susan bassnett translating terror

7/30/2019 Susan Bassnett Translating Terror

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Third World Quarterly

Translating TerrorAuthor(s): Susan BassnettReviewed work(s):Source: Third World Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 3, Connecting Cultures (2005), pp. 393-403Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3993830 .Accessed: 10/11/2011 05:23

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Third World Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 3, pp 393-403, 2005 RoutledgeRTaylor&Francis Group

Translating T e r r o r

SUSAN BASSNETT

ABSTRACT Starting with a reading of a translated text from an Islamist website,this essay looks at the underlying cultural and literary traditions that haveinfluenced the translator's strategy. The author suggests that the horizon ofexpectation of the potential readership has been shaped by centuries of textual

anxiety about Central Asia, a region perceived as a cradle of savagery and anti-modernity since the Middle Ages. From the creator of the C13th Mappa Mundiwho added a note to the effect that all kinds of horrors were to be found in theregion, through the age of the Tamburlaine, hen through the Afghan wars thattriggered the start of the Great Game to Umberto Eco's most recent novelsimilar negative representations of the region can be found. The veracity oftraveller's accounts is mediated through the mythical construction thatcontinues today in reporting on the region and in the language selected bytranslators. Underpinning he essay is the question posed by translator scholarsconcerning the ethics of acculturation as a textual strategy. The author arguesthat there are historical, extra-textual reasons that determine the choicesavailable to translators in this context

In November 2003 a statement purporting to be from a unit of al-Qaidaappeared on an Islamist website. Translated by Reuters, it was published inThe Guardian, under the headline 'Al-Qaida statement: the cars of death willnot stop'. Let us focus for a moment on that phrase, 'the cars of death'. Youare probably not in any doubt about its meaning: it is a reference to carbombs, in particular to the car bomb that killed Roger Short, the Britishconsul, and a large number of Turkish citizens when the British Consulate inIstanbul was targeted just before the statement was issued. But there is a verysignificant difference between the phrase 'cars of death' and 'car bombs' Themeaning may be the same, but the register is different. 'Car bombs' is thephrase we use every day, it is the phrase that we understand, it has become areality over several decades of terrorism. But 'cars of death' is quaintly old-fashioned, stilted-in short, foreign.

There are other curious English phrases in the al-Qaida speeches astranslated. There is the use of the vocative: 'O, Bush, what have you done toAmerica and its allies.. .'; 'O Islamic nation, you must support the mojahedin

to victory...'. There is a strange sentence that must refer to an implicit

Susan Bassnett is at the Centre or Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies, University of Warwick,Coventry CV4 7AH, UK. Email: [email protected].

ISSN 0143-6597 print/ISSN 1360-2241 online/05/030393-11 ? 2005 Third World QuarterlyDOI: 10.1080/01436590500033628 393


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figurative image in the source language. 'As for the tails of America.. .espe-

cially Britain, Italy, Australia and Japan'. There are religious phrases: ' by thegrace of God, he was killed', 'by the will of God, America will soon look forsomeone to protect it'. 'By God, Bush, you've fallen into a trap as weplanned...'. Above all, there is the apocalyptic tone: 'here now are the cars ofdeath reaping (the souls of) the allies of the tyrant of the era everyday...'.What makes this sentence even more apocalyptic are the three words inbrackets ('the souls of') added by the translator to clarify the image ofharvesting, so transforming the phrase 'reaping the allies' into 'reaping thesouls of the allies'.

I am currently director of an Arts and Humanities Research Board projectthat is investigating the politics and economics of translation in

globalmedia.

The project examines texts such as this one, seeking answers to questionsabout how they are translated, what are the strategies employed bytranslators and, most basic of all, who actually does the translating. In thiscase, the translator works for Reuters, hence linguistic competence is not indoubt. Reuters employ people with first class linguistic skills, and in this casethe language is Arabic. We know that to some extent the translator's choiceof English was constrained by the style of the original, which was indeedapocalyptic in tone, and which draws upon rhetorical conventions employedin a particular variant of Arabic generally used by fundamentalist religiousgroups. Such conventions can be discerned in the structure of the English,hence to this extent the translation can be said to be faithful to the norms ofthe source text.

