Questions: Translation as Postcolonial Resistance and Rewriting

Question 1

A 19th-century British scholar translates an Indian classical epic into heroic English verse, cutting passages describing religious rituals he considered 'superstitious.' From a postcolonial translation studies perspective, this translation is best understood as:

• A. A legitimate adaptation that made the text accessible to a new cultural audience
• B. An example of foreignization, which preserved cultural difference for European readers
• C. A form of cultural domination that filtered the text through European aesthetic expectations, presenting a colonial construction as an authentic original
• D. Self-translation, where the writer makes strategic choices about what to explain to different audiences

Answer: (C)

This exemplifies the pattern postcolonial translation studies identifies in colonial-era translations: made for European audiences, filtered through European aesthetic and moral expectations, with cultural specificity that might challenge European frameworks stripped out. The translation was presented as authentic while having already passed through a colonial filter. Foreignization (option B) is the opposite strategy — it preserves cultural strangeness rather than smoothing it into target-culture norms.

Question 2

A contemporary Nigerian writer translates her Yoruba-language novel into English but retains untranslatable Yoruba terms, uses Yoruba syntactic patterns in the English prose, and refuses to provide glosses for cultural references. What strategy does this exemplify?

• A. Domestication — adapting the source text to conform to English language norms and reader expectations
• B. Foreignization as resistance — forcing the colonial language to accommodate what it cannot fully absorb
• C. Self-translation — where the same author produces two independent creative works
• D. Retranslation — revising a prior colonial-era translation to expose its ideological assumptions

Answer: (B)

By retaining untranslatable terms, using Yoruba syntactic rhythms, and refusing explanatory glosses, the writer makes English strain to hold what it was not designed to express. This is foreignization deployed as postcolonial resistance. Rather than domesticating the text into English norms (which would replicate the colonial pattern), the writer makes the dominant language acknowledge its own limits. The reader is not given comfortable access — they must encounter the text on its own terms.

Question 3

When a postcolonial writer retains untranslatable indigenous terms in a translation into a colonial language, this can be understood as a form of resistance rather than a failure of the translation.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: True

Retaining untranslatable terms is a deliberate strategy, not a failure. It forces the target language to acknowledge that it cannot contain everything — refusing the colonial assumption that all meaning can be fully rendered in the dominant language. The 'failure' to translate is a political act: it preserves the foreignness of the source and signals that the reader must meet the text, not the other way around.

Question 4

When an author translates their own work (self-translation), the two versions are typically identical in meaning, differing mainly in language.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

Self-translators typically make strategic choices that cause the two versions to diverge. They may explain what is opaque in one version, withhold what is explained in another, reframe material for a different cultural audience, or make different political interventions with the same source material. Samuel Beckett's English and French versions of his own works diverge in significant ways. Postcolonial self-translators often use the distance between languages as an opportunity to address different audiences differently — the result is two interventions, not two reproductions.

Question 5

Explain why colonial-era translations of non-Western literatures can be considered a form of cultural domination even when produced by scholars with genuine literary interest in the source texts.

Model answer: Colonial translations were made for European audiences and filtered through European aesthetic expectations, religious assumptions, and standards of literary value. Even well-intentioned translators chose what to include, how to render it, and which features to smooth over for readability — decisions that consistently aligned the text with European tastes. Cultural specificity that might challenge European frameworks was removed or explained away. The translated text was then presented as the authentic original, effectively replacing the source culture's self-representation with a European construction of it. Good intentions do not eliminate the structural effect: control over translation is control over how a culture is known by others.

Postcolonial translation studies is not primarily about individual translators' motives but about structural asymmetries: who controls translation, for whom, and with what assumptions about whose aesthetic standards count as universal. The same structural analysis applies to well-meaning translations as to explicitly ideological ones.