Deviations as precursors

This article argues that translation inevitably reaches beyond its immediate sociohistorical context by deviating from contemporaneous norms. These deviations may signal and respond to future norms. Spectrality, a theory of time progression and the historical future proposed by Jacques Derrida in 1993, refutes the triumphant, teleological vision of liberal democracy after the collapse of the USSR and suggests that alternative futures already exist. Spectrality theory has gained renewed relevance in recent years, as global uncertainties caused by pandemics and conflicts have destabilized people’s vision of a liberalized future in the post-Cold War era. From a Derridean spectral standpoint, the present study demonstrates that the inexplicable deviations from norms in translation at a certain time may actually adhere to the norms of the future. This paper presents a case study of the 1988 translation of spectral elements in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) in the People’s Republic of China (1949–), immediately before the end of the Cold War. Despite being subject to a Marxist reading in the 1980s, this initial Chinese translation of the spectral figure in To the Lighthouse circumvented the materialist interpretation and foreshadowed the liberalized future in the 2000s, which emerged beyond human control. In addition to conceptualizing patterns and regularities based on adherence to norms to predict the future — an established approach in Descriptive Translation Studies — this paper proposes another way of perceiving the time to come: by examining deviations from norms.