Translation studies have moved beyond the phase of discussing translatability and untranslatability of a source text from the linguistic perspective alone. Issues such as gender and language inequality have entered the scene, foregrounding translation as a contextual, political, and potentially transformative act. Insofar as translation has to do with a mode of encounter firmly embedded in the on-going disproportional distribution of knowledge and power, the relation between translation and original lies at the heart of translation as a performance, whereas the question of how to mobilise this relation becomes crucial to appropriating translation as a strategy.
This paperdraws upon the writings of Walter Benjamin, Judith Butler, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to look into translation asa practice wherein the source text is acted out through the translator and the audience. While these theorists have formulated distinct views in terms of the role of the translator, this...
Show moreTranslation studies have moved beyond the phase of discussing translatability and untranslatability of a source text from the linguistic perspective alone. Issues such as gender and language inequality have entered the scene, foregrounding translation as a contextual, political, and potentially transformative act. Insofar as translation has to do with a mode of encounter firmly embedded in the on-going disproportional distribution of knowledge and power, the relation between translation and original lies at the heart of translation as a performance, whereas the question of how to mobilise this relation becomes crucial to appropriating translation as a strategy.
This paperdraws upon the writings of Walter Benjamin, Judith Butler, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to look into translation asa practice wherein the source text is acted out through the translator and the audience. While these theorists have formulated distinct views in terms of the role of the translator, this paper will focus on the notion of failure, which is proposed by Spivak and more thoroughly developed by Hetain Patel and Yuyu Rau in their stage performance Who am I? Think Again. If translation concerns doingsomething as supposed to merely sayingsomething,this stage work shows that failure is constitutive to translation as a practice and that the performance of failure is productive to translation as a strategy.
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