Translating Communities

Authors

  • Paul St-Pierre University of Montreal

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21992/T9PP8D

Keywords:

Translation, community, Oriya

Abstract

This article will focus on communities which translate and communities which are translated, with an emphasis on the often unintended, unexpected, and unwanted effects of translation. Beginning with the scepticism – ‘hostility’ would perhaps be a better word – shown by Augustine towards Jerome’s undertaking to produce a new Latin translation of the Old Testament based on the Hebrew text rather than the Greek version of the Septuagint, and from there moving on to Mark Fettes’s discussion (in In Translation) of the reception of the translation into English of Haida myths by the Canadian poet Robert Bringhurst, as well as to the translation, also into English, of literary texts in Oriya, one of the national languages of India, I will draw attention to what, in these cases at least, has been perceived by some – usually those left out of the process of translation – as the danger or violence of translation. Given such a negative perception of translation, generalized in the Italian adage traduttore traditore, the question arises as to how this translation effect can at the very least be reduced, if not eliminated entirely, and how the “community with foreign cultures” that Lawrence Venuti writes of in “Translation, Community, Utopia” can come into being. A collaborative approach to translation involving participants from both source and target, foreign and domestic cultures – a new community of translators – will be put forward as a possible solution

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Author Biography

Paul St-Pierre, University of Montreal

Paul St-Pierre retired from the Department of linguistics and translation at Université de Montréal in December 2005. He is interested in the social and cultural contexts of translation, and has edited volumes relating to the history of translation (TTR 1997) and translation in India (Meta 1997). With Sherry Simon, he co-edited Changing the Terms. Translating in the Postcolonial Era, published both in Canada (University of Ottawa Press 2000) and in India (Orient Longman 2002). He has been involved in a number of collaborative translation projects from Oriya into English, including an anthology of short stories by different authors, Ants, Ghosts and Whispering Trees (HarperCollins 2003; translated with K.K. and Leelawati Mohapatra) ; Jagannath Prasad Das’s Dear Jester and Other Stories (Rupa 2004; with Rabi K. Swain) ; and, with Rabi. S. Mishra, Jatindra K. Nayak and S.P. Mohanty, Fakir Mohan Senapati’s important novel Six Acres and a Third (University of California Press 2005 and Penguin India 2006), hailed by U.R. Anantha Murthy as “a foundational text in Indian Literary history”.

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Published

2008-08-05