A Marxist Critique of Postcolonial Translation Studies
Abstract
Postcolonial Translation Studies has been among the prominent trends in the field during the past three decades. This wide-ranging interest in postcolonial investigations of translation has been so significant that Petterson (1999) identifies “the postcolonial turn” in Translation Studies. Postcolonial approaches in Translation Studies have a twofold purpose: firstly, to investigate the effects of power imbalances in transcultural communications on translation process and product, and, secondly, to find ways in which “translation might contribute to exposing, challenging and decolonizing the legacy of colonialism and various forms of neo-colonialism in a postcolonial era” (Hui, 2013, p. 200). Another field which is engaged with the problem of power imbalances among different societies is Marxism. Marxism and postcolonial studies have both claimed to be anticolonial movements, but Marxists have been critical of postcolonial studies approach to colonialism. The present study tried to use critical perspectives provided by Marxism to see whether postcolonial Translation Studies have been contributive to the campaign against (neo)colonial exploitation of the colonized people or not. The results show that postcolonial Translation Studies has ignored the importance of Capitalism in analyzing translation in colonial and postcolonial situation. Furthermore, it is shown that the resistance strategies adapted in postcolonial translation have little significant result in the Real world.
Keywords:
Postcolonial Studies, Marxism, Capitalism, Power, ColonialismReferences
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Copyright Licensee: Iranian Journal of Translation Studies. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0 license).
