Translation is intercultural communication in its purest form. Its power in forming and/or deforming cultural identities has only recently been acknowledged, given the attention it deserves. The chapters in this unique volume assess translation from Arabic into other languages from different perspectives: the politics, economics, ethics, and poetics of translating from Arabic; a language often neglected in western mainstream translation studies.
Translation is intercultural communication in its purest form. Its power in forming and/or deforming cultural identities has only recently been acknowledged, given the attention it deserves. The chapters in this unique volume assess translation from Arabic into other languages from different perspectives: the politics, economics, ethics, and poetics of translating from Arabic; a language often neglected in western mainstream translation studies.
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Overview
Translation is intercultural communication in its purest form. Its power in forming and/or deforming cultural identities has only recently been acknowledged, given the attention it deserves. The chapters in this unique volume assess translation from Arabic into other languages from different perspectives: the politics, economics, ethics, and poetics of translating from Arabic; a language often neglected in western mainstream translation studies.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781847695543 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Multilingual Matters Ltd. |
| Publication date: | 09/08/2004 |
| Series: | Topics in Translation , #26 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 152 |
| File size: | 412 KB |
About the Author
Said Faiq is Associate Professor of Translation Studies at the American University of Sharjah, where he is Chair of the Department of English & Translation Studies and Director of the Graduate program in Translation & Interpreting. Prior to this, he taught at the School of Languages, Salford University, UK. He has published widely on (Arabic) translation and cultural studies.
Said Faiq is Associate Professor of Translation Studies at the American University of Sharjah, where he is Chair of the Department of English & Translation Studies and Director of the Graduate program in Translation & Interpreting. Prior to this, he taught at the School of Languages, Salford University, UK. He has published widely on (Arabic) translation and cultural studies.
Read an Excerpt
Cultural Encounters in Translation from Arabic
By Said Faiq
Multilingual Matters
Copyright © 2004 Said FaiqAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84769-554-3
CHAPTER 1
The Cultural Encounter in Translating from Arabic
SAID FAIQ
Introduction
The word misunderstanding, writes Rabassa (1996), is crucial in most spheres of life. Misunderstandings are said to derive from incompatibilities in processing of media which carry them: languages. Yet misunderstandings are not only the products of linguistic incompatibilities per se but of cultural ones as well. This means that misunderstandings generally occur in particular social structures, particular histories, and prevailing norms of language production and reception. All these can be said to make up the ingredients of the culture and the ideology subsumed within it. Culture involves the totality of attitudes towards the world, towards events, other cultures and peoples and the manner in which the attitudes are mediated. In other words, culture refers to beliefs and value systems tacitly assumed to be collectively shared by particular social groups and to the positions taken by producers and receivers of texts, including translations, during the mediation process.
Intercultural contacts that resulted in the great cultural shifts from one civilisation to another have been made possible through translation: this has meant a good deal of exchange, naturally through language. But while languages are generally prone to change over time – phonologically, morphologically, syntactically and semantically – cultures do not change fast. Cultures remain by and large prisoners of their respective pasts. Edward Said (1993: 1) succinctly argues:
Appeals to the past are among the commonest of strategies in interpretations of the present. What animates such appeals is not only disagreement about what happened in the past and what the past was, but uncertainty about whether the past really is past, over and concluded, or whether it continues, albeit in different forms, perhaps. This problem animates all sorts of discussions – about influence, about blame and judgement, about present actualities and future priorities.
It is in these pasts that cultures normally reside and, even if the colours, shapes and formulations of these residences change, the spirit changes little or not at all. When cultures cross and mingle through translation, these pasts come face to face and a struggle for power and influence becomes inevitable. Old formulations and modes of mediation appear on the surface, and their realisation is made possible by language.
Culture and Translation
The conception of the intrinsic relationship between language and culture in translation studies has led to theories and arguments calling for the treatment of translation as a primarily cultural act:
That it is possible to translate one language into another at all attests to the universalities in culture, to common vicissitudes of human life, and to the like capabilities of men throughout the earth, as well as the inherent nature of language and the character of the communication process itself: and a cynic might add, to the arrogance of the translator. (Casagrande, 1954: 338)
Casagrande's statement is appropriate in putting culture at the heart of translation, but it generously overgeneralises the universality of culture being common to all men. The Lexicographer of all lexicographers decided this would not be the case: all men are therefore divided into groups each of which has its own culture and by extension its own way of perceiving and doing translation.
