Whitewashing in Representation
Image Source: Pixabay
What is Whitewashing?
When we’re not talking about painting, whitewashing can mean a variety of things—all related to representation.
Covering up or glossing over something criminal or immoral
Altering something that features, favors, or caters to White people
You’re probably more familiar with the whitewashing that happens in Hollywood:
Replacing characters of color by casting White actors
Characters of color are displaced, and the story focuses on the White characters
White actors playing people of color
Translation is a key element of representation when it comes to foreign media and cultures, and our work frequently tips the scales between apt representation and misrepresentation.
Whitewashing and Translation
Examples of Whitewashing in Anime and Poetry
Foreign anime shows are frequently dubbed and subtitled for American audiences, though as Keith Chow at Nerds of Color points out, these shows are often localized differently depending on their Whiteness. Chow compared two kids’ animated shows: Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug & Cat Noir from France and Yo-Kai Watch from Japan. Both are dubbed, as (young) children would struggle with subtitles, but that’s where localization similarities end.
In Miraculous, the characters keep their French names and still live in France; whereas in the American version of Yo-Kai Watch, the fictional town of Sakura is renamed Springdale, and the main character’s name is changed from Amano Keita to Nate Adams. The Japanese folklore and other Japanese cultural aspects were stripped from the show, while Miraculous characters are allowed to remain in their very French cultural context. Are non-White cultural contexts deemed too exotic and difficult for children to grasp?
Rumi was a 13th-century Persian poet, Sufi mystic, and Islamic scholar; today, he is considered “the best-selling poet” in the US. However, when his work is translated into English, mentions of God, Islamic terminology, and Rumi’s 13th-century Muslim context are stripped from the translation. In fact, the most popular “translations” of Rumi’s work are actually paraphrases of others’ translations; the person didn’t know Farsi or hadn’t studied Rumi at all.
While this American “recast” of Rumi English translations was published more recently, many English translations of Rumi’s work were completed during a time when Western countries demonized Islam. As some of you may have seen my presentation of Orientalism and bias in translation, this phenomenon of removing Islam from literary works is not all that uncommon during the Middle Ages and the Victorian age.
The Story of Zahra: A Case Study by Ghenwa Hayek
Hanan al-Shaykh’s حكاية زهرة (Hikayat Zahra) is a novel about a young Lebanese woman named Zahra, who takes refuge during the Lebanese Civil War and travels to live with her uncle in Sub-Saharan Africa. She meets and marries a young man from South Lebanon there, and after their marriage breaks up, she moves back to Beirut. The Story of Zahra “has been critically acclaimed and hailed as an indictment of Lebanese (and Arab) patriarchal culture, as well as a text that lays bare the horrors of violence, war, and trauma.”
Collecting critiques from numerous sources, Hayek argues that the translation whitewashes race and other nuanced cultural and political aspects through selective appropriation. In translation, selective appropriation is “the deliberate omissions or re-writing that enable the text to circulate in different contexts”; selective appropriations “reveal [translators’] social and cultural sensitivities.”
In the case of Hikayat Zahra, there is “a remarkably consistent pattern of textual omission of complex matters, especially politics and racial language.” The translators re-wrote or renamed the various references to Black Africans. The author, al-Shaykh, predominantly used زنجي\زنوج (zinji/zunuj), which denotes Africans in general, and إفريقي (ifriqi), which was used as an adjective to differentiate individuals . The translators’ choice to translate both of these words as “African” reduces the original nuance and differentiation.
In addition, the characters other these African bodies to emphasize the alienation and distance from Lebanon these characters feel. However, the translation completely erases the nuances of Zahra’s complicity in othering Africans. For example, in the original Arabic version, Zahra journals about “Africa, the weather, and the zunuj,” but in the English translation, she journals about “Africa and the weather.” The translation doesn’t explore “the internalization of the Lebanese encounter with colonialism” and what discourse this sparks.
The translators omitted the original text’s “explicitly racialized descriptions of African female bodies, possibly because they would not be acceptable to an Anglophone readership” that chose to read about patriarchal oppression of Arab women. While the translators may not have been willing to bare “this particular kind of violence,” their strategy essentially whitewashed the problematic racial language in specific ways. For example, the word عبد (‘abd) literally means “slave” and is akin to the N-word in English. While it can be used to describe spiritual servitude to God, “it has been etymologically linked to racist descriptions of Black individuals for centuries.”
The translators chose to neutralize the violence and racism in the original Arabic by choosing not the reproduce them with an English equivalent. The usage of ‘abd was usually linked to characters who have a lower social status (uneducated, poor, and rural) and explored “national anxieties around racial miscegenation,” all of which was lost in the English translation. While the language may not have been as derogatory, and therefore not as violent, towards Black people, it lessens the impact of the issues the novel was trying to demonstrate, explore, and discuss.
The translators’ selective appropriation demonstrated the prejudices of the target language and culture that weren’t present in the original Arabic. While the translator chose not to perpetuate violent language against Black Africans, sometimes they chose to substitute it with prejudiced language against other groups, like the Roma. This just muddies the water, so to speak, and trading derogatory language of one group for that of another doesn’t really help in general.
Final Thoughts
As translators, we need to critically analyze whether we are looking at our source material through a White gaze and fix it if that’s the case. I know we could argue about domestication vs foreignization and about how much the target readers will understand for days, but that’s not the point of this post. Our first priority is the target readers, but we should remember that our other priority to the authors/creators, and they deserve to be represented how they see themselves—in my line of work, authentic, non-White representation is important.
Another issue we should consider is that the author/creator may want to be represented in a way we (the translators) may not agree with when their work is translated into the target language and culture. The author of Hikayat Zahra worked with the translator to create the English translation, so perhaps not all of the whitewashing pointed out above was done without the author’s knowledge and consent. While scholars and I may not agree with the translation choices, it seems as though it was (somewhat) aligned with how the author wanted their work represented in English.
Resources
Hayek, Ghenwa. “Whitewashing Arabic for global consumption: translating race in The Story of Zahra”
Translation or Whitewash? The Problem with Yo-Kai Watch in America
Al-Batineh, Mohammed. “Historiography by Proxy: A Eurocentric View of Arabic Translation History through the Eyes of an Orientalist.”