Presentation

How is translation a site of activism? Consider the contribution by Lawrence Venuti to a recent issue of the Times Literary Supplement (“The cracked glass”, TLS June 30, 2006, p. 15) in which Venuti speaks out against American monoculture. He notes that a decline in the importation of foreign culture “has coincided with the rise of the US as the most powerful nation in the world, and the supremacy of a foreign policy that justifies decisive intervention into other countries’ affairs, whether economic, political, or military.” He wonders whether the will to achieve global dominance has been “nurtured by the exclusion of foreign cultures at home.” In denouncing America’s difficult relation to multilingualism–following an increasing number of American academics, Mary Louise Pratt foremost among them–Venuti makes a connection between a generalized reluctance to integrate foreign cultural products and a period of unbridled American militarism abroad–and encourages translation as a practice fostering cultural openness. Venuti’s form of activism, which is sustained by a coherent program of work as a theorist and practician, is to be contrasted with other expressions of activism within the Translation Studies community. In June 2002 Mona Baker committed a sadly notorious gesture when–in the name of progressive political activism–she excluded two Israeli members from the editorial board of her journal, The Translator. While many supported her goals as an activist scholar, few approved of the means which she took to express her goals. By making the Israelis stand-ins for their nation and by excluding them from intellectual conversation with their peers, Mona Baker committed a gesture which promoted a perverse logic. By excluding these two individuals (who were personally and actively opposed to Israeli military policy) Baker denied the possibility of internal opposition to national policies. Would there be a rationale for condemning or excluding Lawrence Venuti as a representative of U.S. foreign policy? What made Baker’s gesture particularly unfortunate was the fact that she expressed her views through the vehicle of her own scholarly journal. There is a desirable collusion between translation studies as a discipline and progressive social and political agendas. But this collusion must be based on principles of scholarly solidarity. Translation studies uses the circulation of translated texts to question the dynamics of power across cultures–and to denounce the imbalances that result. Baker and Venuti take up from such eminent forerunners as Antoine Berman and Walter Benjamin, for whom translation must disrupt rather than confirm the self-sufficiency of national cultures. For Baker to “pin” translation scholars to their national origins, to use them as tokens, was therefore all the more disappointing. Her gesture needlessly divided the community of translation scholars. Because translation studies as a discipline has been affected by the very public reaction to Mona Baker’s actions, it is appropriate for the discipline to closely examine the way that activism is expressed through translation and through translation studies. The contributions to this volume suggest a wide array of means through which translators inflect their activity–and through which translation studies scholars formulate their views. In addition to public debate in the manner of Venuti (following a number of scholars promoting more open attitudes to language in the United States), intervention takes the form both of theoretical interventions and textual practice. Translators exercise influence both through the texts they choose and the manner of their transmission. That there exists an organization called “Translators without borders,” that a recent international conference had as its title “Translation and Intervention” (South Africa, July 2006), testify to this recognition. As Salah Basalamah notes, it has become trivial in translation studies to say that there are no neutral …