Niranjana: Siting Translation
Tejaswini Niranjana read colonial-era English translations of Indian texts as part of the apparatus of empire. The translations did not merely render meaning; they helped construct the colonised subject by selecting which Indian texts mattered and how they sounded in English.
The thesis
Translation, on Niranjana's account, was never neutral; it was a site where power negotiated representation. Sir William Jones's translations of Sanskrit law underwrote colonial legal administration. The choice of which texts to translate at all was itself political.
What an AI pipeline carries forward
Training corpora for translation models are dominated by parallel data from colonial and post-colonial trade routes. The defaults the model has learned are not innocent. A pipeline that lets the user choose foreignization or formal equivalence over the model's domesticating default is the operational reply to Niranjana's critique.
Further reading: Spivak, Cronin on globalization.