The problem, however, which is fundamental to all translation, is thatrhetorical conventions carry different meanings in different contexts. BasilHatim and Ian Mason, both distinguished Arabic translation experts, havedrawn attention to the problem of translating speeches or statements thatinvolve a blend of different genres which is desirable in one context butdefinitely undesirable in another. Discussing a speech by the late AyatollahKhomeini, they note that three different genres: the political tirade, thereligious sermon and legal deontology are all combined in the Farsi:

Such a combination of generic elements, however, although t is disconcertingfor the average English-language eader, is entirely appropriate and notnecessarily perceived as hybrid in the socio-textual practice of languageculture such as Farsi and Arabic.1

Moving from English to Arabic, Hatim and Mason show how similardifficulties arise when rhetorical conventions do not have a match in thetarget language. English understatement, irony and the journalistic conven-tion of opening a passage with a statement that is then going to be challengedand argued down are very difficult to transpose into a linguistic system thatdoes not recognise these textual elements in the

same way. Hatim and Masondiscuss what they term connectivity ie the gradual construction of a line ofargument-and note that this kind of construction is 'discouraged if nottotally disallowed in a number of languages (eg Arabic)'.2 In short, what isstandard practice in one language may not function in the same way at all in

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another language, even though the component parts of the text (eg the

words) are entirely translatable. The result can be serious misreading of thesource text, even though the translator may have done a good job inrendering the sentences of the source into accessible form, and even thoughthat translator may make claims to 'faithfulness'.

The effect of the English versions of the al-Qaida statements, I suggest, isthe opposite of what was intended. I am actually using the dreaded term'intended' here, even though it is so fraught and unstable, because this was apolitical statement put out as a deliberate message for a Western audience,and as such had a particular objective or intention.

The English version, no doubt because it follows the Arabic so closely,comes across as archaic, over-the-top, ranting, almost absurdly OldTestament in short, fundamentalist. It is exactly the kind of speech ascriptwriter would put in the mouth of an Islamic fanatic. Here are two of thedemands made of Bush:

1. 'To purify all Islamic land from the filth of the Jews and Americans,including Jerusalem and Kashmir'.

2. 'For America to stop interfering between us and the tyrannicalgovernments which rule Muslims and for us to set up an Islamiccaliphate (state)'

After the word 'caliphate', a word resonant of medieval legend and avanished world of antiquity, the translator has added the modern English'state' .The words 'caliphate', 'cars of death', the anti-Semitic 'filth of theJews' and the vocative 'O' resonate with contemporary readers, introducing adiscourse of other-worldliness into a text with a very immediate,contemporary set of threats and demands. Its very excess in stylistic termsinvites its dismissal. Yet it is a good and faithful translation, and thetranslator has endeavoured to help his readers by adding clarification wherehe considers there may be room for misunderstanding. Not only is caliphateadditionally rendered as state, but the word 'Mojahedin' is glossed as

'Islamist fighters'. The translator's objective is to render the Arabic sourceinto a form that is accessible to English language readers, and the criterion ofaccessibility leads to the occasional glossing of words that might beunfamiliar. But it does not lead to discursive shifts that might transformthe rhetoric into something more immediate or more explicitly familiar, andbecause of this the text reinforces the stereotype of the fundamentalist as indirect conflict not just with a particular political enemy, but with modernityitself. Even car bombs are transformed into quaintly antiquated cars ofdeath. Terror is transmogrified.

Lawrence Venuti, the translation scholar, has made a strong case in the

postcolonial context for the strategy of foreignization in translation. Hisargument, grossly simplified, is that domestication, or acculturation as astrategy means that the foreign text is transformed into something that mightas well have been written in the target language. The signs of its foreignness,its otherness, hence its independence from the target literary system, are

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erased and it is appropriated into the translating culture. In his book, The

Scandals of Translation, subtitled Towards an Ethics of Difference, Venutiargues that the value of a translated text 'depends on effects and functionsthat can't be entirely predicted or controlled'. Translating, he claims 'is bestdone with a critical resourcefulness attuned to the linguistic and culturaldifferences that comprise the local scene. Only these differences offer themeans of registering the foreignness of foreign cultures in translation'.3 Hisconcern is that at times, as Tejaswini Niranjana has argued, the colonialenterprise has used translation as an instrument of oppression, and hisproposal for a more ethical translation is founded on recognition of thehierarchies of power that pertain in global marketing and the need to rethinkwhat we understand by translating.4 But is it more or less ethical for atranslator to render a statement such as the one discussed so far inacculturated terms or in terms that continue to stress its foreignness with allthe value judgements that this implies? Might it be argued that the moreethical strategy, in this case, could have been domestication, for the transferof the al-Qaida statements into standard English might have underlined theseriousness of the threat without the excuse of linguistic differentiation?

