subject: Hybrid Texts, Sources And Translation [print this page] Since long, war and attempts to dominate a nation, colonialism, and more recently, advances in technology and globalization have made people communicate widely with each other. These phenomena, more strongly the more recent ones, have influenced the whole levels of human life. Among such levels, the linguistic one is to be elaborated on in this article. The primary focus is on hybrid texts which are studied from a translation studies perspective. First the term is defined and located within the field. Then varying factors influential in the creation of such texts what is called hybridization are discussed. Finally, the relation between translation and hybrid texts is argued. The article indicates that translation, depending on the approach of the translator, has both a hybridizing and a dehybridizing effect when it comes to such texts.
Throughout the history of human kinds phenomena of different types and natures have existed, phenomena which made nations interact with each other. However bitter or sweet they were for instance wars or trading, they are much less embracing and influencing compared to the fast-growing phenomenon of globalization. Hand in hand with new technologies, globalization is changing the life of the humankind, making it a highly interrelated one. Multinational corporations and international organizations with their many branches all around the world, along with the fast-moving vehicle of our time, the Internet, have resulted in the widespread interaction among the whole nations of the world. Due to such phenomena, we are now experiencing many changes in many, if not all, levels of human life: social, political, economic.
The way language is used has not been uninfluenced by such phenomena. Take for example the way English is used as a lingua franca all around the world without the features attributed to the English in Britain or America, or any other land where it is the native language used with an underlying cultural background. Here this lingua franca has lost its cultural identity: that it belongs to some specific nations giving identity to those specific people.
Translation and Hybridization
While the preceding sources of text hybridization took place in the process of producing an original text, it can be also mentioned that translation is as well another source of text hybridization, i.e. while producing a non-original text. Now the question is how?
Albrecht Neubert (1997) believes that an important reason for the creation of hybrid texts is that the translator may deliberately try not to get far from the source text, and try to show the differences of the source language and culture by resisting against the norms of the target language and culture. This is exactly in line with Venutis (1995) foriegnization strategy, as opposed to his domestication strategy which favors the production of a translation text as clearly similar to an original target language text as possible. Here the translator will be invisible while in foriegnization, s/he will be visible because of his/her resistance against the norms of the target language and culture.
Interestingly here falls a paradox: translating is both a hybridizing, and at the same time a dehybridizing, source of text production. While a foreignizing approach, as in the case of the Spanish translation of Love and Longing in Bombay, results in a hybrid text, so rarely, however, does it occur, leaving the way open to those with a domesticating approach to translation. In fact, the general trend is toward domestication, [c]ontemporary professional non-literary translation in Europe is an agent of dehybridisation for the simple reason that source-text generation processes are increasingly multilingual, whereas translational outputs are normally monolingual. Further, the general trend is toward domestication. Traditionally, good translations have been supposed to resemble most to original target language texts. Hence both the translators and publishers, if not the readers, are more inclined toward domestication than foriegnization.
In conclusion, one can think of the source language and culture, the target language and culture, and the space in between them as a scale on which a text, if non-hybrid, is located at either of the ends, and will be located somewhere in the space in-between if a hybrid one:
A text of this nature will be either an original piece of writing in the form of one written by an ex-colonized writer in the language of the ex-colonizer, or by an expatriate writer, or one written in international English, or, finally, this can be due to translation. Each of these may raise some problems.
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