A LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF THE UNEQUAL POWER RELATIONSHIP INVOLVED

IN TRASFERENCE OF TEXTS FROM ONE LANGUAGE TO ANOTHER

One important difference between writing an original text and translating one from
source language into target language is that the latter is overtly an intended and purposeful
act. In composing the source text the writer can be unaware of her intention or purpose.
But, translation is an undeniably deliberate act. The translator is motivated by an aim to
initiate social and cultural effect on the target language community. (This is only an
expository remark on the process of translation, not a judgment on the product, the work of
translation, as an achieved content.) A source text is assessed as a socially active linguistic
artifice and its potential impact on target language community is foreseen by the translator.
The translator chooses and decides on a text and then brings it into another language with a
desired impact. Thus translation is a transitive act. The translator is an explicitly responsible
subject.

Translation is a linguistic act just as writing is, but it is also a metalinguistic act. The
translating subject intentionally works between two texts (SL and TL) and two languages. At
every point of her task, she has to decide on the meaning. One serious issue that the
translator has to confront in this process is that of freedom and confinement: How far can
the translator be free from the bounds set by the SL text?

Some early theorists of translation considered it as an act of faithful reproduction of

the ‘original’. The French humanist Etienne Dolet(1509-46) published a paper which
contained five normative principles for translator( How to Translate Well from One
Language to Another). He demanded on the part of a translator a full understanding of the
original author and a perfect knowledge of both languages. (It seems to be a paradox that
Dolet was tried and executed for mistranslating Plato in such a way as to spread disbelief
and immorality.

George Chapman(1559-1634) also stressed the principle of fidelity to the spirit of the
original:

The work of a skilful and worthy translator is to observe the

sentences,figures and Forms of speech proposed in his author,

his true sence and height. 1

The enthusiasm of the Renaissance also caused, on the other hand, exercise of freedom on the part
of translator. The translation of ‘Lives’ of Plutarch by Sir Thomas North is an instance that suggests
itself. North replaced the direct discourse in the SL text by an indirect discourse to provide the ext
with a strong authorial presence.
This issue was addressed variously by various translators and theorists in various periods. However,
one point that strikes even a superficial observer is the way in which the question of freedom of
translator is entangled with that of the status of two languages involved in translation and the
question of cultural hegemony prevailing in between them. The liberty taken by the Renaissance
translators can be viewed in the context of the dominance felt in favour of the language of a more
reformed culture. The ancient Roman text of Plutarch is confidently altered by Sir Thomas North
because the Renaissance had already begun to establish the dignity of the human person and
thereby that of the author. The alterations made by the translator are made possible by the
hegemony of the culture of TL community.

Susan Bassnett notes( in her book ‘Translation Studies’) the difference in accent with which Wyatt
translated a sonnet of Petrach, the Italian poet. Petrarch’s famous sonnet on the events of 1348
involving the death of Cardinal Giovanni Colonna and Laura begins:

Rotta e l’alta colonna e’l verde lauro

Che facean ombra al mio stanco pensero; (CCLXIX)(2)

(Broken is the tall column (Colonna) and the green laurel tree (Laura) that used to shade my tired thought)

Wyatt translated these lines into English as:

The pillar pearished is whearto I lent

The strongest staye of mune unquiet mynde CCXXXVI)(3)

Wyatt went beyond recapturing the elegiac nature of the lines. He stresses the ‘I’. In the
passage of the SL text, it was “my tired thought’ that formerly got support, but in the TL
text, it is ‘I’. The translator boldly replaces the thought with the person.

In nineteenth century, D.G. Rossetti declared that the work of the translator involves self-
denial and self-oppression. He says:
Often would he avail himself of any special grace of his own idiom and epoch,

if only his will belonged to him; often would some cadence serve him,but for his

authors structure. (4)

On the other hand , Edward Fitzgerald wrote about his strategy of translating Persian
poetry:

It is an amusement to me to take what liberties I like with these Persians,

who,(as I think) are not poets enough to frighten one from such excursions,

and who really do want a little Art to shape them. (5)

The strategy of translation practiced by North, Wyatt and Fitzerald are rendered possible by
their conviction of the supremacy of the culture of TL community. The rising authority of
English as a medium of Elizabethan imperialism and established colonial power is the
political factor which operated here. In other words, in the act of translation the meaning
was constructed to benefit the dominant language and its culture. If a text is translated into
English it is made homely by providing the text with content and charm which it lacked in
the SL version. If a text is translated from English into a local language, it must be with the
rigour of an educational activity. This was indeed an approach overcharged with colonial
bias.

