Translation and Power Play

It is easy for translation to masquerade as an ‘innocent’ activity in which an honest translator communes with the original author and passes on un distorted the message of the source text. In reality, translation in all its forms is frequently the site of a variety of power plays between the actors involved. Some of these are quite deliberate manipulations of the original for a wide variety of reasons, ranging from the desire to save money to the desire to control behaviour, from the desire to follow perceived norms (and keep the translator out of prison or worse) to the desire for cultural hegemony. This study attempts to account for the key points at which such distortion and manipulation occur and to explore who is affected by them, using examples from a wide range of sources, including the translation of classical and modern literature and the subtitling of films, and relating the results to the wider cultural environment of censorship.