Politics of translation

A significant statement on The Politics of Translation comes from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1998:95-118) who considers translation as an important approach in pursuing the larger feminist agenda of achieving women's `solidarity'. The task of the feminist translator is to consider language as a sign to the working of gendered agency. Translation can give access to a large number of feminists working in various languages and cultures. She adds that a translator must `surrender' to the text, as translation is the most intimate act of reading. It is an act of submitting to the rhetorical dimension of the text. This for Spivak is more of an erotic act than ethical. She also says that one's first responsibility in understanding solidarity is to learn other women's mother tongue rather than consider solidarity as an `a priori' given. Spivak also shows a kind of anxiety for the ‘Third World' illiterate women and the first task of the feminists is to learn their language rather than impose someone's notion of solidarity and feminism on them. ` There are countless languages in which women all over the world have grown up learning and have been female or feminist, and still the languages we keep learning the most are the powerful European ones, sometimes the powerful Asian ones, least often the chief African ones. Translation for Spivak is an act of understanding the other as well as the self. For her it has a political dimension, as it is a strategy that can be consciously employed. She uses the feminine adjectives like submission, intimacy and understanding for theorizing translation. Thus theorizing translation itself receives a feminist slant
Gayatri Spivak, who is well known for her theoretical and critical work in the postcolonial field, is an interesting case of a translator who assumes her visibility and is engaged with issues of cultural subalternity. Spivak stresses that her concern as a translator has always been to maintain the tone of the subaltern discourse that is manifested with great dignity by Mahasweta Devi in her prose. Communication between author (Devi) and translator (Spivak) is an aspect on which Gayatri Spivak places enormous value, as a form of dialogue which has provided her with feedback in her practice of both translation and literary criticism.
External links.
Panda, Aditya Kumar, Politics and Translation (April 1, 2013). The Criterion, An International Journal in English, Vol. 4, Issue 11, April 2013. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2477841