The Pushing-Hands of Translation and its Theory

In memoriam Martha Cheung, 1953-2013

Douglas Robinson, Douglas Robinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317450580
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Translating & Interpreting
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book presents an East-West dialogue of leading translation scholars responding to and developing Martha Cheung's "pushing-hands" method of translation studies. Pushing-hands was an idea Martha began exploring in the last four years of her life, and only had time to publish at article length in 2012. The concept of pushing-hands suggests a promising line of inquiry into the problem of conflict in translation. Pushing-hands opens a new vista for translation scholars to understand and explain how to develop an awareness of non-confrontational, alternative ways to handle translation problems or problems related to translation activities that are likely to give rise to tension and conflict. The book is a timely contribution to celebrate Martha's work and also to move the conversation forward. Despite being somewhat tentative and experimental, it probes into how to enable and develop dynamic interaction between and reciprocal determinism of different hands involved in the process of translation.

Part 1

Backgrounds

1 The mediated nature of knowledge and the pushing-hands approach to research on translation history¹

Martha P.Y. Cheung

This article focuses on the mediated nature of knowledge as the key theoretical issue pertaining to research on translation history. It is widely admitted that knowledge in the humanities is not impersonal but situated. Especially heavily mediated is knowledge in the domain of translation history, the difference in time, space and language being particularly difficult challenges for researchers in their attempts to interpret and represent the past. The article offers a critical overview of various established ways of dealing with historical knowledge, and presents what the author regards as a most fruitful mode of researching translation history. Borrowing a term from Chinese martial art, I call it the “pushing-hands” (tuishou 推手) approach to translation history, which seeks to bring the past and the present into dialogic engagement and offer an alternative to the dichotomous thinking characterizing much humanities research today.

Keywords: translation history; pushing-hands; interventionist historiography; self-reflective historiography; translation in China; taiji

Translation history and the mediated nature of knowledge

It is widely admitted today that knowledge in the humanities is not disinterested or impersonal but situated. In both the processing and the production of knowledge, a researcher is acted upon by contextual pressures, influenced by prevailing intellectual trends, anchored in tradition or torn between traditions, and shaped by his/her own training, by ideology and societal prejudices.

If knowledge is mediated, this is all the more true of historical knowledge. In the words of L.P. Hartley, “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there” (1953: 9). The road to the past, it should be added, is never a thoroughfare. At times it is even a lost track, and more often than not it is lined with almost illegible signposts and traversed by crossroads and false trails. But most heavily mediated is knowledge gained in the domain of translation history. Dealing with the historical material in this domain, researchers have to overcome the problems of interpretation caused not only by the distance of time but also by the many formidable linguistic and cultural frontiers negotiated by translators in the past. The point can, of course, be made that the long history of translation is still to be written, or, to be precise, still to be completed (Santoyo 2006: 12). Nevertheless, the partial historical studies on translation that are available speak of cultural intersections and intercultural (mis)communication, of cultures coming into contact, conflict and competition with one another, seeking to overcome differences, engaged in negotiation or fruitful interaction, or locked in power struggle before one culture is finally conquered by or integrates with another. In short, historical studies on translation depict sites of vigorous contestations. They show how overdetermined works of translation often are – by the producers of grand narratives of national identity as much as by the marginalized groups, the hybrid groups, and by invaders, explorers, travellers, colonial administrators, missionaries, linguists, anthropologists, spies and other such information-gatherers. They also show that translations are often sites of mutual appropriation and of deep ambivalence on the issue of national and cultural identity.

Yet translation also impinges on historical research more generally, as a further mediating factor. Historical research of all types requires translation, whether due to linguistic discontinuities after the dethronement or loss of a lingua franca (Latin, for example), to the birth of new vernaculars, or to loss or dispersal of source materials when a civilization has been severely disrupted or destroyed. Historical documents or excavated historical materials have to be processed through intralingual translation (such as that between classical Chinese and modern Chinese), interlingual translation, or intersemiotic translation (for example, from inscriptions on prehistoric earthenware to modern written Chinese).² In addition, they have to be elucidated by annotations, introductions, bibliographical studies, and other related discourses. Through these different forms of translation and commentary, then, multiple layers of mediation accumulate.

