This article advances the notion of translatophilia, defined as the fetishisation of translation in hypercorrection of its perceived marginalisation. Using how Translation Studies scholars have engaged with the copyright regime in postpositivist fashion as a case in point, it argues that in the course of resisting structuralist notions of originality and authorship, Translation Studies has ironically come to fetishise its object of study as the privileged site of a new individuality and personality – romantic myths it initially set out to dispel. In light of the recent ‘outward turn’ in Translation Studies, the article identifies sources of anxiety in the field that have pushed it toward extreme theorisation. It proposes that before Translation Studies makes its outward turn, it is pertinent for it to first turn inward to combat its translatophiliac tendencies.
Translation has become something of a fetish. The notion of fetish has been developed along several trajectories, namely anthropology, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. This article follows Cintron’s use of the concept in his book Democracy as Fetish. For Cintron (2020, 57), democracy has become fetishised in the sense that the terms that constitute “democratic rhetorics” (equality, freedom, liberty, self-determination, and so forth) bear an “innate prestige in the hierarchy of values and virtues.” Imbued with a universality, these terms “announce an inclusivity that has no boundaries and a totality that similarly has no bounds,” and the progressive left “continues to fetishise the inclusivity of universalist terms by occulting from their view mechanisms of exclusion. Hence they do not see below liberal democracy and the democratic rhetorics” (58).
References
International convention
Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (Paris Act 1971, as amended 1979)
Cases and court rulings
Designer Guilds Ltd. v. Russell Williams (Textiles) Ltd
[2000] 1 WLR 2416
Infopaq International A/S v. Danske Dagblades Forening (C-5/08
[2009] ECDR 16 [CJEU Fourth Chamber]
Ladbroke (Football) Ltd v William Hill (Football) Ltd
[1964] 1 WLR 273
University of London Press v. University Tutorial Press
[1916] 2 Ch 601
Other references
Aplin, Tanya, and Jennifer Davis
2017Intellectual Property Law: Text, Cases, and Materials. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Barthes, Roland
(1957) 2012Mythologies [orig. Mythologies
]. Translated by Richard Howard and Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang.
Bassnett, Susan
2014aTranslation. Abingdon: Routledge.
Bassnett, Susan
2014b “Translation Studies at a Cross-Roads.” In The Known Unknowns of Translation Studies, edited by Elke Brems, Reine Meylaerts, and Luc van Doorslaer, 17–27. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Bassnett, Susan
2017 “Foreword.” In Translation and Rewriting in the Age of Post-Translation Studies, edited by Edwin Gentzler, viii–x. Abingdon: Routledge.
Bassnett, Susan
2018 “Questioning Authority and Authenticity: The Creative Translations of Josephine Balmer.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Literary Translation, edited by Jean Boase-Beier, Lina Fisher, and Hiroko Furukawa, 333–350. London: Palgrave.
Bassnett, Susan, and Peter Bush
eds.2007The Translator as Writer. London: Continuum.
Bennett, Jane
2010Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press.
Bently, Lionel, and Brad Sherman
2014Intellectual Property Law. 4th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
2014The Legal Environment of Translation. Abingdon: Routledge.
Chesterman, Andrew
2016Memes of Translation: The Spread of Ideas in Translation Theory. Revised ed. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Cintron, Ralph
2020Democracy as Fetish. University Park: Penn State University Press.
Coates, Jenefer
2006 “Vladimir Nabokov.” In Translation – Theory and Practice: A Historical Reader, edited by Daniel Weissbort and Astradur Eysteinsson, 376–392. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lee, Tong King
2020a “Translation and Copyright: Toward a Distributed View on Originality and Authorship.” The Translator 26 (3): 241–256.
Lee, Tong King
2020b “Ideology.” In The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, 3rd ed., edited by Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha, 252–256. Abingdon: Routledge.
Lefevere, André
2017Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame. Abingdon: Routledge.
Litwin, Maciej
2020Review of Contra Instrumentalism: A Translation Polemic, by Lawrence Venuti. The Translator 26 (2): 209–216.
Perteghella, Manuela, and Eugenia Loffredo
eds.2006Translation and Creativity: Perspectives on Creative Writing and Translation Studies. London: Continuum.
Pym, Anthony
2009 “The Translator as Non-Author, and I Am Sorry about That.” In The Translator as Author: Perspectives on Literary Translation, edited by Claudia Buffagni, Beatrice Garzelli, and Serenella Zanotti, 31–44. Berlin: Lit Verlag.
Reynolds, Matthew
2019 “Introduction.” In Prismatic Translation, edited by Matthew Reynolds, 1–18. Cambridge: Legenda.
Ricketson, Sam
1987The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works: 1886–1986. London: Centre for Commercial Law Studies, Queen Mary College/Kluwer.
