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The cultural turn in translation studies

Article  in  Perspectives Studies in Translatology · June 2012

DOI: 10.1080/0907676X.2011.558420

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Xiangjun Liu
Shanghai University of Finance and Economics
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The cultural turn in translation studies

a
Xiangjun Liu
a
Foreign Languages Department, Shanghai University of Finance
and Economics, Shanghai, 200433, China

Available online: 27 Jun 2011

To cite this article: Xiangjun Liu (2012): The cultural turn in translation studies, Perspectives:
Studies in Translatology, 20:2, 249-253

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 Perspectives: Studies in Translatology
Vol. 20, No. 2, June 2012, 249
253

BOOK REVIEW

(The cultural turn in translation studies), by Wang Ning, Beijing,

Tsinghua University Press, 2009, vi 277 pp., RMB 28.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-7-
302-20831-0

When reading Wang Ning’s works, we may find an image recurring in our mind:
Lu Xun’s metaphor of an ‘iron house’. What Lu Xun referred to is the old China
under the spell of feudalism and in urgent need of a pioneer making loud cries to
break the silence and awake the people fast asleep. After a century’s effort, Lu Xun
and his followers have indeed achieved that goal by accomplishing the cultural
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revolution and constructing a modern China that is open to the outside. But in this
new context of globalization, a new problem ensues: while China enjoys a surplus in
its trade of material goods, there is an overwhelming deficit in the exchange of
cultural ones. In this case, the metaphor reappears in a new guise. It is now silence in
the international academic community that is weighing on the mind of a few Chinese
intellectuals. Wang Ning is acutely aware of this, and the present book is a product of
such awareness.
As the fruit of the author’s state-funded project, this book covers many topics
ranging from the translatology turn (the Introduction and Ch. 1) to the globalization
age of translation studies (Ch. 7), from the deconstructive approach (Ch. 2 and
part of Ch. 3) to the postcolonial approach to translation studies (part of Ch. 3 and
Ch. 4), and from the tension between comparative literature and cultural studies
(Ch. 5) to the more promising intersemiotic translation (Ch. 6), all revolving around
the cultural turn in translation studies and
though not always explicitly
around
the necessary role of translation to facilitate the export of Chinese culture and to
give voice to the Chinese intellectuals in the international academic community.
The book’s Introduction presents the cultural turn in translation (studies) and the
translatology turn in cultural studies, the former put forward by Bassnett and
Lefevere and the latter by Wang Ning, to push further translation studies in a more
disciplinarily oriented direction. Wang holds that in this age of globalization, the role
of translation, instead of being relegated to a marginal place, has actually become all
the more important so that its traditional sense of bilingual transformation has to
be expanded to embrace culturally dynamic representation. This new sense of
translation is adopted throughout the book and is to be expanded first to cover the
interpretation and migration of theories (pp. 80
90, 117
153, 156
157) and later to
include the transformation in pictorial texts and iconographical writings (pp. 34,
195
237).
Having discussed the reasons for the translatology turn in cultural studies in the
Introduction, the author further elaborates on them in Chapter 1. First, Wang
legitimizes the disciplinary status of translation studies. He argues that since trans-
lation studies regards all translation practice and interpretational phenomena
be
they practical or theoretical
as its research object, it should then be credited as
occupying the basic requirements for a mature discipline. Its methodology should be

ISSN 0907-676X print/ISSN 1747-6623 online

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0907676X.2011.558420
http://www.tandfonline.com
 250 Book review

not only aesthetic and critical (mainly in terms of literary translation) but also
empirical and scientific (mainly in terms of the translation of scientific documents). It
can be carried out concurrently in contrastive linguistics, comparative literature and
cultural studies without being restricted to any single one of the three. Besides the
above reason to theorize translation studies, the second reason Wang gives is the
monolingual crisis of cultural studies. That is its Anglo-centrism. The fight against this
crisis has involved the effort of many theorists, including Bassnett and Lefevere’s call
for the translation turn in cultural studies. But for their unfamiliarity with Chinese and
the related oriental cultures, they could hardly climb out of their ethnocentric trap.
The third reason is that after 30 years of reform and opening to the outside, China has
come to the stage of making the transition from a theory-consuming country to a
theory-producing one. All the above three reasons call for the active engagement of the
Chinese theorists, and Wang’s translatology turn on the basis of the translation turn
comes right at the proper time.
Starting from the source of deconstruction by Benjamin and Derrida, Chapter 2
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discusses the emergence and development of the deconstructive approach to

