Power
• Traditional Scholars: power is something people
have over others
• Theorists of power: power is only present in
situations of observable conflict, where one party
forces another to act against its will or what it
perceives to be its own interest
• standard reference on power, Lukes (1974)
The most effective and insidious use of power is to
prevent conflict from arising in the first place
Conflict
• conflict refers to a situation in which two or more
parties seek to undermine each other because they
have incompatible goals, competing interests, or
fundamentally different values
• conflict is a natural part of everyday life
• In political sense: hostility between groups of
people, usually belonging to different races,
religions or nation states
Translation and interpreting role in the
management of conflict
 Essential for circulating and
resisting the narratives
Pros and cons of the causing violent conflict, even
presence of a
translator/interpreter though the narratives in
(a third party) question may not directly
depict conflict or war
Problems of translation,
especially of emotionally
charged terms, adds a further
layer to the uncertainty
generated by the incompatible
discursive interpretations of
the two conflict parties and
the third party’.
 Narrative:

• Everyday stories we live by (public and individual)

• Can easily be understood by anyone
• Overlaps Foucault’s ‘discourse’ and Barthes’ ‘myths’ in normalizing effect of publicly disseminated
representations
• allows us to examine the way in which translation features in the elaboration of narratives that cut across time
and texts.
• allows us to piece together and analyze untraceable narrative including non-verbal material
• Are dynamic entities which change as people experience new stories daily
Consequences:
1. people’s behavior is guided by the stories in which they are embedded
2. They are dynamic: cannot be streamlined into a set of stable stories that people simply choose from.
3. They change: they have ‘significant subversive or transformative potential as we expose to new experience and
new stories/ like undermining Nazi under Apartheid
 personal stories that we tell ourselves about our place in the world

Types of Ontological and our own personal history

interpersonal and social in nature

Narrative focused on the self and its immediate world

stories circulating among social and institutional formations larger

Public than the individual,

family, religious or educational institution, the media, and the nation

stories and explanations of scholars in any field about their object of

Conceptual/ inquiry

disciplinary
public narratives ‘in which we are embedded as contemporary actors

meta-narratives in history
 Core Features of Narrativity

normativeness
causal selective (including narrative
temporality relationality particularity genericness
emplotment appropriation canonicity and accrual
breach)
 • Aim: investigating the way in which translators’ and
interpreters’ function in situations of conflict
• Labov: method of summarizing past experience by matching a
verbal sequence of clauses to the sequence of events which (it is
inferred) actually occurred(focus on oral narratives and on their
structural make-up)

Narrative in • Fisher: the context for interpreting and assessing all

communication not a mode of discourse ; anything even
relation to technical procedures and (numerical) data ‘should be interpreted
in a storied context

translation and • Hayden White: the principal and inescapable mode of

experiencing the world; meta-code to underpin all modes of
interpreting communication; a human universal for transmitting
transcultural messages about the nature of a shared reality
• Somers: we come to know, understand, and make sense of the
social world
• ** it is not a genre, and it is not just for literature translation
 Any type of narrative

