|
The Manipulation School
This is the school of scholars like Theo Hermans , Lambert and van Gorp . The School proceeds on the basis of the interplay between theoretical models and practical case studies. There doesn't seem to be anything outstandingly distinctive about this school.
The Cultural Turn in Translation Studies:
This means the study of translation at the interface with culture, looking at translation from the cultural studies angle.
Translation as Rewriting: Lefevere (1992:9) claims that "the same basic process of rewriting is at work in translation, historiography, anthologisation, criticism, and editing". He adds that "translation is the most obviously recognizable type of rewriting, and ...it is potentially the most influential because it is able to project the image of an author and/or those works beyond the boundaries of their culture of origin." The literary system of which translation is a part, says Lefevere, is controlled by three factors:
|
|
Of ideology and translation, Lefevere has this to say: "On every level of the translation process, it can be shown that if linguistic considerations enter into conflict with considerations of an ideological and/or poetological nature, the latter tend to win out."
As may be expected, the cultural turn in Translation Studies has taken Translation Studies away from purely linguistic analysis, bringing it into contact with other disciplines.
Postcolonial Translation Theory
Asymmetrical power relations are the refrain of translation in a postcolonial context. Gayatri Spivak's 'The Politics of Translation' and Tejaswini Niranjana's 'Siting Translation: History, Poststructuralism and the Colonial Context' are among the seminal works in the interface between translation and post colonialism. Writing from a poststructuralist perspective, Niranjana sees the following as the failings of Translation Studies because of its western orientation:
|
|
Brazilian Cannibalism
This is another important postcolonial movement. It basically means the devouring of the colonial text along with the oppressive colonizers to come up with a text in the native tongue, which is energized and revitalized in terms of native ideology. It is a radical view of translation, one, which is increasingly being accepted.
The Irish Translation Movement
The context in Ireland is of course the subjugation of the Irish by the British.
Other Cultural Theorists
Lawrence Venuti is an important name in Translation Studies. Venuti who championed the cause of the translator argued that the translator could do one of the two things: he could as he translates make himself invisible, which means that his target text reads fluently as a target text. This is the domesticating translation, which has no obvious traces or influence of the source language in it. The translator on the other hand could make himself visible, making it obvious that it is a translation, the linguistic traces of the alien thought movement that the source language is showing up. This is the foreignising translation, which Venuti advocates. Although Venuti is for the foreignising type, he insists that rather than binary opposites, they are really 'heuristic concepts...designed to promote thinking and research'. Essentially, domestication and foreignising have to do with 'the question of how much a translation assimilates a foreign language and culture, and how much it rather signals the differences of that text.'
Venuti insists on translation taking into account the value-driven nature of the socio-cultural framework, which is against the Toury's scientific, descriptive, value-free model, and universal laws of translation
Antoine Berman, the French theorist who preceded Venuti, talks of the translation strategy of 'naturalization', which equates with Venuti's 'domestication'. "The properly ethical aim of the translating act", says Berman "is receiving the foreign as foreign", and, as Munday points out, this seems to have influenced Venuti's 'foreignising' translation strategy. Perhaps Berman's contribution to translation studies is his concept of 'negative analytic'. Berman asserts there is a system of textual deformation in TT, which keeps the foreignness from coming through. An examination of this textual deformation is called 'negative analytic'. Berman (1985b/2000) says:
The negative analytic is primarily concerned with ethnocentric, annexationist translations and hyper-textual translations (pastiche, imitation, adaptation, free writing), where the play of deforming forces is freely exercised.
He identifies twelve deforming tendencies:
|
