Translation and postcolonialism

TRANSLATION AND POSTCOLONIALISM

Translation and interpreting have a fascinating historical role in the development of empire and the postcolonial world. AN INTERVIEW BY THOMAS J. CORBETT

The work of Robert J. C. Young, Julius Silver Professor of English & Comparative Literature at New York University, concerns marginalized peoples and cultures. Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction devotes its final chapter to translation. Translation is seen not only as a colonial activity but also as a metaphor: transplanting England to New England, for example, is itself a form of translation. The interview began with an oblique question, a question that provoked a typically original and enlightening response from Professor Young.

TC: What is “localization”?

RY: As I understand it, localization is a word that globalization professionals use—it means localizing a product, either with respect to some material aspect that accommodates it to local practices (hamburgers made with halal meat in Muslim countries, beer in French McDonald’s, cars with heaters in their seats in Scandinavia) or, more interestingly from a translational point of view, taking into account the particular language situation of a specific market. This would mean the translation of any text element into a local language, adaptation to local orthography, but also to other practices such as whether that market uses pounds or kilos, the local currency, etc. I don’t see this as having a significant relation to translation, though you could argue for its importance with respect to certain practices of cultural translation.

As marketing strategies, these forms of adaptation are essentially superficial characteristics with respect to the core product, and this, I think, shows the falsity of the local-global antithesis which has been given much mileage of late. In fact, I don’t think that it constitutes a distinction as such, in the sense that the point about globalization is that the local has become globalized in any number of ways, both experientially and institutionally. We could say that in some sense there is no local any more, in the way that you could once have local experiences which were almost entirely unmediated by anything beyond their own boundaries. So if people are now talking about “localization” it is probably precisely because it is now impossible, other than in the superficial way I have described.

In my own field, that of Postcolonial Studies broadly conceived, there is much talk of location, as in the title of Homi K. Bhabha’s book The Location of Culture, which emphasizes the particular place and time of any cultural production, relative to all others [1]. The meanings of culture are determined by their locational parameters. In this sense, localization could be seen as antithetical to the idea of translation, which will always attempt to cross borders, to convey meanings beyond the local contexts in which they have been developed. Of course that does not prevent a translator attempting to preserve localized elements in a text, however paradoxical that may be given that a translation will always deprive the local of its local specificity. We could say that Schleiermacher’s idea of foreignizing translation is in some sense a version of this [2].

TC: What is one dealing with when one acknowledges that a text is “untranslatable”?

RY: In the heyday of deconstruction, particularly with Paul de Man, there was much talk about the impossibility of translation in general [3]. Today we have reoriented such discussions to more specific instances, even particular terms, such as in Barbara Cassin’s wonderful Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles [4].

First of all I would say that very few texts are untranslatable as such—they are simply less translatable or harder to translate. They are, in other words, at the extreme of the scale. We might say that a text is untranslatable not because it can’t be translated but because there is too much to translate, a surfeit of meaning, effects, rhythms, techniques. The untranslatable text is the text in which there are simply too many things going on. The problem with translation is not that these different aspects of the poem can’t be individually translated but that they can’t all be translated at the same time. You have to choose, and because you have to choose you have to fail with respect to all the other elements that you didn’t choose. So are we saying that the totality of the poem is untranslatable or that the individual element is untranslatable? Particular terms, words, however, can be untranslatable, and one response to that is simply to appropriate the word into the other language, as has been done in vast quantities in English, starting with some very simple examples such as “pajama.”

What interests me more is what one might call the traffic across untranslatable terms, in the sense that a word like “geist” will be translated across various European languages with the assumption that the different translations will have an equivalence, when in fact what develops is a kind of stereoscopic or three-dimensional volume in which philosophy or translation theory work, where there is a constant process of misprision. The paradox of translation theory, in my view, is that theorists move in their discussions about translation between texts written in different languages with the implicit assumption that there can be perfect translations.

TC: In what sense might one assert that an original text has an identity?

RY: Identity is a fluid concept, much over-used in our own time. Its only serious meaning, in my view, is its legal reference. There is much talk, for example, of all identities being constructed, but the simple fact is that my own identity, starting with my birth certificate, passport and the like, are official documents constructed for me by the state. Beyond that, identity means something more like sense of self, and of course we all feel different at different times—between being a professor and being a parent, for example, but I am not sure these are different identities. To say that the fact that we play different roles at different moments in our lives means that we have different identities is somewhat facile and betrays a lack of understanding about what identity involves.

Texts also have legal identities, relating to copyright, in a similar way, and we can say that beyond that their identities are constructed, in the sense that they are read in a certain way and put in certain categories (for example, a novel, or a “postcolonial” text) but these are not fixed, they change all the time. Texts perform different roles on different occasions in different contexts. The question of identity becomes more interesting with respect to translation. Once we translate a text, the question becomes whether the text still has the same identity in some way—so that, for example, we can discuss the translated text as if it is identical to the original. It is translation that poses the problem of the identity of texts, the relation of that to the concept of a “version,” and from that point of view your question demands a philosophical enquiry that is too vast to begin here but which by the same token offers a very promising potential. All questions of translation in some sense pose the question of identity.

TC: What might one understand by ‘postcolonialism’?

RY: I have been writing about postcolonialism for over twenty years now, written two “Introductions” and countless essays, which makes this a very big question for me. Postcolonialism means what it says, which is “after the colonial.” There are many different ways in which we can take this. For countries that were colonized, it means dealing with the aftermath and the debris of colonial rule, institutional, economic, material, cultural and psychic. For countries that were formerly (or indeed remain) colonial powers—all Western European countries with the exception of Norway (though even there the Norwegian Lutherans were involved in forms of colonialism), as well as Russia, China and Japan, together with countries that arguably continue colonialism in different modalities, above all the United States (the United States is both an imperial and formerly colonized power), it means deconstructing and revising their own cultures and historical narratives with respect to their own values, assumptions and hierarchies that were developed in the colonial period, and adjusting their own cultures to accommodate the migrants who have now brought the empire home, so to speak, and come to live in the formerly imperial centre. One effect of that is that the monolingualism that was developed so remorselessly during the state formations that took place during the period of European nationalism has now had to give way to new kinds of multilingual societies.

TC: Was there any such notion in the ancient world?

RY: Of the postcolonial? I know that ideas about the postcolonial have now spread both to the medieval and classical worlds of academic scholarship, and the analogy can be developed quite fruitfully. Having said that, the formation of the Roman Empire, and the world of Christendom that developed in its wake, took place under very different conditions than those of modern European empires. Nevertheless, we can see that the postcolonial perspective can be helpful in thinking through certain aspects of earlier historical periods. All of Anglo-Saxon poetry, for example, could be said to be marked by its own sense of being postcolonial with respect to the departed Romans (though that was not, of course, a word that they used!).

TC: What is the relationship between postcolonialism and translation?

