PHILOSOPHY AND TRANSLATION

Early Philosophers and Theologians

The debate of “word-for-word” versus “sense-for-sense” translation

The distinction between “word-for-word” (i.e., “literal”) and “sense-for-sense” (i.e., “free”)
translation goes back to Cicero (106–43 AD) and St Jerome (347–420 AD).

In the west, it formed the basis of key writings on translation for nearly 2,000 years.

Cicero, Horace, and others thought that sense-for-sense translation tried to produce a speech
that moved the listeners, and it was more preferable.

Horace, in a famous passage from his Ars Poetica, underlines the goal of producing an
aesthetically pleasing and creative poetic text in the TL.

St Jerome, the most famous of all western translators, cites the authority of Cicero’s approach
to justify his own Latin revision and translation of the Christian Bible, later to become
known as the Latin Vulgate, the official text for the Roman Catholic Church.
(He was also criticized for incorrect translation of the Bible.)

Jerome rejected the word-for-word approach because, by following so closely the form of
the ST, it produced an absurd translation, hiding the sense of the original.

The sense-for-sense approach, on the other hand, allowed the sense or content of the ST to be
translated.

“Literal vs. free” or “form vs. content” debate has continued until modern times.

The same concerns have also been represented in other rich and ancient translation traditions
such as in China and the Arab world.

Humanism and the Protestant Reformation

Within western society, issues of free and literal translation were for over a thousand years
bound up with the translation of the Bible and other religious and philosophical texts.
Academic Anthony Pym writes that “the transmission of ideas for much of the Latin ages was
dominated by a theological hierarchy of languages.”

“At the top stood the languages of divine revelation (Hebrew, Greek, Arabic, Sanskrit
for some), then the languages of enlightened mediation (notably Latin), and then the
written vernaculars (English, French, German, etc.).”

Translations were seen as inferior products, given that the direction was normally from
prestigious to inferior languages.

Translation itself was seen as an interiorizing activity.

Latin, controlled by the Church in Rome, had a stranglehold over knowledge and religion.

However, Latin was challenged by the European Humanist movement of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries.

Language and translation became the sites of a huge power struggle.

The Humanists sought liberation from the power of the Church by recovering Classical Latin
and Greek and their secular writers.
Then, in the early fifteenth century, the Protestant Reformation of northern Europe, which
was to lead to a huge schism within Christianity, began to challenge Latin through the
translation of the Bible into vernacular languages.

In such circumstances, the translation of any book which diverged from the Church’s
interpretation ran the risk of being deemed heretical and of being censored or banned.

Even the mere act of translation could be considered a threat to the established order – for
instance, the 1551 Index of the Spanish Inquisition prohibited the publication of the Bible in
any vernacular language.

William Tyndale’s English Bible was banned and copies confiscated on the orders of King
Henry VIII.

Tyndale was abducted, tried for heresy and executed in the Netherlands in 1536.

Étienne Dolet was burned at the stake after for adding, in his translation of one of Plato’s
dialogues, the phrase rien du tout (“nothing at all”) in a passage about what existed after
death.

Non-literal or non-accepted translation came to be seen and used as a weapon against the
Church.
The most notable example is Martin Luther’s translation into East Central German of the
New Testament (1522) and later the Old Testament (1534).

Luther also rejected a word-for-word translation strategy since it would be unable to

convey the same meaning as the ST and would sometimes be incomprehensible.

Early attempts at systematic translation theory

An early attempt at a more systematic translation theory came from the English author John
Dryden in the 17th century.

In the preface to his translation of Ovid’s Epistles in 1680, Dryden reduces all translation to
three categories:

(adaptation means adapting the source text into contemporary world)

Dryden prefers paraphrase, advising that metaphrase and imitation be avoided.

Later, he argued that it is best to stay between Metaphrase and Paraphrase.

In 1813, Friedrich Schleiermacher, German theologian, philologist, and Romanticist, argued

for a translation method that would “give the reader the impression he would have
received as a German reading the work in the original language.”

Schleiermacher’s preferred strategy is to move the reader towards the writer.

He claims that the foreignness of the source text must be preserved; but the translator should
also make the ST intelligible to the German reader.

Another German Romanticist philosopher Wilhelm von Humbolt (1836) viewed all
languages as functioning in the same way, moulding concepts into complementary world-
views.

