Translation and Politics

The seemingly solitary and solipsistic work of the translator is in fact performed within a culture - that of the target language. It is performed, then, in a definite space and time. Spaces and times tend to carry their own worldviews, philosophies, ideologies. Through the translator, the original comes into contact with all of these, and many theorists perceive this coming together not as a friendly encounter but as a double act of aggression: the foreign text invades the receiving culture and its language; yet, at the same time, the same culture pushes the text violently into its own framework of ideology. The latter is a very natural and a very unavoidable phenomenon, since the receiving culture cannot shed its ideologies when capturing a new text into its sphere.

Aggression on the translation can be due not only to the above very general pressure. Translations - or simply the choice of the texts to be translated - can be influenced in a very direct way by the patron of the translator. In the old times, this role would be probably played by a king, a prince, a member of the clergy or an apparatchik, or a corresponding group within the society, who would either push the translator away from "politically incorrect" texts, or towards such a version of the translation that would satisfy the patron's political or religious agendas. This is why George Orwell, communist turned anticommunist, could only be read in Polish in underground publications in the 1980s. At times, the translation might be around instead of the censored original, as was the case of Bulgakov's Master and Margarita. This phenomenon must have been also on Leopold Tyrmand's mind when he wondered, in his Diary of 1954, if communists in Poland falsified translations of the classics.

Nowadays, the controlling patron might take the form of a publisher, who might want to influence the translator. This influence might have for its goal anything from shortening the original's lengthy descriptions of nature ("Ta Pearl Buck trochę przynudza, nie skróciłby jej pan trochę?") to moral or political censorship.

© Jan Rybicki 2005