RY: Many scholars have now investigated this question, and emphasized the role that translation played in the development of empire—from the role of interpreters for early explorers and conquerors, to the role of translations of local texts, particularly legal and religious texts—as a way to facilitate the institution of colonial rule, as in British India. Moreover the imposition of the colonizer’s language, and the devaluation of local languages so that they had no official status, meant that for local people, translation, together with bilingualism for some, became the mark of their colonial condition. At the same time, in this context some of the problems of translation, the impossibility for example of producing a perfect translation, became manipulated in certain power games. On the one hand, it was utilized for the colonizer’s benefit, as in the Treaty of Waitangi, where the English version is very different from the Māori where the language is simplified and vaguer. On the other hand, translation offered a mode of resistance for local people, a practice that is explored in Brian Friel’s wonderful play about British rule in Ireland, Translations [5]. Friel’s play concerns the translation process with respect to maps as a form of domination. In this respect we should add the work of José Rabasa on mapping [6]. The map gives one of the clearest instances of the ways in which knowledge, and the mediation of knowledge through a particularly powerful language and set of representations, can be a significant as well as highly symbolic part of the exercise of political and epistemological control.

The major theoretical impact, we could say, of the work that has been done on the relationship between postcolonialism and translation is to highlight the ways in which translation is always involved in a relation of power, both in terms of the institutional practice of translation and in the general relationship between languages, which are never neutral but always involved in larger formations of power. I think that has been postcolonialism’s most original and significant effect on translation studies.

TC: What is the role of translators in the postcolonial world?

RY: From a social and human perspective, the most important people are interpreters, in particular the people who are interpreting in legal situations such as applications for asylum, refugee status, the right to remain, etc. These people have tremendous power in such processes, and an awareness of the social and cultural issues faced by migrants, by people dispossessed through war, famine and poverty, is extremely important for them if they are to fulfill their roles effectively and humanely. I think interpreting in legal contexts is so important and greatly under-examined. I would like to know much more about its processes. For the most part the courts assume that interpretation, and indeed translation, are straightforward processes, whereas in fact they are often exerted as forms of control and reduction. In more general terms, the role of translators is not essentially different in the postcolonial world than in any other, except with respect to the general social consensus today that interaction and understanding between cultures has become more urgently important. Translators are the people who are most able to facilitate and enable understanding between people of different cultures.

TC: Who might be in a position to judge the quality of a translation?

RY: I don’t think fundamental thinking about this has changed at all in recent years. You can judge a translation from a linguistic point of view, with respect to its accuracy, the success of its rendition from source to target language. On the other hand you can judge a translation from the point of view of the reader. It may be a good translation technically, but unreadable, or it may be a poor translation, technically, but a powerful rendition, or simply useful from a practical point of view.

TC: What might one mean by ‘de-translation’?

RY: This is Jean Laplanche’s term, in his interpretation of Freud on translation [7]. Initially Freud discusses the dream work as a kind of translation that converts unacceptable material into a form that the dreamer can assimilate. Laplanche develops this further, by pointing out that since the dream itself is, from a Freudian point of view, the problem to be decoded, then what the analyst has to do in the analysis is in effect to detranslate it back to the original, unacceptable dream thoughts. These then need to be retranslated into a form that will enable the analysand to cope with his or her life more effectively in the future. I’ve used the concept quite extensively to discuss the ways in which we need to detranslate many of our concepts about other cultures—previous translations, as it were—in order to redevelop them into forms that are more appropriate to our modalities of understanding and cultural awareness in the twenty-first century. TC

NOTES

1. Homi K. Bhabha, Harvard University: The Location of Culture, Routledge 1994 (ISBN 0-415-05406-0)

2. Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768-1834), German theologian and philosopher

3. Paul de Man (1919-1983), Belgian literary critic and theorist

4. Barbara Cassin, Center Leo Robin: Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles (dir Cassin),   Le Robert 2004 (ISBN 2-020-30730-8, 2-850-36580-7)

5. Brian Friel, Irish dramatist: Translations (1980), pub. Faber 1981 (ISBN 9780571117420)

6. José Rabasa, Harvard University, author of Inventing America: Spanish Historiography and the Formation of Eurocentrism (1993)

7. Jean Laplanche, French author and psychoanalyst, author of, inter alia, ‘Psychoanalysis, Time and Translation’ (1992)

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Postcolonial Translation: Domesticating the Exotic (essay)

In The Postcolonial Exotic, Graham Huggan discusses the way the Western world treats African literature. He shows how African writers are dependent on Europe, and how this influences what is written and what literature enters Europe. This paper will try go on where Huggan stopped: it will do more or less the same, but for translation and not specifically the translation of African literature. It will discuss in detail the consequences of the choices that are made in the process of selecting and translating works written in non-hegemonic languages. It will also look at postcolonial translation theory in general, and work towards the future of translation theory, discussing decolonising translation strategies.

Huggan devoted half a chapter to the way Europe dominates the African literary market. On the one hand writers want to tell a certain story, but on the other hand they have to be aware of how they can reach a certain audience and how their writings will be perceived by different readers. Writers want their stories to be read by as many people as possible, both for financial and ideological reasons. In practice this means that writers have to either write in one of the hegemonic languages (often English, in many parts of the world viewed upon as the language of freedom) or to have their works translated. These authors usually end up writing for European publishing houses, because there hardly is a publishing industry in most Third World countries. The fact that all these books are published by European publishers does not only affect what is written and how these books are read, but it also creates a vicious circle: the already underdeveloped book industry does not get the opportunity to develop.
African authors will often turn to foreign publishers because of a general mistrust in local publishing, and to be assured of a higher quality product. Therefore, both writers and books are geared primarily towards an outside audience. This vicious circle seems to be a well-established mechanism by continuously directing its resources and products towards an external supplier and consumer."
(Lizarríbar 1998: 58, quoted in Huggan 2001: 51)
Another problem with this is that these western publishers often have a very limited knowledge of the author's culture, and therefore have false expectations. They want the authors to address certain issues in their writing, or expect them to write like other authors from the same cultural or ethnic background.
"Books are almost always praised for using motifs and symbols out of the author's own national tradition, or when their form echoes some traditional form, obviously pre-English, and when the influences at work upon the writer can be seen to be wholly internal to the culture from which he 'springs'. Books which mix traditions, or which seek consciously to break with tradition, are often treated as highly suspect."
(Rushdie 1991: 66)
There are two processes at work here. One is the fact that authors feel obliged to write something that fits into the world of the reader, or in Rushdie's words, to use motifs and symbols that the reader associates with the culture of the author. For example, a South African author might feel pressured into writing on the Apartheid regime, to describe the streets of Johannesburg and to use words in Afrikaans, because readers think this is the 'authentic' South Africa. Authenticity is a term of praise often used in the studies of Third World and Commonwealth literature, when referring to traditions and stereotypes in a novel. According to Rushdie, "[w]hat is revealing is that the term […] would seem ridiculous outside this world. Imagine a novel being eulogized for being 'authentically English', or 'authentically German'. It would seem absurd" (Rushdie 1991: 67). The other process is that readers sometimes take literary works to gain knowledge. Even if authors do not try to create an image of a country or culture in their novels that exists in the western world, some readers mistake fiction for facts. A good example is Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children. In this novel, Rushdie writes about a generation born at the moment of India becoming independent. The story is told by Saleem Sinai, an unreliable narrator, who "is cutting up history to suit himself" (Rushdie 1991: 24). The book became successful and was even awarded a Booker Prize and this changed the way it was read. Many readers mistakenly took the novel for a history or guide book, and others criticised Rushdie for making mistakes and being incomplete:
'If you're going to use Hindu traditions in your story, Mr Rushdie,' I was asked by an irate and shiny-headed gentleman in Bangalore […] 'don't you think you could take the trouble to look it up?' I have also received letters arguing about Bombay bus routes, and informing me that certain ranks used by the Pakistan Army in the text are not in fact used by the Pakistan Army in Pakistan.
(Rushdie 1991: 23)
According to Huggan, Third World literature has become part of commodity culture: it has "global market-value of a reified object of intellectual tourism" (Huggan 2001: 56). People read novels about foreign cultures to study cultural difference, to celebrate it even, and they try to find universal values in them. They are even actively used as a way to educate people about different cultures: not only do people read them for signs of cultural difference, the novels usually contain footnotes, glossaries, photographs and introductory essays to explain the culture of the author, which help people to understand the novel not in a literary way, but in a historical or anthropological way (Huggan 2001: 53). Unfortunately, although people try to respect other cultures and try to value them for what they are, and although publishers now publish Third World literature, this does not mean there is no power struggle left. It must be clear by now that all the attention paid to other cultures turned them into a product to be consumed by the West. Even though the West publishes their literature, people from the Third World are not free to write what they want: they have to conform to the western genre of the novel and their works are only accepted if they write from a traditional point of view, that is without mixing signs from different cultures. They have to write in a language the West understands, or be prepared to have their works translated.

