Translation in an international perspective

Transcription

1 Translation in an international perspective Cultural Interaction and Disciplinary Transformation Bearbeitet von Rainier Lanselle, Antoine Cazé 1. Auflage Taschenbuch. 390 S. Paperback ISBN Format (B x L): 14,8 x 21 cm Gewicht: 510 g Weitere Fachgebiete > Literatur, Sprache > Angewandte Sprachwissenschaft > Übersetzungswissenschaft, Dolmetschen schnell und portofrei erhältlich bei Die Online-Fachbuchhandlung beck-shop.de ist spezialisiert auf Fachbücher, insbesondere Recht, Steuern und Wirtschaft. Im Sortiment finden Sie alle Medien (Bücher, Zeitschriften, CDs, ebooks, etc.) aller Verlage. Ergänzt wird das Programm durch Services wie Neuerscheinungsdienst oder Zusammenstellungen von Büchern zu Sonderpreisen. Der Shop führt mehr als 8 Millionen Produkte.

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3 Introduction 13 concept est intéressant à une monstrueuse progéniture dont l excès et l instabilité opposent une résistance farouche au processus d assimilation et d homogénéisation ethnocentrique. L écriture électronique redouble encore cette aliénation, le code binaire et une langue maternelle étant incommensurables l une à l autre. Pour finir, c est encore de modernité que nous parle Cécile Sakai dans Translation and Creation, New Approaches of Japanese Contemporary Literature, où elle émet l hypothèse que le schéma classique du lien auteur-texte-lecteur se trouve bouleversé par la manière dont des auteurs contemporains (Murakami Haruki, Mizumura Minae, Tawada Yôko) interrogent, dans leurs stratégies littéraires, la place de la langue japonaise confrontée à la domination de l anglais : cette nouvelle situation les conduit à explorer des modalités inédites de création littéraire qui anticipent sur la portée internationale des œuvres. La place et le rôle de la traduction s en trouvent, par là même, déplacés. *** Introduction For quite some time now, translation scholars have been calling for a shift of the paradigms in which to consider the relationship between translation and the circulation of knowledge. Although the idea is largely admitted that the greater part of knowledge is made accessible worldwide thanks to translation, the actual impact of this state of affairs upon the production and circulation of knowledge is rarely taken into account; this is particularly the case in the humanities, due to the interpretative nature of the disciplines they encompass, and especially in literary and linguistic studies. As a matter of fact, an epistemological shift is implied by the act of translation itself. Translation may play a role within some disciplines for which intercultural transfer is a natural

4 14 Introduction situation; conversely, other disciplines may take such a transfer itself as their object of study; or again, translation may be instrumental in circulating new practices and bringing texts to new audiences. In all these cases, translation itself can be perceived on a par with these texts and forms of knowledge as a transforming force and factor contributing to setting up new disciplinary fields. If only for this reason, translation should be considered as part and parcel of the humanities, constantly remodeling the traditional borders between disciplines in an innovative and often unforeseen manner. Translation and translation studies are global disciplines and activities, which have varied considerably depending on contexts such as place, time, and scholarly discipline. Bearing these parameters in mind, the contributions to this volume were selected from a large array of papers presented at a conference held on this topic at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign from October 14 16, 2010 Paradigmes en mutation: Du rôle transformateur de la traduction pour les sciences humaines (Shifting Paradigms: How Translation Transforms the Humanities). Jointly organized by the Center for Translation Studies at UIUC and the Université Paris-Diderot, this conference allowed scholars of various disciplines (some of them also translators) to contribute from widely different perspectives to highlighting the role of translation as a theoretical framework that may help take into account the linguistic and cultural determinants of various disciplines in the humanities, notably calling upon concepts such as the dislocation of culture (H. Bhabha), the ethnocentric violence of translation (L. Venuti), the experience of the foreign (A. Berman), and the dissymmetry of cultural transfer. The contributions gathered in this book are organized in three thematic areas: cultural transfers, terminology and literary studies. In the first section, all the contributions examine the part translation plays in intercultural transfer by focusing on an important cultural nexus that, in the near future, should become key to every consideration of translation namely, Modern and Ancient China. Whether it concerns age-old exchanges across Asian regions, or more recent interactions between China and the Western World, the Chinese case reveals the

5 Introduction 15 rich complexity and diversity of the translation issues at stake. Jean- Noël Robert s Translate Scripture and Change the World opens the book with wide-ranging reflections that cannot easily be summarized, so crucial are the topics he touches upon for the history of intercultural and interreligious exchanges in Asia, in which translation played a key part. Masterfully depicting several centuries of Chinese history through carefully chosen examples, which he analyzes in depth, Robert highlights some aspects of what the spreading and assimilation of Buddhism implied in the history of the Asian continent, for the languages through which these processes took place and for the relationships between them. On the face of it, Chinese might have seemed the least appropriate of all languages to translate ideas and concepts, as well as a rhetorics and a vision of the world, that had first been conveyed by the Indo- European languages in which Buddhism was initially nurtured. Yet, not only was Chinese up to such a task thus becoming in turn the vehicle for a multi-secular faith in the Buddhist doctrine whose influence can still be felt today but even more interestingly for our purposes, this language, already boasting a rich heritage when the transfer took place, let itself be profoundly remodeled by this assimilation. Because it had been used to spread the Buddhist faith, the Chinese language was never the same again, and the ideas for which it would later serve as a vehicle of transmission, even in widely different domains, were to keep a permanent trace of this deep interaction with the foreign, an interaction that has characterized its history from time immemorial. In Quand le traducteur se fait visible: essai d analyse des notes de traducteur dans la Description de l Empire de la Chine et de la Tatarie chinoise ( When the Translator Becomes Visible: An Analysis of Translator s Notes in the Description of the Chinese Empire and Chinese Tatary ), Wu Huiyi examines the ways in which 18 th -century translators working in domains ranging from political philosophy to medicine attempt to explain foreign things and concepts, and how they comment upon layers of meaning supposedly buried deep in the original texts, which leads them to enter into a critical discussion with the authors they are translating. Florence-Xiangyun Zhang s Traduction et révolution ( Translation and revolution ) explores how translation was supposed to