What is it about?
This is one of a series of double-binds of translation, each of which voices the ideological/cultural "forces" or "pressures" on translators to think and act in contradictory ways--this one focused on the geopolitical context of "going abroad" and "staying home."
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Why is it important?
The translation theorist who most influentially drew attention to the geopolitics of "going abroad" and "staying home" was Friedrich Schleiermacher, in his 1813 Academy address, where he distinguished between "taking the reader to the author" (going abroad) and "bringing the author to the reader" (staying home) as the two main methods of translating--but while he technically preferred the former, his nationalistic project was based on bringing the world to "Germany." And his followers, notably Antoine Berman and Lawrence Venuti, have continued that. Venuti insistently talks of "the local culture" (meaning the target culture) and "the foreign text" (meaning the source text: his geopolitical focus is always sedentary, local, staying in his home country and looking out at the world.
Perspectives
This may be the most (surreptitiously) personal of the many double-binds of translation I have written, because my life has so insistently been stretched across the nationalist-migrant double-bind, living abroad (and dreaming of a migrant lifestyle, without really wanting it), living in the US (and dreaming of getting back to "the world"), always wanting something else, always situating my work as a translator and a translation scholar in those seams and tensions as well.
Professor Douglas J. Robinson
Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Translation and the nationalist/migrant double bind, Translation and Interpreting Studies, January 2006, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/tis.1.1.07rob.
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