Introduction to Translation Studies - Chapter 10 PDF

J. Munday, Introducing Translation Studies Chapter 10 This chapter looks at modern philosophical approaches to translation. It examines the inter-attraction of translation and philosophy. Steiner’s Hermeneutic Motion: George Steiner’s seminal After Babel is the key advance of the hermeneutics of tra...

J. Munday, Introducing Translation Studies Chapter 10 This chapter looks at modern philosophical approaches to translation. It examines the inter-attraction of translation and philosophy. Steiner’s Hermeneutic Motion: George Steiner’s seminal After Babel is the key advance of the hermeneutics of translation. There Steiner defines the hermeneutic approach as “the investigation of what it means to understand.” Initially, Steiner focuses on the psychological and intellectual functioning of the mind of the translator and discusses the process of meaning and understanding underlying the translation process. Steiner posits his model as in follows: A theory of translation is a theory of semantic transfer. (1) It is an intentionally sharpened, hermeneutically oriented way of designating a working mode of all meaningful exchanges, of the totality of semantic communication. (2) Or it is a subsection of such a model with specific reference to interlingual exchanges, to the emission and reception of significant messages between different languages. The totalizing designation is the more instructive because it argues that all procedures of expressive articulation and interpretative reception are translational, whether intra- or interlingually. Steiner’s description of the hermeneutically oriented translation, the act of elicitation and appropriative transfer of meaning, is based on a conception of the translation not as a science but as an exact art, with precisions that are intense but unsystematic. Steiner’s hermeneutic motion consists of four parts: initiative trust, aggression (or penetration), incorporation (or embodiment) and compensation (or restitution). (1)​Initiative trust: The translator’s first move is an investment in belief, a belief and trust that there is something there in the ST that can be understood and translated. The translator considers the ST to stand for something in the world, a coherent meaning that can be translated. Therefore, nonsense rhymes are untranslatable because they are lexically non-communicative. (2)​Aggression: This is an incursive, extractive, invasive move. This move views comprehension as appropriative and violent. Steiner uses the metaphor of an open-cast mine for the translator’s seizure of the ST and extraction of meaning. The translator invades, extracts and brings home. The simile is that of the open-cast mine left an empty scar in the landscape. At times, Steiner describes the aggression involved as penetration. This metaphor has been criticised by feminists for its violent male-centric sexual imagery. (3)​Incorporation: This move refers to the ST meaning, extracted by the translator in the second movement, being brought into the TL, which is already full of its own words  and meanings. Different types of assimilation can occur: complete domestication, and permanent strangeness and marginality. The importing of the meaning of the foreign text can potentially dislocate or relocate the whole of the native structure. This process functions in two ways: sacramental intake or infection. The target culture either ingests and becomes enriched by the foreign text, or it is infected by it and ultimately rejects it. This dialectic of embodiment (either intake or rejection) takes place within the individual translator. The dialectic of embodiment entails the possibility that we may be consumed. Acts of translation add to our means; we come to incarnate alternative energies and resources of feeling. But we may be mastered and made lame by what we have imported. A culture can be unbalanced by the importation of certain translated texts. A translator’s energies can be consumed by translation that saps the creative powers necessary to produce his or her own works. (4)​Compensation: The enactment of reciprocity is the crux of the morals of translation. The aggressive appropriation and incorporation of the meaning of the ST leaves the original with a dialectically enigmatic residue. This is dialectical because the residue is positive event though there has been a loss for the ST. The ST is enhanced by the act of translation. Enhancement occurs when the ST is deemed worthy of translation, and the subsequent transfer to another culture broadens and enlarges the original. The ST enters into a range of diverse relationships with its resultant TT. Imbalance arises from an outflow of energy from the source and an inflow into the receptor altering both and altering the harmonics of the whole system. Such imbalance needs to be compensated. Balance needs to be restored. At those points where the TT is lesser than the original, the TT makes the original’s virtues more precisely visible; where the TT is greater than the original, it nevertheless infers that the ST possesses potentialities, elemental reserves as yet unrealised by itself. In this way, equity is restored. The requirement of equity (balance) provides ethical meaning to the concept of fidelity. The translator is faithful to the text and makes his response responsible only when he endeavours to restore the balance of forces. Steiner believes that this fluid, moral, balanced hermeneutic of trust will allow translation to escape the sterile triadic model (literal, free, faithful) which had marked theory. Steiner focuses on the word, which can be circumscribed and broken open to reveal its organic singularity. He believes that real understanding and translation occur at the point where languages diffuse into each other. Hence, the ability to move outside the self is essential. The insinuation of self into otherness is the final secret of the translator’s craft. For Steiner, the question of difference occurs in two ways: the translator experiences the foreign language differently from his mother tongue; and, each pair of languages, source and target, differs and imposes its vivid differences on the translator. To experience difference, to feel the characteristic resistance and materiality of that which differs, is to re-experience identity. The linguistic and cultural experiencing of resistant difference may make the original text impermeable. Nevertheless, Steiner also regards this impermeability as being transcended by elective affinity. Elective affinity occurs when the translator has been drawn to the text as a kindred spirit and recognises himself or herself in it. When resistant difference and elective affinity are both present, they generate an unresolved tension, attracting and repelling the translator, which expresses itself in good translation. Good translation can be defined as that in which the dialectic of impenetrability and ingress, of intractable alienness and felt at-homeness remains unresolved, but expressive. Out of the tension of resistance and affinity, a tension directly proportional to the proximity of the two languages and historical communities, grows the elucidative strangeness of the great translation. The unresolved state of tension between resistant difference and elective affinity is mirrored by the pull of Venuti’s domesticating and foreignizing strategies. PS: We have explored the sections on Ezra Pound and Walter Benjamin as well, so you are responsible for them too.