Taking culture and ideology as their starting point, a number of theorists have argued that the act of translating involves manipulation, subversion, appropriation and violence. Venuti (1995, 1996 and 1998), for example, argues that the very purpose and activity of translation represents violence. Postulating the concepts of domestication and foreignisation, Venuti argues that the Anglo-American translation tradition, in particular, over the last three centuries or so, has had a normalising and naturalising effect. Such an effect, Venuti stipulates, has deprived source text producers of their voice and has re-expressed foreign cultural values in terms of what is familiar, i.e. unchallenging to Western dominant culture:
The violence of translation resides in its very purpose and activity: the reconstruction of the foreign text in accordance with values, beliefs, and representations that pre-exist in the target language, always configured in hierarchies of dominance and marginality, always determining the production, circulation, and reception of texts. ... Whatever difference the translation conveys is now imprinted by the target-language culture, assimilated to its positions of intelligibility, its canons and taboos, its codes and ideologies. The aim of translation is to bring back a cultural other as the same, the recognizable, even the familiar; and this aim always risks a wholesale domestication of the foreign text, often in highly self-conscious projects, where translation serves an imperialist appropriation of foreign cultures for domestic agendas, cultural, economic, political. (Venuti, 1996: 196)
Debates about translation become volatile, charged and sensitive when the notions of culture and ideology – which are always there – are marked and discussed. These two notions remain open to many assessments, one of which is the radical relativism between languages and their respective cultures. But since translation is one of the oldest occupations and/or practices, there is no escape from cultural loads that represent certain ethnic, linguistic and political groups which cross, violently or otherwise, into other ethnic, linguistic and political groups. Culture has been considered from different angles: colonial, post-colonial, modernist, postmodernist, feminist, post-feminist, orientalist, post-orientalist, and other dichotomies of X and post-X.
In post-colonial contexts, translation assumes a particularly added significance: choice of texts for translation, the use of particular discursive strategies, circulation of the translations, etc. In this respect Venuti (1994: 201–2) writes that translation is:
an inevitable domestication, wherein the foreign text is inscribed with linguistic and cultural values that are intelligible to specific domestic constituencies. This process of inscription operates at every stage in the production, circulation, and reception of the translation. It is initiated by the very choice of a foreign text to translate, always an exclusion of other foreign texts and literatures, which answers to particular domestic interests. It continues most forcefully in the development of a translation strategy that rewrites the foreign text in domestic dialects and discourses, always a choice of certain domestic values to the exclusion of others. ... Translation is instrumental in shaping domestic attitudes towards foreign countries, attaching esteem or stigma to specific ethnicities, races, and nationalities, able to foster respect for cultural difference or hatred based on ethnocentricism, racism, or patriotism. In the long run, translation figures in geopolitical relations by establishing the cultural grounds of diplomacy, reinforcing alliances, antagonisms, and hegemonies between nations.
The Cultural Dimension in Translating from Arabic
Starting from the premise that cultural and translation studies deal with the conditions of knowledge production in one culture, and the way this knowledge is interpreted and relocated according to knowledge production in another culture, Carbonell (1996) laments the situation of translating Arabic works into mainstream European languages.
Manipulation through translation not only violates the Arabic original but also leads to the influencing of the target readers and their views of the source culture and its people. This manipulation ultimately leads to subversion of texts through translation and/or other discourses at all levels (cf. for example Jaquemond; Carbonell; Abdul-Raof; Sara, in this volume). Carbonell (1996) reports that in his comments on Burton's translation of the Arabian Nights, Farwell (1963/1990: 366; quoted in Carbonell, 1996), for example, says:
The great charm of Burton's translation, viewed as literature, lies in the veil of romance and exoticism he cast over the entire work. He tried hard to retain the flavour of oriental quaintness and naivete of the medieval Arab by writing 'as the Arab would have written in English'.
