Douglas Robinson's book Translation and Empire mainly focuses on the imperial use of translation throughout the colonization period and the resistance against this use of translation by certain scholars (such as Niranjana and Rafael) via offering alternative ways to translate. Robinson tries to show how translation studies and post-colonial studies can affect and at the same time feed one another. Because analysing how the act of translation was used by the imperial power can help post-colonial theorists shape their translation strategies against the empire while these new strategies will definitely nourish the field of translation studies.
"The old assumptions about translation, that is purely linguistic and largely impersonal process for achieving semantic equivalence between texts, still dominate thinking about translation in many parts of the international translation-studies community." [Robinson: 12] The eternal dualism (word-for-word vs. sense-for-sense) in translation studies lies of course at the heart of the issue since translation has been defined with these terms through the ages and no other way has been thought through much. However, postcolonialists try to strengthen the political aspects of translation other than the concepts of meaning, equivalence, accuracy, and technique [Robinson: 8] with which translation has been studied for years and challenge the dualism. Because as Cheyfitz suggests "Our imperialism historically has functioned (and continues to function) by substituting for the difficult politics of translation another politics of translation that represses these difficulties." [Robinson: 68] In other words, challenging power relations (mostly inequalities) in translation has been deliberately supressed by the "powerful" -which can be named differently according to where you stand: patron, colonialist etc.-, and postcolonial theorists try to position and these inequalities/assymetries in the act of translation.
Robinson's questions throughout the book are quiet important to keep in mind while choosing your strategy prior to or during translation; because they are actually shaking the throne of such terms as adecuacy, effect, and equivalence. Especially questions like this one "How does one rephrase an American English text in Mexican Spanish so that it will make anything like the same sense to a member of a poor third-world country that it makes to a member of one of the richest countries on earth?" [Robinson: 28]. It actually shows us that dynamic equivalence as suggested by Nida will not be the first and easiest solution since it is hardly possible to create the same effect in two distinct cultures. Or the sense-for-sense translation as suggested by many translation studies scholars throughout the ages since then it reveals another basic question which is; what is sense at all? Then there is the issue of diaspora and exile -or perhaps self-exile as suggested by Aijaz Ahmad. Diaspora has come to represent difference, alienness and mixedness, the fact that most or all of the peoples on earth came from somewhere and now live elsewhere. [Robinson: 29] As these postcolonial theorists, many people in the colonized land and many of those who are in the diaspora actually "belong too many places" [Ahmad: 127]. So in this situation of excess of belongings then the question becomes what is foreign actually?
Postcolonial translation studies take shape around these problems. And the approaches to these problems differ according to the ideological background of the translator and experiences s/he has gone through during the colonialization hence these approaches are not universal. Being not universal is the "inherent" concept of poststructuralism, anyway.
Niranjana's suggestion of retranslation is one of these approaches taken form around a nativist idea. She suggests a nearly impossible going back to past by highly disregarding the fact that after all that the culture has gone through it has changed drastically. Actually Niranjana's idea is quite nostalgic and contradictory in itself, since it is impossible in a post-structuralist thinking to assume the past as the "pure", "good" and "uncorrupted" as the post-structuralists' world is a morally complex one in which good and evil are always mixed [Robinson: 90]. Thus most probably her suggestion of a foreignized translation (retranslation) similar to Venuti's will not serve to go back to her presumed "good" state in time.
While Rafael mentions translation's role to create a feel of solidarity between the indiviuals in the culture by creating a mistranslation, Samia Mehrez suggests a perspective -namely hybridization- different from both Niranjana's and Rafael's. Because it is important for her to communicate with power-holders while still to be able to communicate with her family and friends.
As Robinson mentioned in the conclusion and all these different strategies showed postcolonial translation theory is still a new field of study; thus both being a new field of study and people's having different experiences on colonial times bring a productivity in this field. And since all these strategies propose some kind of resistence to colonial powers, all of them are ideologically motivated and suggest embracing the difference by different methods.

REFERENCES
Aijaz Ahmad, 1992. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. New York: Verso Books.
Robinson, Douglas, 1997. Translation and Empire: Postcolonial Theories Explained. Manchaster: St. Jerome Publishing.

Meta-response to Conscious Choices vs Internalized Actions

As Ceyda has mentioned in her paper, Conscious Choices vs Internalized Actions, a Bourdieusian approach to translation seems to be too homogenizing as Bourdieu is more into "internalized rationals" behind the actions thus reducing the translation to a communal/societal level by highly disregarding the indiviual differences between translators. And this results in seeing the translator as the representator of her/his society since s/he realizes what is actually going on around her/his habitus in the text and actually this kind of a perspective really blocks the way for a foreignizing approach to translation and an ideologically oriented translation. And as suggested by Latour, maybe it would be better that social phenomena (in our case, translation) is examined through actor-networks and the associations between them.