The rest of this paper will focus on translation. It will start with looking at the process of selecting a text for translation, and then examine the strategies used in the process of translation itself. In the field of translation studies there has been a debate on the preferred strategy of translation: domestication or exoticisation? This should clear up the title of this paper. In translation there has been a tendency to domesticate, and this paper will also attempt to explain why. In this way, the other culture, the exotic, is domesticated: a foreign culture is translated so that the Western reader can understand. This has been severely criticised by many translators and postcolonial critics, among them Gayatri Spivak, Harish Trivedi and Susan Bassnett.

In the Introduction to Translation and Empire, Douglas Robinson writes that postcolonial studies and translation studies have got closer to each other. Over the years, postcolonial scholars have come to realise that culture is mediated through language, and thus that translation is an intercultural phenomenon significant to their field of study. Not only postcolonial scholars have become interested in this, postcolonialism has also become part of translation studies. It is also interesting that both studies consider movement in a very different way. Postcolonialism studies the influence of colonialism, or the new ways that Europe and the USA have power over the Third World (through movement of knowledge or products), and translation studies the way one culture or language is taken to another culture or language. Translation can be seen as a metaphor, because originally it means something like 'bearing across'. Translation thus does not only have the meaning of replacing a word from one language with that from another, but also that of replacing a sign (anything) from one culture with a sign from another culture. This leads to the most important issue in translation studies: the age old 'word-for-word' vs. 'sense-for-sense' debate, which over the centuries developed into the debate of 'domestication' vs. 'exoticisation'. The first one to write about this issue was Cicero in the first century BC, and this debate still forms the basis of translation studies. Word-for-word translation used to mean just that: replacing individual words of a source language (SL) with that of a target language (TL). This was how translation was practised until the translation of the Old Testament from Greek by St. Jerome. He believed this literal translation lead to an absurd translation that actually did not represent the meaning of the original (Munday 2001: 20). He was the first one to start translating sense-for-sense. In the sixteenth century another important event took place: Martin Luther translated the Bible into the language of the German people, a language they could understand. He took an enormous risk, though, because not even two decades later the French humanist Etienne Dolet was burned by the church because of his 'blasphemous' translation of the Bible. In the seventeenth century, the ideas on translation began to change a bit, and there were some early attempts of developing a systematic translation theory. It was still thought that one should be 'true' or 'faithful' to a text, but it now meant that one would have to stay as close to the original meaning as possible. The word 'imitation' was introduced by Cowley, who admitted to changing texts any way he wanted to, so that he could pass on the 'spirit' of the text; he tried to prevent texts from losing beauty by adding his own ideas (Munday 2001 : 24). The English poet and translator described three categories of translation: "metaphrase," literal or word-by-word translation; "paraphrase," staying close to the original, but conveying meaning is more important than strict translation of the words; "imitation," which corresponds to what is now called adaptation (Munday 2001 : 24). Over the centuries there have been many translators who have tried to think of ways to capture the meaning of a text. Alexander Fraser Tytler, in the eighteenth century, thought the translator had to "adopt the very soul of his author" (Munday 2001 : 26) and, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Schleiermacher asks the question of how to bring the source text (ST) writer and the target text (TT) reader together:
Either the translator leaves the writer alone as much as possible and moves the reader toward the writer, or he [sic] leaves the reader alone as much as possible and moves the writer towards the reader.
(Schleiermacher 1813, cited in Munday 2001: 28)
Schleiermacher wanted the reader to be moved towards the writer, so that the reader of the translation would get the same impression as the reader of the original. Of course all these terms and Schleiermacher's proposed method of translation are rather vague and subjective. Many theoreticians have noticed this problem and tried to develop more coherent and objective theories. In the second half of the twentieth century many theoreticians were concerned with the concepts of meaning and 'equivalence'. Equivalence is a concept developed by Roman Jakobson. In "On linguistic aspects of translation," Jakobson explores the relation between the signifier and the signified, showing that this relation is arbitrary and that there are no full equivalents in language. The English word 'cheese,' for example, can easily be translated into any other language of cultures that are familiar with a 'food made of pressed curds,' but they are not exactly the same because the words for 'cheese' in different languages refer to different sorts of cheese. And where the Dutch only have 'neven,' the British have 'cousins' and 'nephews.' But according to Jakobson, this does not mean that meaning cannot be translated at all, only that differences in the structure and terminology of a language have to be taken into account (Jakobson 1959, cited in Munday 2001: 37). From then on many linguistic theories on translation have been developed, which are far too complicated to explain in this paper and have hardly anything to do anymore with the discussion of translation strategies. It was only in the 1970s that Itamar Even-Zohar developed his polysystem theory. This theory is highly relevant, because it was the first theory that actually saw all literary work as part of a literary system, and translated literature works as a system in two ways: "in the way the TL selects works for translation" and "in the way translation norms, behaviour and policies are influenced by other co-systems" (Munday 2001 : 109). The importance of translation fluctuates. In smaller nations dominated by the culture of a larger one, translated literature has a leading role in the development of new models for target culture literature. Normally, however, translated literature has a peripheral position in the polysystem: translated literature conforms to the literary standards of the TC (Munday 2001: 110). This, of course, is what happens to Third World literature translated into English, and which is so fiercely criticised by postcolonial scholars who feel that it is impossible to tell who wrote the novel in the first place:
In the act of wholesale translation into English there can be a betrayal of the democratic ideal into the law of the strongest. This happens when all the literature of the Third World gets translated into a sort of with-it translatese, so that the literature by a woman in Palestine begins to resemble, in the feel of its prose, something by a man in Taiwan (Spivak 1993, cited in Huggan 2001: 25).
According to Even-Zohar, translation strategy is conditioned by the position of translated literature in the polysystem. Although this is certainly true, there are more processes that influence the way in which a literary work is translated. What is not recognised by him, but is by Gideon Toury, is that translation is a process taking place in the translator. Toury tries to describe trends in translation behaviour by examining texts and statements by translators, publishers and reviewers, and so to find out what 'norms' are operating during the process of translation. The most important norm, 'the initial norm,' is the choice of translation strategy of the translator. If the translator decides to follow the norms of the ST, the translation will be adequate, and if he decides to follow the norms of the target culture, the TT will be acceptable. In the 1980s, translation theory changed from an analysis of translation as text to a translation of culture, which is where postcolonial studies and other cultural studies come in. When closely examined, postcolonial translation theory has much in common with the translation theory of the 1970s in general and that of Even-Zohar and Toury in specific. They try to see translation in relation to other literature, to the wishes of publishers, the expectations of the public and power relations (as pointed out by Even-Zohar on the position of translated literature in the polysystem: in smaller nations translated literature influences national literature, and in stronger nations translations are adapted to national literary norms) and they look at the processes at work in the translator the way Toury does. But of course there are also plenty of differences. Toury and Even-Zohar did not take a political stand, and many of the postcolonial critics do. They criticise the way the West dominates the literary market, and they disapprove of the translation strategies commonly employed in the west, as does Spivak, who even argues that feminists in the West should learn the languages of women in Third World countries to show solidarity, because translations into hegemonic languages overassimilate their work (Munday 2001 : 134).