Humboldt examined languages and cultures such as Quechua, Basque, and German, which
were in the process of historical development.

He rejected the medieval hierarchies between languages.

He also thought translation could be used to refine and standardize developing target
languages.

Humboldt, along with Schleiermacher, stressed the priorities of foreignizing (verfremdend)

over domesticating (verdeutschend) translation.

This meant that a translation should look like a translation, and not like just another target-
language text.

However, some conceptual lines between ST and TT should also be maintained.

This approach marked translations as a separate kind of text, or a genre, potentially apart from
the truly national.

Yet, translations would also theoretically contribute to the development of German language
and culture (for which some degree of ideal sameness was still required).

With its insistence on foreignization, German Romanticists represented a mode of cultural

openness that welcomed rather than excluded the other.

The Hermeneutic Approach

Hermeneutics is originally the study of interpretation of religious and philosophical texts.

Most notably, it means the interpretation of the Bible.

Today, hermeneutics refers to textual interpretation or textual analysis in general.

Scholar Chau Suicheong (1984) summarizes the hermeneutic approach in terms of a few
basic tenets.

 There is not a truly objective understanding of a text,

 No translation can represent its source fully,
 Cultural “prejudices” are unavoidable on the part of the translator,
 An awareness of one’s own prejudices makes the translator at once humble and more
responsible,
 Translation means an active creation,
 It doesn’t mean remaining a slave to illusions of equivalence.

German philosophers Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin (who contributed to

hermeneutics and phenomenology) emphasized the plurality of interpretations.

They argued that the original expression always contains a plurality of meaning in its very
form.

To work on the original form, to bring out those hidden meanings, is the task of
translation.

Many branches of contemporary philosophy, including hermeneutics, phenomenology,

cultural relativism, and historicism, have rejected the view that there is only one way to
render any given source element.
(Phenomenology is a branch of philosophy, which investigates the nature of reality and
objectivity.)

(Cultural Relativism argues that there is no universal standard to measure cultures by, and
that all cultural values and beliefs must be understood in their own cultural context. The
norms and values of one culture should not be evaluated using the norms and values of
another.)

(Historicism (coined by German philosopher Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel) tries to

explain social and cultural practices as well as ideas and beliefs by studying a culture’s history
— the process by which they came about.)

Another view of translation was initiated by the American analytical philosopher Willard
Quine (1959).

Quine argued that the one set of data can interpreted in multiple ways, and that there is no way
to decide between these.

In the example he gives, “A rabbit runs past, the native speaker exclaims ‘Gavagai!’; the
linguist can note this term as meaning ‘rabbit, or ‘Lo, a rabbit!,’ or ‘there is a flea on the
rabbit,’ and so on.”

Quine concludes that there can be no absolute determination of the translation but only
varying degrees of certainty for various kinds of propositions:
The meaning of “Gavagai!” will never be translated with certainty.

He calls this the “indeterminacy of translation.”

Roman Jakobson (1959) also argues that meaning is a constant process of interpretation
or translation.

American thinker Charles Sanders Peirce claims that “translations do not transfer or
reproduce meaning but are actively creating meanings.”

POSTSTRUCTURALISM

For the French philosopher Roland Barthes, the meaning of a text should not be sought in the
author’s personality, life, or psychology.

It shouldn’t be sought in a social-historical context, either.

Barthes writes that, “It is language which speaks, not the author.”
Barthes advocates freeing the reading process from the constraints of fidelity to an origin, a
unified meaning, an identity, or any other exterior or interior reality.

Furthermore, poststructuralists, including Barthes, Derrida, Julia Kristeva and others, argue
that the meaning in a text is always elusive.

The meaning is never coherent.

A text can be interpreted in an endless number of ways.

Textual interpretation is like a “play” — a “play of the signifier.”

The text and the language itself is a storehouse of endless possible meanings, interpretations,
repetitions and references.

Barthes writes that “writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin.
Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the
negative where all identity is lost.”

On page 1467, Barthes furthers his discussion by referring to an argument by French linguist
Emile Benveniste.
Benveniste argues that pronouns, “I, you, we, this, that, etc.” and adverbs such as “now, then,
today, etc.” are empty signifiers, they are discursive, contextual.