translation studies. The author thinks that Benjamin’s contribution to the
deconstructive theory of translation lies in its demystification of the absolute
‘faithfulness’ to the original and its emphasis on the function of translation to bring
the ‘afterlife’ to the original so that the priority of the original over its translation is
invalidated. Derrida, though revolving around the necessity and impossibility of
translation and the criterion of ‘relevant’ translation, excels instead in his insistence
on the descriptivism
not prescriptivism
of translation theories so as to enable
the translator to freely display his or her creativity in translation practice.
The deconstructionist school of translation theorists does not lead translation
studies nowhere but has its own agenda. That is, these theorists persistently question
and deconstruct the established views and principles of translation to rid the
traditional concepts
such as faithfulness, criterion, the original, translatability and
nontranslatability
of their conventional senses so that a new set of rules and
principles are constructed in the process, in particular the non-representable
authenticity of the original and the inexhaustibility and incompleteness of the
translated version. In addition, they have also reactivated some topics that have been
assumed to be fixed.
Chapter 3 continues the deconstructive line of translation studies by focusing on
J. Hillis Miller’s new viewpoints on translation theory and Lawrence Venuti’s
emphasis on foreignizing translation from the postcolonial and deconstructionist
perspectives. Wang thinks that Miller’s argument that theoretical translation leads to
the loss of the original and the emergence of the new is very enlightening. Venuti’s
advocacy of foreignizing translation, though under heavy influence of decons-
truction, tends to be more postcolonial-oriented and imperialism-resistant. The
author thinks that besides the above, Venuti’s contribution lies also in his exposure
of the translator’s long and embarrassing situation of ‘invisibility’ and his call for
the translator’s creativity and subjectivity.
Chapter 4 moves to the role of the postcolonial theory in the further development
of the cultural turn in translation studies. Edward Said’s cultural representation is
covered, but much more emphasis is placed on Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha’s
pioneering postcolonial translation theories. Wang thinks that Spivak’s translation
practice has been conducted almost concurrently along two lines: her early years of
 Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 251

rendering Derrida’s work in French (a first-world imperial language) into English

(a more popular first-world imperial language) and her later readiness to apply the
deconstructive theories to her anti-colonial resistant translation. Her translation
theory is characterized by its political and ideological criticism. Bhabha’s cultural
translation, on the other hand, adopts a strategy of cultural transformation,
expanding the sense of translation to take up the mission to position and
revolutionize a culture. All of the above constitute a critical contribution to the
cultural turn in translation studies.
Chapter 5 discusses the relationship between comparative literature and cultural
studies. The author thinks that the contradiction between the two should give way to
interaction and complementarity. Translation may play an important role in this,
because scholars in the two fields have all paid great attention to translation and have
contributed a lot to the cultural turn in translation studies. The author not only sings
high praise of Lefevere and Bassnett’s historical contribution to the cultural turn in
translation studies but also points out that Bassnett’s extreme viewpoint to first put
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comparative literature after translation studies and later deprive the two of their
disciplinary status is profound but unbalanced. For a way out of the problem, Wang
turns to the iconographical turn in the present age of globalization. That is what the
next chapter is about.
Wang Ning’s solution to the above problem in Chapter 6 lies in his adoption of
the visual turn in cultural studies. He argues that, though the cultural turn in
translation studies helps to expand the scope of translation studies from its
restriction to purely interlingual translation to cross-cultural transformation, it has
not overcome the ‘logocentric tendency’ in the translation studies dominated by
contrastive linguistics because in both these two stages, the mediation for semantic
transfer remains words. This has not changed with the coming of the iconographical
turn in the present postmodern world, where images come to challenge words or even
replace words as the main medium of communication. It is from this vantage
point that he questions Jakobson’s formalistic exclusion of intersemiotic translation
from the scope of the translation proper and argues that the interpretation of
art works that leaps across languages, cultures, disciplines and arts should also
be ‘rehabilitated’ as a proper object of translation studies. He thinks that this
embrace of the iconographical turn in translation studies has the great potential to
liberate translation studies from its previous logocentric myopia. He bases his
discussion on the modern Chinese translator Fu Lei’s practice and verifies the
legitimacy and validity of intersemiotic translation, regarding it as one of the most
important research topics in the future translation studies.
Chapter 7 summarizes the main points of the whole book and gives an optimistic
forecast of the future translation studies in the age of globalization. The author
argues that though the scope of translation has now become wider and wider and still
more and more scholars from outside translation studies come to show a keen
interest in translation, we do not have to worry about the future prospect of
translation studies. Time will tell whether or not the achievement made by these
theorists is worthwhile for the discipline of translation studies.
In short, the author has, on the basis of his achievement in comparative literature
and cultural studies and his rich experience of literary and theoretical translation
practice, given a historical review and a theoretical analysis of the present Chinese
 252 Book review