Now that the main problem of translation has been explained, the other processes at work in translation will be discussed.
Toury's method … must still turn to cultural theory in order to assess the significance of the data, to analyse the norms. Norms may be in the first instance linguistic or literary, but they will also include a diverse range of domestic values, beliefs, and social representations which carry ideological force in serving the interests of specific groups. And they are always housed in the social institutions where translations are produced and enlisted in cultural and political agendas.
(Venuti 1998, cited in Munday 2001: 145)
Translation starts with the selection of a text, but not many attention has been given to the process of selection. This is strange, considering it is a very important decision. What is translated decides what can be read by people from other cultures, it influences the perception of the source culture and often there are political reasons for (not) selecting a work. In the past, many texts were translated by rich white men with too much time on their hands, and they usually had strong beliefs that could be detected from a mile away; e.g. they wrote for a religious or a political cause, like Martin Luther. Nowadays things are completely different. It still happens that translators select texts themselves, but usually it is the publishers and editors deciding on what text should be translated and then hiring an agency to translate it for them. The main purpose of literary translation in the West is generating profit, and this means that it is important to find texts that are appealing to as many people as possible. This leads us back right to the beginning of this paper, to the discussion of Third World literature written in English: the novel has to be acceptable to people, it has to live up to their expectations. The Anglo-American world is monolingual, it is not open to influences from outside. They are not very interested in literatures from other parts of the world; these are considered of interest only to specific groups of people, e.g. specialists and students. It is estimated that works from the Third World represent only one or two percent of the books read in the First World (Robinson 1997: 33). It seems that British and American publishing
has reaped the financial benefits of successfully imposing Anglo-American cultural values on a vast foreign readership, while producing cultures in the United Kingdom and the United States that are aggressively monolingual, unreceptive to the foreign, accustomed to fluent translations that invisibly inscribe foreign texts with English-language values and provide readers with the narcissistic experience of recognizing their own culture in a cultural other.
(Venuti 1995, cited in Robinson 1997:33)
Because of this, texts are selected that can easily be understood by the dominant culture, or that can be translated in a domesticating way. This means that Western values are dominant in the translation, both politically and aesthetically. The language of the original is adapted to a language accepted in the target culture and sometimes the form of the work is altered. As already said above, the content should not contradict the commonly accepted views of the source culture, and this means that the works selected are often written by authors who are educated enough to either speak English or to be able to write a text fully conscious of the stereotypes and ideas of the West relating to their own culture. On the other hand there are also groups trying to promote foreign literature. Some of them are companies like Heinemann (see Huggan 1991 on the African Writers Series), but others are non-profit organisations or postcolonial scholars trying to heighten the status of Third World literature or to fight racism. Translations by these organisations often advocate a foreignising translation strategy, so that the 'voice' of the original can be heard in the translation. This strategy will be addressed later on, when discussing the future of (postcolonial) translation, now this paper will proceed with the next step in the process of translation: the role of publisher and editor. Translators often do not get to have a lot to say in the process. They have to work for low wages because publishers try to keep the costs to a minimum. It is usually the editors deciding on the translation strategy, but more often than not they are only concerned with the text reading well, because they are not fluent in the foreign language (Munday 2001: 154). In some cases, this has disastrous consequences for the original, as in that of Milan Kundera's The Joke
whose first English translator and editor, working jointly, decided to unravel the ST’s intentionally distorted chronology in an attempt to clarify the story for the readers. Kundera was sufficiently shocked and used his dominant position to demand a new translation.
(Munday 2001: 154)
Unfortunately, things like this happen very often, and also in cases where the author is not so influential. In the article "Staten van verwarring, Nederlandse vertalingen van Chinese literatuur," Mark Leenhouts writes about the film Raise the Red Lantern, which was based on a novel by Su Tong, Wives and Concubines, which had absolutely nothing to do with red lanterns. People thought it was a lovely, authentic depiction of traditional Chinese culture and the film became a success. Nobody even knew that the filmmaker Zhang Yimou had made up the ritual of the red lanterns himself. The novel is still known as De Rode Lantaarn [The Red Lantern] in the Dutch translation. To prevent these things from happening in the future, some changes have to be made in the world of translation. Venuti is one of the translators-theorists that are concerned with this issue. Venuti deplores the fact that many translators are underpaid and dominated by the publishers and editors. He calls for action: for 'resistancy,' a foreignising translation strategy to increase the visibility of the translator. He has often been criticised for this, because it is doubtful whether this would actually change anything in translation, but what is generally appreciated in his theory is that he recognises the role of the publisher and the editor, and sees translators as real people in a system. Another problem in Venuti's theory is that his 'resistancy' cannot be tested or measured: that foreignisation is always relative. Some of the techniques that, according to Venuti, can be used in foreignising translation are a close adherence to the structure and syntax of the ST, including calques, and making the reader aware of the translator through language, by e.g. juxtaposing archaisms and colloquialisms (Munday 2001: 147).

