Translation and Politics

Dr Sonali Lakhera

Considering translation as an activity involved in transferring/transporting the texts across cultural,

linguistic as well as territorial borders, it can no way escape the influence of politics. Translation

thus is not an innocent activity of transference of St into TT but a complicated one involving much

politics. Starting from the selection of the text to be translated into a particular language, for a

particular Target culture and for a specific geographical boundary. As Sussan Basnett states

Writing does not happen in a vacuum, it happens in a context and the process of

translating texts from one cultural system into another is not a neutral, innocent,

transparent activity. Translation is instead a highly charged, transgressive activity,

and the politics of translation and translating deserve much attention than has been

paid in the past.

The political aspect of translation can be best understood in the colonial and post-colonial

discourse. The powder of English in the politics of translation has rendered more translations from

other languages into English than the other way round. The reason is obviously is the degree of

visibility of the target language. This perhaps is the reason for the translation of Rabindranath

Tagore’s famous collection of songs – Geetanjali from Bengali to English. The writer bagged a

Nobel prize in literature for this much acclaimed work. The Europeans when tried their hand at

translating the literature of the colonized, did not follow the intricacies and the result is a mediocre

representation of classics like Kalidas’s Abhijnan Shakuntalam and Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat

Since it is a well accepted fact that language constructs meanings, it gives a voice to the text,

Gayatri Spivak, the noted critic with a series of translated works from various languages like
French and Bengali, observes the politics involved in translating the women works in the context

of construction of meanings. Spivak observes

I can agree that it is not the bodies of meaning that are transferred in translation. And from

the ground of that agreement I want to consider the role played by language for the agent,

the person who acts, even though intention is not fully present to itself. The task of the

feminist translator is to consider language as a clue to the workings of the gendered agency.

(Spivak, The Politics of Translation)

Translation thus produces “a transnational space”, “where ideas and projects can be debated across

linguistic and administrative borders.” (Balibar, At the Borders of Citizenship: A Democracy in

Translation?) Communication in the global scenario cannot be discussed without thinking of

translation – more appropriately inter-cultural translations. The words in a language bear

denotative, connotative and contextual meaning and this is exactly where the politics comes in

while interpreting the words from SL to TL. Depending upon the target audience, and the target

culture, the position of Target culture and target language, certain areas of ST are omitted, some

are appropriated to cater to the interests of powerful agencies, and some are refracted to fit in the

context. It is therefore the politics of translation that decides what is to be conveyed, how much

of it to be conveyed and how should it be conveyed.