Translation and Race. Corine Tachtiris. Routledge, New York, 2024, 172 pages, Paperback, £39.99.

Abstract

Focusing on the aspect of race and racism in the practice of literary translations, the book Translation and Race by Corine Tachtiris, Assistant Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, elaborates how racial discrimination has always been an integral part of translation practice throughout history till contemporary times, through its five main chapters and the significantly fitting introduction. The preface begins with the author’s experience of disjuncture that she felt twenty-five years before writing the book, as an undergraduate student, being a part of a group of students and faculties translating a book by a Black author whose culture was not very familiar to them. That feeling of unfamiliarity guided her to the understanding that race is but a construct — a concept that she remembers throughout her life and uses meaningfully in her book. She then draws opinions of scholars on capitalising the ‘b’ in Black and how their perceptions shape their respective ideas of race. After considering all the opinions, she agrees with La Marr Jurelle Bruce in his statement, “I use a lowercase b because I want to emphasise an improper blackness […] a blackness that is ever-unfurling rather than rigidly fixed” (Bruce 6). She supports Bruce’s opinion and discusses her opinion on “translation’s potential to unfix language through linguistic and cultural disjunctures” (Tachtiris ix). The author rejects norms in translation theories that are normalised by the mainstream but are actually rooted in White supremacy and chooses to rely on the translators’ joke of “it depends” by capitalising the ‘b’ only contextually. The preface, therefore, sets the tone of what the book primarily seeks to express later on.