Karen Bennett
Karen BENNETT has an MA and PhD in Translation Studies from the University of Lisbon. She is Associate Professor at Nova University in Lisbon, lecturing on the various translation courses, and a researcher with the Centre for English, Translation and Anglo-Portuguese Studies (CETAPS), where she coordinates the Translationality strand. Within Translation Studies, she is interested in: translation theory and history, the transmission of knowledge across languages and cultures, performativity, multilingualism and (inter-)semiotics.
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Books by Karen Bennett
The first section looks at the role played by translation in the construction of contemporary identities, both horizontally (through translingual processes) and vertically (through temporal transposition). In a world characterised by physical migrations and instantaneous data transmission, identity is increasingly hybrid and translingual, forged at the interface of cultures through an effort of will and memory. Whether English is experienced as an oppressive or liberating force, as a mediator between localized realities, or as a rich resource to be drawn upon at will, the variety used is likely to be tinged with the sounds and forms of other linguistic realities and punctuated with nodes of untranslatability. Indeed, exploring just what may or may not be rendered in English in this process of self-translation constitutes one of the central aims of this section.
Hybrid identities continue to play an important role in the second section, but now the attention shifts to translation in the classic sense, namely, the difficulties faced by translators in their attempts to render the miscegenated discourse of translinguals in a third language. The issue is discussed both in broad terms, with reference to the ongoing debate about world literature and (un-)translatability, and also more specifically, in relation to concrete problems arising in particular texts. One innovative feature is the attention given to the role of the multilingual reader, whose communicative needs may differ considerably from those of the usual target reader of translations as conventionally conceived.
The final section draws together these different understandings of ‘translation’ to explore the implications of it for language change in different cultural settings. The evidence suggests that the process is by no means unidirectional: for although English, as the prestige vehicle of global communication, undoubtedly leaves its mark upon all the languages with which it comes into contact, it is also being influenced by them too. The extent to which this may ultimately result in the breakdown of English into mutually unintelligible varieties, and the implications of such a development for the translation economy, particularly in the light of the new nationalisms of the Brexit/Trump era, form the subject of the book’s conclusion.
Papers by Karen Bennett
This paper urges the need for a critical approach to the study of academic translation in order to problematize the very vehicle through which knowledge is construed and transmitted. Most of the methods currently favoured in Translation Studies are themselves grounded in the empiricist paradigm and thus shed little light upon the issue, possibly even contributing to the process of epistemological colonization. The paper therefore describes a method of textual analysis called rhetorical criticism, which has long been used in the USA to explore the unacknowledged or unconscious assumptions underpinning texts of all kinds, offering suggestions for how it could be adapted to enable its application to the study of academic or philosophical texts in translation.
Smith’s translations for Tavistock Publications, were not domesticated at all. Despite the fact that the originals are grounded in a non-empiricist theory of knowledge and use terms drawn from a universe of discourse that would have been completely alien in the English-speaking world, these translations closely follow the patterns of
the French, with few or no concessions to the target reader’s knowledge and expectations. This paper analyses passages from Sheridan Smith’s English translations of Les mots et les choses and L’archéologie du savoir in order to discuss the long-term effects of this translation strategy. It then goes on to compare and assess two very different translations of Foucault’s lecture, L’ Ordre du discours (1970), an early one by Rupert Swyer (1971), which brings the text to the English reader, and a later one by Ian McLeod (1981), which obliges the reader to go to the text. The paper concludes by reiterating the need for Anglophone academic culture to open up to foreign perspectives, and suggests, following Goethe (Book of West and East, 1819) that new epistemes are best introduced gradually in order to avoid alienating or confusing a public that might not be ready for them.
However, as we move away from the centre towards the periphery, we find that those values become weaker, and may enter into conflict with another moral code, which is usually more traditional in nature, though no less coherent. Indeed, in some parts of the world, it is those traditional values that actually hold sway in local universities, raising serious problems for academic mobility and the internationalization of knowledge.
The very concept of plagiarism is also full of inherent contradictions, caused, at least in part, by historical tensions generated by the passage from one kind of society to the other. Vestiges of the Gemeinschaft continue to penetrate all aspects of modern university culture, ranging from teaching practices (the persistence of imitatio in academic writing courses) and hierarchical relations (the power balance inherent in the tutor/student dynamic) to the very philosophy of knowledge underlying modern science (where the rhetorical implications of the citation procedure sit uncomfortably alongside a metadiscourse of transcendental truth).
Hence, this chapter argues that, in a context of increased globalization, there is a need for a deeper understanding of the various dynamics at work in this complex concept.
This article argues that the shift from a performative to a representational understanding of meaning in Western culture was intimately bound up with translation mechanisms, which significantly altered the way in which the sacred language was understood. In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, two major paradigm shifts were necessary before the process was complete: the fusion of Judaism with Hellenistic philosophy in 1st century Alexandria, which introduced the all-important notion of mediation into the Jewish worldview, legitimizing the translation of sacred texts and enabling Christ to be understood as the incarnation, or translation into flesh, of the divine logos; and the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, which made the scriptures into the ultimate source of religious authority, shifting the emphasis away from the ritualistic utterance of the divine word to contemplation of its sense. This had tremendous implications upon all aspects of society, enabling the development of modern science and ultimately leading to the desacralisation of the Western worldview.