The debate between foreignization and domestication as a strategy islongstanding, and reflects two different worldviews. To see the debate at itsclearest, we need only consider the differences between French and Germanattitudes to translation in the Age of Enlightenment. Again, simplifyinggrossly, the dominant French tendency was towards acculturation, while theGermans took the opposite view. Johann Gottfried Herder sums up thedifference between these two positions, albeit in a slightly biased way ratherneatly:

The French, who are much too proud of their own taste, adapt all things to it,rather han try to adapt themselves o the taste of another time. Homer mustenter France a captive and dress according o their fashion, so as not to offendtheir eyes. He has let them take his venerable beard and his old simple clothesaway from him. He has to conform to French customs, and where his peasantcoarse-ness till shows he is treated as a barbarian. But we poor Germans, who

are still almost an audience without a father-land, who are still without tyrantsto dictate our taste, want to see him the way he iS.5

The value judgements in this extract are striking: Homer is betrayed, madecaptive, deprived of his own clothes. He is regarded as coarse, a barbarianpeasant by the French, who are depicted as overlords, denying the originalhis true value. The Germans, in contrast, want to see him the way he is-theystand for honesty, truth, freedom and a translation strategy that allows theforeign to exist on its own terms. Significantly, Herder links this to thecontemporary political situation: the Germans have a culture, but. are'without a fatherland' and without 'tyrants', who, unlike the French, dictatetaste and feeling. The strategy of foreignization is here linked to a nationalistdiscourse that champions democracy and free thinking.

Jacques Delille presents the counter-argument from the French perspec-tive. He argues that translation is a means of enriching a language but notes

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significantly that extreme faithfulness in translation will lead instead to

extreme unfaithfulness. He provides numerous examples: a word that wasnoble in Latin, might be ordinary in French if translated literally, an imagethat was once original and exciting might seem cliched, an allusion that couldonce be picked up by one set of readers might be obscure to another. The taskof the translator is therefore not to be faithful either in strict linguistic terms,or in terms of style, it is to 'try to reproduce the effect the author produced':

Whoever wants to translate goes into debt. To repay t he must pay the samesum but not in the same currency. f he is unable to render he image he shouldreplace t with a thought. If he cannot paint for the ear he should paint for themind.. Does he foresee that he will have to weaken his author in a certain

passage? Let him strengthen hat author in another. Let him give back belowwhat he takes away above. Let him compensate everywhere while staying asclose as possible o the nature of the original n all its parts... His merit must bedetermined on the basis of the totality of his work and the overall effectproduced by every passage.6

Delille predates skopos theorists by well-over 200 years, but his point is thatthe objective of translation is the creation of a text that will be acceptable to anew set of readers, and that their judgement will be made in terms of theircultural norms, rather than those of the source. The translator needs to keepa balance between the original and the ultimate destination of the translatedtext. It is, of course, in keeping that balance where the real skills of thetranslator reside.

Translation is a kind of journey. It is an activity that always involvesmotion, it is a passage from one language to another, and hence from oneculture into another. There is also always a temporal dimension, for what iswritten in one place, in one time, is then rendered for other readers in anotherplace and another time. Translation theory today is increasingly concernedwith translation as movement between different contexts, and increasinglyconcerned also with the consequent ideological dimension. Back in 1990,Bassnett and Lefevere argued for the cultural turn in translation studies, and

drew attention to the problems of both textual and extra-textual manipula-tion involved in the translation process:

Translation/rewriting tudies tend to deal with the constraints hat enter intoplay during the process of both the writing and the rewriting of texts. Theseconstraints both belong to the field of literary tudies proper' and transcend t.They ultimately have to do with power and manipulation, wo issues potentiallyof enormous nterest not only to those engaged n literary tudies, but also to alltheir victims outside.7

