Presentation

In May/June of 2016, the 29^th annual conference of the Canadian Association for Translation Studies assembled on the subject of “power.” The question, specifically, was how translators view their position (“reflexivity” was our guiding concept.) within the normative constraints bearing upon them as they version the other. Among the many interesting contributions, I discerned two distinct conceptions of this position. In the first, I heard echoes of Daniel Simeoni (1998): the translator accepts his or her lot, devises tactics to maneuver within these constraints, and ultimately becomes their most willing exponent. The second conception, however, was livelier, more interesting: it invoked countertactics for pushing against constraints, transgressing them. Translation Studies is full of tactics, to be sure, but not countertactics. Our scholarship has been quick to articulate the strategies that fall within the rules—Vinay and Darbelnet’s “translation procedures” (1995 [1958]) and Toury’s “shifts” (1995), etc.—but has done relatively little to address strategies that break them. A countertactic, then, is a translational act of open rebellion—certainly an act of self-assertion, perhaps even of self-defence. It takes place at the eccentric point of an infraction where orthodox translation methods are questioned, resisted, or where experimental translation runs the risk of arousing, in its turn, resistance from more orthodox factions. Three types of countertactical maneuvering are represented by our authors here: The first (Henitiuk; Bessaïh and Bogic) is counter-narrative, where the translator is involved in telling the story of minoritized groups in an unconventional way. The second (Lemieux; Fraser; Slessor and Voyer) is language mixing, where the translator undermines our conception of languages as discrete, autonomous systems. The third (Bowker; Guénette) is reconnaissance, which involves venturing into power’s cultural sites of production and discovering how it manifests among the agents exercising it through discourse. Counter-narrative is about minoritized individuals and groups telling their story back to a dominant culture in which they had previously found themselves voiceless. Valerie Henitiuk gives the account of how Canadian Inuit novelist Mitiarjuk turned a translation commission from Catholic missionaries in Nunavik in the 1950s into an opportunity to tell her own story (in her “own tongue,” her own way) in Sanaaq, the first Inuit novel. The question now, Henitiuk asks, is with what sensibility should Sanaaq be translated into French and English? Feminist translation is the focus for Nesrine Bessaïh and Anna Bogic. Their contribution addresses the translation and re-translation of arguably the most influential piece of women-oriented writing in history: Our Bodies, Ourselves (1971). To remain accessible and relevant, Bogic argues, this book must be re-edited and translated in the same way that it was written—by feminist collectives doing fieldwork, collecting and corroborating interviews from women over a range of geographic populations. Now, however, this range is to account for race, class, gender, and sexual orientation as well, Bessaïh argues. It is time for the translation of OBOS to reflect the intersectional concerns of third-wave feminism, and Bessaïh gives an account of her own fieldwork coordinating a collective to produce a new francophone version of OBOS specifically for the women of Quebec. The countertactic of language mixing, for its part, pushes against orthodoxy from within language’s materiality. A power relationship depends entirely on our sense of discretion and order, on our ability to distinguish one body, group, language, or ideology from another; to hold them separately in the abstract as enduring truths; and finally to organize them into hierarchies of relative value. What then, if the translator mounts an offence against the order of languages through the suppositio materialis, begins mixing together the materials of languages normally held separate? …