Translating Science, Translating Empire: The Power of Language in Colonial North India

Translation has often been characterized as a ‘central act' of European colonialism and imperialism. For example, it has been argued that translation had been utilized to make available legal-cultural information for the administration and rule of the non-West, but perhaps more importantly, translation has been identified as important for the resources it provided in the construction of representations of the colonized as Europe's ‘civilizational other.' In the context of British imperialism in South Asia, Bernard Cohn has persuasively demonstrated the first point, namely, that the codification of South Asian languages in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries served to convert ‘indigenous' forms of textualized knowledge into ‘instruments of colonial rule.' Translational technology, in the form of language grammars and dictionaries, Cohn argues, enabled information gathering and the effective communication of commands, as well as the (at least partial) displacement of European dependence upon interlocutors of perceived dubious reliability. Most recent discussions of translation in this context, however, have focused rather more upon the act of translation as a strategic means for representing ‘otherness' to primarily domestic British reading audiences. In this case, the act of linguistic translation is more clearly being enumerated as a practice of cultural translation. English translations of the ‘ancient' Sanskrit texts of India, for example, have been analyzed for the rhetorical work that the text performs in certain contexts. On the one hand, European-produced translations of these texts might serve to reinforce the dominance of a European aesthetic sensibility through a process of ‘naturalization,' in which the culturally-specific is ‘sanitized,' subordinated to a European norm, thereby inherently limiting the ‘artistic achievement' of the colonized. The orientalist William Jones' erasure of the motif of sweat as an indication of sexual interest and arousal in his translation of Kālidāsa's fourth- or fifth-century Sanskrit play Śakuntala is a case in point. On the other hand, literary translations from Sanskrit might also foreground the ‘otherness' of Indian texts and cultural norms through a strategy of ‘foreignization'; that is, by registering for the European reader differences in language and cultural content. For example, European translations from Sanskrit might include anthropological notations which explain the cultural relevance of the text, or might instead adopt an overly literal rendering of prose, thereby foregrounding differences in syntax, vocabulary, symbol, or motif. Both such rhetorical devices, it can be argued, leave the reader tripping over the text, giving him pause to consider the very strangeness of its appearance and contents.