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Using translation/interpreting as a tool of hegemony or resistance has long existed in human history (see also Chapter 2.3.1). For instance, Cronin has observed the act of translation itself may be a form of resistance:

We are familiar with the figure of loss, infidelity and treason. Less current […] is the figure of resistance. By resistance, we mean the desire of an individual or group not to translate a language or be translated into another language. The act of translation is consciously or unconsciously resisted. The motivations for this resistance vary, but two dominant forms are what we might call aesthetic translation resistance and political translation resistance, […] This aesthetic resistance to translation is […] directed at a re-ordering of the senses to quicken and intensify the experience of the foreign reality. Political translation resistance is an unwillingness to translate or be translated as a means of protecting an identity that is perceived to be under threat from another language group (1998: 39-40).

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Political translation resistance may be demonstrated by minority languages which are on the verge of extinction. Cronin (2003) examines minority languages in a global setting and urges people to note the difference between ‘translation-as-assimilation’ and

‘translation-as-diversification’ as he observes:

Minority languages that are under pressure from powerful major languages can succumb at lexical and syntactic levels so that over time they become mirror-images of the dominant language. Through imitation, they lack the specificity that invites imitation. As a result of continuous translation, they can no longer be translated. There is nothing left to translate (2003: 141).

As a result, refusing to translate or be translated may be a means for these minority languages to resist losing their identity to the dominant cultures and languages.

In terms of aesthetic translation resistance, the foreignizing translation strategy advocated by German scholar Friedrich Schleiermacher (2004) and Walter Benjamin’s

‘pure language’ of translation (2004) may be two good examples. The foreignizing translation strategy is to retain as much foreignness of the source work as possible and open a window to the outside world for the target reader, while its opposite strategy, domesticating translation, attempts to make the author speak the target language as fluently as the target readers. Schleiermacher advocates the former in that it can help enrich and refine the target culture and language through proper choice of foreign text and adoption of a specific discursive strategy. In Schleiermacher’s sense, foreignizing translation seems to appreciate otherness and resist dominant culture, but fundamentally it is no more than another means to practice hegemony in that why Schleiermacher, in the nineteenth century, promotes foreignizing translation is to serve his Prussian nationalist purpose of resisting French cultural hegemony and realizing global domination of German culture through absorbing essence of the foreignness provided by translation en masse (Venuti, 1995: 99-147; Schleiermacher, 2004).

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Schleiermacher’s advocacy of foreignizing translation has been echoed by some renowned translation scholars in favour of retaining the style or spirit of source language in the early twentieth century, such as Walter Benjamin. Benjamin suggests that a translation should represent the original with the pure language instead of rendering it in the way as if the author him/herself had spoken the target language, and that ‘fidelity as ensured by literalness’ can make a translation reflect ‘the great longing for linguistic complementation (2004: 81).’ Generally, both Schleiermacher and Benjamin appeal for using translation as a means to resist or challenge domestic cultural values.

However, at the turn of twentieth and twenty-first centuries, translation has turned into a tool for spreading Anglo-American cultural hegemony. Venuti observes the adverse effect of Anglo-American culture on global cultural exchanges through translation in post-colonial context, which is manifest in the dangerous disproportion between English translations and other language translations in a recent world translation publications survey (1995: 14-15). What’s worse, Venuti finds that not only has transparency dominated the criteria for evaluating appropriateness of English translation but also domesticating translation has been used to serve ideological purposes of the domestic culture. Perceiving that the domesticating method commonly adopted in English-language translation has contributed to reducing the original values of foreign texts and reinforcing the Anglo-American cultural hegemony, Venuti suggests that the translator be visible by adopting a foreignizing method as ‘a strategic cultural intervention’ to resist ‘the hegemonic English-language nations and the unequal cultural exchanges (ibid: 20)’ and that the reader be active in engaging in ‘symptomatic reading⁴’

4 Symptomatic reading is to look critically at translated texts which are produced through a domesticating method and detect the inconsistent dictions which reveal the interpretative choice of the translator under the influence of social and cultural values of the target culture. In brief, symptomatic reading is to foreignize a domesticating translation and disclose ethnocentric violence embedded in that domesticating translation (Venuti, 1995: 24-39).

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to demystify what lies behind the transparency of English-language translation (ibid:

24-29). In his following work The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference, Venuti explicitly points out that due to its ethnocentric nature, translation can never be cultural exchanges between ‘equals’ and that ‘minoritizing translation’, which is to translate marginal foreign texts by adopting a foreignizing method, can release linguistic ‘remainder⁵’ that may subvert, remold or innovate the major form of language, which in turn boost the equal status of language variants and of different cultures (1998: 9-11; my emphasis). Looking critically at how English-language translation has contributed to the formation and reinforcement of Anglo-American cultural hegemony and suggesting the visibility of translators and the active interpretation of readers, Venuti aims to address the issue of hegemony and resistance between unequal powers by minoritizing the dominant, promoting equality of cultures, and reducing ethnocentrism within translation.