Third World Quarterly

Translating Terror Author(s): Susan Bassnett Reviewed work(s): Source: Third World Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 3, Connecting Cultures (2005), pp. 393-403 Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3993830 . Accessed: 10/11/2011 05:23
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Third World Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 3, pp 393-403, 2005

RTaylor&Francis

Routledge Group

Translating
SUSAN BASSNETT

Terror

ABSTRACTStarting with a

reading of a translated text from an Islamist website, this essay looks at the underlying cultural and literary traditions that have influenced the translator's strategy. The author suggests that the horizon of expectation of the potential readershiphas been shaped by centuries of textual anxiety about Central Asia, a regionperceived as a cradle of savagery and antimodernitysince the Middle Ages. From the creator of the C13th Mappa Mundi who added a note to the effect that all kinds of horrors were to be found in the region, through the age of the Tamburlaine,then through the Afghan wars that triggered the start of the Great Game to Umberto Eco's most recent novel similar negative representations of the region can be found. The veracity of traveller's accounts is mediated through the mythical construction that continues today in reporting on the region and in the language selected by translators. Underpinningthe essay is the questionposed by translator scholars concerning the ethics of acculturationas a textual strategy. The author argues that there are historical, extra-textual reasons that determine the choices available to translators in this context

In November 2003 a statement purporting to be from a unit of al-Qaida appeared on an Islamist website. Translated by Reuters, it was published in The Guardian,under the headline 'Al-Qaida statement: the cars of death will not stop'. Let us focus for a moment on that phrase, 'the cars of death'. You are probably not in any doubt about its meaning: it is a reference to car bombs, in particular to the car bomb that killed Roger Short, the British consul, and a large number of Turkish citizens when the British Consulate in Istanbul was targeted just before the statement was issued. But there is a very significant difference between the phrase 'cars of death' and 'car bombs' The meaning may be the same, but the register is different. 'Car bombs' is the phrase we use every day, it is the phrase that we understand, it has become a reality over several decades of terrorism. But 'cars of death' is quaintly oldfashioned, stilted-in short, foreign. There are other curious English phrases in the al-Qaida speeches as translated. There is the use of the vocative: 'O, Bush, what have you done to America and its allies.. .'; 'O Islamic nation, you must support the mojahedin to victory...'. There is a strange sentence that must refer to an implicit
Susan Bassnett is at the Centrefor Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AH, UK. Email: corav@csv.warwick.ac.uk. ISSN 0143-6597 print/ISSN 1360-2241 online/05/030393-11 DOI: 10.1080/01436590500033628

2005 Third World Quarterly 393

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figurative image in the source language. 'As for the tails of America.. .especially Britain, Italy, Australia and Japan'. There are religious phrases: ' by the grace of God, he was killed', 'by the will of God, America will soon look for someone to protect it'. 'By God, Bush, you've fallen into a trap as we planned...'. Above all, there is the apocalyptic tone: 'here now are the cars of death reaping (the souls of) the allies of the tyrant of the era everyday...'. What makes this sentence even more apocalyptic are the three words in brackets ('the souls of') added by the translator to clarify the image of harvesting, so transforming the phrase 'reaping the allies' into 'reaping the souls of the allies'. I am currently director of an Arts and Humanities Research Board project that is investigating the politics and economics of translation in global media. The project examines texts such as this one, seeking answers to questions about how they are translated, what are the strategies employed by translators and, most basic of all, who actually does the translating. In this case, the translator works for Reuters, hence linguistic competence is not in doubt. Reuters employ people with first class linguistic skills, and in this case the language is Arabic. We know that to some extent the translator's choice of English was constrained by the style of the original, which was indeed apocalyptic in tone, and which draws upon rhetorical conventions employed in a particular variant of Arabic generally used by fundamentalist religious groups. Such conventions can be discerned in the structure of the English, hence to this extent the translation can be said to be faithful to the norms of the source text. The problem, however, which is fundamental to all translation, is that rhetorical conventions carry different meanings in different contexts. Basil Hatim and Ian Mason, both distinguished Arabic translation experts, have drawn attention to the problem of translating speeches or statements that involve a blend of different genres which is desirable in one context but definitely undesirable in another. Discussing a speech by the late Ayatollah Khomeini, they note that three different genres: the political tirade, the religious sermon and legal deontology are all combined in the Farsi: Such a combinationof genericelements,however,althoughit is disconcerting for the average English-language reader, is entirely appropriate and not necessarily perceived as hybrid in the socio-textual practice of language culturesuch as Farsi and Arabic.1 Moving from English to Arabic, Hatim and Mason show how similar difficulties arise when rhetorical conventions do not have a match in the target language. English understatement, irony and the journalistic convention of opening a passage with a statement that is then going to be challenged and argued down are very difficult to transpose into a linguistic system that does not recognise these textual elements in the same way. Hatim and Mason discuss what they term connectivity ie the gradual construction of a line of argument-and note that this kind of construction is 'discouraged if not totally disallowed in a number of languages (eg Arabic)'.2 In short, what is standard practice in one language may not function in the same way at all in 394