systematizes experience by
categorizes the world into
ordering events in relation
types of character, events,
to each other - temporally,
bounded communities
spatially, socially
 Scientific narrative
• Participate in the process of legitimation and justification that is
ultimately political
Example:
1. Difference between black and white: we are all born equal, the scientific
narrative went, but the environment in which we are born determines our
place in an established hierarchy with whites at the top and blacks at the
bottom. If black grew up in white environment from early ages can be
positioned along the whites
2. In the journal Human Immunology: Middle Eastern Jews and
Palestinians are genetically almost identical; thus, the team’s research
challenges claims that Jews are a special, chosen people and that Judaism
can only be inherited.
 • It normalizes the accounts over time, so that
they are perceived as self-evident, benign,
uncontestable and non-controversial
• Georges Cuvier: The white race, with oval
face, straight hair and nose, to which the
civilized peoples of Europe belong, and
The normalizing which appear to us the most beautiful of all,
is also superior to others by its genius,
function of courage and activity…
narratives • depending on one’s narrative location, we
are socialized into barbarous narratives,
from narratives about ‘security’ and
‘terrorism’ to those of ‘Islamic
fundamentalism’ and the so-called ‘Clash of
Civilizations
• Translation, even of scientific texts, plays
a key role in naturalizing and promoting
such narratives across linguistic boundaries
 • Matthew Kneale’s award-winning English Passengers, a historical novel which takes place in
1857 and depicts the colonization of Tasmania
Categories:
• 1. British: Type = Saxon. Status = natural rulers of Colony.
• 2. Boers: Type = Belgic Celtic. Status = assistants to British.
• 3. Malays: Type = Oriental. Status = farm labourers + servants.
Categories and • 4. Hindoos: Type = Indian Asiatic. Status = as Malays but lower.

stories • 5. Native Africans: Type = Negro. Status = low.

• 6. Hottentots: Type = lower Negro. Status = low and brutal.

Then gradually the words shape the sentences/narrative

our choice of what to categorize and how to categorize it is always dependent on our narrative
location; therefore, different people looking at the same phenomenon will always devise different
sets of categories
Translators play role in elaborating and promoting these narrative visions of society, with all the
real-world consequences + scientific narratives are no more truthful and are open to contestation
 • On Narrative, a special issue of Critical Inquiry by
Bruner (1980): narrative as a form not only of
representing but of constituting reality
• Difference between story and text: designates the
narrated events / chronological order/
• Historical narratives according to Zhang: facts are
the basis of all the narration. facts + non-linguistic
Narrative and artefacts, relics and archaeological findings = a firm
ground for judging the veracity of historical
the world: fact narratives: approximation of truth
• No narrative is absolute truth/ events take place in
and fiction real time and space/ verifiable by a range of means
that are always extendable and open to refinement
and reassessment
• The truth of event/ narrative must be assessed by
any means
• assumption of constructedness does not mean the
rejection of a truth
 shapes people’s views of rationality, of
objectivity, of morality, and of their
conceptions of themselves and others’
(Bennett and Edelman 1985: 159)
Important point: how it operates as an
instrument of mind in the construction of
reality
• Narrative
 How is it political:
• acceptance of a narrative involves a rejection of others
• narratives of the past define and determine the narrative present:
competition among different narratives may continue for centuries
There is no way a mutually-agreed upon decision can be reached on any
issue of significance (Liu, 1999: 299)
Despite conceptual contrast among people who are certain of their own
vision, there is audience around that is not yet invested in a particular
version of the narrative, and is worth appealing to (Fisher, 1997)
Example: Muslim schoolgirls wearing headscarves or hijab as France
(2004) banned religious symbols
Political Import of Related narratives:

Narratives 1) an attack on individual freedom and a racist gesture, 2) a necessary

measure to ensure unity and social cohesion
A translation from Arabic to English: because of a friction in the Franco-
U.S as the French opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq; the French targeted its
own Muslim population appease the Americans,
(Naseem 2004)

cross-cultural and cross-linguistical negotiation occurs via translation

 • narrative both reproduces the existing power structures and provides a means of contesting
them
• power is not a straightforward, linear relationships between the dominant and the
dominated
• hegemony and cultural strength are established through much subtler mechanisms, and has
the possibility of resistance
Example: marginalized or dissenting voices within a dominance that are not silenced completely
and narrate the world in their terms
Advantages of supporting these voices:
1) individual’s and institution’s appeal and enhance their own standing

