Traduction de la culture / Culture and la traduction: Une perspective postcoloniale

The postcolonial theory of translation has emerged as a pattern of systems thatenables a translator to re-conceptualize and revisit texts and redirect his attention to thedichotomy of Subject/Object relationships far from the hegemonic language of thelogocentric Europe. Reproducing a text through rewriting is subjugating it to the will andintention of the local – the margin / the Other. Culture and Translation are two verypolemical elements in perpetual tension due to the amount and the degree of reliability ofthe transfer from the source text to the target. Many studies have been made to find anissue and an adequate theory of translation to transfer the culture of the source to thetarget smoothly. However, these studies are not as effective as they might be becausetranslation is rather a maneuvering and a biased manipulation of the text, and what istransferred as culture is just what is conceived or rather perceived by the translatorwhose background is the cornerstone of his rendering. Postcolonial theory has come inrecourse to translation: its basic strategy is translation through dualism and alterity. It isa kind of H. Bhabha’s Third Space or Bill Ashcroft’s Rewrite: revisiting the text and itsculture through the Other’s Eye / “I.” But this Rewrite pattern of translation needs moreadequate mechanisms to transfer one culture into another language and avoid theconstraints imposed by the power of the Subject that hinders the reading, rethinking, andinterpreting of the text and is, frequently, hovering around and behind any translationactivity.