.
The present collection seeks to put translation studies on a global map. It offers
theoretical and methodological reflection as well as case studies. Only a minority of the
latter concern Europe, and they mostly deal with neglected aspects of the continent’s
translation history. To that extent these volumes go behind prevailing disciplinary he-
gemonies and focus instead on the detail of translation in Asia, Africa and the Middle
East. This accounts for the ambiguity in the collection’s title. ‘Translating Others’
refers not only to alterity and how it affects translation, but also to the countless others
who translate, in their own way, for their own reasons, in their own world. Many of
these ‘others’ the traditional discipline of translation studies never even saw.
It is not a unified collection. No single model of investigation can capture the
intensity of the local. What emerges, rather, is the prospect of a splintered discipline,
a de-centred and perhaps ex-centric field of study that must learn to speak several
tongues, recognizes the contingency of theory and seeks to make it its own uncertain-
ties productive. The models that are explored in these volumes are dialogical rather
than dialectical, geared to negotiation rather than integration, and historicist rather than
formalist in inspiration. They involve critical self-reflection. The engagement with the
contextual detail of difference strains the researcher’s discourse, especially when the
reporting language – English, in this case – is compromised by its own history and
status. In their breadth, in their self-interrogation and in their attention to the particular,
these volumes present one of the faces of the future of translation studies.
Most of the essays in the present collection have grown out of the project ‘Trans-
lations and Translation Theories East and West’ which ran in the Centre for Asian
