Translation: A Key(word) into the Language of America(nists)

If attendance at American Studies Association (ASA) panels is any indicator, Americanists today seem to be a tribe in search of new buzzwords—or at least new ways to think about the old ones. At the inaugural "Keywords for American Studies" panel at the 2001 meeting and the two similar roundtables featured in the 2002 program, familiar terms ranging from identity to sentiment to the border have been turned over like the well-worn coins they are: their origins plumbed, their role in maintaining and transforming the ideologies of the discipline scrutinized. Any one of those keywords can be found in numerous titles of papers and panels in the convention program— proof that it hovers on the verge of becoming an idée reçu and thus in need of some Raymond Williams-style historical-materialist exegesis— except my choice, translation. Rather than saturating the current critical discourse of American studies, translation is virtually absent from it. While other reflexes of thought are interrogated and revealed as situated knowledge, the assumption that linguistic differences are bridged easily and transparently remains undisturbed. In a conference dedicated to the theme of globalization, intentionally located in a border city (Houston) and conjoined with a meeting of scholars of the Hispanic literary heritage, where is the attention to the process of such bridging? It is as if everything is subject to critique except the language in which those critiques are voiced: by default, the register of academic US English.

The invisibility of translation as a critical term in American studies discourse is due at least in part to the tacit practice of understanding translation as invisible. In a history of translation that deserves to be far better known among Americanists, Lawrence Venuti argues that when Anglo-European culture elevated fluency—the removal of all traces of "foreignness"—as the highest value to which a translation could aspire in the nineteenth century, the practice of translation itself effectively became a tool in dominating and subsuming both the source language and its culture. This historically specific desire for a translation to seem invisible, a seamless and transparent passage from source to target language, is a form of domestication and therefore of domination: "transparency results in a concealment... of the conditions of production" (Translator's Invisibility 61). Questioning this purportedly invisible process will, Venuti suggests, "occasion revelations that question the authority of dominant cultural values and institutions" because "translation, like any cultural practice, entails the creative reproduction of values" (Scandals 1). Not surprisingly, the preference for a domesticating form of translation practice evolved concurrently with the ideologies of white superiority that were necessary to uphold colonialism itself, and recent collections like Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi's Post-colonial Translation (1999) have explored this coalescence in productive ways. For all the postcolonial critiques articulated across the globe from which Americanists have borrowed in the past 20 years, an attention to language difference and translation is not among them.

To practitioners of translation studies—a groovier offshoot of the old discipline of comparative literature—translation is anything but transparent. Countering the assumption that translation is simply an imprecise but essentially effective machine by which one linguistic code is transferred into another, scholars such as Venuti, Bassnett, Sherry Simon, André Lefevere and those of the so-called Göttingen School emphasize "processes of literary and cultural transfer in their specific historical settings," using the theories and assumptions that govern particular, situated translation practices as a means of inquiry into relations of power and their shifts over time (Mueller-Vollmer xii). Venuti's Translator's Invisibility, for instance, resurrects the losing side of nineteenth-century debates about translation to point out the "deviant" cultural work done by practitioners who deliberately rendered "foreign" unassimilable versions of texts, countering the dominant trend to domesticate expressions and ideas from parts of the globe seen as threatening and unfamiliar.

This historical-materialist approach has the potential, at least...