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another language, even though the component parts of the text (eg the words) are entirely translatable. The result can be serious misreading of the source text, even though the translator may have done a good job in rendering the sentences of the source into accessible form, and even though that translator may make claims to 'faithfulness'. The effect of the English versions of the al-Qaida statements, I suggest, is the opposite of what was intended. I am actually using the dreaded term 'intended' here, even though it is so fraught and unstable, because this was a political statement put out as a deliberate message for a Western audience, and as such had a particular objective or intention. The English version, no doubt because it follows the Arabic so closely, comes across as archaic, over-the-top, ranting, almost absurdly Old Testament in short, fundamentalist. It is exactly the kind of speech a scriptwriterwould put in the mouth of an Islamic fanatic. Here are two of the demands made of Bush: 1. 'To purify all Islamic land from the filth of the Jews and Americans, including Jerusalem and Kashmir'. 2. 'For America to stop interfering between us and the tyrannical governments which rule Muslims and for us to set up an Islamic caliphate (state)' After the word 'caliphate', a word resonant of medieval legend and a vanished world of antiquity, the translator has added the modern English 'state' .The words 'caliphate', 'cars of death', the anti-Semitic 'filth of the Jews' and the vocative 'O' resonate with contemporary readers, introducing a discourse of other-worldliness into a text with a very immediate, contemporary set of threats and demands. Its very excess in stylistic terms invites its dismissal. Yet it is a good and faithful translation, and the translator has endeavoured to help his readers by adding clarification where he considers there may be room for misunderstanding. Not only is caliphate additionally rendered as state, but the word 'Mojahedin' is glossed as 'Islamist fighters'. The translator's objective is to render the Arabic source into a form that is accessible to English language readers, and the criterion of accessibility leads to the occasional glossing of words that might be unfamiliar. But it does not lead to discursive shifts that might transform the rhetoric into something more immediate or more explicitly familiar, and because of this the text reinforces the stereotype of the fundamentalist as in direct conflict not just with a particular political enemy, but with modernity itself. Even car bombs are transformed into quaintly antiquated cars of death. Terror is transmogrified. Lawrence Venuti, the translation scholar, has made a strong case in the postcolonial context for the strategy of foreignization in translation. His argument, grossly simplified, is that domestication, or acculturation as a strategy means that the foreign text is transformed into something that might as well have been written in the target language. The signs of its foreignness, its otherness, hence its independence from the target literary system, are 395