Such views of translation, and by extension of readers, lead to translations that imply the production of what Carbonell calls 'subverted texts' at all levels. Translators blatantly flout all norms and maxims of shared information: they become dictators, so to speak, by altering what a group of readers is allowed to know and read, thus censoring and, to a large extent, alienating the target readers.
Reporting on personal experience of translating contemporary Arabic literature into English, Peter Clark (1997: 109) writes:
I wanted ... to translate a volume of contemporary Syrian literature. I ... thought the work of 'Abd al-Salam al-'Ujaili was very good and well worth putting into English. 'Ujaili is a doctor in his seventies who has written poetry, criticism, novels and short stories. In particular his short stories are outstanding. Many are located in the Euphrates valley and depict the tensions of individuals coping with politicisation and the omnipotent state. ... I proposed to my British publisher a volume of 'Ujaili's short stories. The editor said, 'There are three things wrong with the idea. He's male. He's old and he writes short stories. Can you find a young female novelist?' Well, I looked into women's literature and did translate a novel by a woman writer even though she was and is in her eighties.
The assumed and imaginary basis in most representations of all that is Arab and Islamic lies in the Western obsession with fixed texts and its fixation with the mechanisms of this fixedness, which all non-Western cultures are said to lack. Translating Arabic texts, with specific traditions for production, reception and circulation, into fixed texts has meant taking liberties, being invisible, violent, appropriationist and subverter to shift the texts into mainstream world culture and literature. World culture and literature means, of course, the Western canons of production that also stand as signs of universalism and humanism (cf. Asad, 1995).
When Arab writers, like the superb critic of the Middle Eastern oil based societies Munif, are translated into English, critics either ignore or denigrate their writings. Dallal (1998) quotes a John Updike remark about Munif's outstanding Cities of Salt: 'It is unfortunate ... that Mr Munif ... appears to be ... insufficiently Westernized to produce a narrative that feels much like what we call a novel.' Such an attitude stems from the one-sided, still current stereotypical ideology based on universalism, unitarism, and the homogeneity of human nature. This ideology marginalises and excludes the distinctive and unique characteristics of Arab societies and their discursive traditions. What Updike is saying is that the West needs to satisfy itself that it knows its natives: it is others who should adapt to its norms in order to be welcomed as members of universalism and world culture and literature. The Western centric assumptions about others – races, nationalities, literatures – has provided the site for critiques of representations, language and ideological control towards writers from places like the Arab world. These assumptions return time and again to haunt the production, reception and circulation of Arabic texts, and in turn complicate the issue of translation (cf. Jacquemond, 1992).
Though the West has, in the 1980s and 1990s, opened up to Third World peoples, cultures and texts – Latinos, for example – the literatures of the Arab-Islamic world remain generally marginalised, despite the enormous and persistent attention – almost hysteria – accorded to Arabs and to Islam. Translation from Arabic still proceeds along familiar and established scripts whereby:
stereotyping, strategies of signification and power: the network in which a culture is fashioned does appear as a texture of signs linked by endless connotations and denotations, a meaning system of inextricable complexity that is reflected, developed and recorded in the multifarious act of writing. (Carbonnel, 1996: 81)
In his translation of Naguib Mahfouz's novel yawma qutila zza'iim (The Day the Leader was Killed/Assassinated), André Miquel explains in his foreword to the French-language reader that he kept footnotes to the very minimum. Yet Jacquemond (1992) counted 54 footnotes in a 77-page translation. What transpires is that the translator-cum-orientalist expert assumes total ignorance on the part of his reading constituencies, and proceeds to guide them through assumed authoritative knowledge of an unfathomable world where backwardness and the assassination of peacemakers are the norms. But this would be acceptable compared with Edward Fitzgerald's 'infamous comment' on the liberties he had allowed himself to take with his version of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam, 'really [they] need a little art to shape them' (Bassnett, 1998a: 78).