The interplay of 2)
3)
Allowing them to speak freely diffuses the build up of tension in society
Institutions supporting existing power (for example the CIA) can hijack the agenda of a
dominance and resistance resistance group and replace it with ineffectual form of opposition
• Third world elite adopt the Western terms of debate rather than their own native context
(anti-trust/ human right/ democracy) to build arguments on established legislation of the
Western world:
1) it shows the effect of dominance
2) strategy of shrewd calculation: exploit the heterogeneity of domestic discourses in the
West by appealing to different constituencies and changing cross-cultural controversy with the
West to a domestic controversy of the West (winning the heart of Muslims to ‘justify Western
positions in non-Western term/ British officials decided to adopt Indian laws to govern the
Indian population)
 Translation

Significant
Contesting and
Technology of
Undermining
Colonial
Domination
Domination
 Translators and Interpreters:
active and responsible participants in creating, negotiating and contesting social reality.

translate
• reproduce existing ideologies in the narratives

Refuse to translate
• dissociate themselves from those ideologies

Resort to various strategies

• strengthen or undermine aspects of the narratives they mediate
• dissociate themselves from the narrative position of the author or speaker
• signal their empathy with it
• Frame according to Goffman:
the culturally determined definitions of reality that allow people to make sense of objects and events (Shaw, 2013)
Processes of (re)framing:
Applicable on linguistic or non-linguistic resource,
paralinguistic devices such as intonation and typography
visual resources such as color and image
linguistic devices such as tense shifts, deixis, code switching, use of euphemisms
• key strategies for mediating the narrative(s)
temporal and spatial framing,
framing through selective appropriation
framing by labelling (including rival place names and titles)
repositioning of participants.
 • Goffman: individual’s framing of activity establishes meaningfulness for him
• Frames:
- consciously initiated structures of anticipation and strategic moves in order to
present a movement or a particular position
- provide a mechanism through which individuals can ideologically connect with
movement goals and become potential participants in movement actions

Framing, frame Example1: Revelation

17th century Zoroastrian ethnographer Mubad Shah in Dabistan-i Mazahib(School

ambiguity and frame of Religious Faiths):categorized religions based on revealed or non-revealed

*Separation of Hindus and Islamic nations: Lack of a revealed book/ so their truth
space is questioned
*Prince Shikoh actively frame Hindu religious texts as ‘heavenly’ and ‘revealed’
Example2: political violence since September 2001
translating all original violence into the target language of ‘terrorism,
*Act of pure negativity
* effectively marketed to domestic and international audiences as well as global
one
***Osama bin Laden label Americans [as] proponents of ‘bad terror’ and
himself of ‘good terror.’
 Frame ambiguity: product of competing attempts to legitimize
different versions of the relevant narrative
Forms of violent conflict framed as ‘war’, ‘civil war’, ‘guerrilla warfare’, ‘terrorist acts’, or even ‘low intensity conflict’
- Supporters of the Chechen conflict: insisted that their conflict with Russia is an inter-state war or a war of independence [ not Russia’s
sovereignty over the territory of Chechnya]
- Civil war in Bosnia-Hercegovina: unacceptable to the government and its supporters since the civil war frame does not allow for the
recognition of certain types of war crimes recognized within the inter-state war frame
- Israel soldiers framed the Palestinian intifada:
Law and Order= a riot police in charge of ‘the repression of disturbances
War= traditional role of the army and frames the intifada as another outbreak of the ongoing conflict
State Terror= identifies Israel’s actions in the intifada as illegitimate aggression which triggers thoughts of refusing to serve [in the army\
Frame ambiguity as a feature of everyday life is reflected in the texts and utterances we translate and interpret, but this ambiguity is
often resolved or obscured in translation
- Hugo’s text reveals attitude to slavery , translator’s narrative is unequivocally anti-slavery
 Frame space
normatively allocated’; contribution is
1. acceptable when it stays within the frame space allocated to the speaker or writer
2. unacceptable when it falls outside that space
• Participants in any interaction
Have different roles (announcer, author, translator, prosecutor, lecturer, military officer, parent)
engage in different capacities (speaker, reader, primary addressee, overhearer, eavesdropper)
and take different positions (supportive, critical, disinterested, indifferent, uninformed outsider, committed)
• Restrictive effect of frame space in translation is to adopt a strategy of temporal and spatial framing -the need to intervene in the
text; inject the discourse with your own voice (in other words to actively frame its narrative)
• Example:
Aphra Behn’s préface to her English translation of Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la luralité des mondes habités/ additions and rewordings
I have endeavored to give you the true meaning of the Author and have kept as near his Words as was possible; I was necessitated to
add a little in some places, otherwise the book could not have been understood.
Kostas Venetsanos, the publisher of the 1969 Greek translation of Machiavelli’sThe Prince
instructed by the censors to delete parts of the text that were deemed subversive, he implemented the changes but left
white margins where the cuts had been made and increased letter spacing to add emphasis to parts that were equally or even more
subversive
Temporal and spatial framing:
1) selecting a particular text and
embedding it in a temporal and
spatial context that accentuates
the narrative it depicts and
encourages us to establish links
between it and current narratives
2) no further intervention in the
text itself
• Translating Vasko Popa’ s Collected Works with its
Serbian Atavistic images and figure of the wolf as
tribal totem during the Kosovo war ‘:
A backdrop of ‘murderous misuse of such imagery by
Serbian nationalists’ and at a time when ‘White
Wolves' stood for an anti-Muslim death squad lend
credibility and project it to new narratives
 Selective appropriation of textual material:
patterns of omission and addition to suppress/ accentuate/ elaborate aspects of a narrative

