ABSTRACT
Cambodia’s extensive landscape of translation covers two thousand years of history. This chapter foregrounds the impact of two significantly disruptive “foreign” languages shaping its contours over time: Sanskrit in antiquity and French in the modern period, both with culturally defined literary traditions at the time of their introduction. The first section begins with the translation challenge of representing Khmer based on an Indic script prototype. It includes analyses of literal versus literary translation in the context of academic research on inscriptions written in Sanskrit prosody. The second section predominantly discusses the cultural ruptures engendered by the privileging of French language and literature during the early modern, colonial period (1863–1954). Initially, the introduction of French inspired a complex emotional response, which unintentionally resulted in the development of new Cambodian literature and academic translations. This productivity was temporarily quashed by the Khmer Rouge’s (1975–1979) ideologically motivated destruction of this new literature and its educated writers. Ironically, their cultural devolution would engender one of the most productive literary genres of modern Cambodian literature and translation: testimonial memoirs. Finally, this section concludes with several issues regarding the academic translation methods for recent English translations of “modern” Cambodian literary texts.
