Cultural translation and Britain’s minor literatures

Literary translation as considered from the Translation Studies perspective is a fascinating issue and a meeting point for various academic disciplines - literary studies, linguistics, culture studies, sociology. Translation of literature reveals itself to be a complicated and multifaceted process, which goes far beyond any matters of purely linguistic nature, gaining a complex cultural and ideological dimension. Even though the literary text itself serves here as a starting point, the analysis is not limited thereto, as it takes into account such matters as the place of translated literature in the target culture’s literary polysystem, reception of the target-culture text, the translator and their visibility and invisibility. Studies of literary translation are, therefore, not limited to explorations of the relationship between the target and the source texts, but serve as an important source of knowledge on the cultures which have produced these texts, and their interrelationship. Translation itself, in turn, is shown to be a process and a product that can never be simple and neutral, as they are both necessarily marked: by history, ideology and politics. Consequently, they provide us with important information about the world that they are part of. Such translation becomes a form of rewriting, ideology-driven and viewed from a number of different perspectives: feminist, gender studies, postcolonial, etc.

With regard to British literature (or rather British literatures) the perspective that seems particularly significant is the postcolonial take on translation, and especially the ideas of Maria Tymoczko, who shifts matters usually associated with the Empire’s former colonies to the home territory of the British Isles. For we need to be aware that British literature is not a coherent homogeneous entity, but a dynamic space of meeting and conflict between the dominant English culture and literature, and the so-called minor cultures and literatures - Irish, Scottish and Welsh - seeking to establish their own distinct identities. Tymoczko marks out an analogy between postcolonial literature and literature in translation - in both cases the author (and the translator) not only create a text, but also have to transpose a whole culture. The complexity of the notions of ”Irishness”, ”Scottishness” and ”Welshness” becomes particularly prominent when considered in the context of translation: the matter of ignoring minor-culture writers, the question of the inexpressibility of cultural and linguistic difference, the erasure of distinct identity, ways translators use to try to preserve and highlight that identity - all of these elements are a source of valuable information not only on (a given) translation, but also on the source-text culture and the reception thereof in the target culture. Our Institute offers courses on contemporary Scottish fiction in translation (where students become acquainted with major works of Scottish literature, analyse existing translations and translate fragments of texts themselves), as well as an MA seminar on cultural translation (focusing on Irish, Scottish and Welsh writing).

Such a culturally-oriented understanding and study of literary translation is then a comprehensive discipline, allowing one to develop various competencies and offering extensive insight into different literatures and cultures, including their ideological, historical and political contexts. Contemporary Translation Studies are inherently interdisciplinary, making us aware of the fundamental inseparability of the various phenomena shaping literature and literature in translation. As a result, this field of study is also highly satisfying - due to the broad scope of Translation Studies, we can focus on the aspects we find particularly interesting, whilst also gaining knowledge on how our interests function within the more extensive literary, linguistic and cultural context.