1) censorship program enforced Nazis to filter out Jewish

authors required that every translation of a work of fiction
be submitted for approval, with author’s racial background
: German public narratives remained immune to their
influence
2) deselecting authors in three anthologies of translations
in the Philippines (1971 and 1975): a national resistance
movement; an educational system set up by the American
colonizers to ensure that Filipinos remain ‘estranged from
themselves and their values
 Selective appropriation in literature:
patterns of omission that result from the exercise of censorship, including self-censorship

1) censorship in children’s literature in López (2000): narrative may be repeatedly

censored in the source text but retained in its translations. racist or xenophobic concepts
cleaned in English versions of Roald Dahl’s and Enid lyton’s books but not in their Spanish
translations
The girl stared at him (English)
‘The girl, who looked like a Gypsy, stared at him intently( Spanish)

‘It had nasty gleaming eyes oh, I was frightened (English)

‘Its eyes were cruel and gleaming. It was too dark to see anything else. Perhaps it was the
face of a black man. Oh, how afraid I was! ( Spanish)

2) The original narrative, Slave-King(Bug-Jargal), adopts a more ambivalent attitude of slavery,

but this frame ambiguity is resolved in translation
 Selective appropriation in the media
Exaggerate Sensational Aspects Of Public Narratives To Improve The Newspaper’s Circulation and Repeat
Official Narratives

1) Elian González, a six-year-old Cuban rescued by the US navy while fleeing Cuba: Translation of New York Times
on 29 March 2000:
• include details such as ‘at the order of a frantic nun, a police officer snatched their cell phones’: narrative of
American police as aggressive, rough, and inclined to treat the public with disrespect
• omission of 800 words at the end of the article discussing the history of relations between the USA and Cuba
and analyzing potential repercussions for one of the candidates (Al Gore) in the American presidential
campaign later in the ear (2002) and shows that New York Times is aligned to the mainstream official
narratives in the US than, say, The Nation
2) An article published by BC News on 10 November 2001: mass-circulation Pakistani newspaper
Dawn wrongly quoted Bin Laden : al-Qaeda possesses chemical and nuclear weapons and intends to use them
against America
while in Urdu version there is no threat, Dawn’s English version quotes: ‘If America used chemical and nuclear
weapons against us, then we may retort with chemical and nuclear weapons. We have the weapons as a
deterrent