translation studies and the cultural turn imported from the West since the early
1990s. The significance of this work may be summarized as below.
First, the author is the first to put forward the cultural turn in translation studies
and the related strategy in the Chinese context. This is a step forward on the basis of
the cultural turn in translation presented by Western scholars in the 1990s, which
falls short of universality for its failure to take into consideration the Chinese
translation practice and the relevant research achievements. Another step forward is
his modification and development of the turn to embrace the translatology turn in
cultural studies.
Second, the author first defines translation and translation studies from a
cultural perspective by granting academic status to the third dimension of Roman
Jakobson’s threefold definition of translation studies. He thinks that in the present
age of globalization, thanks to the large scale of cultural expansion and the pictorial
omnipresence, iconographical writing has emerged as a new genre, making up for the
shortcomings of normal verbal writing and posing a new challenge to critics.
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Third, the author is the first to make a case analysis of Fu Lei’s cross-cultural
intersemiotic translation practice, and he gives a definition of cross-cultural
intersemiotic translation, which he thinks must be an interpretation that leaps
across not only different languages but also different cultures as well as different
disciplines and arts. The author thinks that besides its immunity from logocentrism,
Fu Lei’s interlingual and cross-cultural semiotic translation has superseded Benjamin
and Gombrich’s limit of centering on Western culture and has reached the true
intersemiotic translation that breaks through the barriers between different
languages, cultures, disciplines and arts. Such successful translation practice
has not only illustrated Jakobson’s threefold definition of translation from the
cross-cultural perspective but also modified and substantiated Jakobson’s universal
translation theory on the basis of China’s art translation practice.
Fourth, the author is also the first Chinese scholar to give a systematic
elaboration of the postcolonial translation theory in China, maintaining direct
exchanges and dialogues with international scholars. As one of the earliest Chinese
scholars exploring globalization and postcolonialism, he presents a unique elabora-
tion and analysis of Spivak’s translation theory and Bhabha’s cultural translation
strategy. This book may be claimed to be the first globalization-based systematic and
theoretical view of the cultural turn in translation studies in the Chinese context. The
author believes that in a globalized context, translation plays an increasingly bigger
role as globalization has increased the differences between cultures. In fact,
translation has become more and more indispensable and an expanded sense of
translation is all the more necessary for the mediation of cultural differences in this
new context.
Last but not least, underlying all of Wang’s works is an agenda that draws our
attention again to the metaphor of an ‘iron house’. We may as well divide modern
Sino-foreign (Sino-English in particular) exchanges into two phases separated by
the collapse of the ‘house’, the first shrouded in the isolationist feudal mentality and
the second embraced by modern human civilization. Through this transition, we
have overcome the first spell of silence under Lu Xun’s exemplary guidance and
we have become an enlightened nation within China. But in this second phase, we are
now facing another spell of muteness in the world. With the flooding importation of
Western culture, Wang Ning is now orienting China’s theorists towards the removal
 Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 253

of the second wall of intercultural silence and the leap into the third phase
a new
phase we may add to the above
of visibility. Here lies the real significance of Wang
Ning’s ‘call to arms’ (to quote Lu Xun’s exact wording).

Xiangjun Liu
Foreign Languages Department, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics
Shanghai 200433, China
Email: liuxiangjun126@126.com
# 2012, Xiangjun Liu
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