The organising principle of Robinson’s Translation and Empire is a utopian myth of translation studies: translation has three different roles in past, present and future. In the past it was actively used in colonisation, in the present translation is a postcolonial act, but in the future it will be used in decolonisation.
[T]ranslation has been used to control and 'educate' and generally shape colonized populations in the past; translation in the present remains steeped in the political and cultural complexities of postcoloniality; and one of the hopes of postcolonial translation studies is that translation might open new and productive avenues for the future. (Robinson 1997: 6, 31)

Translation over the centuries has developed into an interdisciplinary field of study, and it is likely that the field will keep expanding: that more and more fields of study will become interested in the phenomenon of translation, and start working together. The different groups of theorists that are interested in translation do not seem to be interacting as much as one could hope. Postcolonial translation theory will probably discuss the different ways in which translation can be a part of the process of decolonisation. This discussion has started already, but there seems to be more emphasis on the signs of postcolonialism. Several critics have proposed strategies of decolonisation through translation. Venuti and Spivak have already been mentioned. They both propose a foreignising translation strategy, but Venuti focuses on the role of the translator and creating visibility of the translator through language, whereas Spivak focuses on the way other cultures are depicted and feels that text should always be recognisable as foreign, that the voice of the original should be present in translation. Niranjana, however, writes from a poststructuralist perspective and believes that postcolonial translators have to call into question aspects of colonialism, to dismantle the West from within, and to actively look for the methods the West uses to repress other cultures to be able to counter it. She demands an active approach of the translator (Munday 2001: 135).

It is difficult to draw a conclusion, because this paper has discussed so many different issues, concepts and opinions from everywhere in the world and over a long period of time. Because of that, I will not attempt a conclusion, but end with the hope that Robinson is right, and that translation in the future can be used as a means of decolonisation, and that Third World countries and authors will get more opportunities and be able to escape from the vicious circle of postcolonialism described above.

"It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained" (Rushdie 1991: 17).

The Postcolonial Turn in Literary Translation Studies: Theoretical Frameworks Reviewed Bo Pettersson University of Helsinki