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erased and it is appropriated into the translating culture. In his book, The Scandals of Translation, subtitled Towards an Ethics of Difference, Venuti argues that the value of a translated text 'depends on effects and functions that can't be entirely predicted or controlled'. Translating, he claims 'is best done with a critical resourcefulness attuned to the linguistic and cultural differences that comprise the local scene. Only these differences offer the means of registering the foreignness of foreign cultures in translation'.3 His concern is that at times, as Tejaswini Niranjana has argued, the colonial enterprise has used translation as an instrument of oppression, and his proposal for a more ethical translation is founded on recognition of the hierarchies of power that pertain in global marketing and the need to rethink what we understand by translating.4 But is it more or less ethical for a translator to render a statement such as the one discussed so far in acculturated terms or in terms that continue to stress its foreignness with all the value judgements that this implies? Might it be argued that the more ethical strategy, in this case, could have been domestication, for the transfer of the al-Qaida statements into standard English might have underlined the seriousness of the threat without the excuse of linguistic differentiation? The debate between foreignization and domestication as a strategy is longstanding, and reflects two different worldviews. To see the debate at its clearest, we need only consider the differences between French and German attitudes to translation in the Age of Enlightenment. Again, simplifying grossly, the dominant French tendency was towards acculturation, while the Germans took the opposite view. Johann Gottfried Herder sums up the difference between these two positions, albeit in a slightly biased way rather neatly: The French,who are much too proudof theirown taste, adaptall thingsto it, ratherthan try to adapt themselvesto the taste of anothertime. Homer must enterFrancea captiveand dressaccordingto theirfashion,so as not to offend theireyes. He has let them take his venerablebeardand his old simpleclothes away from him. He has to conformto Frenchcustoms,and wherehis peasant coarse-ness still showshe is treatedas a barbarian. But we poor Germans,who are still almost an audiencewithouta father-land, who are still withouttyrants to dictate our taste, want to see him the way he iS.5 The value judgements in this extract are striking: Homer is betrayed, made captive, deprived of his own clothes. He is regarded as coarse, a barbarian peasant by the French, who are depicted as overlords, denying the original his true value. The Germans, in contrast, want to see him the way he is-they stand for honesty, truth, freedom and a translation strategy that allows the foreign to exist on its own terms. Significantly, Herder links this to the contemporary political situation: the Germans have a culture, but. are 'without a fatherland' and without 'tyrants', who, unlike the French, dictate taste and feeling. The strategy of foreignization is here linked to a nationalist discourse that champions democracy and free thinking. Jacques Delille presents the counter-argument from the French perspective. He argues that translation is a means of enriching a language but notes 396

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significantly that extreme faithfulness in translation will lead instead to extreme unfaithfulness. He provides numerous examples: a word that was noble in Latin, might be ordinary in French if translated literally, an image that was once original and exciting might seem cliched, an allusion that could once be picked up by one set of readers might be obscure to another. The task of the translator is therefore not to be faithful either in strict linguistic terms, or in terms of style, it is to 'try to reproduce the effect the author produced': Whoeverwants to translategoes into debt. To repayit he must pay the same sum but not in the samecurrency. If he is unableto renderthe imagehe should replaceit with a thought.If he cannotpaint for the ear he shouldpaint for the mind...Does he foresee that he will have to weaken his author in a certain that authorin another.Let him give back below passage?Let him strengthen what he takes away above. Let him compensateeverywhere while staying as close as possibleto the natureof the originalin all its parts....His meritmust be determinedon the basis of the totality of his work and the overall effect producedby everypassage.6 Delille predates skopos theorists by well-over 200 years, but his point is that the objective of translation is the creation of a text that will be acceptable to a new set of readers, and that their judgement will be made in terms of their cultural norms, rather than those of the source. The translator needs to keep a balance between the original and the ultimate destination of the translated text. It is, of course, in keeping that balance where the real skills of the translator reside. Translation is a kind of journey. It is an activity that always involves motion, it is a passage from one language to another, and hence from one culture into another. There is also always a temporal dimension, for what is written in one place, in one time, is then rendered for other readers in another place and another time. Translation theory today is increasingly concerned with translation as movement between different contexts, and increasingly concerned also with the consequent ideological dimension. Back in 1990, Bassnett and Lefevere argued for the cultural turn in translation studies, and drew attention to the problems of both textual and extra-textual manipulation involved in the translation process: studiestend to deal with the constraintsthat enter into Translation/rewriting play duringthe process of both the writingand the rewritingof texts. These constraintsboth belongto the fieldof literarystudies'proper'and transcend it. haveto do with powerand manipulation, two issuespotentially Theyultimately of enormousinterestnot only to those engagedin literarystudies,but also to all their victimsoutside.7 All sorts of complex sets of power relations are involved in translation, from commercial, marketing constraints through to hegemonic cultural assumptions. How many Nobel prizes have been awarded to writers working in what are perceived to be the dominant world languages compared to those writing in lesser known, or politically more marginalized languages, and can this be accidental? Highly unlikely. Translators may be poorly paid, they may, since 397