This is most clear in the assessment of the Arab/Muslim character by the Victorian Orientalist Richard Burton, who provided the images he grew up with before he ever met an Arab or Muslim person:
Our Arab at his worst is a mere barbarian who has not forgotten the savage. He is a model mixture of childishness and astuteness, of simplicity and cunning, concealing levity of mind under solemnity of aspect. His stolid instinctive conservatism grovels before the tyrant rule of routine, despite the turbulent and licentious independence which ever suggests revolt against the ruler; his mental torpidity, founded upon physical indolence, renders immediate action and all manner of exertion distasteful; his conscious weakness shows itself in an overweening arrogance and intolerance. His crass and self-satisfied ignorance makes him glorify the most ignoble superstitions, while acts of revolting savagery are the natural results of a malignant fanaticism and a furious hatred of every creed beyond the pale of Al-Islam. (quoted in Karim, 1997: 159)
It is barely conceivable that a person like the informed, know-all Burton, bothered to translate from the language of a people with such characteristics. Moreover, it is inconceivable not to link Burton's assessment with the social fabric of Britain and Europe at that time. After all, the inquisition in Spain targeted mainly Muslims who, for centuries, tolerated and protected non-Muslims. Burton's and Fitzgerald's assessments are instances of how the Other Arab and Islam are perceived, and how their culture is systematically represented in ready-made scripts prevalent in the Western culture at all levels: education, poetics and politics. In this respect, Niranjana (1992: 71) fittingly writes:
The naturalising, dehistoricising move is, of course, accompanied by a situating of the 'primitive' or the 'Oriental' in a teleological scheme that shows them to be imperfect realisations of the Spirit or of Being.
This is exactly what Christian polemics have been propounding about Islam, its Prophet, Muhammad, and by extension Arabs: attributing violence, salaciousness, and irrationality to them. Bhabha (1994: 82) aptly argues that: 'It is recognizably true that the chain of stereotypical signification is curiously mixed and split, polymorphous and perverse, an articulation of multiple belief.' Recall Burton's assessment and Clark's experience!
An example of how translation deformed an Arabic indigenous literary genre is the qaSida, that 'canonized genre of Arabic poetry, which has never been satsfactorily translated in the West, because it has no obvious generic equivalent' (Lefevre, 1990: 25). The qaSida was forced into translation, losing its status with the advent of free poetry because of Western influence in the Arab world with imperialism, and the readiness of Arab élites to embrace Western poetical genres to the detriment of the qaSida, a genre that lasted since pre-Islam. Lefevere (1990: 26) again:
Language is not the problem. Ideology and poetics are, as are cultural elements that are clear, or seen as completely 'misplaced' in what would be the target culture version of the text to be translated. One such element is the camel dung mentioned in Labid's qasida, which can hardly be expected to make a 'poetic' impression on Western readers. Carlyle, the English Victorian translator, leaves it out altogether ... German translators, on the other hand, try to find a cultural analogy, but with little success: the solution is worse than the problem: 'German scholars, familiar with the peasants of their own land, where the size of the dung heap is some indication of the prosperity of the farmer, merely transported to the desert the social values of Bavaria'.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Cultural Encounters in Translation from Arabic by Said Faiq. Copyright © 2004 Said Faiq. Excerpted by permission of Multilingual Matters.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Preface,Notes on Contributors,
1 The Cultural Encounter in Translating from Arabic Said Faiq,
2 The Cultural Context of Translating Arabic Literature Richard van Leeuwen,
3 Exoticism, Identity and Representation in Western Translation from Arabic Ovidi Carbonell,
4 Autobiography, Modernity and Translation Tetz Rooke,
5 Integrating Arab Culture into Israeli Identity through Literary Translations from Arabic into Hebrew Hannah Amit-Kochavi,
6 Translating Islamist Discourse Mike Holt,
7 On Translating Oral Style in Palestinian Folktales Ibrahim Muhawi,
8 The Qur'an: Limits of Translatability Hussein Abdul-Raof,
9 Translating Native Arabic Linguistic Terminology Solomon I. Sara,
10 Towards an Economy and Poetics of Translation from and into Arabic Richard Jacquemond. Translated from French by Philip Tomlinson,
Bibliography,
Index,