In 1990 Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere, two towering translation studies scholars, famously announced what had been under way for some time: the "cultural turn" in translation studies. In brief, they envisaged that "neither the word, nor the text, but the culture becomes the operational ‘unit’ of translation" (Lefevere and Bassnett 1990: 8). The collection in which their piece appeared (Bassnett and Lefevere 1990) has recently been hailed by Edwin Gentzler (1998: xi), one of the leading synthesizers of translation theory, as the "real breakthrough for the field of translation studies" - which is true in the sense that it epitomized what is sometimes termed "the coming of age" of the discipline. In the 1990s translation studies has in many ways been informed by this cultural turn, which, as Bassnett (1998: 132-133) has shown, includes a rapprochment between cultural studies and translation studies, due to their related efforts to understand the process and status of globalization and national identities. This focus, together with the veritable explosion of postcolonial studies in literature in the last few years of the millennium, has entailed that the cultural turn in translation studies increasingly has become intercultural or multicultural. More specifically, owing to the wide-ranging interest in postcolonial literature and criticism, it might be termed the postcolonial turn. In this paper I set out critically to review this postcolonial turn in literary translation studies. In order to do so, I must first at some length consider the theoretical - often poststructuralist - frameworks of postcolonial criticism, which so extensively have informed postcolonial translation studies. Then I go on to survey how and to what effect such frameworks are employed in the discipline. Finally I evoke some roads not taken--or not yet taken--that might be fruitfully explored if the aim is to pursue postcolonial studies with some degree of rigor. 1. On the Theoretical Frameworks of Postcolonial Criticism It is well-known that after Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin’s (1989) much-cited survey of postcolonial literature and criticism, The Empire Writes Back, the field has been one of the most fertile areas in literary studies. In fact, in many ways this study pointed the way in postcolonial studies with its positive comments on the major names discussed in this section and its final welcoming of "powerfully subversive general accounts of textuality and concepts of ‘literariness’" (Ashcroft et al. 1989: 194). Of course, Ashcroft and others had a number of predecessors - say, from Frantz Fanon to Edward Said in theory (and criticism) and from Chinua Achebe to Ngugi wa Thiong’o in literature and criticism -, who paved the ground for the boom in this decade (see e.g. Walder 1998). But perhaps the field has been most strongly moulded by three theorists and critics, sometimes facetiously referred to as "the Holy Trinity" of postcolonial criticism: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi K. Bhabha - here mentioned in their possible ascending order of significance (according to which they are given space below). Understandably, all three are major names, but as one of the leading scholars in African-American literary criticism Gates has primarily had an impact on his own area of specialization. Similarly, perhaps Spivak’s combination of postcolonial criticism and feminism has been most evident in analyses of race and/or nationality from feminist and "subaltern" perspectives. Thus, one could argue that Bhabha has played a central role in recent postcolonial literary studies, since his view of the key concept of hybridity has largely informed the postcolonial debate of the late 1990s. Since these three scholars have exerted a considerable influence on the theory and practice of postcolonial criticism and later - directly or indirectly - on postcolonial translation studies, their theoretical starting-points should be examined. In doing so, I focus on the most influential work by the respective scholar. In The Signifying Monkey. A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism Gates (1988/1989: 46, 58) bases his central notion of Signifyin(g) (the "black" oral term) in contradistinction to signifying (the "white" literate term) expressly on Jacques Derrida’s well-known reformulation of différance for Saussure’s différence. In addition to Derrida, Gates (1988/1989: 58) identifies Freud as well as "Lacan’s reading of Freud and Saussure" as having informed his "reading of Signifyin(g)". Moreover, Gates expressly bases his practical analyses of the fiction of Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker on Roland Barthes’s metaphorical division of texts into readerly and writerly categories (Gates 1988/1989: 198; 170-216, 239-258). For a long time Gayatri Spivak was primarily known as the translator of Derrida’s De la grammatologie into English and, by prefacing her translation with a lengthy, insightful introduction, she proved to be one of Derrida’s most sympathetic readers in (American) academia. She has gone on to develop a critical account of the multiple alliances - gender, national, racial, class, professional - of multicultural people, such as (e)migrants, taking herself as an example (female; Bengali/American; middle-class; academic). In doing so, she has made use of both Derrida’s work and that of French feminism, largely based on poststructuralist theory. This is evident in many essays and interviews as well as in her major work In Other Worlds. Essays in Cultural Politics (1987/1988). She describes her theoretical alliances as follows: "most critical theory in my part of the academic establishment (Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, the last Barthes) sees the text as that area of the discourse of the human sciences [...] in which the problem of the discourse of the human sciences is made available" (Spivak 1987/1988: 77). In typical poststructuralist fashion this emphasis on textuality is presented - hedgingly, but still - as an attack on allegedly naive, liberal-humanist and positivistic conceptions. "To my way of thinking, the discourse of the literary text is part of a general configuration of textuality, a placing forth of the solution as the unavailability of a unified solution to a unified or homogeneous, generating or receiving, consciousness. This unavailability is often not confronted. It is dodged and the problem apparently solved, in terms perhaps of unifying concepts like "man," the universal contours of sex-, race-, class-transcendent consciousness as the generating, generated, and receiving consciousness of the text." (Spivak 1987/1988: 78) But can Spivak’s typically deconstructionist interpretive indeterminacy - "a placing forth of the solution as the unavailability of a unified solution" -, despite the aid sought in Marx, Freud, Foucault and French feminists, really cut the mustard in practical postcolonial criticism - except for drawing similar sweeping conclusions? In The Location of Culture Homi Bhabha (1994) relies at least as heavily on poststructuralist theory, especially on Jacques Lacan, Derrida and Barthes (in this order, perhaps, since he considers himself primarily a psychoanalytic theorist). Bhabha (1994: 64) chooses "to give poststructuralism a specifically postcolonial provenance" in order to answer the later Terry Eagleton’s call for a "theory of the subject, which is capable in this dialectical way of grasping social transformation as at once diffusion and affirmation, the death and birth of the subject" (quoted loc.cit.). Characteristic of Bhabha is his use of abstractions, such as the subaltern instance, otherness and hybridity, and when at times the subject does exist as something approaching a real-life agent it is prevalently textualized in the most abstract forms with a questionable argumentative logic. As he puts it in his perhaps most widely anthologized essay, "The Other Question. Stereotype, discrimination and the discourse of colonialism": "The construction of the colonial subject in discourse, and the exercise of colonial power through discourse, demands an articulation of forms of difference - racial and sexual. Such an articulation becomes crucial if it is held that the body is always simultaneously (if conflictually) inscribed in both the economy of pleasure and desire and the economy of discourse, domination and power." (Bhabha 1994: 67) Here (as elsewhere in Bhabha 1994) central notions, their definitions and effect often remain vague: How and by whom is the colonial subject constructed? How is colonial power wielded through discourse? How exactly is the notion of articulating difference to be understood? How does this articulation of racial and sexual difference relate to the body (since it relies on the hypothetical claim that the body is always doubly inscribed)? Finally, how does this mysteriously simultaneous double inscription take place, who is behind it and what are its results? Bhabha’s suggested answer to such questions - and not a very original one at that - seems to be that power structures are intentionally mystified and operate in people’s subconscious minds in ways that suit the powers-that-be. In Bhabha’s (1994: 77) words, drawing on Lacan, Roman Jakobson and Fanon, "The construction of colonial discourse is then a complex articulation of the tropes of fetishism - metaphor and metonomy - and the forms of narcissistic and aggressive identification available to the Imaginary." Now the fact that I have excluded the arguments that support Bhabha’s conclusion may make his formulations even harder to grasp. However, if his point is something like the one suggested above, his cryptic and abstract formulations hardly help the reader to grasp, let alone effectively employ, his theoretical concepts. Similar objections could be leveled at the way in which Bhabha introduces his key notions of in-between and hybridity. The former is first formulated in connection with Bhabha’s (1994: 1-2) implied aims: "What is theoretically innovative, and politically crucial, is the need to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences. These ‘in-between’ spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood - singular or communal - that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself." Characteristically for poststructuralist rhetoric, the reader of this passage gets the general drift of the argument, but when he or she attempts to pin down its meaning the argument evaporates. (We should not be duped by the common poststructuralist claim that this is the case for all communication, since we know from experience that communication can effectively take place in acts of communication of various sorts - and that this can be checked orally or in writing.) Has the first sentence in fact implied anything to warrant the deictic phrase "These ‘in-between’ spaces"? Precisely what "terrain" and what sort of "strategies of selfhood" are employed, by whom and how, and in what circumstances? Of course, Bhabha (or anybody rushing to his defence) could argue that what he is writing is theory, which by definition is rather abstract. True enough, but does that justify conceptual vagueness, bad logic, rhetorical fudging? If the aim is to effect the dismantling of postcolonial power structures, should they not be minutely analyzed rather than further mystified by theoretical jargon? When the notion of hybridity is introduced a few pages later, it builds on the concept of in-between and an interview with Renée Green, an African-American artist. Her view of a stairwell as "a liminal space" is made use of as a metaphor for identity: "This interstitial passage between fixed identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy" (Bhabha 1994: 3, 4). After this initial mention the term ‘hybridity’ is defined in a variety of ways, usually in vague poststructuralist jargon. At one point Bhabha offers an aggregate of definitions, which goes on for a few pages. Here are some examples: "Hybridity is the sign of the productivity of colonial power, its shifting forces and fixities; it is the name for the strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal [...]