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the sixteenth century, have received less attention than the original author they may often have been deemed to have been invisible, but they have exercised enormous power nevertheless. Today, in this era of global communication, texts are endlessly translated and then retranslated. We live in a world awash with translated texts, though increasingly in the Englishspeaking world we have less access to other languages and hence to other mindsets, to other norms, to other cultural codes. Would the translator of the Reuters' text have been doing a service to alQaida had he abandoned any pretence at reproducing a rhetorical system that was in any case unintelligible to his readers and rendered the statements in straightforward modern English? Delille would have approved of this strategy, but would the ultimate effect have been to make the terrorist demands seem more rooted in our everyday existence, hence less extreme and, inevitably, less foreign? Would that have made the threats more frightening, by effectively normalising what has been presented to us as a text written by extremists? Or should those textual conventions, however strange, be rendered as they have been, thereby heightening the sense of impending apocalypse, the fanaticism, and, as noted above, the implicit anti-modernity, the desire for a caliphate that would be established on premises that reject Western notions of democracy and global communication? More to the point, whose decision is it to keep the apocalyptic tone? The translator's? An editor's? A press baron's? A politician's? Or is it dictated by the horizon of expectation of the readership, the target English-language readers worldwide, whoever they are and however they can be determined. I have just said that translation is a highly complex activity, involving far more than the linguistic. Of course translation is the act of transferringa text written in one language into another language, but it is much more besides. It is, as pointed out, an act that involves the crossing of boundaries, hence the negotiating of space in between boundaries. It is a territorial exercise, it is a kind of journey. It also always involves anhistorical dimension. Translation always takes place in a continuum. Translations are continuations of texts through space and through time. The project on politics and economics of translation in global media is linked to another piece of ongoing research that I have now been working on/ around/with, for some 10 years or so, and I want to try and pull the two lines of enquiry together in the remainder of this paper. This other area of interest concerns ways in which travellers from the West have journeyed through, documented, sought to represent, and ultimately fantasised about a vast area of the planet that is loosely termed Central Asia. It is the region through which the Silk Routes ran, a region that has seen the rise and fall of great civilisations, the region from which came Genghis Khan and his Tartar hordes who reached the outskirts of Vienna in the thirteenth century, then later Tamburlaine, scourge of the world and the Moghuls, who founded their great empire in India. It is a region that has received an enormous amount of attention over the centuries, and yet it is a region that resists definition. Michel Jan, editor of a huge anthology of writings about the region, Le voyage en Asie central et au Tibet (1992) bases his definition on the natural 398

