ABSTRACT
Quite often, when one reads about translation practices such as those in South America, where literary translators have used translation as an anticolonial instrument (Gentzler, 2008), and you compare this to similar practices in India or Canada (Brisset, 2005; Simon, 2012), where translation was used to promote cultural identity, you come on striking similarities: People translate novels to achieve particular ideological aims, mostly to free their country or culture from colonial hegemony. Another example would be to compare translation practices in Turkey, where translation was used in the modernization of Turkey on a scientific level (Susam-Sarajeva, 2006), to some of the practices presented by Milton and Bandia (2009a), where translation is presented as an agent in cultural, educational and political modernization (see Uchiyama, 2009). Again, these practices show similarities: People translated large volumes of text to expose the people in their country to (better) views from elsewhere. These similarities, to me, are due to either the comparative literature or postcolonial frameworks that have been imposed on the interpretations of the data. In other words, because the theoretical expectations of researchers are framed by a near-dogmatic critical and postcolonial interest in translation studies, the findings largely reflect those expectations.
