1 While this literature of disquiet is large and still growing, the specific question of translation has only recently begun to receive the attention it deserves. Moreover, as Dutton notes, many social scientists continue to depend on an older, positivist orientation toward knowing the social. Dutton denounces an orientation toward evidence which resembles superficially that of certain natural sciences. In such natural-science settings, one formulates models that rest on one or more testable hypotheses and then devises experiments that will yield evidence able to confirm or infirm the hypotheses. But applying such a method in the context of area studies—where translation of evidence into the usable language of science is left to specialists not involved in the devising of models—is disastrous. If translation is regarded as transparent, then, of course, it may be left to technicians. However, if translation is a tricky, difficult problem that entails coming to grips with different (and, perhaps, equally valid) constructions of reality, then the translated evidence is no evidence at all. This precut evidence will conform to the general type of model building that it was designed for, simply because everything that does not fit the language of the modeling has been excised. If translation is anything less than transparent, this approach to social research is a misapplication of the natural science model.
Dutton might have titled his essay, “Lead Us into Translation.” In effect, he (along with other contemporary critics of translation) is calling for a renewed engagement with translation. If we are to abandon a practice of [End Page 543] translation based on the assumption that its results can be transparent, we must necessarily come to grips with multiple translations. We must realize that translation takes multiple forms with political implications. As-if-transparent translation is a particularly misleading form that has helped sustain a delusion on the part of some Western experts that their own specialist vocabulary has a uniquely universal validity. It is true that this kind of self-serving translation practice developed in the context of Western domination of much of the world (during the colonial and immediate postcolonial periods). However, one must ask if Western domination was really sustained by this approach to meaning. The distortions that are inevitable in such a translation practice can hardly be unambiguous in their political effects. They may help those in power to believe that their power is exercised benevolently and accurately; but this can only continue for a time. Inevitably, distortion will mean mistakes, perhaps on a massive scale. Such power may undermine itself; arguably it has repeatedly done so.
The kind of translation practice Dutton wishes to lead us into is very different. It entails awareness that translation is always an unfinished interpretive work. In translating, Lydia Liu (1999b, 137) insists, “one creates tropes of equivalence in the middle zone of translation between the host and guest languages.” The only way to get at such tropes—at their shape, their significance, their unintended consequences—assuming one does not become fluent in both languages, is to attempt to back-translate. That is, one must take the result of translation and attempt, however approximately, to translate that text back into the original language. In doing so, one is inevitably pressed into ethnographic thinking. In Dutton's example of the “ceremonial” warning shot of arrows that begins the construction of an “engineering” project, one would be forced to gloss each of these terms so as to bring out the fact that the Chinese language of the time (roughly 1000 C.E.) had no equivalents. From this recognition, a series of questions must follow.
This is not to say that engagement with the space of translation leads us back into an older type of ethnography, with its essentializing tendencies and its blindness to power and...
Lead Us Back into Translation
