The translator as agent of change and the visible gaps

The figure of the translator as performing agent—as opposed to scribe—is telling about the motivation if not the nature of translation as well. Translation as performance is primarily concerned with impact and its transmission rather than the certainty of meaning; it is no longer an exercise in reproducing any formal or dynamic equivalence. Venuti has famously shown that the motivation of translation as such is a kind of activism with the visible translator giving expression to what is repressed originally— to raise the political consciousness of the translation audience. Granted that political activism may not always succeed or have a predictable outcome, performative translation provides the powerful vindication of language as immeasurably more than can be reduced into closed systems of innocent communication. One recalls in this connection Steiner’s early assertion in After Babel of the human “compulsion to otherness” (236) and translation as a mimetic speech act whereby we instinctively emulate one another at the same time as we stretch the limits of intentional and conventional meaning. Although his inadvertent translator has no manifest agenda, translation so executed is necessarily performative, and radically transformative of self and society—but not without revealing consequences, too. While recognizing the practice of translation as performance and transformation, I critique in my presentation the description of Hong Kong by Matthew Turner as a “culture of translation” in his influential essay on the formation of the local identity in the 1960’s and 1990’s. To the extent that translation here is the purposeful appropriation of a desired cosmopolitan modernity by our forebears, which many consider nostalgically to be the defining moment of the Hong Kong identity, I argue that translation as such had its limitations under colonialism which can only become apparent in the postcolonial era.