Niranjana, Tejaswini, «Representing Texts and Cultures: Translation Studies and

Ethnography» en Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism and the Colonial Context,

California, University of California Press, 1992.

Answer the following questions:

1) What is “translation” according to Tejaswini Niranjana? Niranjana draws on Derrida

and Benjamin to render a complex critique of translators, ethnographers, and
historians in their treatment of colonial cultures. Niranjana argues that translations
cannot just be understood in terms of faithful/free or source-text/target-text models,
but that they should instead be viewed as a two-way flow, reciprocally reinforcing
and/or transforming established notions of culture and identity. Translation is
therefore a site of disruption, where power relations and historicity can’t be
disregarded.

2) Based on the discussion between different authors about translation, in what way are
the following words related? Translation - mimesis - meaning.
According to Niranjana, contemporary translation theories are based on a vision of
text, author and meaning based on an unproblematic theory of language as the
representation/mimesis of reality. These theories imply that all languages are equal,
that there’s no loss of meaning, defining translation in humanist terms as a «
dialogue between cultures ».

3) What are the “two very different discourses concerned with translation” mentioned by
the author? Translation studies is a rubric for traditional theories of translation and
their contemporary formulations; ethnography refers to the writings of cultural/social
anthropologists, who, until recently, in a more or less unproblematic fashion, saw the
object of their study as "man" and their mission as one of translation.

4) What is the importance of “the translation problematic for a post-colonial context”?

assymetries, inequalities – repressed, excluded or displaced
draw attention to those questions constituting "translation studies" as a field,
questions that are normally left unconsidered because to do so would be to
interrogate the very project of translation as a "humanistic" enterprise. Its notions of
text, author, and meaning are based on an unproblematic, naively representational
theory of language. I shall shortly discuss the implications of these blindnesses and
explore their connection with the refusal to consider questions of power and
historicity

Match the following concepts with their corresponding definitions:

a. Translation Studies 3. A rubric for

traditional theories of translation and their
contemporary formulations. b. Ethnography
1. The writings of cultural/social
anthropologists, who, until recently, in a
more or less unproblematic fashion, saw
the object of their study as “man” and their
mission as one of translation. They c. Humanism 2. Theory based on the
invented that man. idea that “man” is the origin and source of
meaning, action, and of history.

Choose the correct answer

1. Anton Popovič proposes four types of equivalence:

a. formal, linguistic, textual and stylistic.
b. linguistic, paradigmatic, stylistic and textual.
c. paradigmatic, stylistic, dynamic and textual.

Anton Popovic proposes four types of

equivalence: linguistic (word for word), paradigmatic (at the
level of grammar), stylistic (where meaning must remain
identical) and textual (at the level of shape and form).

2. European missionaries in Africa and Asia were among the first to stress the importance of:
a. colonialism.
b. anthropological research.
c. translation.
the importance of translation and prepare bilingual
dictionaries of a host of Asian and African languages for
the use not only of their own workers but also for merchants
and administrators.

3. The “empirical science” of translation comes into being through the repression of the
asymmetrical relations of power that inform the relations between _________.
a. cultures
b. texts
c. languages stainer – dialogical relation – ideal exchange without loss

4. Translation theory’s obsession with the humanistic nature of translation seems to blind
___________ to their own insights into the complicitous relationship of translation and the
imperialistic version.
a. translators
b. writers (to what they thought was the truth and that was a political)
c. anthropologists
INDIANNESS - In spite of a recognition on the part of some writers of the
colonial beginnings of modern translation studies,37 there has
not as yet been any serious attempt to explore the relationship
between the kind of debates generated by translation
studies (and the assumptions underlying them) and the complicity
with the liberal humanist rhetoric of colonialism. There
is clearly a similarity between James Mill's remark that India
must discard her Indianness in order to become civilized, 38
and the Rubaiyat translator Edward Fitzgerald's comment in
 1851:
Steiner criticizes the "simplified history" and "stylized, codified markers" that aid the Western
translator in "getting behind" the remote non-Western language. Failing to pursue these
insights, however, he remains finally committed to an idealistic vision of "exchange without
loss," of a humanist enterprise
5. Traducir in Spanish means to _________.
a. translate and convert
b. translate and maintain
c. translate and displace

Again the movement toward totalization, again the desire

for univocity and diaphanousness, this time marked deeply
by the effort to erase difference, by the colonial violence of
the Gospel "applied" to "various societies." Traducir in Spanish
means to translate as well as to convert. 55 To recognize
the striving for self-presence and self-identity of the concepts
of text and meaning that underpin classical translation theory
is to understand, to some extent, the widespread impact
translations have had. UNIVOCITY PLURALITY OF GODS INTO UNIVOCAL VOICE
RELATION RENOUNCE THEIR HERITAGE CONTROL THE NATIVES

Read the following sentences and choose true or false

1. In “Structure, sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” Jacques
Derrida explains: “the ethnologist accepts into his discourse the premises of
ethnocentrism at the very moment when he praises them”. f Denounces them

2. Some critics of ethnography suggest that the anthropologist needs to explore his own
thought and language and this is something which the ethnographer is often not
equipped, or is unwilling, to do. T NATIVE LANGUAGES WERE NOT LINEAR –
MISCONCEPTION OF WRITING -

professional "tools" that

would enable her/him to construct entire cosmologies on the
basis of a one- or two-year acquaintance with a tribe and its
language

3. The knowledge produced by anthropology has only recently been questioned, in

particular by scholars who belonged to the hegemonic culture. f in particular by those
who have for a long time been the objects of its gaze THIRD WORLD SCHOLARS
NIRANJANA – COLONIAL ABSENTEE (SEMBRARON IDEAS Y VOLVIERON A
BRITAIN - GIFTED- HOW SE PERPETUO. REPRESENTA
the architects of absentee
colonialism and indirect rule, drew on their experience
of administering the Indian Empire to formulate policy for
Africa, and anthropologists with their translations assisted the
administrators on both continents.
 4. With the onset of World War I, British anthropology became professionalized with the
help of state sponsorship. Ww2 COLONIZERS NEEDED THE COOPERATION OF
THE COLONIZED

Fill in the blanks

Revealing the constructed nature of cultural translation shows how translation is always is
always producing rather than merely reflecting
or imitating an "original." RECHAZO A LA HETEROGENEIDAD

Recognizing the tropes of translation can help show us how to problematize ethnographic
representations of the non-Western “Other”. a significant or recurrent theme; a motif
METAPHORS IN TRANSLATION – view of the STATIC SUBJECT IN NATURE, native
needed to be civilized with the favor of the colonizers.

The personal authority of the ethnographer is less important, according to Talal Asad, than his/her
"social authority." (Institutional) An ethnographer's translation of a culture occupies a privileged
position as a "scientific text," (it constructs folk memory of a history that may have been different
than what is told – cristobal colon) – a text of knowledge that becomes the established discourse -
"may simplify in the direction of his own 'strong' language. Who you are reading when you are
reading murakami https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/09/haruki-murakami-translators-
david-karashima-review/616210/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

The new critique of anthropology accepts that neither culture nor text is unified – immersed
in power relations and history