The Transformation of English in Postcolonial Literatures

The production of Anglophone texts by postcolonial writers has often raised the issue of translation.This article argues that the transformation of English in the postcolonial text may be seen as a form of‘inner translation’in which the text is both source and target.More importantly the postcolonial author produces a culturally signifi cant text by various strategies of appropriation and transformation that act as metonymic of the source culture.Such strategies produce what may be called the‘metonymic gap’,that cultural distance established within the text by the second language author.The article suggests that Gumbrecht’s term stimmung conveys that sense of the untranslatability of cultural difference that becomes installed in the text by the metonymic gap.It is through these strategies that the postcolonial author can convey a sense of cultural difference to a world anglophone audience,combining communicability with cultural distance.