Postcolonial Translation Studies: The Translator’s Apolitical Impartiality in Men in the Sun

Questions of identity, representation, and difference have a distinctive status in postcolonial studies. “What distinguishes postcolonial approaches to translation is that they examine intercultural encounters in contexts marked ‘by unequal power relations” (Shamma, 2009, p.185). In postcolonial discourse, language is not neutral and thus translation can never be impersonal. Postcolonialist critics highlight that the translator needs to take the larger framework of power relations into account and neglecting the sociocultural background of the text is considered a major problem in postcolonial studies. Therefore, the translator, from a postcolonial perspective, should embed the translated text in a shell that explains the necessary historical and political background for the receiving audience through the use of introductions, footnotes, critical essays, glossaries, maps, etc. The translator, in postcolonial discourse, must reflect the context in which texts are produced through historicization. Though the translator cannot and will not produce the exact same text, what s/he can do is to encode the text in its textual and contextual spheres through annotations and glosses. For the sake of this paper, I analyze Ghassan Kanafani’s masterpiece Men In the Sun from a postcolonial lens, arguing that Hilary Kilpatrick, the translator, tends to show apolitical impartiality through transferring the surface meaning not the deep meaning of the text with a tendency of not thickening the translation with annotations, glosses, or footnotes to contextualize the piece