Cultural Encounters in Translation from Arabic (Topics in Translation, 26) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1853597430 ISBN 13: 9781853597435

Verlag: Multilingual Matters, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

Translation is intercultural communication in its purest form.  Its power in forming and/or deforming cultural identities has only recently been acknowledged, given the attention it deserves.  The chapters in this unique volume assess translation from Arabic into other languages from different perspectives: the politics, economics, ethics, and poetics of translating from Arabic; a language often neglected in western mainstream translation studies.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Said Faiq is Associate Professor of Translation Studies at the American University of Sharjah, where he is Chair of the Department of English & Translation Studies and Director of the Graduate program in Translation & Interpreting. Prior to this, he taught at the School of Languages, Salford University, UK. He has published widely on (Arabic) translation and cultural studies.

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Cultural Encounters in Translation from Arabic

By Said Faiq

Multilingual Matters

Copyright © 2004 Said Faiq and the authors of individual chapters
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-85359-743-5

Contents

Preface, vi, 
Notes on Contributors, x, 
1 The Cultural Encounter in Translating from Arabic Said Faiq, 1, 
2 The Cultural Context of Translating Arabic Literature Richard van Leeuwen, 14, 
3 Exoticism, Identity and Representation in Western Translation from Arabic Ovidi Carbonell, 26, 
4 Autobiography, Modernity and Translation Tetz Rooke, 40, 
5 Integrating Arab Culture into Israeli Identity through Literary Translations from Arabic into Hebrew Hannah Amit-Kochavi, 51, 
6 Translating Islamist Discourse Mike Holt, 63, 
7 On Translating Oral Style in Palestinian Folktales Ibrahim Muhawi, 75, 
8 The Qur'an: Limits of Translatability Hussein Abdul-Raof, 91, 
9 Translating Native Arabic Linguistic Terminology Solomon I. Sara, 107, 
10 Towards an Economy and Poetics of Translation from and into Arabic Richard Jacquemond. Translated from French by Philip Tomlinson, 117, 
Bibliography, 128, 
Index, 137, 

CHAPTER 1

The Cultural Encounter in Translating from Arabic

SAID FAIQ

Introduction

The word misunderstanding, writes Rabassa (1996), is crucial in most spheres of life. Misunderstandings are said to derive from incompatibilities in processing of media which carry them: languages. Yet misunderstandings are not only the products of linguistic incompatibilities per se but of cultural ones as well. This means that misunderstandings generally occur in particular social structures, particular histories, and prevailing norms of language production and reception. All these can be said to make up the ingredients of the culture and the ideology subsumed within it. Culture involves the totality of attitudes towards the world, towards events, other cultures and peoples and the manner in which the attitudes are mediated. In other words, culture refers to beliefs and value systems tacitly assumed to be collectively shared by particular social groups and to the positions taken by producers and receivers of texts, including translations, during the mediation process.

Intercultural contacts that resulted in the great cultural shifts from one civilisation to another have been made possible through translation: this has meant a good deal of exchange, naturally through language. But while languages are generally prone to change over time – phonologically, morphologically, syntactically and semantically – cultures do not change fast. Cultures remain by and large prisoners of their respective pasts. Edward Said (1993: 1) succinctly argues:

Appeals to the past are among the commonest of strategies in interpretations of the present. What animates such appeals is not only disagreement about what happened in the past and what the past was, but uncertainty about whether the past really is past, over and concluded, or whether it continues, albeit in different forms, perhaps. This problem animates all sorts of discussions – about influence, about blame and judgement, about present actualities and future priorities.

It is in these pasts that cultures normally reside and, even if the colours, shapes and formulations of these residences change, the spirit changes little or not at all. When cultures cross and mingle through translation, these pasts come face to face and a struggle for power and influence becomes inevitable. Old formulations and modes of mediation appear on the surface, and their realisation is made possible by language.

Culture and Translation

The conception of the intrinsic relationship between language and culture in translation studies has led to theories and arguments calling for the treatment of translation as a primarily cultural act:

That it is possible to translate one language into another at all attests to the universalities in culture, to common vicissitudes of human life, and to the like capabilities of men throughout the earth, as well as the inherent nature of language and the character of the communication process itself: and a cynic might add, to the arrogance of the translator. (Casagrande, 1954: 338)

Casagrande's statement is appropriate in putting culture at the heart of translation, but it generously overgeneralises the universality of culture being common to all men. The Lexicographer of all lexicographers decided this would not be the case: all men are therefore divided into groups each of which has its own culture and by extension its own way of perceiving and doing translation.

Taking culture and ideology as their starting point, a number of theorists have argued that the act of translating involves manipulation, subversion, appropriation and violence. Venuti (1995, 1996 and 1998), for example, argues that the very purpose and activity of translation represents violence. Postulating the concepts of domestication and foreignisation, Venuti argues that the Anglo-American translation tradition, in particular, over the last three centuries or so, has had a normalising and naturalising effect. Such an effect, Venuti stipulates, has deprived source text producers of their voice and has re-expressed foreign cultural values in terms of what is familiar, i.e. unchallenging to Western dominant culture:

The violence of translation resides in its very purpose and activity: the reconstruction of the foreign text in accordance with values, beliefs, and representations that pre-exist in the target language, always configured in hierarchies of dominance and marginality, always determining the production, circulation, and reception of texts. ... Whatever difference the translation conveys is now imprinted by the target-language culture, assimilated to its positions of intelligibility, its canons and taboos, its codes and ideologies. The aim of translation is to bring back a cultural other as the same, the recognizable, even the familiar; and this aim always risks a wholesale domestication of the foreign text, often in highly self-conscious projects, where translation serves an imperialist appropriation of foreign cultures for domestic agendas, cultural, economic, political. (Venuti, 1996: 196)

Debates about translation become volatile, charged and sensitive when the notions of culture and ideology – which are always there – are marked and discussed. These two notions remain open to many assessments, one of which is the radical relativism between languages and their respective cultures. But since translation is one of the oldest occupations and/or practices, there is no escape from cultural loads that represent certain ethnic, linguistic and political groups which cross, violently or otherwise, into other ethnic, linguistic and political groups. Culture has been considered from different angles: colonial, post-colonial, modernist, postmodernist, feminist, post-feminist, orientalist, post-orientalist, and other dichotomies of X and post-X.

In post-colonial contexts, translation assumes a particularly added significance: choice of texts for translation, the use of particular discursive strategies, circulation of the translations, etc. In this respect Venuti (1994: 201–2) writes that translation is:

an inevitable domestication, wherein the foreign text is inscribed with linguistic and cultural values that are intelligible to specific domestic constituencies. This process of inscription operates at every stage in the production, circulation, and reception...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Multilingual Matters
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1853597430
• ISBN 13: 9781853597435
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 152
• Herausgeber: Faiq Said
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland