ABSTRACT
The emergence of translation studies as a distinctive field of research has had considerable impact across a number of disciplines since its early tentative beginnings in the late 1970s. Opinion is divided as to whether or not translation studies can be classified as a discipline in its own right, and the term ‘interdiscipline’ is probably the most favoured term at present (Snell-Hornby et al., 1994). But regardless of debates about the name and nature of the subject area, what is clear is that discussion of translation has grown steadily in importance since then and has become significant in a wide variety of fields, from literary studies to post-colonial studies, from socio-linguistics to discourse theory, from business studies to international relations and globalization studies. Understanding something of what happens when translation takes place has come to be seen as necessary and important. Translation as a metaphor for intercultural exchange serves also as a key
image for the start of the twenty-first century, a century that is already one of massive movement of peoples around the planet on an unprecedented scale. Millions of people are displaced, some by wars and repressive governments, others by failed harvests, famine and economic catastrophe of one kind and another. Millions have left their homelands, abandoning their culture and language and seeking to start a new life in another place. In such circumstances, there is a heightened awareness of cultural difference and a greater need to reach out across cultural and linguistic boundaries than there has ever been before. This is reflected increasingly in literature, and many of the great writers of our age have changed languages, crossed borders and experimented with the unfamiliar: writers such as Vladmir Nabokov, Josef Brodsky, Milan Kundera, Samuel Beckett and Carlos Fuentes, and literary theorists such as Julia Kristeva and Tsvetan Todorov follow on from James Joyce, Joseph Conrad and Franz Kafka, and find themselves anew by translating themselves through the use of other languages. The pain of exile can result in extraordinary creativity, and is also a means of writing differently, because exiles, like translators view their world from more than one perspective.
