Against Translation: An Inquiry into the Poetics of Opposition and Renewal

Kelly Washbourne

Journal of Translation Studies ›› 2023, Vol. 7 ›› Issue (2) : 61-96.

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Journal of Translation Studies ›› 2023, Vol. 7 ›› Issue (2) : 61-96.

Against Translation: An Inquiry into the Poetics of Opposition and Renewal

  • Kelly Washbourne
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Abstract

The taking of a critical stance toward particular translations has a long history in translation criticism, but the position against translation itself has been studied only piecemeal and without an eye to the commonalities and divergencies in the various stances that motivate it or to its divergent nomenclature. “Resistance to translation” is often evoked as a talisman of a text’s untranslatability (e.g., Apter 2013), but it can denote a translatorial opposition: refusing to translate or else translating subversively. The stance against translation may be born of various resistances: feminist, indigenist, postcolonial, or anthropological. To Robinson’s (1996) translation as taboo (owing to the ontological and theological status of the source), we can add aesthetic objections registered by those against translation. Non-translation, as a wholesale policy or a philosophy, is sometimes absolute. I briefly catalog some forms of anti-translation poetics: pseudotranslation, displacement, accentedness, untranslation, intradução, detranslation, counter-translation, distranslation, dystranslation, hypertranslation, mistranslation, transcreation, translelation, non-translation, partial translation and half-translation, literary machine translation, rhizomatic translation, and transtranslation. Critical linguistic-ideological stances and subversions of translation proper, these projects or platforms are meant to produce or champion everything from censure or opacity, to reinscription (“counter-translation”) or greater clarity of the source.

Key words

non-translation / anti-translation / resistance / displacement / accentedness

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Kelly Washbourne. Against Translation: An Inquiry into the Poetics of Opposition and Renewal[J]. Journal of Translation Studies. 2023, 7(2): 61-96

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