Martha P. Y. CHEUNG (Hong Kong Baptist University, China)

Academic Naval-gazing or a Postcolonial Imperative? – Pages from the Notebook of a Translation Anthologist

What are the excitement, burden and responsibilities of a postcolonial translator and/or translation scholar? The excitement, I believe, lies in a heightened awareness of what we can do and achieve as a translator/translation scholar. We now have a lot more roles to play than the traditional ones of an efficient cross-lingual cross-cultural communicator, or a dispassionate, professional manufacturer of cultural products. We can choose to be a cultural mediator, an innovative image-maker, or an architect-cum-builder of a project of political and or ideological import, to name but just a few of the new possibilities open to us. Of course, possibilities carry with them the burden of choice, of divided loyalties. We might have been freed from the confines of a mentality dictated by slavish loyalty to the source text, and we might have been rid of the naïve belief in translation as an innocent activity, but we often find ourselves pulled in different directions by conflicting values, and having to make difficult value judgments. The agency of a translator, something of which no postcolonial translator is ignorant, entails responsibilities, the first and foremost being the responsibility to know why one is doing certain things in the first place, and to be articulate about it.
In this presentation, I shall explore the burden and responsibilities of a postcolonial translator and translation scholar by analyzing how positionality and agency function in a specific translation project. In particular, I will give an account of how I initiated and brought to completion a translation project aimed to serve an agenda of cultural activism. The project is the compilation of an anthology of texts (most of which are translated into English for the first time) registering the views, reflections, and thoughts about translation in China, from ancient times to the early twentieth century. Volume one of this anthology, entitled An Anthology of Chinese Discourse on Translation, Volume 1: From Earliest Times to the Buddhist Project, was published in 2006, and the sequel, entitled An Anthology of Chinese Discourse on Translation, Volume 2: From the 13th Century to the Beginning of the 20th Century, is under preparation. Discussion is focused on a single project because it telescopes many of the ethical, ideological and political issues which a postcolonial scholar has to handle. Reflections on this project therefore would teach about larger issues of representation, mediation and intervention that are of common concern to anyone interested in compiling translation anthologies.