Postcolonial Theory

The cultural studies have made an impact on the translation process as a social and cultural practice, but also as a practice of diffusion and relocation of cultural goods that “allows us to situate linguistic transfer within the multiple ‘post’ realities of today: poststructuralism, postcolonialism and postmodernism.” (Simon, 1996 cited in Munday 2008: 131) Moreover, postcolonialism, as generally defined by Munday (2008: 131), is the term utilised to describe the studies of the history and culture of the former colonies and their conquerors, the opposition towards the European imperialists and the power relationships among them. Translation is closely linked to postcolonialism as both postcolonial writing and translation are influenced by

Thus, postcolonial approaches are mainly focused on examining the impact of translation on a colonised culture and the consequences of this act of homogenisation.

What also constitutes a common reference point for both translation and postcolonial theory, is that of power relations, equal, or mostly, unequal. The most important contribution of the postcolonial approaches is their research about the effects of power that explain the power relations in the production and reception of translation. Postcolonial translation engages in power relations through its practice and is susceptible in developing inequalities between different languages against “the one master-language of our postcolonial world, English.” (Bassnett and Trivedi, 1998: 13)

In addition, translations into English aim for the effect of fluency of the original author, emphasizing this way the superiority of the hegemonic languages in relation to the colonized ones and thus reinforcing their individualism. However, it is evident that the role of translation in promoting colonisation comes with a price, as it maintains inequalities among languages, races and people. In his article, Xie (2009: 126) supports this argument by stating

Rewriting, moreover, is restricted by power relations and a triple mechanism of ideology, patronage and poetics. The effect of the cultural turn in Descriptive Translation Studies is also intensified by the successive emergence of the feminist translation studies, which promotes feminine visibility and paves the way for the feminist and, generally, the gender discourse. Finally, the postcolonial translation studies pinpoint the notion of cultural hegemony in translation and cultural individuality as its object. Thus, the cultural turn helps to draw the attention on the extralinguistic and extraliterary factors that operate simultaneously throughout the course of translation by “revealing the possibilities offered by the study of translation as a mode of representation of culture and as an active player in the dialectic of competing cultural discourses within and across languages and national cultures.” (Marinetti in Gambier and van Doorslaer, 2011: