Manipulation as rewriting – the Manipulation School

Dukate’s idea of the translational manipulation is widely based on the achievements of an international group of scholars “loosely-knit”, as Hermans puts it (1985: 10), and “not constituting a school”, still though described in such terms, most active during the 1970s and 1980s. The crucial thesis of their scholarly activity within the translation of literature and cultural aspects of translation is Hermans’s conviction that "from the point of view of the target literature all translation implies a degree of manipulation of the ST for a certain purpose"( 1985:

11), which has also become known as the manipulation hypothesis (Dukate 2009: 15).

According to the Manipulation School's views any translation might be characterised as manipulated because of the factors and processes in three translational stages, the pre-production stage, the pre-production stage and the post-pre-production stage. The first stage relates to the selection of a text for translation. In the production stage the translator receives certain guidelines, indications and hints about the way a text should be translated. Also various objective (e.g. language-related) and subjective (e.g. ideological and psychological) factors come into play. The post-production stage is related to the way the text is presented and reflected in metatexts and discourse. All those activities, which could be termed manipulation, are mostly due to cultural, political and ideological considerations.

The manipulation hypothesis was repeated and developed by other representatives of Hermans’s circle, e.g. Lefevere, who claims that “ translation, like other forms of rewriting, plays an analyzable part in the manipulation of words and concepts which, among other things,

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constitute power in a culture” (Lefevere 1985: 241). In the collection of articles Translation, History, Culture, edited by Bassnett and Lefevere (1992), the same as in Lefevere’s Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame (1992), translation is studied in a broader political and cultural context, characterized by power and manipulation, and influenced by institutional and ideological factors.

As observed in the above claims, the representatives of the Manipulation School perceive the translation as rewriting of texts for a specific target audience. According to Lefevere (1992: vii), translation is always a rewriting of an original text. Rewriting is manipulation, as it serves a given society and is matched to their ideology, dictating the basic strategy the translator tends to use and the solutions to problems (Lefevere 1992: 41), the same as an application of a certain poetics, e.g. the selection of themes, motifs, genres (Lefevere 1992:26). The author claims that:

[…] rewriters adapt, manipulate the originals they work with to some extent, usually to make them fit in with the dominant, or one of the dominant ideological and poetological currents of their time. Again, this may be most obvious in totalitarian societies […].

(Lefevere 1992: 8)

The author perceives rewriting as an element in the theory of system. The theory defines culture as “system of systems”, “a differentiated and dynamic ‘conglomerate of systems’ characterized by internal oppositions and continual shifts” (Hermans 1985: 11), composed of different subsystems such as literature, science and technology, all functioning in an interplay. In such a system referred to literature by the Russian Formalists (Jacobson, Tynianov), literature – a literature – is conditioned by both - texts (objects), and human agents who read, write and rewrite them (Lefevere 1992: 12). In this system poetics, ideology and the so called “patronage” – the powers (persons, institutions – a religious body, a political party, a social class, a royal court, publishers, the media etc.) are decisive factors which can promote or hinder the reading, writing and rewriting of literary, and by analogy, any other kind of texts. As Lefevere writes:

Patrons try to regulate the relationship between the literary system and the other systems, which, together make up a society, a culture. As a rule they operate by means of institutions set up to regulate, if not the writing of literature, at least its distribution:

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academies, censorship bureaus, critical journals, and, by far the most important, the educational establishment. (Lefevere 1992: 15)

The obvious conclusion while considering such a state of affairs is that manipulation includes various constraints. The constraints are grouped by Lefevere under 5 different headings:

- patronage, - poetics,

- “universe of discourse”, defined as “the knowledge, the learning, but also the objects and the customs of a certain time, to which writers are free to allude in their work” ,

- the natural language in which the work is composed,

- original work itself, in which “ideology, poetics, universe of discourse and language come together, mingle and clash” (Lefevere, 1985: 232-233).

Three basic factors at least underlie the translator’s choices, according to Lefevere - some of them being of personal nature, some of ideological and some – belonging to the sphere of patronage (Lefevere 1992: 61),.

Van Dijk also sees the point in the power of patronage claiming that dominant groups can, to a certain extent, succeed in persuading other people – the ‘dominated groups’ – to adopt an ideology that does not sustain their own interests but those of the dominant ones (van Dijk 1998: 258). In such a view manipulation could be defined as Rigotti does, according to whom:

A message is manipulative if it twists the vision of the world (physical as well as social - or human – actual as well as virtual) in the mind of the addressee, so that he/she is prevented from having a healthy attitude towards decision (i.e., an attitude responding to his/her very interest), and pursues the manipulator’s goal in the illusion of pursuing her/his own goal. (Rigotti 2005: 68)

An interesting situation, stressed by Rigotti, is “when an already manipulated person aims at convincing another” (Rigotti 2005: 69), which was the case with translators of the communist era. The author claims that “Anecdotal evidence and the personal testimony of people who survived totalitarian regimes suggest that the effect of a manipulative device is

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heavily strengthened if it is applied by somebody who has himself been manipulated” (Rigotti 2005: 69).

There is still another point worth mentioning here – it is the norms. Whether considered in connection with culture in a broad sense, or specifically with one area of its manifestation as e.g. within translation, according to Kenny:

Norms serve as the backdrop against which behavior is evaluated and positively or negatively sanctioned. They thus exert a kind of regulatory force on translators’

activities, but they are also reinforced by translators, or other agents in the translation process by virtue of their tendency to conform to prevailing norms. It is possible to deviate from norms, but there is often a price to pay if one does so, and not everyone is equally well placed to do so. (Kenny 2001: 51)

This sounds like a kind of unwritten charter for translators of totalitarian epoch in Poland and explains their reasons for using manipulative strategies in translations – simply in order to conform to imposed norms..

Still more emphatic a reason for their following the norms of totalitarian system was the one expressed in detail by Kenny:

Normalisation may, however, be more easily explained in terms of socio-cultural, or even economic constraints. In cultures where the initial norm that seems to inform most translation decisions biases translation towards target language and culture acceptability, translated texts that deviate from such target acceptability may run the risk of being ignored, criticized, or ultimately rejected by their intended audiences, and so involve higher financial risks for publishers. (Kenny 2001:67)

Those observations of the Manipulation School and its followers, concerning the idea of manipulation in literature and its translation, could be attributed to all other text types, not only lierary ones, and also to general sociological functioning of communities.