. Hybridity is the revaluation of the assumption of colonial identity through the repetition of discriminatory identity effects. [---] Hybridity is the name of this displacement of value from symbol to sign that causes the dominant discourse to split along the axis of its power to be representative, authoritative. [---] [Hybridity] is not a third term that resolves the tension between two cultures, or the two scenes of the book [of English colonial fiction] in a dialectical play of ‘recognition’. [---] Hybridity reverses the formal process of disavowal so that the violent dislocation of the act of colonization becomes the conditionality of colonial discourse." (Bhabha 1994: 112-114) The reason why I dwell on Bhabha’s definitions of hybridity is that his name is most predominantly evoked in discussions of hybridity in postcolonial criticism. What is more, his writings have been endorsed by major names in various circles of the academic establishment - postcolonial (Said), marxist (Eagleton), new historicist (Stephen Greenblatt), cultural studies (Stuart Hall), literary (Toni Morrison). Still, if Bhabha’s own definitions, logic and rhetoric are as enigmatic and mercurial as the above instances suggest, then where does that leave postcolonial critics and, as we shall see, postcolonial translation scholars worldwide? As yet I have not even mentioned the well-known fact that in many other academic quarters, such as philosophical and empirical aesthetics, historiography and sociology, the very underpinnings of poststructuralism have been severely criticized for more than two decades (despite the fact that poststructuralism - at times broadly termed postmodernism - has had a foothold in some niches of these fields). This critique has - as far as I know - never been adequately answered (and, most likely, cannot be). In brief, poststructuralism mainly rests on: (1) a conservative notion of language and a misreading of Saussure (see Tallis 1988/1995); (2) an (elitist) exaggeration of indeterminacy in meaning-making; (3) an autonomous, agentless textuality and intertextuality; (4) an untenable anti-humanism (neglect of actual author and actual reader/s); and (5) a constructionist view of man (emphasis on nurture, neglect of nature). As we have seen in this brief review of three leading postcolonial theoreticians and critics, they have all largely based their writings on an array of poststructuralist theories. This means, in turn, that their theoretical frameworks are dubious and that the criticism they - and scholars and students influenced by them all over the world - produce stands on very shaky ground indeed. To spell it out, the reason why I am so critical of the leading postcolonial theoreticians is that I consider postcolonial literature and criticism and postcolonial translation of such momentous importance to contemporary literature, literary studies and translation studies that the theoretical frameworks that inform our view of them should be plausible (to say the least), and should build on actual, contextual, historically-informed, sociocultural (including ideological) and textual groundedness in at least two cultures - and a willingness to employ this groundedness in order to bring about more discriminating understanding of those cultures and their artifacts. In other words, what we need to recognize today is the complexity of literary communication and translation. In this endeavour expendable criticism in academic jargon on an untenable theoretical basis is not just scientifically off the mark; it is also morally dubious pedagogy (if this kind of writing is endorsed by teachers and scholars) and, ultimately, one of the reasons why literary studies have been given such a bad name in other academic disciplines. As in all literature, in postcolonial literature we should be aware of the uniqueness of every work, its context of production, mediation and reception - and the latter two in diachronic as well as synchronic perspectives (see Pettersson 1999). More specifically, in postcolonial criticism sweeping notions of hybridity are of little use, since the (post)colonial contexts differ so radically from case to case. What has brought us to this point is obvious: this century has been one of textuality in literary studies: from Russian formalism and new criticism to structuralism and poststructuralism. All the theoreticians and critics who endorse the writings of "the Holy Trinity" do so because they too are steeped in this tradition - which, needless to say, was sorely needed after the preceding romantic biographism and which has produced much of lasting interest. To reiterate, what is called for now are broader frameworks, which are able to account for originary, mediating, receptive as well as textual aspects in literary communication - and case studies recognizing this complexity. In this century notably marxists, feminists and postcolonial scholars have contextualized their objects of study; this is why it is particularly deplorable to see how many such (even prominent) scholars have been swept off their feet by poststructuralist frameworks and jargon. A final point: the most lasting contribution of poststructuralism, as far as I can see, is its probings into the uses of rhetoric - even though the very rhetoric such probings are dressed in may show little self-critical awareness (see Pettersson in press.) 2. Postcolonial Translation in Theory and Practice As we move from postcolonial theory to the theory and practice of postcolonial translation, we see that much is taken over from the former or from the theoretical frameworks that inform the former. The most widely discussed and cited translation scholar in the last few years has probably been Lawrence Venuti (especially Venuti 1995), who advocates foreignizing (as against domesticating) translation at all costs. First we should note what is obvious: this attitude is at least as old as Schleiermacher (1813/1992) in translation studies. Another point I have made elsewhere is that there are, especially in literary translation, instances in which the source text includes features such as the ones Venuti advocates - "discursive variations, experimenting with archaism, slang, literary allusion and convention" (Venuti 1995: 310). In such cases perhaps the convention of "faithful" or "invisible" translation Venuti (1992a, 1995, 1998) so despises would better convey the features that prompted their translations in the first place. What is more, it is at least potentially paradoxical that the translator should be "visible" and employ "foreignizing" features at the same time, since foreignizing features, at least in the Schleiermacher tradition (see Lefevere and Bassnett 1998: 7-10), were primarily introduced into the target text from the source text, not by the translator’s invention (on the last two points see Pettersson 1998: 338-339). The influence Venuti has exerted on translation studies - not least postcolonial translation - has been widespread enough to warrant scrutiny of his theoretical framework. In fact Venuti’s major studies (1995, 1998) include little overt reference to literary theoreticians that inform his work. But in other fora he has been more outspoken. In his introduction to and selection in the edition Rethinking Translation. Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology (Venuti 1992b) and in a recorded debate (in Schäffner and Kelly-Holmes 1995), he puts his cards on the table: "Poststructuralism has in fact initiated a radical reconsideration of the traditional topoi of translation theory. Largely through commentaries on Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Task of the Translator,’ poststructuralist thinkers like Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man explode the «binary opposition between ‘original’ and ‘translation’» which underwrites the translator’s invisibility today." (Venuti 1992a: 6) "[...] the methodological framework I’m coming from is the post-structuralist framework with a very heavy dose of the Marxist tradition of the Frankfurt school." (Schäffner and Kelly-Holmes 1995: 41; yet he voices his scepticism of Derrida’s "free play with the signifier", 1995: 35) In fact poststructuralist thinkers did not initiate the reconsideration, let alone the explosion, of "the binary opposition between ‘original’ and ‘translation’" in translation studies. The relevant changes were largely part of a development within the discipline more generally and could be identified already at the famous Leuven conference in 1976 and in the collection entitled The Manipulation of Literature. Studies in Literary Translation by Theo Hermans (1985) (see Gentzler 1998: ix-xi). In this collection there are only two overt references to poststructuralism and its predecessors: Leon Burnett (1985: 169-70) briefly paraphrases Walter Benjamin’s famous essay "Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers", which, as we have seen, Venuti (1992a) considers seminal for poststructuralist translation theory (as does Niranjana 1992: 4-5); and Lefevere (1985) invokes Paul de Man’s view of criticism as a kind of literature and on that basis launches his famous view of "translation as one, probably the most radical form of rewriting in a literature, or a culture" (see Lefevere 1985: 219, 241 quote). However, as the "manipulation" view later gained ground, it was certainly cross-fertilized by poststructuralist frameworks, such as Venuti’s. A brief review of the theory and practice of postcolonial translation studies quickly