The existence of a body of texts so strongly mediated by translation deserves attention, especially since translated historical materials tend to be used as a matter of course and without reflection on their translatedness, both in the discipline of history and in historical translation studies. Furthermore, while there is heavy reliance on translated material in historical work, it is unclear what the status of this body of material is. Is it primary material? Is it secondary material? Or does it lie somewhere in between, in a hyphenated category of its own? Should it be dismissed or ignored, as it often will be by those who know the source language? A pragmatist would probably say that the answer to this depends on the linguistic ability of the individual researcher, the state of research in a particular topic, and the type of research involved, but a theoretical question remains: Where historical research on translation and comparative historiography are concerned, is the knowledge derived from translated sources deemed sufficient to allow a researcher [to] speak with authority on the subject? Judy Wakabayashi has discussed this in the context of “the relative merits of emic (insider) and etic (outsider) historiographies” (2007: 9–10). It may be argued that the outsider (etic) approach is necessary under certain circumstances but is at best an expedient measure. However, the categories of “insider” and “outsider”, like those of primary and secondary material, source language and target language, are often problematic, especially if a researcher is bilingual or multilingual and has bicultural or multicultural affinities. Wakabayashi’s own profile – an Australian with knowledge of the Japanese language and culture and many years of experience of researching the history of translation in Japan – effectively brings out this fuzziness of boundaries. In addition, through her experience of conducting comparative historical research on translation traditions to which she is not bonded by language, Wakabayashi is able to comment reflectively on the limitations of relying on secondary material, as well as the relative advantages of an outsider’s perspective (see Wakabayashi 2005).

The idea that meaning is interpreted, constructed and refracted by the political or ideological stance of a researcher and his/her view of history is unsettling to many historians because it challenges, at a fundamental level, the very existence of the discipline. Their resistance is vehement. The strongest objection is to the emphasis on the textuality of written history, on the notion that history has to be narrativized, structured by a plot and sustained by imagination, and hence is a narrative rather than an objective, impartial recounting of historical events belonging to the order of the real and presented in the belief that immanent in these events is a structure of meaning that can be directly inferred.³ In the Chinese contexts, this notion is perceived by some historians as opening the floodgates to relativistic interpretations, undermining the discipline’s claims to historical truth and to the objectivity of historical knowledge, and thus destroying its very raison d’être. E.H. Carr’s remark, made in 1964, still represents the views of many historians of China today, including those researching translation history: “It does not follow that, because a mountain appears to take on different shapes from different angles of vision, it has objectively either no shape at all or an infinity of shapes” (Carr 1964: 26–7).⁴ In response to the challenge of relativism, there has been a strong insistence that facts can speak for themselves and that the historian’s duty is to find better ways of ascertaining that the facts are facts, not fabrications, and to work out better methods of reducing distortion. It is worth noting that even now, in the discipline of sinology at least, “the model of scholarship that most students of China find most convincing [is] the faithful translation, into either modern Chinese or some other language, of an authentic document” (Saussy 2001a: 3). Clearly, the connection between historical knowledge and translation is deep and inseparable. Not only is historical knowledge heavily dependent on translation, but both also share the same epistemology; just as the reliability of historical “facts” is assumed, so too is the reliability of translation as a “faithful” reflection of a factual “original”. But that epistemology, as we have already noted, is very much in crisis.

Responses to the challenge posed by the mediated nature of historical knowledge

Depending on their epistemological stance, historians have refined traditional methods or devised alternative methods of writing history and conducting historical research. These methods, both traditional and alternative, have also been adopted by researchers in translation studies,⁵ and are summarized below.

