Batchelor, K; (2024) Decolonial and Postcolonial Perspectives on Translation: Compatibilities and Contradictions. In: Chambers, Claire and Demir, Ipek, (eds.) Translation and Decolonisation: Interdisciplinary Approaches. (pp. 36-51). Routledge: Abingdon, UK.

Text Batchelor_2 Kathryn Batchelor - Decolonial and Postcolonial Translation PRE COPYEDITING Nov 2023.pdf Access restricted to UCL open access staff until 1 December 2025. Download (246kB)

Abstract

This chapter stages a critical conversation between postcolonial and decolonial frameworks using their shared interest in translation theory and practice. Decolonial scholars have tended to stress the distinctiveness of their own work, presenting it as moving beyond postcolonialism, which itself, in their view, is in need of decolonising. Decoloniality’s criticism of postcolonial translation scholarship fits this overall trend, yet on closer examination seems difficult to justify. In this chapter, I interrogate Walter Mignolo and Freya Schiwy’s (2003) ready dismissal of Lydia Liu and Tejaswini Niranjana, arguing that both Liu and Niranjana incorporate questions of power and directionality into their theorisations of translation, contra Mignolo and Schiwy’s claims. I suggest that Mignolo and Schiwy’s criticism of Liu and Niranjana may be linked to their position vis-à-vis deconstruction, another sphere of scholarship which decolonial scholars see as needing decolonisation. Yet here, too, Mignolo’s claims can be challenged, particularly regarding his reading of Derrida’s statement ‘all culture is originally colonial’. Alongside this artificially staged theoretical conversation, the chapter places Mignolo and Schiwy’s claims about the radical newness of decolonial translation practices under the spotlight. In particular, it questions the idea that the Zapatistas’ syncretic (‘decolonial’) translation approach marks a radical break with previous translation practice by comparing it with the innovations of African and Indian authors, as highlighted in, inter alia, Post-Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice (Bassnett and Trivedi, 1999).

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