Translation not as an individiual but as a social activity

In his paper, “A Bourdieusian Theory of Translation”, Jean-Marc Gouanvic tries to describe the act of translation through field, “habitus”, capital, and “illusio” concepts of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, in a way described as “providing new sets of analytical concepts and explanatory procedures to theorize the social nature of translation practices” by Moira Inghilleri [Inghilleri: 279]. Gouanvic’s aim is to reflect the sociological environment (fields and agents such as publishers, series directors, literary directors and critics) of the act of translation and how this environment is effected by translation and affects the translation.

Unlike Functionalist Approaches to translation that put the commissioner and translation’s purpose in the target culture in the centre of the translation activity and give a role to translator to realize the commissions only -although given the name expert-, Sociological Approaches’ focus is not on the individuals in the field or one specific translation activity, but rather the whole society and despite this idea, Sociological Approaches are less restricted in defining the translator’s choices during the process. According to the Functionalist Approaches as the translator is the expert of translating, s/he has a purpose during the process and translates appropriately for this purpose, thus has a conscious activity throughout the process shaped by her/his commission. However, Sociological Approaches take Bourdiue’s term habitus -embodied dispositions acquired through individuals’ social and biological trajectories and continually shaped and negotiated vis-à-vis fields [Inghiller: 208]- and define the act of translator through her/his habitus. According to Gouanvic, translation as a practice has little to do with conforming to norms through the deliberate use of specific strategies; in other words, it is not a question of consciously choosing from a panoply of available solutions [Gouanvic: 157, my emphasis]. The only freedom of the translator is to choose between translating a text or not and following the original closely or not. The other decisions of the translator actually are not her/his decisions, but they are decisions made unconsciously with the effect of habitus. Besides, the translator places him- or herself at the service of the writer to this capacity[*] in the target language and culture [Gouanvic: 157]. Thus, translator actually has no individualistic role in the process since all s/he does is to make explicit what the author implicit for the target culture. Translator has to understand the author in author’s own habitus and interpret her/him in her/his own habitus, therefore the translator is only a messenger between two cultures because of his/her expertise in both cultures’ habitus and her/his only job is to express the habits and the conventions.

The same approach to translator as a dependent entity in the field of literature is also apparent in the social capital gain. An author gains capital if her/his writing becomes a classic; however, translators’ role in turning these writings into classics are not discussed. Authors achieve these ranks, i.e. being an author of classic, all of a sudden by themselves and translator only “benefit” from this capital which the original text already has had. I think what Gouanvic misses here is examples such as translation of Edgar Allen Poe by Baudelaire, since through his translation Edgar Allen Poe gained his capital in Europe and became a classic in gothic literature.

And finally, the difficulty of translating is defined in the interaction between the original and the translation and keeping the “resemblance in difference” as if any room is made for any extreme. The translator is described as the agent of the writer, transferring the writer’s discourse into the target culture [Gouanvic: 158], so in other words, it has to resemble the writer’s text. And at the same time, the translator translates according to the norms defined by her/his habitus, so in a way the translation has to be different since it is encoded in a totally different environment. Therefore a translation has to resemble the original, but also has to be different from it somehow. The obscurity in Gouanvic’s paper actually lies particularly in this point. How resembling or how different should the translation be in order to be called a translation? The loose boundaries between all the concepts in the text make it ambiguous and confusing. The difference between the writer and the translator, between the translation and adaption, and between the resemblance and difference. They are all represented as binaries, but no clear limits are drawn around them. Thus it creates the question if the borderline between the activities of the writer and the translator are so blurred, how can Gouanvic define the role of the translator, habitus of the translator, and the capital of the translator so easily?

REFERENCES

Gouanvic, Jean-Marc. “A Bourdieusian Theory of Translation, or the Coincidence of Practical Instances” in The Translator. Volume 11, Number 2 (2005). pp. 147-166.

Inghilleri, Moira. “Sociological Approaches” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies ed. by Mona Baker and Gabriel Saldanha. Abington (2009). pp. 279-282.

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[*] “The capacity to ‘[make] public things which everyone felt in a confused sort of way’ and the capacity of ‘publishing the implicit, the tacit’” [Gouanvic: 158].