All sorts of complex sets of power relations are involved in translation, from

commercial, marketing constraints through to hegemonic cultural assump-tions. How many Nobel prizes have been awarded to writers working in whatare perceived to be the dominant world languages compared to those writingin lesser known, or politically more marginalized languages, and can this beaccidental? Highly unlikely. Translators may be poorly paid, they may, since

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the sixteenth century, have received less attention than the original author

they may often have been deemed to have been invisible, but they haveexercised enormous power nevertheless. Today, in this era of globalcommunication, texts are endlessly translated and then retranslated. We livein a world awash with translated texts, though increasingly in the English-speaking world we have less access to other languages and hence to othermindsets, to other norms, to other cultural codes.

Would the translator of the Reuters' text have been doing a service to al-Qaida had he abandoned any pretence at reproducing a rhetorical systemthat was in any case unintelligible to his readers and rendered the statementsin straightforward modern English? Delille would have approved of thisstrategy, but would the ultimate effect have been to make the terroristdemands seem more rooted in our everyday existence, hence less extremeand, inevitably, less foreign? Would that have made the threats morefrightening, by effectively normalising what has been presented to us as a textwritten by extremists? Or should those textual conventions, however strange,be rendered as they have been, thereby heightening the sense of impendingapocalypse, the fanaticism, and, as noted above, the implicit anti-modernity,the desire for a caliphate that would be established on premises that rejectWestern notions of democracy and global communication?

More to the point, whose decision is it to keep the apocalyptic tone? Thetranslator's? An editor's? A press baron's? A politician's? Or is it dictated bythe horizon of expectation of the readership, the target English-languagereaders worldwide, whoever they are and however they can be determined.

I have just said that translation is a highly complex activity, involving farmore than the linguistic. Of course translation is the act of transferring a textwritten in one language into another language, but it is much more besides. Itis, as pointed out, an act that involves the crossing of boundaries, hence thenegotiating of space in between boundaries. It is a territorial exercise, it is akind of journey. It also always involves anhistorical dimension. Translationalways takes place in a continuum. Translations are continuations of textsthrough space and through time.

The project on politics and economics of translation in global media islinked to another piece of ongoing research that I have now been working on/around/with, for some 10 years or so, and I want to try and pull the two linesof enquiry together in the remainder of this paper. This other area of interestconcerns ways in which travellers from the West have journeyed through,documented, sought to represent, and ultimately fantasised about a vast areaof the planet that is loosely termed Central Asia. It is the region throughwhich the Silk Routes ran, a region that has seen the rise and fall of greatcivilisations, the region from which came Genghis Khan and his Tartarhordes who reached the outskirts of Vienna in the thirteenth century, then

later Tamburlaine, scourge of the world and the Moghuls, who founded theirgreat empire in India. It is a region that has received an enormous amount ofattention over the centuries, and yet it is a region that resists definition.Michel Jan, editor of a huge anthology of writings about the region, Levoyage en Asie central et au Tibet (1992) bases his definition on the natural

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boundaries provided by the Himalayas, the Pamir and the Hindu Kush to the

south, Siberia to the north and the Volga and Caspian to the West, and ontravellers' accounts, but emphasizes that he has had to settle on an arbitrarydefinition because there is so much diversity of opinion.8 Jan also notessignificantly that this is a region that has never experienced political unity. Itis a region of vast deserts, the highest mountains on earth, great rivers, alandlocked sea, a region through which Europeans have travelled on theirway to somewhere else. It is not a destination, it is a place of transit and inthe European mythology, not a place to inhabit either. Travellers from theMiddle Ages onwards have emphasized the difficulties presented by theclimate, the inhospitability of the landscape and the immense size of the area.

