On Language and Translation

Abstract

Translation has often been characterised as a ‘central act’ of European imperialism.¹ It has been argued that translation was utilised to make available legal-cultural information for the administration and rule of the non-West, but perhaps more importantly, translation has also been identified as important for the resources it provided in the construction of representations of the colonised as Europe’s ‘civilisational other’. On the former point, Cohn has argued that the codification of South Asian languages in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries served to convert ‘indigenous’ forms of textualised knowledge into ‘instruments of colonial rule’.² Most recent discussions of translation in this context, however, have focused rather more upon the act of translation as a strategic means for representing ‘otherness’ to primarily domestic British reading audiences. In this case, the act of linguistic translation is more clearly being enumerated as a practice of cultural translation. English translations of the ‘ancient’ Sanskrit texts of India, for example, have been analysed for the rhetorical work that the text performed in certain contexts.³ On the one hand, European-produced translations of these texts might serve to reinforce the dominance of a European aesthetic sensibility through a process of ‘naturalisation’, in which the culturally specific is ‘sanitised’, subordinated to a European norm, thereby inherently limiting the ‘artistic achievement’ of the colonised.