Selective Appropriation within the Text
is Not Always Easy to Explain in the
Case of Web-Based Translations:
Without knowing who is behind the
site
1) English Translation of Funeral Article in Egyptian
Paper: al-Wafd, Wednesday, December 26, 2001,
Vol 15 No 4633 News of Bin Laden’s Death and
Funeral 10 days ago, Islamabad
continued American bombardment of the Tora Bora
region is suppressed here
 Selective appropriation in interpreting
1) processing Kosovar refugees through the United Nations High Commission on Refugees’ office in
Tirana, Albania, in 2000: Albanians who had never set foot in Kosovo were claiming to be Kosovars in
order to get out of the country
Investigation: focusing on their accents, clothes, and knowledge of the Kosovo region and its customs in
court and asking related questions from a woman
woman identifies the color of her attackers’ uniforms as green (which could be due to a lapse of
memory following a traumatic experience), but the interpreter decides that her claim is false and
simply disregards her contribution
2) In the trial of John Demjanjuk, interpreters and other participants repeatedly corrected slips of the
tongue in relation to both dates and places without dismissing the relevant narratives as false

Framing by labelling:
explains the motivation for the use
of euphemisms in many context
Labelling: any discursive process that involves using a lexical item, term or
phrase to identify a person, place, group, event
1) opposition party in the US : The Democrats or The Democratic Party
avoid the first because ‘-ic’ form would convey the meaning of the lower-
case d-word, democratic
2) Food biotechnology instead of ‘genetically modified’ and its acronym ‘GM’
in ads
3) ‘comfort women’ coined by imperial Japan to refer to young women who
were forced to offer sexual services in World War II
4) ‘civilian contractors’ in the context of Afghanistan and Iraq is often a
euphemism for ‘hired guns’ or ‘mercenaries
5) ‘neighborhoods’ in Occupied Palestine is a euphemism for ‘colonial
settlements’
6) ‘rationalization’ means getting rid of a lot of employees
7) UK newspaper The Sun : massive bombardment of Iraq as blitz on
Baghdad(18 January 1991) ‘reduces the slaughter to a game of alliteration
Rival systems of naming: to use a name is at once to make a claim about political and social legitimacy and to deny a rival claim

1) Doire Columcille’ in Irish and ‘Londonderry’ in English

- To use either name is to deny the legitimacy of the other
- there is no way to translate ‘Doire Columcille’ into English
What this brings out: naming of persons and places is not only naming as; it is also naming for. Names are identification for those who share the
same beliefs, the same Justifications of legitimate authority,
2) The choice of West Bank vs. Judea and Samaria
Judea and Samaria are biblical names for the southern and central areas of Palestine, under Israeli occupation
embedded in a Zionist narrative in which the entire West bank and Gaza Strip
Uncritical use of Judea and Samaria: the narrative location of the speaker or writer; within a Zionist narrative
The solution of Translators and editors working for the BC Monitoring Unit: use West Bank when they quote Israeli politicians or reproduce extracts
from Israeli papers
signaling their disassociation from the Zionist narrative while staying within their prescribed frame space as Journalists and translators
• square brackets: this is an addition by the translator
• Word choice: narrative location of the speaker or writer
• The use of [sic]: narrative location of the writer/translator
• repeat whatever name the writer or speaker uses without comment: participating in uncritical circulation of a narrative
 We Are Firmly Embedded Within Specific Narratives.
• Ben-Ari (2000), article entitled ‘Ideological Manipulation of Translated Texts
• expressing surprise and distaste at the practice of Egyptian translators of Israeli literature:
• “in literary texts translated from Hebrew to Arabic, the name of the country, Israel, must be converted to Palestine. The
name of the capital, Jerusalem, must be converted into its Moslem [sic] name ‘Al Kuds’ [sic]”

• Ibrahim Muhawi:
• The international community does not acknowledge Jerusalem as the capital of Israel
• the name of the city that is the Capital of Palestine/Israel is al-Quds (not al-Kuds)
• its Arabic name, not its Muslim name
• by not willing to contemplate an Arabic name for the city, the author denies the existence of the majority of the population
in East Jerusalem, and a minority in West Jerusalem
• ‘Jerusalem’ is more commonly known than al-Quds : at least 250 million Arabs Know it as the name of the place
 Titles

