Translation Studies And Cultural Studies: The Politics Of Translation

From a post-structuralist perspective and with a large number of first-hand English texts as a basis, the present dissertation sorts out the explicit or implicit power networks existing in translation, thus tracing out and making academic discussion of the issue of the politics of translation in the Western and Chinese contexts.The dissertation consists of four chapters: 1) A Map of Sources and Shape of the Issue of the Politics of Translation; 2) The Politics of Gender in Translation; 3) The Politics of Violence in Translation and Post-colonial Criticism; 4) Concluding Remarks: The Reconstruction of the Poetics of Translation. Obviously, Chapters 1 and 4 belong to a macro study; Chapters 2 and 3 belong to a micro study or a case study. They are logically related to each other.Chapter 1 first briefs the reasons for choosing this project and the context concerned, and second examines the intension and extension of the concept of 'power'. Based on it ,it devotes a lot to exploring the sources and shape of the issue of the politics of translation in the Western and Chinese contexts. Morever, this chapter maps out the basic modes of thinking, research methods and original ideas of the whole dissertation.The traditional theory of 'fidelity and equivalence'rests on an empiricist -idealist framework, a 'humanistic' enterprise that is built on an unproblematic, naively representational theory of language. It has many demerits harmful to anexcavation of the sense of questioning for translation studies. Cultural studies as a discipline which was funded in the 1950s and 1960s, and the culture-oriented Translation Studies as a discipline whick was founded in the mid-19703,both offer academic approaches to rescuing the tradtional theory of fidelity and equivalence from danger. The Dutch scholar James Holmes, the Belgian-American scholar Andre Lefevere, the Israeli scholars Gideon Toury and Even-Zohar, and the British scholars Susan Bassnett and Theo Hermans are all founders of Translation Studies. They unanimously argued that the process of translation is not merely that of linguistic transference but that of subjective adjudication. Only when we study and analyze the source-language culture, the literary system and the translations themselves in translation studies can we master what a translator thinks of subjective adjudication, ideologies and poetic norms in source -language and target-language cultural systems and the role or a function a translation performs in target-language cultural-literary systems. All this has been further covered in the work of the American scholar Lawrence Venuti, the Indian-American woman scholar Gayatri C.Spivak, the Indian woman scholar Tejeswini Niranjana and the Canadian woman critic Sherry Simon from the 1990s onwards. They discuss in particular such post-modern issues as gender in translation, violence in translation, and the formation of cultural identity and translation. These issues view the complicated power networks inherent in translation. They are just what the title 'the politics of translation 'means.Whether in the Western context or in the Chinese context, the term 'politics'in the politics of translation is a concept of power. And therefore, 'the politics of translation ' refers to expicit or implicit power relationships that arise when translation faces two different kinds of cultural contact and integration. Specifically, such power relationships may include subjective aspects-competence,gender identity and manipulative strategies of a translator-and objective aspects-patronage with media,publishing houses and journals as units, translation as a product and the issue of violence or appropriation a translator imposes upon the original. Historically, the politics of translation dates back to the first translation ofthe Hebrew Old Testament into Greek, i. e. The Septuagint, which happened at Alexandria in the 3th century B. C. It's in this project that official patronage and the translator's competence decide whether a translation is a success or not .Following this, Jerom...