Perhaps one consequence of this uncertainty is that Central Asia is a regiononto which all kinds of fantasies have been projected. Early mapmakers filledit with strange and terrifying monsters, with cannibals who survived bydrinking human blood, with web-footed creatures, humans without mouths,dog-headed giants. 'Here are all kinds of horrors' wrote the author of theHereford Mappa Mundi (1300) in a note on his map.9 If you want asummary of some of the most popular medieval fantasies about Central Asia,you could do worse than to read Umberto Eco' s latest novel, Baudolino.Baudolino and his companions cross 'an ocean of sand, which rose like thegreat waves of the sea, and it seemed that everything moved beneath theirfeet'.10 Baudolino tells of an encounter with the black rocks of the Bubuctorthat turn human skin the colour of coal, with gigantic scorpions and three-headed snakes, of their first sight of the Sambyaton, the river of stone, oftheir meetings with the skiapods with their single leg, and with unicorns. Allthese wonders are part of Baudolino's tale of his journey to the kingdom ofPrester John, for a dominant medieval fantasy located this idealised Christianruler somewhere in Central Asia.

In his novel, Eco draws upon a range of medieval sources, includingaccounts of the journeys of three friars, John of Pian de Carpini (1245 - 1247)William of Rubruck (1253-1255) and Odoric (1318-1330) to the court ofthe great Khan as emissaries.1 These texts are matter-of-fact accounts of the

hardships suffered by the friars, all fairly similar in tone and all stressing thenatural horrors of the region-the terrible deserts, the intolerable cold, thefierce winds, the sandstorms, the raging rivers and the wild mountains, alongwith the barbarity of the savage nomadic people they encountered. Eco alsodraws upon other medieval texts recounting fantastic journeys, notably thetravels of Marco Polo and the travels of Sir John Mandeville.12 Both theseworks were enormously popular, constantly reprinted over several centuriesand translated into diverse European languages. But both and this pointneeds to be emphasized have been highly questioned in terms of theirauthenticity. Marco Polo' s version of events was apparently related to one

Rustichello da Pisa, who tells us this in the prologue. The text is thereforewritten by one man, Rustichello, who had already acquired a reputation as aromance writer, on the basis of an account of travels in Central Asiaprovided by another man (Marco Polo) who was his cellmate for a time in1298, when they were both prisoners of war in Genoa. Rustichello insists in

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his prologue that readers can rely on the veracity of his book: 'And all who

read the book or hear it may do so with full confidence, because it containsnothing but the truth'.That 'truth' has subsequently been questioned, not only because of the

liberties a writer of romances may have taken with the story he heard, butbecause it cannot be proved that the story was not invented in the first place.Similarly, the author of Sir John Mandeville's travels has never beenidentified, though that text is full of insistence on the truthfulness ofeverything set down init. Mandeville' s book is a masterpiece of manipula-tion: he always has an excuse when he has not actually seen something, forthere is always someone whose honesty cannot be doubted who assures himthat he has seen it. This is very very different from Friar Odoric, who declaresthat he has only included things he saw with his own eyes and has omittedstories of things he did not actually see. Mandeville' s book concludes withassurances to the reader that he showed his work to the Pope in Rome on hisway home and the Holy Father had it examined and vouched for itstruthfulness. The fact that the Pope was in Avignon at the time did not deterthe author from making this claim. Being seen to be honest was far moreimportant to the writers of both Mandeville's and Polo's accounts thanactual facts. In this respect, they share traits with contemporary journalism-and both can be seen as translators in a way, reworking stories, reshapingmaterial for new readers. Eco too is a translator, and it is interesting to notethat he was working on his book on translation at the same time as he waswriting Baudolino.

The popularity of these (and other) medieval books shows a fascinationwith Central Asia as the locus of all kinds of imaginary horrors, the site ofabsolute otherness. Myths about the region go a long way back in time:Alexander the Great marched on India in 328 BC, the armies of the Sogdians,the Scythians, the Samanids, the Seljuks emerged from the region, so thatlong before the army of Ghengis Khan crossed the Danube into Austrianterritories in 1241, fantasies of violent peoples who brought terror anddestruction with them were well-established. The terror inspired by the

Mongols led to the missions of the friars, as European rulers including thePope realised that they had to begin some kind of dialogue with the Khan inorder to avoid annihilation. Here is the travel writer Colin Thubronsummarising perceptions of the region:

For two thousand years Central Asia was the womb of terror, where animplacable queue of barbarian aces waited to impel one another nto history.Whatever spurred heir grim waves-the deepening erosion of their pasture-lands or their seasons of fleeting unity-they bore the same stamp of phantommobility and mercilessness.'3

A place from whence people bent on destruction come, people with norespect for Western civilization, barbaric people who seem not to feardeath this was Central Asia in the European imaginary of the MiddleAges. Does that sound familiar? Let us come back to this shortly. But itwas also a region that had to be traversed, because of the pressures of

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commerce. Silk, china, spices, paper, all kinds of luxury goods were

brought into Europe along the Silk Routes, and all kinds of luxury goodssuch as stained glass were exported to the East. Europe-and China-hadto engage with the region because they needed to trade. Another familiarstory?