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boundaries provided by the Himalayas, the Pamir and the Hindu Kush to the south, Siberia to the north and the Volga and Caspian to the West, and on travellers' accounts, but emphasizes that he has had to settle on an arbitrary definition because there is so much diversity of opinion.8 Jan also notes significantly that this is a region that has never experienced political unity. It is a region of vast deserts, the highest mountains on earth, great rivers, a landlocked sea, a region through which Europeans have travelled on their way to somewhere else. It is not a destination, it is a place of transit and in the European mythology, not a place to inhabit either. Travellers from the Middle Ages onwards have emphasized the difficulties presented by the climate, the inhospitability of the landscape and the immense size of the area. Perhaps one consequence of this uncertainty is that Central Asia is a region onto which all kinds of fantasies have been projected. Early mapmakers filled it with strange and terrifying monsters, with cannibals who survived by drinking human blood, with web-footed creatures, humans without mouths, dog-headed giants. 'Here are all kinds of horrors' wrote the author of the Hereford Mappa Mundi (1300) in a note on his map.9 If you want a summary of some of the most popular medieval fantasies about Central Asia, you could do worse than to read Umberto Eco' s latest novel, Baudolino. Baudolino and his companions cross 'an ocean of sand, which rose like the great waves of the sea, and it seemed that everything moved beneath their feet'.10 Baudolino tells of an encounter with the black rocks of the Bubuctor that turn human skin the colour of coal, with gigantic scorpions and threeheaded snakes, of their first sight of the Sambyaton, the river of stone, of their meetings with the skiapods with their single leg, and with unicorns. All these wonders are part of Baudolino's tale of his journey to the kingdom of Prester John, for a dominant medieval fantasy located this idealised Christian ruler somewhere in Central Asia. In his novel, Eco draws upon a range of medieval sources, including accounts of the journeys of three friars, John of Pian de Carpini (1245 - 1247) William of Rubruck (1253-1255) and Odoric (1318-1330) to the court of the great Khan as emissaries.1l These texts are matter-of-fact accounts of the hardships suffered by the friars, all fairly similar in tone and all stressing the natural horrors of the region-the terrible deserts, the intolerable cold, the fierce winds, the sandstorms, the raging rivers and the wild mountains, along with the barbarity of the savage nomadic people they encountered. Eco also draws upon other medieval texts recounting fantastic journeys, notably the travels of Marco Polo and the travels of Sir John Mandeville.12 Both these works were enormously popular, constantly reprinted over several centuries and translated into diverse European languages. But both and this point needs to be emphasized have been highly questioned in terms of their authenticity. Marco Polo' s version of events was apparently related to one Rustichello da Pisa, who tells us this in the prologue. The text is therefore written by one man, Rustichello, who had already acquired a reputation as a romance writer, on the basis of an account of travels in Central Asia provided by another man (Marco Polo) who was his cellmate for a time in 1298, when they were both prisoners of war in Genoa. Rustichello insists in 399

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his prologue that readers can rely on the veracity of his book: 'And all who read the book or hear it may do so with full confidence, because it contains nothing but the truth'. That 'truth' has subsequently been questioned, not only because of the liberties a writer of romances may have taken with the story he heard, but because it cannot be proved that the story was not invented in the first place. Similarly, the author of Sir John Mandeville's travels has never been identified, though that text is full of insistence on the truthfulness of everything set down init. Mandeville' s book is a masterpiece of manipulation: he always has an excuse when he has not actually seen something, for there is always someone whose honesty cannot be doubted who assures him that he has seen it. This is very very different from Friar Odoric, who declares that he has only included things he saw with his own eyes and has omitted stories of things he did not actually see. Mandeville' s book concludes with assurances to the reader that he showed his work to the Pope in Rome on his way home and the Holy Father had it examined and vouched for its truthfulness. The fact that the Pope was in Avignon at the time did not deter the author from making this claim. Being seen to be honest was far more important to the writers of both Mandeville's and Polo's accounts than actual facts. In this respect, they share traits with contemporary journalismand both can be seen as translators in a way, reworking stories, reshaping material for new readers. Eco too is a translator, and it is interesting to note that he was working on his book on translation at the same time as he was writing Baudolino. The popularity of these (and other) medieval books shows a fascination with Central Asia as the locus of all kinds of imaginary horrors, the site of absolute otherness. Myths about the region go a long way back in time: Alexander the Great marched on India in 328 BC, the armies of the Sogdians, the Scythians, the Samanids, the Seljuks emerged from the region, so that long before the army of Ghengis Khan crossed the Danube into Austrian territories in 1241, fantasies of violent peoples who brought terror and destruction with them were well-established. The terror inspired by the Mongols led to the missions of the friars, as European rulers including the Pope realised that they had to begin some kind of dialogue with the Khan in order to avoid annihilation. Here is the travel writer Colin Thubron summarising perceptions of the region: For two thousand years Central Asia was the womb of terror, where an raceswaitedto impel one anotherinto history. implacablequeue of barbarian Whateverspurredtheir grim waves-the deepeningerosion of their pasturelands or theirseasonsof fleetingunity-they bore the same stampof phantom mobilityand mercilessness.'3 A place from whence people bent on destruction come, people with no respect for Western civilization, barbaric people who seem not to fear death this was Central Asia in the European imaginary of the Middle Ages. Does that sound familiar? Let us come back to this shortly. But it was also a region that had to be traversed, because of the pressures of 400