• Titles of novels, films and academic books are not part of a rival system, but used very effectively to (re)frame
narratives in translation
• The Slave-King: foregrounds the issue of slavery/ part of the abolitionist discourse
• Aphra Behn’s A Discovery of New Worlds as a title for Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la luralité des mondes habités ‘:
the conversational quality of the text /possible existence of many other worlds
• Badran’s Harem Years: Memoirs of an Egyptian Feministas for English translation of Huda Sha’rawi’s
Mudhakkirati(My Memoirs) : ontological narrative of a rich and complex personal experience about the seclusion
of Arab and Muslim women.
• Joseph Finklestone’s Anwar Sadat: Visionary Who Dared. The Arabic translation, by Adel Abdel Sabour, Al-Sadat:
Wahm l-Tahaddi(Sadat: The Illusion of Challenge): a very different narrative of Sadat and his role in initiating what
came to be known as the Peace Process, Sadat was an American stooge who operated under the illusion that he
could force his people to make peace with Israel at the expense of ‘selling’the Palestinians.
 One aspect of relationality: the way in which participants
in any interaction are positioned, or position themselves,
in relation to each other and to those outside the
immediate event.

Change in positions in translation alters the dynamics of

Repositioning of the immediate and wider narratives

participants
Change must be done carefully by translators through
realignment of participants in time and social/political
space

reconfigure the relationship between here and there, now

and then, them and us, reader and narrator, reader and
translator, hearer and interpreter
 Repositioning in paratextual commentary
• Paratextual elements: available to translators for repositioning themselves, their readers and other participants in
time and space.
• Hong Kong Collage: Contemporary Stories and Writing (Cheung 1998)
In introduction: the editor/translator weaves a narrative dedicated to repositioning the main players in the Hong
Kong/Other interface
- Western writers as well as those from the Mainland: outsiders
- The new rulers of Hong Kong, the Chinese: alongside old rulers, the West/British, in the same socio-political space
(example: ‘Which version of Hong Kong history is one to take as “true”?)
- herself as a ‘long-time inhabitant of the city and in the same space as the writers represented in the volume:
insiders
- choice of pronouns and deictic expressions: she and the people of Hong Kong( representing Hong Kong) are
positioned together, and on the opposite side of others(political figures representing colonizers) who would
represent them in ways with which they do not identify
Xiao Si’s writings, noted for the fineness of their observations, often make those of us who have lived in this
city for a long time feel that we have never really got to know the place. For Hongkongers over the age of
thirty, the bronze lions referred to in this piece will almost certainly play a part in our memories of our
growing up experience. But how many of us have looked at the lions the way she does?
(1998: 81)

• 1) those of us who have lived in the city for a long

time are set off from both Westerners and
‘immigrants from the Mainland’
• 2) The ‘us/we’of the translators and editor :those
with inside knowledge and real empathy,
contesting the narratives of outsiders
 Mason and Serban’s :shifts ‘continuously reshape the
relationship between translator/text’, allowing translators ‘to
create distance or, on the contrary, closeness between
translations and readers’ and ‘position themselves toward the

Repositioning text they work on

within the text 1) proletarization of language in Québécois theatre

translations: choice of Joual( nonstandard form of popular
Canadian French/ working class language) as the language of
or utterance translation, as opposed to continental French which separate
them from both the English and the French

2) Safouan’s choice of the Egyptian vernacular as a vehicle for

both his translation of Othello and his own meta-discourse on
the translation is an explicit attempt to undermine the claim
of a homogeneous collective Arab identity,/Egyptian reader
is outside what he sees
References
Shaw, E. (2013, May 31). Frame analysis. Encyclopedia Britannica.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/frame-analysis
Baker, M. (2006). Translation and conflict: a narrative account. London and New York: Routledge.
Thank you