The opening up of sea routes lessened demands on the Silk Routes and forabout a century, roughly from the early seventeenth century to the end of theeighteenth, attention shifted to the New World as the primary locus ofEuropean fantasies of otherness. Then, with the great change of conscious-ness that came with altered perspectives of the natural world in the eighteenthcentury, combined with the British presence in India, Central Asia returnedto prominence.

From Coleridge' s fantasy of the stately pleasure dome, the deep romanticchasm, the savage waters and the 'ancestral voices prophesying war', a newelement entered writing about the region. Subsequent travellers from all overEurope would write about the beauty in the savage landscapes, the wildmountains, the ruined civilisations, the palaces and cities sinking back intothe sands. Eugene Schuyler declared in 1876 that Turkistan was the place inAsia that had most 'impressed the imagination of Europe'. New adjectiveswere added to the prevailing ones used by earlier writers-vast empty,limitless, desolate, cruel, barren, harsh, extreme-and those include lost,abandoned, fallen, decayed. Now the people were seen differently too; nolonger monsters with single legs or cannibalistic tendencies, they are victimsof corrupt governments, cruel and untrustworthy, living in unspeakablesocial conditions, Eugene Vambery wrote about the goitres that afflict peoplearound the salty wastes of the Aral sea and the parasitic worm that couldburrow into human flesh, found in foul water and particularly prevalent inBokhara.

But what also brought Central Asia back into prominence were the eventsculminating in the expulsion of the British from Kabul in 1842 after a longsiege. One of the most graphic accounts of the retreat from Kabul is the bookpublished in 1843 by Lady Florentia Sale, A Journal of the Disasters in

Afghanistan.In this book, all the familiar stereotypes of the region and itspeoples recur, woven into the stark details of the massacre of thousands ofmen, women and children and the appalling conditions faced by the fewhundred survivors, including Lady Sale (I had fortunately only one ball in myarm) who walked through the mountains in January snows to escape toIndia' .14 The point to note here is the recurrence of certain ideas and imagesacross the centuries and across Europe. As the British presence in India grewin importance, so the frontier territories acquired a new resonance, andanother dimension was added to the history of European fantasies aboutCentral Asia. For the British in India and for the Russians in the nineteenth

century,the Central Asian regions marked the frontier between civilisation

and barbarism. Both the Russians and the British engaged in complex spyingactivities against one another in the region, each coining a term for thisclandestine activity. To the British, this was the space where 'The GreatGame' was played, while for the Russians it was the site of the 'Tournament

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of Shadows'. Michael Edwards summarises a century and more-of

conflict between the superpowers:The Great Game was a contest or political ascendancy n Central Asia betweenBritain and Tsarist Russia. The secret agents, British and Russian, were theadvance guards of armies hat never met... but their clandestine ctivities oftenfed the dreams and terrors of the decision-makers housands of miles away intheir comfortable ffices. Other wars were embarked n, despite he protests ofthose who had so often risked their lives to gather the facts on which sensibleand pragmatic policies might be based.. In high politics, however, illusionsacquire a special armour against reality...15

Reporting on the region in the nineteenth century repeats the oldcivilisation - barbarism dichotomy. Dostoievesky saw Russia as the meansof bringing stability and civilisation to a region he despised. WinstonChurchill sent dispatches from the Northwest Frontier in 1897, oftencomparing the savagery of the landscape to the savagery of its inhabitants:the mountains are 'the greatest disturbance of the earth' s surface that theconvulsions of chaotic periods have produced'. As for the people: 'The strongaboriginal propensity to kill, inherent in all human beings, has in thesevalleys been preserved in unexampled strength and vigour'. Interesting tonote that recent fighting between Taliban and the Pakistani army has been inprecisely the area Churchill was describing: Waziristan.