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commerce. Silk, china, spices, paper, all kinds of luxury goods were brought into Europe along the Silk Routes, and all kinds of luxury goods such as stained glass were exported to the East. Europe-and China-had to engage with the region because they needed to trade. Another familiar story? The opening up of sea routes lessened demands on the Silk Routes and for about a century, roughly from the early seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth, attention shifted to the New World as the primary locus of European fantasies of otherness. Then, with the great change of consciousness that came with altered perspectives of the natural world in the eighteenth century, combined with the British presence in India, Central Asia returned to prominence. From Coleridge' s fantasy of the stately pleasure dome, the deep romantic chasm, the savage waters and the 'ancestral voices prophesying war', a new element entered writing about the region. Subsequent travellers from all over Europe would write about the beauty in the savage landscapes, the wild mountains, the ruined civilisations, the palaces and cities sinking back into the sands. Eugene Schuyler declared in 1876 that Turkistan was the place in Asia that had most 'impressed the imagination of Europe'. New adjectives were added to the prevailing ones used by earlier writers-vast empty, limitless, desolate, cruel, barren, harsh, extreme-and those include lost, abandoned, fallen, decayed. Now the people were seen differently too; no longer monsters with single legs or cannibalistic tendencies, they are victims of corrupt governments, cruel and untrustworthy, living in unspeakable social conditions, Eugene Vambery wrote about the goitres that afflict people around the salty wastes of the Aral sea and the parasitic worm that could burrow into human flesh, found in foul water and particularly prevalent in Bokhara. But what also brought Central Asia back into prominence were the events culminating in the expulsion of the British from Kabul in 1842 after a long siege. One of the most graphic accounts of the retreat from Kabul is the book published in 1843 by Lady Florentia Sale, A Journal of the Disasters in Afghanistan.In this book, all the familiar stereotypes of the region and its peoples recur, woven into the stark details of the massacre of thousands of men, women and children and the appalling conditions faced by the few hundred survivors, including Lady Sale (I had fortunately only one ball in my arm) who walked through the mountains in January snows to escape to India' .14 The point to note here is the recurrence of certain ideas and images across the centuries and across Europe. As the British presence in India grew in importance, so the frontier territories acquired a new resonance, and another dimension was added to the history of European fantasies about Central Asia. For the British in India and for the Russians in the nineteenth century, the Central Asian regions marked the frontier between civilisation and barbarism. Both the Russians and the British engaged in complex spying activities against one another in the region, each coining a term for this clandestine activity. To the British, this was the space where 'The Great Game' was played, while for the Russians it was the site of the 'Tournament 401