reveals the extent to which translation scholars draw on poststructuralism, "the Holy Trinity" (especially Bhabha 1994), and Venuti (1995). Two of the earliest and most explicitly poststructuralist studies are Vicente L. Rafael’s (1988/1993) Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule and Tejaswini Niranjana’s (1992) Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context. They are lucidly reviewed by Douglas Robinson (1998) in his survey Translation and Empire. Postcolonial Theories Explained. In fact Robinson (1998: 108-113) presents such a useful four-point list of criticisms of the frameworks of these two works and Venuti (1995) that I am content to list his points in brief. He asks: (a) whether the impact of foreignizing vs. domesticating translations on a target culture is as different as has been claimed; (b) whether the impact of either type of translation (if such a naive division in fact should be made at all) is as monolithic as has been supposed; (c) whether foreignizing translations are not inherently elitist; and (d) whether the stable separation of source and target languages in the assimilating-foreignizing distinction is tenable. The importance of these four critical points lies in the fact that Robinson considers the results of employing theoretical frameworks in translation studies and goes on to suggest that acts of translation should be contextualized. (I return to Robinson 1998 and this point in section 3.) Even more recently Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi (1999b) have edited a collection titled Post-Colonial Translation. Theory and practice which is largely informed by poststructuralist frameworks. In their introduction Bassnett and Trivedi (1999a: 6, 12) invoke Bhabha’s "inbetweenness" (and "Third Space"), and so does Sherry Simon (1999) in her essay on bilingualism in Quebecois writing. Maria Tymoczko (1999) draws on Venuti and Bhabha - and other translation scholars - in her analysis of how Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Chinua Achebe, among other African authors, employ, without supplying explanations, African terms in the original as a foreignizing device (forgetting that Achebe 1959/1984: 192 added a glossary to his first novel, Things Fall Apart, and thus trained his readers in Igbo terminology). G. J. V. Prasad (1999: 54 quote, 54-55) situates his intriguing conclusion that "Indian English writers are [...] using various strategies to make their works read like translations" in relation to Bhabha and two like-minded critics (Sherry Simon 1992 and Samia Mehrez 1992, both in Venuti 1992b). Else Ribeiro Pires Vieira (1999) describes the way in which Haroldo de Campos launches his "poetics of transcreation" from a Brazilian point of view. De Campos’ evocations of Benjamin and Derrida are thus held to be inscribed within a larger project aimed at effecting a liberation from the Eurocentric tradition by "cannibalizing" it. Even though Rosemary Arrojo (1999: 159) briefly cites Spivak in her critique of Hélène Cixous’s "masculine" appropriation of the intriguing Brazilian fiction writer Clarice Lispector, she also suggests - and I take it that she intends this suggestion as a negative assessment - that Cixous’s translation strategy "seems to follow a similar rationale" as do Venuti and Niranjana (Arrojo 1999: 148). However, the most dissenting voice in Bassnett and Trivedi (1999b) is that of Vinay Dharwadker (1999), who, in the longest paper in the collection, shows what indigenous scholarship cross-fertilized with Western traditions of literary studies, linguistics and anthropology has accomplished in the translation theory and practice of A. K. Ramanujan. In the course of so doing, Dharwadker (1999: 123-126, 130-135) amasses much evidence for his argument against the criticism Niranjana (1992) directs against Ramanujan - and Dharwadker thus turns the tables on Niranjana, whose theory and practice are, it seems, effectively dismantled. Dharwadker (1999: 126-30) gets to the bottom of Niranjana’s theorizing when examining Benjamin’s and Derrida’s pronouncements on translation, which prove to be parochial and of little use, respectively, when viewed in the light of A. K. Ramanujan’s practice. What is more, expressly unlike Bhabha, for whom, Dharwadker (1999: 129) rightly claims, "all identities are ineluctably ambivalent and hybrid in the end", "Ramanujan accepted the hybridity of languages and cultures as a starting point and tried to show, instead, how different degrees and kinds of hybridization shape particular languages, and how, despite the universal fact of mongrelization, no two mongrels are actually alike." The aim of my critical view has been, not to invalidate everything the above theorists and critics have done, but to point to the damage that the misguided theoretical frameworks have caused - and continue to cause - in the theory and practice of postcolonial translation studies. However, one should remember that even though I here have singled out the poststructuralist frameworks that translation scholars employ, many of them draw on a broad array of translation theories and (in some cases) practices. To conclude, let us briefly consider where translation studies in general and postcolonial literary translation studies in particular are today, and where they might go. 3. Roads to be Taken and Roads Not to be Taken The above section title probably irks people who feel that translation studies should be past prescriptive admonitions, since the disciplinary watchword for more than two decades has been description rather than prescription. But why, then, have so many of the most eminent names in the field, from Lefevere (1975) to Gideon Toury (1995), continued to offer us various rules and regulations for translation praxis? What is more, Andrew Chesterman (1998: 226, 227) has recently suggested that "a prescriptive statement is simply a form of hypothesis, usually concerning the desirability parameter", and, if this is the case, then "we should incorporate it [prescriptivism] into our empirical theory, testing its hypotheses just as we would test any others". Chesterman (1998: 201) also identifies "the shift from philosophical conceptual analysis towards empirical research" as "the most important trend" in current translation studies, in conjunction with the general movement from translational to translatorial studies. It is evident that if such a shift is to take place in postcolonial literary translation studies - and such a shift, I believe, is sorely needed inasmuch as the relevant approaches have been highly theory-driven since their inception -, then much should be done in order to effect rewarding interaction between theory and practice. Perhaps the discipline should even be turned on its head: translation studies could be practice-driven, rather than theory-driven. Since each act of postcolonial translation has such manifold contextual parameters, perhaps a meticulous study of those parameters would benefit not only the object of study and possible comparative theorizing, but also lead to a better understanding of the relevant postcolonial situation and its ties with the (former) colonizing culture - and other cultures. Moreover, some ingrained notions in translation rhetoric - especially evident in the work of poststructuralist scholars but in that of others too - are definitely unhelpful. First, translation is often employed as an overriding and rather one-dimensional metaphor for interpretation of all kinds. Second, Lefevere’s notion of translation as rewriting is of little help, unless rigidly specified. Third, comparisons of postcolonial literature and translation are certainly of some interest, but should be combined with more enlightening studies of their dissimilarities. In all three cases it is the complexity of the act of translation and its position in its various sociocultural (etc.) contexts that should be closely examined. Despite the fact that this paper has primarily presented a critical review of poststructuralist frameworks that have extensively informed postcolonial translation studies, let me note what should go without saying: other frameworks too should be subjected to similar scrutiny. For instance, Eric Cheyfitz’s (1991) The Poetics of Imperialism. Translation and Colonization from The Tempest to Tarzan does not draw on poststructuralism but is seriously flawed by the rather common view in postcolonial translation studies of the precolonial society as a utopia and translation as the colonizer’s demonic tool (for a critical reading of Cheyfitz 1991 see Robinson 1998: 63-77, 105-108). José Lambert, who for many years has struggled to see translation studies in a more global perspective, proposed "A Program for Fieldwork" a few years ago. Some of the central points in the program - the call for "hypotheses on communication principles" together with "microscopic and macroscopic research" (Lambert 1996: 414) - could certainly be of use in postcolonial translation. What is more, Lambert (1994: 21) has noted that since "the target pole and - even more - the binary opposition source/target have been stressed excessively in recent publications, the discussion of the source-target-transfer aspects of translation research has hardly taken place". This would suggest that Anthony Pym’s (1992) multidimensional approach to text transfer in translation should still be pursued and renewed - and introduced into postcolonial translation studies. In short, what postcolonial translation studies now need is at least (a combination of) the following: theoretical eclecticism, so that, for instance, the polysystem, Handlung and Skopos schools could be made use of; case studies firmly grounded in sociocultural fieldwork; and an interdisciplinary openness to related work in ethnography, anthropology, sociology, history, linguistics (especially pragmatics) and literary studies (especially literary pragmatics). This way translation studies might be able to accomplish what Robinson (1998: 79) - arguing against linguistic equivalence in translation studies - envisages: "Translation in its multifarious social, cultural, economic and political contexts is impossibly more complex a field of study than abstract linguistic equivalence (which is already complex enough); but the chance of perhaps coming to understand how translation works in those contexts, how translation shapes cultures both at and within their boundaries, offers a powerful motivation to push on despite the difficulty of the undertaking." This aim is potentially of such great consequence, not just for literary studies and translation studies but also for the future of the cultures involved, that the theoretical frameworks within which postcolonial translation studies are conducted must be subjected to scrutiny, and, if found wanting, replaced. 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