Theo Hemans 翻译、伦理与政治().docVIP

TRANSLATION, ETHICS, POLITICS THEO HERMANS [In Munday, Jeremy.(ed.)The Routledge Companion to Translation Studies Routledge Companions. Routledge,2009, pp. 93-105] 6.0 INTRODUCTION In his opening address to the post-apartheid South African parliament in 1994, President Nelson Mandela said that a word like ‘kaffir’ should no longer be part of our vocabulary. Its use was subsequently outlawed in South Africa. Imagine you are asked to translate, for publication in that country, an historical document from the pre-apartheid era which contains the word. Should you write it, gloss it, omit it or replace it with something else – and if so, with what, with another derogatory word or some blander superordinate term? Are you not duty-bound to respect the authenticity of the historical record? Would you have any qualms about using the word if the translation was meant for publication outside South Africa? In Germany and Austria, denying the Holocaust is forbidden by law. In November 1991, in Germany, Günter Deckert provided a simultaneous German interpretation of a lecture in which the American Frederic Leuchter denied the existence of gas chambers in Auschwitz. Deckert was taken to court and eventually convicted. Was this morally right? Was Deckert not merely relaying into German someone else’s words, without having to assume responsibility for them? Is it relevant that Deckert is a well-known neo-Nazi, and that he expressed agreement with Leuchter’s claims? If Deckert’s conviction was morally justified, should we not also accept that Muslims who agreed with Ayatollah Khomeiny’s 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie were right to regard the translators of The Satanic Verses as guilty of blasphemy too? The examples (from Kruger 1997 and Pym 1997) are real enough, and they involve, apart from legal issues, moral and political choices that translators and interpreters make. While translators and interpreters have always had to make such choices, sustained reflection about this aspec