ABSTRACT
Taking a long-historical view, this chapter traces how modern ideas about translation in the West developed alongside the consolidation of modern ideas about race and racialization. While translators of the Romantic era in Europe came to see imagination as a key component of literary translation, the “scientific” racism of the day—used to justify colonization and enslavement—posited that people racialized as Other lacked the capacity for imagination. Out of racist beliefs but also a need to control populations when they could not speak their languages, Europeans both expected and demanded those they colonized and enslaved to produce literal translations. This chapter shows how the disparaging term “slavish translation” for “overly” literal translation reveals persistent ideas in the West not only about who translates and how but about who translates how. These attitudes endure today in the practice of bridge translation, in which a literal translation is prepared by a source-language speaker, frequently a person of color, for a usually White poet or author to shape it into a literary text with their imaginative “creative genius.”
