Siting Translation

The act of translation, the author maintains, is a political action. She draws on Benjamin, Derrida and de Man to show that translation has long been a site for perpetuating the unequal power relations among peoples, races and languages. The traditional view of translation underwritten by Western philosophy helped colonialism to construct the exotic "other" as unchanging and outside history and thus easier both to appropriate and control. Scholars, administrators and missionaries in colonial India translated the colonized people's literature in order to extend the bounds of empire. Examining translations of Indian texts from the 18th century to the present, she urges post-colonial peoples to reconceive translations as a site for resistance and transformation.