Translation and cultural representation : globalizing texts, localizing cultures

Abstract

Intercultural contacts that allowed for cross-cultural fertilization were made possible through translation. Translation, in the main, has been understood as an activity that requires knowing the source and target languages to achieve the same informational and emotive effects of the source language in the target one. Yet, the search for equivalence led translators to realize that linguistic terms do not appear in isolation; they are part and parcel of a culture. Fairclough's stipulation, from a critical discourse analysis point of view, that language as discourse is invested with ideologies that organize socially shared attitudes, engages language in a complex relationship with social cognition, power and culture. The characterization of language as such leads to the production of a master discourse through which identity, similarity and difference are identified. Within the context of globalization, intercultural translation, particularly between cultures that are unequal politically and economically, adheres to a master discourse of translation and representation through which the other is received, accepted and/ or refused then reproduced. Consequently, source texts and people are transformed into signs familiar to the translating community constructing as such domestic identities of foreign cultures. Drawing on translation from Arabic, and in light of critical discourse analysis approaches, the translation of culture and the culture of translation, the research considers the case of Nawal El-Saadawi. The aim is to explore and examine how the constraints and disciplinary demands of the master discourse of translation and representation affect the translation traffic from Arabic into English. In a rapidly globalizing world, the ethics of translation postulate that translation should create a readership that is open to cultural differences for a true globalization of cultures, and improve cultural relations rather than being a tool for reinforcing and diffusing existing representations and images of one culture about the other