2 - The Scandals of Medieval Translation: Thinking Difference in Francophone Texts and Manuscripts

Summary

This chapter seeks to develop some of the broader theoretical ramifications of the pioneering work undertaken by Jocelyn Wogan-Browne on the languages and cultures of medieval Britain. Her scholarship has paid meticulous attention to multilingualism in Britain, in ways that have often challenged more traditional literary histories and narratives of linguistic change. As part of this rethinking of literary and socio-linguistic histories, Wogan-Browne has also encouraged scholars working on both the French and English traditions to reconsider some of the linguistic and literary terminology that often shapes their objects of study. The present discussion is much indebted to this work, which has already raised important questions concerning how terms such as ‘language’, ‘multilingualism’ and ‘translation’ might be thought about in post-Conquest contexts.

Discussions of translation today often draw attention to ethical questions concerning how far translation facilitates an engagement with various kinds of difference: does translation – particularly translation into modern English – accommodate the alterity at the heart of any translated work, or does it render it invisible? If the latter, how can translations avoid the assimilation or suppression of difference? To what extent is cultural homogenization an inevitable feature of the market in which translation operates? The work of Antoine Berman and Lawrence Venuti has been central in motivating discussion of the ethical and ideological stakes of translation, as well as in interrogating the ways in which translators may comply with or resist the ethnocentric tendencies of translation in the modern marketplace. My title deliberately echoes that of Venuti's influential monograph on translation ethics, The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference. Here, as elsewhere in his work, Venuti argues against an assimilationist model of translation, advocating translation techniques that cultivate gaps and incompatibilities between languages, rather than seeking to smooth them out. Good, ethical translation in his view is demystifying in the sense that it manifests in its own language the foreignness of the foreign text (or ‘foreignizes’ it); ethical translation is also what he terms ‘minoritizing’, meaning that it cultivates a heterogeneous discourse that opens standard dialects, languages and literary canons to features of minority languages that may be alien to them.