However, no translator can evade this question. As she has to render a foreign text into a
native language some kind of appropriation seems unavoidable. Translation involves a face
to face of two cultural and linguistic structures that are mutually disruptive as well as co-
extensive. The difference between these two structures is not only that of kind, but also of
status. All the functional features of the SL text can not be transferred as such into the
target language. Functional dimensions of the two languages blend and clash at one and the
same time. Some have to be sacrificed in order to gain some others. The translator has to fix
her priority . It is a choice which involves the risk of either domestication or alienation.

II

Some decisive intellectual movements, the cumulative effect of which has constructed
translation studies as a separate discipline are still valid in addressing this question of
dealing with the unequal relationship of SL and TL. The twentieth century critiques of the
metaphysics of origin are the most pertinent development in this regard. Studies of
language were a significant, if not determinant, part of this general movement against
metaphysics.

The emergence of modern linguistic theories and their application in the analysis of larger
discursive units called certain basic notions of writing into question. The concepts of a
stable meaning, originality of a work and author as the final point of meaning were thus
subjected to revisions. One decisive break through was created by ‘Course in General
Linguistics’ by Ferdinand De Saussure(published in 1915).Formerly language was conceived
as a system of symbols which represented a reality outside it. Saussure formulated the idea
that language is a self referential system of signs which have no natural relationship with
the so called reality. A linguistic sign consists of a signifier and signified whose relationship is
arbitrary:

The bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary.

Since I mean by sign the whole that resuls from the associating

of the signifier with the signified, I can simply say: the linguistic

sign is arbitrary.(6)
This idea of language as a system of sign, whose relationship with the referent is only
conventional, has two important implications. One is that no linguistic act represents reality.
The second implication is that language operates as an active medium which shapes our
experience, both emotional and intellectual, of any reality. The force of language as
formative structure is further stressed by Sapir and Benjamin:

It was found [by linguists] that the background linguistic system

(in other words, the grammar) of each language is not merely a

reproducing instrument for voicing ideas but rather is itself the

shaper of ideas... Formulation of ideas is not an independent process,

strictly rational in the old sense, but is part of a particular grammar,

and differs, from slightly to greatly, between different grammars...

The world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which

has to be organized by our minds--and this means largely by the linguistic

systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe

significance as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize

it in this way... We cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and

classification of data which the agreement decrees. This fact is very significant for

modern science, for it means that no individual is free to describe nature with absolute

impartiality but is constrained to certain modes of interpretation. (7)

These modes of interpretations are not, however, the arbitrary choice of an individual. It
was stated in Course in General Linguistics:

The word arbitrary also calls for comment. The term should not

Imply that the choice of the signifier is left entirely to the

speaker… I mean that it is unmotivated.(8)

This linguistic initiative had radical effect on theories of writing. It was systematically shown
for the first time that perceptions and knowing involve not only the subject and the object,
but the medium which is not simply a passive mediator, but an active fabricator. Thus
writing was cut off from the author and the idea of fixity of meaning with the author as the
final arbitrator lost its vogue. This new shift was cleanly articulated by Roland Barthes in
Death of the Author:

We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single

'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God) but a

multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them

original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from

the innumerable centres of culture.(9)

Another significant move in linguistics was the notions of paradigmatic relationship of

substitution as a decisive functional relationship. It enabled us to consider meaning as a
differential process in which saying something is just excluding another thing which is
supposed to share the same paradigm. The act of selection is an act of refusal to select
another in a given choice. Roman Jakobson writes:

A selection between alternatives implies the possibility of substituting one

for the other, equivalent to the former in one respect and different from it

in another. Actually selection and substitution are two faces of the same

operation. (10)

Thus we become aware of a negative dimension of meaning. A stated word carries the trace
of an absent word for which it is a substitution. These two- the stated and the dormant- are
supposed to be members of a single paradigm, a reservoir of elements which seem to share
common feature so that they can be substituted for one another. If structural linguistics
thought of this paradigmatic operation in terms of binary opposition, many later theorists
extended it “ad infinitum” to pose challenges against the very concept of binary opposition.
These later developments thus enabled us to free ourselves from the air of distinction
created by paradigmatic substitutions. For instance, Idealism and materialism are different
from one another because the presence of one presupposes the absence of the other. At
the same time they are similar to each other because of the very fact that can be
substituted thus. A verb can be replaced by a verb only because it is a verb. The
substitutable categories are of the same paradigm. Verb is the name of a paradigm which
belongs to discourse of linguistics. In the similar way materialism and idealism belong to a
single discourse. Thus we are now enabled to consider ideas not as ideas, but as functional
elements of a larger discourse.