In the 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a boomin books about Central Asia in English, French, Italian, German. A sub-group of books focus on Afghanistan. Yet what is striking about these textsis the way in which they continue to translate earlier writings. Through all theaccounts of human endurance, harsh conditions, appalling weather, terriblefood, savage behaviour, decaying greatness, the images are recognizablythose of the medieval world. The fantasies that have been for centuriesinscribed in this area have continued to flourish, fed now by another set ofmyths. For where else on the planet would it seem more appropriate for ananti-Western terrorist organisation to hide than here, in the region that has

aroused images of terror for so long?How then does this relate to our starting point, to the translation strategy

of Reuters and the al-Qaida statements? There is a relationship, and thatconcerns the horizon of expectations of the target text readers. I said earlierthat translation never takes place in isolation, there is always a history. Thehistory of European attitudes to Central Asia, to the savage unknown regionfrom whence have come forces bent on destroying the known, civilised worldis implicit in the translated text. The apocalyptic language, the extremethreats, the use of a rhetoric that appears barbaric and over-inflated connectswith the ways in which the inhabitants of the region have been depicted.Churchill wrote about the mercilessness of the tribes people of Waziristan.Mandeville, 600 years earlier, wrote about the 'full cursed People' whodelight in fighting and killing: 'And they drink gladliest man's blood, theywhich they clepe Dieue. And the more men that a man may slay, the moreworship he hath among them.'.16 To the collective memory of Mandeville' s

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age of a region producing people who despised urban civilisation (signalled

by the destruction of cities such as Merv or Balhk) were added memories ofwarriors bent on destroying Christianity, and today we are acquiring furthermemories of dark forces opposed to reason, to democracy, to progress and tomodernity. These memories are present in both writers and readers, and theydetermine what is written and how it is read. By being faithful to therhetorical conventions of the source text, the Reuters translator created anEnglish version that connects with the collective memory of generations ofreaders attuned to fantasies of horror about a particular region. Theforeignization strategy employed in the translation taps into anothertradition, that of the collective fantasy of a barbaric anti-modern assailant.Given such a history, would whatever strategy employed by the translator ofthe Al-Qaida message, domesticated or foreignized, make much difference?

Notes

1 B Hatim Basil & I Mason, The Translator as Communicator, London & New York: Routledge, 1997, p149.

2 Ibid, p 37.3 L Venuti The Scandals of Translation. Towards an Ethics of Difference, London & New York:

Routledge, 1998, p 189.4 T Niranjana, Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism and the Colonial Context, Berkeley, Los

Angeles & Oxford: University of California Press, 1992.5 JG Herder, 'From Fragmente (1766-1767)', in A Lefevere (ed), Translation/History/Culture: A

Sourcebook, London & New York: Routledge, 1992, p 74.6 J Delille, 'Preface to Virgil's Georgics (1769)', in A Lefevere (ed), Translation/History/Culture: ASourcebook, London & New York: Routledge, 1992, p 37.

7 S Bassnett & A Lefevere (eds), Translation, History and Culture, London: Cassell, 1990, p 12.8 M Jan (ed) Le voyage en Asie centrale et au Tibet, Paris: Laffront, 1992.9 SD Westrem, The Hereford Map. A transcription and translation of the legends with commentary,

Turnhout, Belgium: BREPOLS, 200110 U Eco, Baudolino, London: Secker & Warburg, 2002, p 329.11 M Komrof (ed), Contemporaries of Marco Polo, consisting of the travel records to the eastern parts of

the world of William of Rubruck (1253-1255) the journey of John of Pian de Carpini (1245- 1247) andthe journal of Friar Odoric (1318-1330), London: Cape, 1929.

12 R Latham (trans), The Travels of Marco Polo, London: The Folio Society, 1968; The Travels of SirJohn Mandeville, London: Macmillan, 1915 (modern spelling version of the Cotton manuscript).

13 C Thubron, The Lost Heart of Asia, London: Heinemann, 1994, pp 158-159.

14 F Sale, A Journal of the Disasters in Afghanistan (1841-42), London: John Murray, 1843.15 M Edwards, The Great Game, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1975, pp vii-viii.16 Mandeville, 1915, p 129.

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