Barthes argues that the entire language is made up of empty signifiers.

Unlike what semiologists and structuralists once thought, language is not a fixed, unchanging,
and reliable system of signs.

Since a literary text is an act of language, the same is also true for literature.

On page 1468, Barthes implies that the author is not the creator of a text; rather, the text
creates the author: “a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning
(the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of
writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn
from the innumerable centres of culture.”

Barthes writes that “To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it
with a final signified, to close the writing.”

In other words, the task of discovering the author’s meaning is the same with trying to
discover unchanging truths about society, history, psyche, etc.

For Barthes, such an approach is dogmatic.

Jacques Derrida and Deconstruction

In his important work, “Of Grammatology,” Jacques Derrida argues that western way of
thinking understands everything in terms of hierarchies between binary oppositions.

Whether it is in philosophical language, literary language, or the language of everyday life,

western thought is always built upon hierarchies.

For instance, reason vs. irrationality; truth vs. falsity; good vs evil; white vs. black, and so on.

Derrida claims that in this kind of oppositions, one of the terms is always superior, or
“privileged”, meaning more valuable than the other.

However, for Derrida, this kind of binary oppositions are actually artificial, or
“metaphysical” as he calls it.
Most of the time people take them for granted, never questioning their reliability.

Derrida writes that in western philosophy there is always a tendency to create binary
hierarchies.

He calls this tendency “logocentrism”.

An example of Logocentrism is the idea that speech is superior to writing.

Derrida proves the falsity of this idea, claiming that writing could be regarded as more
fundamental than speech.

Although “logos” means the spoken word, with poststructuralism it became associated with
truth, reason, and logic.

Derrida argues that such hierarchies exist because there is an incessant search for unchanging
truths.
People always want to be able to explain unknown things by a strong adherence to reason and
logic.

To do so, they must rely on linguistic constructs such as binary oppositions, in which one
term always comes before the other.

For Derrida, these linguistic constructs are metaphysical, they don’t reflect reality.

Derrida goes a step further, and claims that there is in fact no reality outside language!

Today, the words “logocentrism” and “logocentric” are used to define a misleading search
for unchanging, singular, unifying, universal truths.

They can also mean an obsession with reason and logic.

Like Barthes, Derrida also claims that in language, meaning is never stable.

For instance, when you look up a word in a dictionary, you see that a signifier is explained
through other signifiers.

In language, there is never a “transcendental signified”, a pure, unchanging meaning.

There is only an eternal chain of signifiers.

Meaning is constantly deferred, or delayed.

To demonstrate his argument, Derrida uses the extensions of the French word différer, which
is translated into English by two different verbs, “to differ” and “to defer”.

In written language the noun form of différer can either be différence (which means
difference) or différance (which means deferment, delaying something).

In spoken French, these two different nouns are pronounced in the same way, as if the two
different senses are simultaneously present in the same word.

For this reason, Derrida uses the word différance as a symbol of how in language there is
both an eternal differentiation between signifiers, and a constant deferment of meaning.
Derrida argues that since in language meaning is elusive, there is always a gap between what
a speaker or writer intends to say, and what he/she really says.

A writer’s discourse is dominated by a system and laws that he cannot control.

For Derrida, the critic and the translator should be aware of the gap between a writer’s
intended message, and the language he uses.

Literary interpretation should not only reproduce what the text says. It should also produce
what the text does not say directly.

This method is called “deconstruction.”

In deconstructive reading, the critic points out the elements that give the text coherence, and
at the same time he/she unravels them.

The critic reveals how in fact conflicting messages are interwoven in the same text.

Derrida calls this “plurivocality.” (In contradistinction to univocality.)

Derrida claims that translation is not possible without mastering this “plurivocality.”

Derrida gives the example of the Greek term pharmakon, which he has seen in a translation
of Plato.

The word pharmakon could be rendered in French as either remede (cure) or poison (poison),
but not both terms at the same time.

The translation should retain this ambivalent nature of the word.

Another related term used by Derrida is Iterability.

The verb iterate is defined as “to say or perform again; to repeat.”

It derives from the Latin iterum, “again”, and is also related to iter, “journey” or “route”.

Derrida argues that every sign and every text is iterable, or repeatable, differently.

There is not a single, correct way of translation.