Ensuring a more accurate understanding of history by guarding against bias

This approach is grounded on the assumption that there is a reality out there. With rigour, and by reading against the grain and taking into account the largest possible number of parameters, bias and distortions can be reduced, mistakes corrected and “the best possible reconstruction of the past ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen [ist]’ [how it really was]” (D’hulst 2001: 31) can be achieved.⁶ In the Chinese context, particularly strong advocates of this approach are those sinologists who conduct philological studies of newly unearthed bamboo scrolls of ancient canonical texts, or inscriptions on oracle bones and other artefacts. They also include sinologists who work on data generated by the latest scientific advances.⁷ A similar epistemological position prevails in historical translation studies. The empirical approach adopted in much of the historical research conducted in the last few decades by the descriptive translation studies school of researchers – evidenced in their works on, for example, pseudotranslation, changing translational norms in time and space, and the ways that translations function as facts of the target culture – are all rigorous attempts to read against the grain, focusing on neglected translation phenomena and unexplored terrains of the past in order to make fuller sense of the more elusive facts of history. Even if the postmodernist paradigm of historiography will criticize this approach as showing a naïve belief in empiricism, it can actually produce effective counter-discourse. Efforts to produce such counterdiscourse can be seen, for example, in the movements to rewrite history, whether literary history or translation history, in the last few decades in the PRC.⁸

The interventionist approach

This approach is adopted mostly in the historical research conducted by postcolonial and feminist translation scholars. It contests the dominant accounts of the translation history of any group, culture or people belonging to the weaker side of the power divide. Aside from articulating the history of those who have been silenced in the past, there is also a twofold purpose in the present: (1) to help change the mindset of the subjugated – that the state of subjugation (for example of the colonized by the colonizer, of the economically and/or intellectually marginalized by those from the centre, of women by men) is natural; and (2) to disrupt or eventually end the perpetuation of asymmetrical power relations. For postcolonial translation scholars, the periods to be covered include the age of European colonialism and imperialism, the postcolonial eras of former colonies, and even the late twentieth century where neocolonialism is rife. Their strategy is to lay bare the mechanisms by which translation was used to interpellate the colonized as colonial subjects (Austen 1990; Niranjana 1992). They also expose as constructs a panoply of distorted, exaggerated, idealized, mysterious and mystifying images of dominated cultures that have come to function as “realities” for both dominant and dominated peoples (Said 1978; Jacquemond 1992; Wang 2008). Their objects of research also include textual manoeuvres of resistance in translations in the colonial contexts (Rafael 1988; Tymoczko 1999). Political intervention may also be pursued by explicitly replacing Eurocentric structural models for the writing of history (that is, models based on the nation as the organizing principle, or categories for periodization that disfigure the contours of local historical events) with categories that bring out sharply the outline of local events (see, for example, Bastin 2006: 114–25). Replace “the colonized” with “women”, “Eurocentric” with “gender-biased”, and extend the period of historical research to the entire stretch of human history, or any segments of it where inequality of the sexes was particularly pernicious, and we get a sense of the scope (potential or actual) of the research projects undertaken by feminist translation historians (Chamberlain 1992; Tharu and Lalita 1993: 1–40; Kadish and Massardier-Kenney 1994; Simon 1996: esp. 39–85, 111–133; Fang 2009).

The self-reflective approach

This approach acknowledges the interpreted and mediated nature of knowledge and the relativism of meaning by means of sustained self-questioning. In the succinct summary of Clara Foz:

From the positivist movement inherited from the nineteenth century to Marxist or structuralist scientism that marked the middle of the twentieth century – the claim of a historical truth, modeled on the idealized image of the natural sciences, driven by the scientific philosophy – the historical discipline has experienced a very thorough questioning of itself.

(Foz 2006: 132)

This approach also devises methods to make situated knowledge meaningful to those situated differently. An illuminating example is Paul A. Cohen’s China Unbound: Evolving Perspectives on the Chinese Past (2003). Combining historical research with historiography, China Unbound is interspersed with reflective chapters on larger issues such as different ways of knowing the past (ibid.: especially 200–220). Its introduction comments retrospectively on the strengths and limitations of the major approaches Cohen has used to conduct historica...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Editor’s introduction: pushing hands with Martha Cheung
• PART 1 Backgrounds
• PART 2 Practical applications
• PART 3 Theoretical applications
• References
• Index