We are concerned here with the bearings of these three linguistic notions- the formative
nature of language, irreducibility of meaning to the speaking/writing subject and differential
operations in a discourse which condition meaning- on translation. Linguistic analysis is valid
in studying translation process, not because translation is predominantly a linguistic activity,
but because it involves signifying systems. Linguistic models can serve as useful in studies of
other cultural activities which also deal with systems of signs.

In the interest of our vantage point, we can restrict ourselves to two consequences that
these concepts bring about. Most importantly, they called into question the age-old legacy
of a metaphysical concept-that of originality. Secondly, they implied to revolutionize the
relationship between the reader and the writer by tilting the balance in favour of the
former.

1. Once the myth of language as a medium that faithfully represents the reality as
known by the language using subject is dismissed, writing can no longer be viewed as a body
of truth authored by an individual. This removal of truth and its knower, the author,
radically altered the spacial and temporal dimensions of the text. Formerly the text was
belonged to the place and time of its author. The person behind the text being reduced to a
mere writer without authority, the text is no longer a property of the time and space of its
origin. This is not a lack. The text is enabled to be viewed without spacial and temporal
determinism. Thus “Othello” is not originally Shakespearean, not originally British and not
originally of seventeenth century. It is a text potentially of any place and any time. Then
translation is not an act of aping modeled on the original. It is an activity where two
languages engage each other in the context of a text. Translation is an impossible task, if it is
conceived as a faithful reproduction of the original. Sapir points out that experience is
modeled by language and so it is not possible for the experience recorded in one language
to be transferred as such to another language:

No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing

the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct

worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.(11)
This takes us once again to the discussions in translation studies with the concept of
equivalence on one side and the idea of cultural untranslatability on the other side.
However, Even Nida, who was an advocate of equivalence, has admitted that sameness is
not possible to be achieved:

Since no two languages are identical, either in meanings given to

corresponding symbols or in the ways in which such symbols are

arranged in phrases and sentences, it stands to reason that there

can be no absolute correspondence between languages. Hence

there can be no fully exact translation.(12)

J.C. Catford’s view of translation also bears such an internal tension of equivalence and
untranslatability when he defines translation as the replacement of textual material in one language
(SL) by equivalent textual material in another language (TL). 13

Translation is a replacement, not a transference. It implies that it is not a process of

conveyance of meaning from one to another language.

Levy formulates this problem a little more explicitly:

A translation is not a monistic composition, but an interpretation

and conglomerate of two structures. On the one hand

there are the semantic content and the formal contour of the

original, on the other hand the entire system of aesthetic

features bound up with the language of the translation.(14)

Translation is thus a substitution of SL material by TL material based on the interpretation of

the translator. It is a reconstitution of SL text into a different space and time. How the
translator interprets the meaning of SL material is not determined by the intention of the
author or the socio-historical conditions of its origin, but by the specific encounter of the
text with the socio-historical conditions of the act of translation.

The impact of this demystifying concepts, which I would like to call ‘deoriginalisation’,

is two fold: It frees translation from the parasitic secondary status formerly assigned to it.
Secondly, it signifies an ethical shift by redefining the principle of fidelity in translation.
2. The transformations brought about by the differential view of linguistics in the
relationship of reader with the text and the author also has immediate bearing on
translation. Roland Bathes dramatically declared the new freedom assumed by the reader:

The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up

a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's unity

lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot

any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology;

he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces

by which the written text is constituted.(15)

This new freedom makes possible readings of a text in terms of its loopholes. However,
being compared with a mere reader or a critic, the translator has a distinctive position as a
reader.

This distinction is the ‘doubleness’ of her function- as a reader of the SL text and as the
writer of the TL text. A mere reader can read a text as controlled by her gut feelings. A
critic’s office may be independent of all functions of hermeneutics. She is not an interpreter.
A critic can have an expository reading. But the translator is, as we have already found,
necessarily an interpreter. She can not shun away the task of making precise decisions as to
what the text means at every point. Some how all readers translate internally the materials
of a text using other materials of the same of different language. But here, this substitution
may not be explicit. But translator as a reader substitutes SL elements as a matter of
imperative.

