Relativity as a Solution

Late studies within the field of translation seem to adopt ‘representation of reality’ as a point of departure in order to present translation as an active agent of culture/history construction. Here, the representation in question has nothing to do with Saussure’s structuralist view adhering each signifier to a specific signified. Together with the development of anti-essentialist views in phenomenology, rather than a Saussurrean systematic and stable nature, language has started to be qualified with such concepts as dynamicity, relativity and heterogenity. The denial of a universally absolute real (and even if there’s one language is incapable of represent that!) has been a great impact on author-oriented approaches in literary studies. As for translation, this seems to be both a challenge and a way out of the hegemonia of the source text, since now, both sides of the line (ST and TT) can be classified as a ‘tendency’.[1]

As Rosemary Arrojo also problematizes in her article, the approach of the poststructuralist era has shifted the roles of the literary agents (here I mean the reader, the author and the translator). Neither Jane Austen nor Emily Bronte would wish to provide their readers with a labyrinth in which a battle of power is about to start. Rather, there exists this ‘fill in these blanks and achieve the truth’ type of authorial encouragement promising the reader a purification- or eudaimonia one may call it- in the end. The involvement of the struggle of power within fiction is rather modern and seems to be appraised by contemporary critiques. Regarding the authorial reality as solely one among millions of others, today, heterogeneity is promoted as a productive object of study for the academy.

With a translational concern, Arrojo indicates the necessity of embracing plurality and rejecting fixed meanings in saving the translator from being a ‘kleptomaniac’ who steals author’s reality, and therefore authority. As implied within the article, it’s the translator’s own legitimate reality and authority presented within the target text. This is a different perspective towards the concept of translator’s in/visibility: Closed-texts (the texts whose meaning is considered as fixed and absolute) are the ‘textual properties’ of the author. Any intervention into this ‘private property’ constitutes a ‘crime’. Thus, translators are ‘urged to be as invisible and as humble as possible’ (Arrojo 2002: 74).

Luise Von Flotow’s study on the disunity of feminist approaches adopts a similar attitude in terms of embracing relativity. Here, the diversification of feminist discourse in translation studies, as exemplified with varying approaches of Spivak, Gilliam and Arrojo, is proposed far from leading the discipline to disintegration. Instead, the existence of different perspectives, and different ‘realities’ as Arrojo would call them, leads to highly productive work. Besides, it’s clearly seen that what Arrojo refers to in explaining the production of fiction is rather applicable here: the will to power triggers creativity, since each discourse is ‘constructed’ to become the ‘only one’.

Apparently, in terms of the evolution of translation studies, these contemporary theorists’ adopting the relativity aspect of post-structuralism is as much a beneficial method as Even-Zohar’s adopting the systemic approach of Russian Formalists. Such attempts bestow the field with legitimacies of various types: the legitimacy of the target text constructed, the legitimacy of translator’s task and interference, and the legitimacy of the scholars’ studies in the academy. However, it would be highly paradoxical if this attitude of embracing the relativity/dynamicity becomes the discipline’s ‘static position’ in the near future.

References
Arrojo, Rosemary
2002 “Writing, Interpreting, and the Power Struggle for the Control of Meaning: Scenes from Kafka, Borges, and Kosztolanyi”
Luise Von Flotow
1998 “Dis-Unity and Diversity: Feminist Approaches to Translation Studies”

[1] This is a reference to Popovic’s statement regarding source text as a constant and the target text as a tendency.