Reframing Narratives in Translation

Posted by on Mart 7, 2007 in Kuram

(Aşağıda, çeviribilimci Mona Baker’ın 1 Mart 2007 tarihinde, Boğaziçi Üniversitesi’nde gerçekleştirdiği “Translation and Conflict” konulu toplantı sırasında dağıtılan yardımcı metin yer almaktadır. Metin yazarının izniyle yayınlanmıştır.)

A Narrative Perspective on Translation and Interpreting in Situations of Conflict

Narrative(s): not an optional mode of communication but the principal mode by which we experience the world; constitute rather than merely represent reality; diffuse: not necessarily articulated in a single text or stretch of language; discursively elaborated, in the main, but may also be elaborated through other means, for example visually.

Four types of narrative: ‘ontological’ (personal), public, conceptual and meta-narratives (Somers & Gibson 1994).

1. Ontological/Personal Narratives: personal stories that we tell ourselves about our place in the world and about our own personal history.
2. Public: stories elaborated by and circulating among social and institutional formations larger than the individual, such as the family, religious or educational institution, the media, and the nation.
3. Conceptual (disciplinary): stories and explanations that scholars in any field elaborate for themselves and others about their object of inquiry.
4. Meta-narratives: narratives “in which we are embedded as contemporary actors in history … Progress, Decadence, Industrialization, Enlightment, etc.” (Somers & Gibson 1994:61). Somers (1992:605) explains that meta-narratives can also be “the epic dramas of our time: Capitalism vs. Communism, the Individual vs. Society, Barbarism/Nature vs. Civility”.

Four features of narrativity (Somers & Gibson 1994). These features reflect the fact that narratives are stories, and as such have to be causally ‘constituted’ and located in temporal and social space. They have to allow us to make moral decisions:
1. Relationality of parts: Relationality means that it is impossible for the human mind to make sense of isolated events or of a patchwork of events that are not constituted as a narrative.
2. Causal emplotment: Emplotment allows us to turn a set of propositions into an intelligible sequence about which we can form an opinion and thus charges the events depicted with moral and ethical significance.
3. Selective appropriation: Narratives are constructed according to evaluative criteria which enable and guide selective appropriation of a set of events or elements from the vast array of open-ended and overlapping events that constitute experience.
4. Temporality: Temporality refers to the embeddedness of narrative in time and space and is understood as constitutive of narrativity rather than as an additional or separable layer of a story.

Framing
For the features of narrativity to become operative, and for a set of events to be constituted as a narrative with a specific pattern of causal emplotment, a considerable amount of discursive work has to be undertaken by those doing the narration. The notion of frame, and especially the more active concept of framing, can be productive in outlining some of the ways in which this discursive work is carried out. Framing – definitions in Goffman et al. vs. social movements and activism literature.

Sites of framing in and around the translation proper

* Temporal & Spatial Context (Historical Moment)
* Titles
* Outer Paratexts (cover, blurb)
* Inner Paratexts: Introductions/Prefaces
* Inner Paratexts: Footnotes
* Textual Choices (within the translation)

Some Core Questions for the Application of a Narrative Framework

QUESTION 1: How are translators and interpreters positioned or how do they position themselves in relation to: personal, public, conceptual and meta-narratives?

QUESTION 2: What is the nature of the interplay between the different types of narrative (e.g. personal and public) and how is this interplay reflected in translation-related decisions?

QUESTION 3: What strategies do translators draw on in order to renegotiate (or reframe) a narrative in a new setting?

QUESTION 4: How do people, translators and interpreters included, assess the various narratives that circulate in their communities to decide whether they are believable, coherent and worthy of their commitment?

Some Advantages of Applying Narrative Theory

1. Allows us to move away from essentialist, deterministic, and reductive categories such as race, gender, ethnicity, religion, etc.: “Narrativity offers a way of conceptualising identity that is neither universal nor essentialist, but rather temporally and culturally specific” (Hall et al. 2003:38).

2. Allows us to see social actors, including translators and interpreters, as real-life individuals, rather than theoretical abstractions.

Theory frequently fails to make the political agent concrete … character is treated as a matter of ‘the variables an observer must assess when trying to understand or predict anyone’s behaviour’ … A turn to narratives allows for the de-personalized persons of theory, the bearers of a representative or typified identity, to be understood as separate persons – characters – with singular sets of characteristics, including but not confined to their political context and/or group identity. (Whitebrook 2001:15)

3. Allows us to explain behaviour in dynamic rather than static terms – recognises the complexity of being embedded in crisscrossing, even competing, narratives: “The narrative identity approach embeds the actor within relationships and stories that shift over time and space and thus precludes categorical stability in action” (Somers and Gibson 1994:65).

4. Recognises the power of social structures and the workings of the ‘system’ but does not preclude active resistance on a personal or group level. In other words, it pays equal attention to issues of dominance and resistance, to the ritual nature of interaction as well as the means by which rituals are questioned and undermined.

5. Allows us to explain translational choices in relation to wider social and political contexts, but without losing sight of the individual text and event.

References

Baker, Mona (2005) ‘Narratives in and of Translation’, SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation 1(1): 4-13. Online: www.skase.sk.
Baker, Mona (2005) ‘Targamat al-sardiyyaat/Sardiyyaat al-targama’ (The Translation of Narratives/The Narratives of Translation), translated by Hazem Azmy, Fossoul 66(3): 21-34.
Baker, Mona (2006) Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account, London & New York: Routledge.
Baker, Mona (2006) ‘Translation and Activism: Emerging Patterns of Narrative Community’, The Massachusetts Review 47(III): 462-484. Also to appear in Maria Tymoczko and Edwin Gentzler (eds) Translation and Resistance, University of Massachussetts Press.
Baker, Mona (in press, 2007) ‘Reframing Conflict in Translation’, Social Semiotics 17(1).
Baker, Mona (forthcoming) ‘Resisting State Terror: Communities of Activist Translators and Interpreters’, in Esperança Bielsa Mialet and Chris Hughes (eds) Translating Terror: Globalisation and the New Planetary Wars, London & New York: Routledge.
Bruner, Jerome (1991) ‘The Narrative Construction of Reality’, Critical Inquiry 18(1): 1-21.
Goffman, Erving (1974/1986) Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience, Boston: Northeastern University Press.
Somers, Margaret R. and Gloria D. Gibson (1994) ‘Reclaiming the Epistemological “Other”: Narrative and the Social Constitution of Identity’, in Craig Calhoun (ed) Social Theory and the Politics of Identity, Oxford UK & Cambridge USA: Blackwell, 37-99.
Whitebrook, Maureen (2001) Identity, Narrative and Politics, London & New York: Routledge.

(Her hakkı saklıdır. İntihal edilmemesi, intihalci siteler tarafından izinsiz olarak yayınlanmaması özenle rica olunur.)

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