Now there are signs that the process may be going into reverse. In the ongoing debate about untranslatability (cf. Cassin 2014; Apter 2008), performativity is reclaimed as a central feature of philosophical texts, challenging the fundamental tenets underpinning the hegemonic understanding of how knowledge is constructed and acquired.
The paper looks at several moments in history when these two rhetorical attitudes came into conflict, finishing with a brief discussion of the rhetorical dilemma facing humanities authors in Portugal today in the context of globalization.
The first section looks at the role played by translation in the construction of contemporary identities, both horizontally (through translingual processes) and vertically (through temporal transposition). In a world characterised by physical migrations and instantaneous data transmission, identity is increasingly hybrid and translingual, forged at the interface of cultures through an effort of will and memory. Whether English is experienced as an oppressive or liberating force, as a mediator between localized realities, or as a rich resource to be drawn upon at will, the variety used is likely to be tinged with the sounds and forms of other linguistic realities and punctuated with nodes of untranslatability. Indeed, exploring just what may or may not be rendered in English in this process of self-translation constitutes one of the central aims of this section.
Hybrid identities continue to play an important role in the second section, but now the attention shifts to translation in the classic sense, namely, the difficulties faced by translators in their attempts to render the miscegenated discourse of translinguals in a third language. The issue is discussed both in broad terms, with reference to the ongoing debate about world literature and (un-)translatability, and also more specifically, in relation to concrete problems arising in particular texts. One innovative feature is the attention given to the role of the multilingual reader, whose communicative needs may differ considerably from those of the usual target reader of translations as conventionally conceived.
The final section draws together these different understandings of ‘translation’ to explore the implications of it for language change in different cultural settings. The evidence suggests that the process is by no means unidirectional: for although English, as the prestige vehicle of global communication, undoubtedly leaves its mark upon all the languages with which it comes into contact, it is also being influenced by them too. The extent to which this may ultimately result in the breakdown of English into mutually unintelligible varieties, and the implications of such a development for the translation economy, particularly in the light of the new nationalisms of the Brexit/Trump era, form the subject of the book’s conclusion.
This paper urges the need for a critical approach to the study of academic translation in order to problematize the very vehicle through which knowledge is construed and transmitted. Most of the methods currently favoured in Translation Studies are themselves grounded in the empiricist paradigm and thus shed little light upon the issue, possibly even contributing to the process of epistemological colonization. The paper therefore describes a method of textual analysis called rhetorical criticism, which has long been used in the USA to explore the unacknowledged or unconscious assumptions underpinning texts of all kinds, offering suggestions for how it could be adapted to enable its application to the study of academic or philosophical texts in translation.
Smith’s translations for Tavistock Publications, were not domesticated at all. Despite the fact that the originals are grounded in a non-empiricist theory of knowledge and use terms drawn from a universe of discourse that would have been completely alien in the English-speaking world, these translations closely follow the patterns of
the French, with few or no concessions to the target reader’s knowledge and expectations. This paper analyses passages from Sheridan Smith’s English translations of Les mots et les choses and L’archéologie du savoir in order to discuss the long-term effects of this translation strategy. It then goes on to compare and assess two very different translations of Foucault’s lecture, L’ Ordre du discours (1970), an early one by Rupert Swyer (1971), which brings the text to the English reader, and a later one by Ian McLeod (1981), which obliges the reader to go to the text. The paper concludes by reiterating the need for Anglophone academic culture to open up to foreign perspectives, and suggests, following Goethe (Book of West and East, 1819) that new epistemes are best introduced gradually in order to avoid alienating or confusing a public that might not be ready for them.
However, as we move away from the centre towards the periphery, we find that those values become weaker, and may enter into conflict with another moral code, which is usually more traditional in nature, though no less coherent. Indeed, in some parts of the world, it is those traditional values that actually hold sway in local universities, raising serious problems for academic mobility and the internationalization of knowledge.
The very concept of plagiarism is also full of inherent contradictions, caused, at least in part, by historical tensions generated by the passage from one kind of society to the other. Vestiges of the Gemeinschaft continue to penetrate all aspects of modern university culture, ranging from teaching practices (the persistence of imitatio in academic writing courses) and hierarchical relations (the power balance inherent in the tutor/student dynamic) to the very philosophy of knowledge underlying modern science (where the rhetorical implications of the citation procedure sit uncomfortably alongside a metadiscourse of transcendental truth).
Hence, this chapter argues that, in a context of increased globalization, there is a need for a deeper understanding of the various dynamics at work in this complex concept.