A model borrowed from Austin’s speech-act theory can be suggestive of the different
potential performances involved in translation. The source text is a locution with
illocutionary desires on the part of its writer and as a reader the translator is at the receiving
end having the perlocutionary effect of the text on her. But, as the writer of TL version, the
translator has her illocutionary desires and gats some kind of perlocutionry effect on the
reader. But these activities are not in a linear sequence. The most important point is that
her illocutionary desires as the writer of the TL text conditions the way in which she ranges
over the source text.

III

Now we are in a position to come back to the politics of interpretation. One ethical
orientation that underlies any scholastic investigation, I think, is that knowledge and
meaning are to be constructed to benefit the most depressed and there by to expand the
sphere of living. . So, when two languages meet on the ground of translation, the shifts, as
they are necessary, ought to be in the interest of the language down in the ladder. Guided
by this ethical orientations, the strategies of translation can be reconsidered.
The linguistic revolutions of the twentieth century, of which we availed in our second
section, have sharp socio-political edge in that they paralleled a philosophical exposition of
the inadequacy of the western models of thought. The Semitic cultural and social model
repeatedly reproduced in the discourses of the west only substituted one for the other in a
paradigmatic play of substitution. The result was a self referential discourse into which
other thoughts were violently incorporated. The parochial and exclusive nature of this
dominant discourse has successfully been exposed particularly by Orientalism of Edward
Said. This is the concrete moment in intellectual history that activated translation with
strenuous excitement. The world is in need of new models of thought and imagination. This
need requires treatment of other literatures independent of the bias of dominant western
discourses. This is a guiding point when translations are made from various local languages
into English. Translation maps the difference.

Translation of English texts into different local languages is significant in quite different way.
The status enjoyed by English in the present world has overt political connotations.
Language as a signifying system is related to the will to Power in collective sense also.
Historically English has been an instrument of colonialism often frustrating the formation of
colonized societies into independent mother tongue societies.

This colonial subjection was carried out in different way in different parts of the world. It
took the form of a massive genocide in early colonies like America. Native communities and
their languages were eradicated. Now settlers have become the natives with their mother
tongue English.

In African societies the general pattern of this language issue is a little different. The native
population was not as such eradicated, but their language and culture were oppressed.

In societies like India, this question of inequality of languages took subtle discursive forms
and inferiorisation of local languages was the key strategy adopted here. As a result, the
mother tongues of Indian peoples are reserved as languages of ‘lower’ activities of life and
English has become the language of higher activities like those in academic and legal realm.

The strategies of translation from English to local languages can vary according to the
specific nature of the relationship of those languages with English. But, in every case
translation is an act disruptive of the balance of power imposed by colonial past and
imperial present. Historically, translations proved effective in two ways, On the one hand, it
was a one sided imposition on the TL. Equally, translation has been used as a way to combat
the power of dominating an SL like English making use of the resources of the same
language.

This is a dynamic possibility. To say that there are power relations involved in the encounter
of SL and TL is not to say that the TL community is immune of any questions of power within
itself. Both languages carry structures of significations which are complexly incorporated
with other power structures. If applications of English language have potential significations
of colonial subjection, any local language will be permeated by discourses of local elitism. It
can be instrumental in the oppression or silencing of many sections. For instance many
Dalith intellectuals point out that English language resources have an emancipatory
dimension as far as the Dalith communities of India are concerned.

Translation can be used as an act of mutual modifications. The SL modifies and disrupts the
TL and Vic versa. How ever, the politics ought to be oriented towards the actualization of
the potentials of the subjected language.

References

1. Chapman’s Homer, ed. R. Heme Shepherd(London:Chatto&Windus, 1875)

2. Bassnett, Susan, Translation Studies, Routledge, 2002
3. Ibid
4. Quoted Ibid, page 13
5. E. Fitzgerrald, Letter to Cowell, 20 March 1956
6. Ferdinand De Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, Mc Graw-Hill paperback 1966
7. Whorf, Benjamin L. "Linguistic Relativity", Reading in Applied Linguistics. Oxford University
Press, 1973
8. Ferdinand De Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, Mc Graw-Hill paperback 1966
9. Barthes, Roland, Death of the Author,1967
10. Jakobson, Roman, Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasiac
Disturbances, Fundamentals of Language,II edn, The Hague :Mouton 1971
11. Edward Sapir, Culture, Language and Personality, Berkeley, Los Angels:University of
California press, 1956
12. Eugene Nida, Principles of Cortrespondence, Translation Studies Reader, Ed
Lawrence Venuti
13. Catford. J.C,A Linguistic Theory of Translation, Oxford, Oxford University Press,
1965.
14. Cited in Bassnett, Susan, Translation Studies, Routledge, 2002
15. Barthes, Roland, Death of the Author,1967