Postcolonial translation theories and the language myth: an integrationist perspective

Abstract

These few decades have witnessed a surge of postcolonial translation movements which put the Western transference ideal, one that sees translation as transference of meaning between two languages, to the test. Two of such movements are postcolonial literalism and Antropofagia, which both redirect significance from the meaning to the form and unsettle the colonial notion of ‘originality’ in translation. This paper introduces a semiological viewpoint on these two movements, evaluating the similarities and incongruities between a postcolonial re-theorization of translation and an integrationist theoretical account of translation. It is argued that while postcolonial translation theories show some tendencies to break away from ‘the language myth’ inherent in colonial translation i.e. a supposition of pre-given language codes for translation to take place between (Harris, 2011a), demythologization is never the postcolonialists' primary concern nor achievement, who still ultimately rely on the language myth and its entailments to serve political ends.