This article argues that the shift from a performative to a representational understanding of meaning in Western culture was intimately bound up with translation mechanisms, which significantly altered the way in which the sacred language was understood. In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, two major paradigm shifts were necessary before the process was complete: the fusion of Judaism with Hellenistic philosophy in 1st century Alexandria, which introduced the all-important notion of mediation into the Jewish worldview, legitimizing the translation of sacred texts and enabling Christ to be understood as the incarnation, or translation into flesh, of the divine logos; and the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, which made the scriptures into the ultimate source of religious authority, shifting the emphasis away from the ritualistic utterance of the divine word to contemplation of its sense. This had tremendous implications upon all aspects of society, enabling the development of modern science and ultimately leading to the desacralisation of the Western worldview.
Now there are signs that the process may be going into reverse. In the ongoing debate about untranslatability (cf. Cassin 2014; Apter 2008), performativity is reclaimed as a central feature of philosophical texts, challenging the fundamental tenets underpinning the hegemonic understanding of how knowledge is constructed and acquired.
The paper looks at several moments in history when these two rhetorical attitudes came into conflict, finishing with a brief discussion of the rhetorical dilemma facing humanities authors in Portugal today in the context of globalization.
This chapter examines the way that epistemicide operates in the current academic context. It suggests that the primary mechanism is discursive – implicit in the translation, revision and editing procedures used to bring academic papers into line with the dominant norms – but that this is backed up by a series of non-discursive mechanisms that reinforce the hegemony of EAD and, by extension, the empiricist paradigm, through “quality-control” and, crucially, resource allocation procedures. The result, it is argued, will be an epistemological monoculture of global proportions in which alternative knowledges are systematically eliminated in the interests of ‘quality’.
As traders and transporters of economic and cultural assets, semiperipheral countries are also translators par excellence. For example, Cronin (2003:76-103) has shown how Ireland’s semiperipheral location and status with regards to the UK and to Europe enabled it to become “an important node in the new global economy of translation” (Idem: 81), today dominating the market in the software localization industry. Portugal plays a similar role with regard to the transmission of knowledge. Not only has it traditionally mobilised its intermediary status to transport Western science to the Portuguese-speaking parts of Africa, it has recently become active in the opposite direction; major research projects in the area of epistemology organised by the Centre for Social Studies at Coimbra University have been instrumental in bringing “Third World” knowledges to the attention of the West.
This paper examines the translational stages involved in this process, as indigenous knowledges are rendered firstly into the former colonial language (in this case, Portuguese) before being translated into English for wider distribution.
David Walton’s book, Doing Cultural Theory (Sage, 2012) seems to be a conscious attempt to right this balance. Indeed, he smartly dispatches the usual foundational myth in his first chapter, and then proceeds to recount a very different narrative, one that focuses not upon subcultures and identities, but upon signifying systems and how they create, rather than represent, the world we inhabit. The line he traces is predominantly French (passing from Saussure to Barthes, Althusser, Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Lyotard, Baudrillard, etc) and organised into a series of self-contained chapters with titles like ‘Semiotics’, ‘Ideology’, ‘Postructuralism’, ‘Psychoanalysis’ and ‘Discourse and Power’. Each one contains a ‘help file’, summary of key points and indications for further reading, as well as practice exercises, which, significantly, make use of Anglo-Saxon cultural references in order to make these difficult theories intelligible to a novice Anglophone readership brought up on a diet of empiricism and linguistic realism.
Indeed, Walton systematically engages with concepts that have been problematic to translate into English (such as Lacan’s notions of ‘l’imaginaire’ and ‘le réel’, which are by no means encapsulated by their English cognates), presenting them in a way that an English speaker with no knowledge of French can understand. In the absence of new scholarly translations of these key authors, Doing Cultural Theory is a very successful attempt at bridging the gap between two almost incommensurable epistemological paradigms.
This polarization is reflected in the practice of translation too. Technical translators using CAT tools handle verbal segments so decontextualised that they can be transferred between documents virtually intact, irrespective of purpose or medium. Yet language professionals are also asked to work with texts that assert their materiality forcefully, often through intersemiotic dialogues that defy the facile separation of content from form. This iconicity is evident not only in works of art but also in everyday rhetorical artefacts like advertisements, websites, children’s books, comic strips and videogames, and is fundamental to specialist areas like subtitling, sign interpreting and audiodescription.
These developments bring implications for translation theory, of course. Disembodiment represents translatability taken to extremes – the victory of the transcendental signified, arguably the culmination of the process to which Western (Christian) translation has been tending since Cicero and Jerome. Materiality, on the other hand, asserts the opposite: the importance of the sign vehicle and the ultimate inseparability of signifier and signified.
This paper argues that translators need to be trained to deal with the new iconicity. The structuralist insistence on the arbitrariness of the sign is untenable in a world where the verbal is no longer privileged and communication takes place using multiple semiotic resources.
Indeed, translation itself needs to be reconceptualised to take account of the sheer physicality of multimodal encounters. Drawing upon concepts such as unlimited semiosis (Peirce), iconicity, performativity (Austin, Searle, Butler etc) and translationality (Robinson), I suggest a theoretical framework for Translation Studies that no longer privileges the verbal but instead assumes multimodality as the default mode of communication, exploring some of the challenges that this will raise.