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    Response by Palmer to "Betraying Empire: Translation and the Ideology of Conquest"


    Palmer, Patricia (2015) Response by Palmer to "Betraying Empire: Translation and the Ideology of Conquest". Translation Studies, 8 (3). pp. 357-361. ISSN 1478-1700

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    Abstract

    For anyone familiar with the history of linguistic colonization in Ireland, Vicente Rafael’s assertion that “translation [is] a kind of conquest” seems uncontroversial. For Irish speakers, translatio imperii, English-style, entailed the wholesale translation of a hibernophone country into an anglophone one. A process set in motion by Tudor, Jacobean and Cromwellian plantations and culminating in the Great Famine (1845– 52) left the Irish, in the words of the nineteenth-century nationalist and translator, Thomas Davis, “adrift among the accidents of translation” (quoted in Lloyd 1982, 145). The real interest of Rafael’s move, therefore, lies in its implicit insistence that we use the past to interrogate and inform (perhaps even reform) the present; to go beyond retelling the old story and succumbing, as Rancière fears that cultural historians increasingly do, to “the infinite work of grieving” (2007, 17). With that in mind, we need to think not just about colonial translation, but about its afterlife and how its “radically reductive attitude towards language” (Rafael) continues to shape the present...

    Item Type: Article
    Keywords: Language & Linguistics; Translation; Evangelization; English; Ireland; Colonialism;
    Academic Unit: Faculty of Arts,Celtic Studies and Philosophy > School of English, Media & Theatre Studies > English
    Item ID: 11447
    Identification Number: https://doi.org/10.1080/14781700.2015.1063450
    Depositing User: Patricia Palmer
    Date Deposited: 23 Oct 2019 15:22
    Journal or Publication Title: Translation Studies
    Publisher: Taylor & Francis (Routledge)
    Refereed: Yes
    URI:
    Use Licence: This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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