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of Shadows'. Michael Edwards summarises a century and more-of conflict between the superpowers: The GreatGamewas a contestfor politicalascendancy in CentralAsia between Britainand Tsarist Russia. The secret agents, Britishand Russian, were the advanceguardsof armiesthat nevermet....but theirclandestine activitiesoften fed the dreamsand terrorsof the decision-makers thousandsof miles away in theircomfortable offices.Otherwarswereembarked on, despitethe protestsof those who had so often riskedtheirlives to gatherthe facts on which sensible and pragmaticpolicies might be based...In high politics, however,illusions acquirea specialarmouragainstreality...15 Reporting on the region in the nineteenth century repeats the old civilisation - barbarism dichotomy. Dostoievesky saw Russia as the means of bringing stability and civilisation to a region he despised. Winston Churchill sent dispatches from the Northwest Frontier in 1897, often comparing the savagery of the landscape to the savagery of its inhabitants: the mountains are 'the greatest disturbance of the earth' s surface that the convulsions of chaotic periods have produced'. As for the people: 'The strong aboriginal propensity to kill, inherent in all human beings, has in these valleys been preserved in unexampled strength and vigour'. Interesting to note that recent fighting between Taliban and the Pakistani army has been in precisely the area Churchill was describing: Waziristan. In the 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a boom in books about Central Asia in English, French, Italian, German. A subgroup of books focus on Afghanistan. Yet what is striking about these texts is the way in which they continue to translate earlier writings. Through all the accounts of human endurance, harsh conditions, appalling weather, terrible food, savage behaviour, decaying greatness, the images are recognizably those of the medieval world. The fantasies that have been for centuries inscribed in this area have continued to flourish, fed now by another set of myths. For where else on the planet would it seem more appropriate for an anti-Western terrorist organisation to hide than here, in the region that has aroused images of terror for so long? How then does this relate to our starting point, to the translation strategy of Reuters and the al-Qaida statements? There is a relationship, and that concerns the horizon of expectations of the target text readers. I said earlier that translation never takes place in isolation, there is always a history. The history of European attitudes to Central Asia, to the savage unknown region from whence have come forces bent on destroying the known, civilised world is implicit in the translated text. The apocalyptic language, the extreme threats, the use of a rhetoric that appears barbaric and over-inflated connects with the ways in which the inhabitants of the region have been depicted. Churchill wrote about the mercilessness of the tribes people of Waziristan. Mandeville, 600 years earlier, wrote about the 'full cursed People' who delight in fighting and killing: 'And they drink gladliest man's blood, they which they clepe Dieue. And the more men that a man may slay, the more worship he hath among them.'.16To the collective memory of Mandeville' s 402

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age of a region producing people who despised urban civilisation (signalled by the destruction of cities such as Merv or Balhk) were added memories of warriors bent on destroying Christianity, and today we are acquiring further memories of dark forces opposed to reason, to democracy, to progress and to modernity. These memories are present in both writers and readers, and they determine what is written and how it is read. By being faithful to the rhetorical conventions of the source text, the Reuters translator created an English version that connects with the collective memory of generations of readers attuned to fantasies of horror about a particular region. The foreignization strategy employed in the translation taps into another tradition, that of the collective fantasy of a barbaric anti-modern assailant. Given such a history, would whatever strategy employed by the translator of the Al-Qaida message, domesticated or foreignized, make much difference?
Notes
1 B Hatim Basil & I Mason, The Translatoras Communicator,London & New York: Routledge, 1997, p 149. 2 Ibid, p 37. 3 L Venuti The Scandals of Translation. Towards an Ethics of Difference, London & New York: Routledge, 1998, p 189. 4 T Niranjana, Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism and the Colonial Context, Berkeley, Los Angeles & Oxford: University of California Press, 1992. 5 JG Herder, 'From Fragmente (1766-1767)', in A Lefevere (ed), Translation/History/Culture: A Sourcebook, London & New York: Routledge, 1992, p 74. 6 J Delille, 'Preface to Virgil's Georgics (1769)', in A Lefevere (ed), Translation/History/Culture: A Sourcebook, London & New York: Routledge, 1992, p 37. 7 S Bassnett & A Lefevere (eds), Translation, History and Culture, London: Cassell, 1990, p 12. 8 M Jan (ed) Le voyage en Asie centrale et au Tibet, Paris: Laffront, 1992. 9 SD Westrem, The Hereford Map. A transcription and translation of the legends with commentary, Turnhout, Belgium: BREPOLS, 2001 10 U Eco, Baudolino, London: Secker & Warburg, 2002, p 329. 11 M Komrof (ed), Contemporariesof Marco Polo, consisting of the travel records to the eastern parts of the world of William of Rubruck (1253-1255) thejourney of John of Pian de Carpini (1245- 1247) and the journal of Friar Odoric (1318-1330), London: Cape, 1929. 12 R Latham (trans), The Travels of Marco Polo, London: The Folio Society, 1968; The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, London: Macmillan, 1915 (modern spelling version of the Cotton manuscript). 13 C Thubron, The Lost Heart of Asia, London: Heinemann, 1994, pp 158-159. 14 F Sale, A Journal of the Disasters in Afghanistan (1841-42), London: John Murray, 1843. 15 M Edwards, The Great Game, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1975, pp vii-viii. 16 Mandeville, 1915, p 129.

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