Читать книгу German as Contact Zone - Russell West-Pavlov - Страница 13

From the 1980s onwards, translators finally got their long-awaited turn to have a ‘turn’ (Robinson 1991; Snell-Hornby 2006), emerging from the marginality of a secondary, derivative and often elided practice to the fully-fledged status of a cultural practice and an academic discipline (Venuti 1998). After the famous ‘linguistic turn’ that inaugurated structuralism and poststructuralism, a number of other ‘sub-turns’ followed, among them the ‘translational turn’ (Bachmann-Medick 2007: 238-81). This ‘turn’ was in reality already a double affair: the cultural turn in translation studies, which had hitherto been a largely technical and instrumentalist discipline, was followed by a translative turn in cultural studies. Translation studies were released from a restricted text-linguistic base centred on questions of original and derivative status, measures of ‘fidelity’, to explore the manifold cultural processes of cross-border communication, cross-cultural negotiation and so on in a much broader sense. Subsequently translation studies emerged as a cultural paradigm in their own right. These incremental shifts away from a narrow notion of translation as an exclusively linguistic process of semantic transfer between natural or even national languages did not, however, go unresisted. Rather, such successive border infringements were registered with increasing disapproval by putative guardians of disciplinary purity. In this opening chapter I wish to use that moment of resistance as a heuristic device to interrogate the very notion of a translational border and point to possible ways of overcoming it in an even more radical manner.