Untranslatable, Allegedly

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Translation theory: feminist and postcolonial extensions

The cultural-turn page named this as an open gap: its own source (the Liu 2010 article) introduces feminist and postcolonial translation studies as direct 1990s extensions of the cultural turn — the same move away from linguistic equivalence toward culture, ideology, and power as the operative variables, applied specifically to gender and to colonial/postcolonial power relations. This page ingests both.

Feminist translation studies

Founding claim. Sherry Simon's Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission (Routledge, 1996) is the field's first book-length study. Its premise is an analogy between two subordinations: translation's status relative to an "original" text, and women's status in society — the theory seeks to "identify and critique the tangle of concepts which relegates both women and translation to the bottom of the social and literary ladder." Source Simon separately (elsewhere in the same secondary source's citation trail) situates this move as continuous with the wider cultural turn, locating "linguistic transfer within the multiple 'post' realities of today: poststructuralism, postcolonialism and postmodernism" — an explicit bridge between this section and the postcolonial one below. Source

Simon's reframing of the translator's role: rather than a translator serving either the author or the reader, feminist translation theory proposes a shared "translation project" in which "both writer and translator participate." Source

Luise von Flotow (University of Ottawa; Full Professor of Translation Studies) is named, alongside Simon, as a founding figure of the field. Source Her 1991 TTR journal article "Feminist Translation: Contexts, Practices and Theories" and her 1997 book Translation and Gender: Translating in the "Era of Feminism" set out three strategies feminist translators use to make gender visible in a text:

Source — note this citation is a low-authority course-notes blog restating von Flotow's own taxonomy; see that source page's Gaps.

Other names surfacing in the same secondary material, not elaborated here: Barbara Godard (translator-theorist emphasizing deliberate textual manipulation, quoted above), Keith Harvey (translation of "camp talk" register), and Constance Garnett (historical antecedent — translator of roughly sixty volumes of Russian literary classics), named without enough context in the source consulted to say more. Source

Gayatri Spivak's "The Politics of Translation" (in Outside in the Teaching Machine, Routledge, 1993) is this project's second feminist-translation thread, distinct from Simon/von Flotow/Godard's textual-intervention strategies and closer to an ethics of reading. Spivak is herself a practicing translator, not only a theorist of translation: she translated Jacques Derrida's De la grammatologie into English (a translator's introduction reportedly setting "a new standard for self-reflexivity in prefaces") and Bengali fiction by Mahasweta Devi, work for which she received a 1997 Sahitya Akademi translation prize in India. Source Spivak: "the task of the feminist translator is to consider language as a clue to the working of the gendered agency." Her central demand is surrender — the translator surrendering their own self to the text, cultivating "love and affinity" for it, so as to hold "the agency of the translator and the demands of her imagined audience at bay" rather than imposing either on the source. She distinguishes rhetoricity from logic: a translator who "play[s] safe by siding with logic over rhetorical inferences" loses "vital clues hidden in the source text" — i.e., flattening a text's irony, ambiguity, or silence into plain grammatical sense misses part of what it is doing. And she warns against "translatese": rendering non-European women's writing into a homogenized English erases "the identity of politically less powerful individuals and cultures," which she calls, in the strongest terms found this session, "a betrayal of the democratic ideal into the law of the strongest." Her proposed alternative for cross-cultural feminist solidarity is that Western feminists learn the actual languages of the women whose writing they engage with, rather than treating English translation as a sufficient substitute. Source A second, independent secondary source — a Jagiellonian University course guide — quotes the same "surrender" passage verbatim with a page citation ("Translation is the most intimate act of reading. I surrender to the text when I translate," Spivak 2000: 398, in the essay's reprinting in Lawrence Venuti's The Translation Studies Reader), corroborating the modlingua.com source's rendering of it. Source

Postcolonial translation studies

Tejaswini Niranjana, Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context (University of California Press, 1992): frames translation as one instrument of colonial discourse alongside education and theology, arguing that "translation as a practice shapes...the asymmetrical relations of power that operate under colonialism." She criticizes Western translation studies for ignoring these power imbalances and for resting on a flawed, transparent theory of representation, and calls instead for "interventionist" translation practice that resists colonial assimilation rather than reproducing it — examined across translations of Indian texts from the eighteenth century to the present. Source Wikipedia independently confirms the book's existence, 1992 date, and publisher, and Niranjana's general reputation as the theorist most associated with the colonialism–translation relationship, but supplies none of this argumentative detail itself. Source

Bassnett and Trivedi, eds., Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice (Routledge, 1999): describe English as "the one master-language of our postcolonial world" and cast translation itself as the "battleground" of postcolonial struggle, linking it to migrancy, hybridity, and "locational disrupture." This is the same Susan Bassnett already on file as co-founder of the cultural turn generally see the cultural-turn page — her involvement here is this project's first documented instance of one theorist bridging both the general cultural turn and its postcolonial extension specifically. Source

Homi Bhabha is named in the same secondary source as a theorist of "ambivalent cultural hybridity," under which colonized discourse can subvert colonial authority — recasting the translator from neutral mediator to active participant in a contested cultural space. Flag explicitly: Bhabha is a postcolonial theorist more generally, not himself a translation-studies figure in the way Niranjana, Spivak, Bassnett, and Trivedi are; his inclusion here reflects this one secondary source's own framing, not an independently confirmed claim that his work is part of the translation-studies canon. Source

How the two threads meet

Spivak's essay sits at the intersection named at the top of this page: it is simultaneously feminist (its explicit subject is "gendered agency" and translating women's writing) and postcolonial (its explicit target is the English-language translation of "Third World" texts and the power relations that move governs). This project treats her, on the sourcing gathered so far, as the clearest documented bridge between the two extensions — not as evidence the two are the same movement.

Relevance to this project's mission

This gives the wiki two more vocabularies for describing translator choices already on file elsewhere: von Flotow's supplementing/prefacing-footnoting/hijacking names deliberate, visible textual intervention — a more activist stance than anything the cultural-turn page's Lefevere/Venuti framework describes, where the translator's choices are shaped by outside forces (patronage, poetics, ideology) rather than chosen as deliberate political acts. Niranjana's and Spivak's account of translation as a site of colonial/postcolonial power is directly relevant to this project's cultural-politics thread — the same kind of power-relations question the mission asks about "untranslatable" claims involving non-European words (so far, only komorebi among this project's three word case studies): whose framing of a word as exotic or untranslatable serves whose interests. A later session applied this lens to komorebi — see the new section on the komorebi page — though using different grounding sources (Iwabuchi's "complicit exoticism," on Japan's own participation in marketing itself as exotic) than Niranjana/Spivak's colonial-power framework, since komorebi's case (a never-colonized Japan marketing itself voluntarily) is a different mechanism from the colonial-domination cases Niranjana and Bassnett-Trivedi examine — the two are related in theme, not sourced to the same claim.

Gaps

See also