AGAINST TRANSLATION

Translation would seem to offer much to someone imagining a future different from the apartheid past: it emphasises mutuality, is intent on contextualisation and demands of one to imagine the position of another. Yet in the following pages I make a number of arguments against translation. I show why I prefer accentedness to translation as a description of the activist work of the ending of apartheid, and argue that refusal to translate or resistance to being translated are forms of the activism this book analyses and theorises.

There is a growing literature from within translation studies that is suspicious of itself and of its own good intentions. Translation, Susan Bassnett has written, can be understood as ‘an effect of inequalities’ (2002: 4) rather than as a meeting of equals. In this version of translation work, it can be seen as a suspect activity in which inequalities (of economics, politics, gender, geography) are not only reflected but also reproduced in the mechanics of textual production. Bassnett summarises:

The insight that translation features in asymmetrical relations is not new. In a 1986 paper on ‘The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology’, Talal Asad had this to say on the inequality of languages: ‘I have proposed that the anthropological enterprise of cultural translation may be vitiated by the fact that there are asymmetrical tendencies and pressures in the languages of dominated and dominant societies. And I have suggested that anthropologists need to explore these processes in order to determine how far they go in defining the possibilities and the limits of effective translation’ (1986: 164).