News & Events
Topic: A Study of Translation as Critique by Dr. Sheung Shing Yue
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Posted - 20/03/2003 : 11:20:30
Richard Sheung
Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics
Staff Research Seminar
by
Dr. Sheung Shing Yue
City University of Hong Kong
A Study of Translation as Critique
Time: 4:30 - 6:00 pm
Date: 25th March 2003 (Tuesday)
Venue: B7603 (CTL Multi-purpose Room), City University of Hong Kong
Abstract
Translation is conventionally valued as a useful instrument of translingual communication as well as being dismissed as no more than that, an instrument that is at best a contingent copy of the original. It does not exist for its own sake. This paper challenges, first of all, this ambivalent position by drawing on George Steiner's "mimetic" theory of translation as the benign creation of diversity, and its radicalization in Lawrence Venuti's theory of the visible translator and translation as political activism. It then turns on both Steiner and Venuti whose positions are critiqued in light of the controversial reading by Paul de Man of Walter Benjamin's "The Task of the Translator". The argument is that the primacy of translation as it were lies not in the serving of human or even "revolutionary" ends but precisely in the illuminating ways in which translation invariably fails, and outlasts, the agendas of any author and translator.
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