NEGOTIATING THE BLANK: POWER AND ADEQUACY IN TRANSLATION STUDIES

Abstract

This essay reviews the major theoretical paradigms of translation and argues that what unites them is not a shared definition of transfer but a shared inability to supply one. From Jakobson's designation of interlingual transfer as translation proper, through the equivalence and systems theories of Nida, Vermeer, Even-Zohar, and Toury, to the cultural turn associated with Lefevere and Venuti and the postcolonial interventions of Niranjana, Asad, Cheyfitz, and Rangarajan, the discipline has repeatedly named a criterion of adequacy that it cannot then specify. This essay calls that unspecified criterion the “blank,” and argues that the “blank” is never left empty: it is filled by whoever holds the authority to fill it. Translation is accordingly proposed here as a movement from one set of circumstances to another whose defining feature is the negotiation of power, and the study of any structure of power in human society is therefore the study of translation. The argument is developed through cases that exceed the linguistic—scripture recitation without comprehension, the codification of proper cricketing technique, and the Bollywood adaptation of Shakespeare—and closes on machine and model translation, where the criteria of adequacy have been transferred to systems that cannot be asked to justify them.