It is now generally acknowledged that the “cultural turn” in the social sciences and the humanities that occurred in the 1990s changed Translation Studies (TS) forever. Culture had come to take center stage in translation analyses and discourses, rather than language viewed mainly in term of a system of linguistic exchange and communication. Language became subordinate to culture, both intertwined and often fused together in any serious discussion or analysis of translation. The ramifications were numerous for Translation Studies, as age-old notions and concepts such as equivalency, pure or standard language, distinctive binarisms and their implied hierarchy (original/translation; source-text/target text; word-for-word/sense-for-sense, etc.) were thrown into disarray. The study of post-colonial literatures is one of the fundamental areas through which the “cultural turn” made inroads into Translation Studies. By the very nature of this literature, written in colonial languages by post-colonial subjects, a host of issues often overlooked in the past, namely gender, ethnicity, sociology, linguistic alterity, identity, politics and ideology became prominent in translation research.

References

Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths, Gareth & Tiffin, Helen

1989 The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Postcolonial Literatures. London & New York: Routledge

Bandia, Paul F

2008 Translation as Reparation: Writing and Translation in Postcolonial Africa. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.  TSB

Mehrez, Samia

1992 “Translation and the Postcolonial Experience: The Francophone North African Text.” In Rethinking Translation, Lawrence Venuti (ed.), 120–138. London & New York: Routledge.  TSB

Niranjana, Tejaswini

1992 Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context. Berkeley: University of California Press.  TSB

Rushdie, Salman

1991 Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticisms, 1981–1991. London: Granta.

Shamma, Tarek

2009 “Postcolonial Studies and Translation Theory.” MonTI 1: 183–196  TSB

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty

1993 “The Politics of Translation.” In Outside in the Teaching Machine, 179–200. London & New York: Routledge.  TSB

Tymoczko, Maria

1999a “Post-Colonial Writing and Literary Translation.” In Post-Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice, Susan Bassnett & Harish Trivedi (eds), 19–40. London & New York: Routledge.  TSB

Tymoczko, Maria

1999b Translation in a Post-Colonial Context: Early Irish Literature in English Translation. Manchester, UK: St. Jerome Publishing.  TSB

Tymoczko, Maria

2000 “Translations of Themselves: the Contours of Postcolonial Fiction.” In Changing the Terms: Translating in the Postcolonial Era. Sherry Simon & Paul St-Pierre (eds), 147–163. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press.  TSB

Zabus, Chantal

1991 The African Palimpsest: Indigenization of Language in the West African Europhone Novel. Amsterdam & Atlanta: Rodopi.

Further reading

Bassnett, Susan & Harish Trivedi

(eds) 1999 Post-colonial Translation. Theory and practice. London & New York: Routledge  BoP

Cheyfitz, Eric

1991 The Poetics of Imperialism. Translation and Colonization from The Tempest to Tarzan. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.  TSB

Rafael, Vicente L

1988/1993 Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule. Rev. ed. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.  TSB

Simon, Sherry & Paul St-Pierre

(eds) 2000 Changing the Terms: Translating in the Postcolonial Era. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press.  TSB