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Inside or between languages, human communication equals translation. A study of translation is a study of language.

Cultural critic and literary historian George Steiner makes this broad claim in his magisterial work After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. “Translation,” he goes on to say, “is formally and pragmatically implicit in every act of communication, in the emission and reception of each and every mode of meaning, be it in the widest semiotic sense or in more specifically verbal exchanges. To hear significance is to translate.” Once a word has been uttered, written, or otherwise made evident, it has already become a translation and incorporated into the world’s Babel. Translation, then, is an inevitable act of every cognitive process.

One hundred and fifty years before Steiner, Friedrich Schleiermacher, German Romantic philosopher and theologian (1768-1834), was one of the first theorists of translation to posit that a translator cannot simply search for an equivalent in the target language but must strive to preserve the cultural context of the source text in the translated text to the extent possible. He puts the translator’s dilemma this way: “Either the translator leaves the author as much as possible in peace and moves the reader towards him or he leaves the reader in peace and moves the author towards him.” Schleiermacher’s preference is for the former method, whereby the altérité or “otherness” of the original tongue is foregrounded in the translated text. “Foreignizing the Domestic or Domesticating the Foreign?” That is the question. To what extent does the translator acknowledge the fundamental tenet of otherness implicit in translation? And what effect does this notion of translation have on the conception of national and ethnic cultures? In The Experience of the Foreign, Antoine Berman risks positing that every culture needs translation, whatever the degree of its resistance to it:

The very aim of translation — to open up in writing a certain relationship with the Other, to fertilize what is one’s Own through the mediation of what is Foreign — is diametrically opposed to the ethnocentric structure of every culture, that species of narcissism by which every society wants to be a pure and unadulterated Whole.

Like every cultural practice, translation exists at the intersections of history in that it involves the linguistic, literary, religious, political, economic, and didactic values of a certain moment and of a certain subjectivity. According to theorists Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere, translation has moved beyond a positivistic and “scientific” emphasis on the word as the unit of equivalence, and past the notion of the text as a unit, with the result that it has taken a “cultural turn.” What, then, is “faithfulness” in translation if it does not exist in the guise of a “functional equivalence” between words or texts? Is it a matter of responding to changes in the values and institutions of a particular culture, of delivering what those who commission their translations want, even if that means substantially adapting the source text?

For Steiner, the key notion of “fidelity” in the “hermeneutic motion, the act of elicitation and appropriative transfer of meaning,” is not only ethical and economic but also wholly contingent:

Fidelity is not literalism or any technical device for rendering “spirit.” [. . . ] The translator, the exegetist, the reader is faithful to his text, makes his response responsible, only when he endeavors to restore the balance of forces, of integral presence, which his appropriative comprehension has disrupted. Fidelity is ethical, but also, in the full sense, economic. [. . .] A translator is accountable to the diachronic and synchronic mobility and conservation of the energies of meaning. A translation is, more than figuratively, an act of double-entry; both formally and morally the books must balance.

Jacques Derrida analogously views the “oath of fidelity” in translation in terms of an “ethics of the word” and an “economy of inbetweenness” in the movement from source text to target text. In an essay rendered into English by Lawrence Venuti under the untranslatable title —“What is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?” — Derrida proclaims provocatively: “I don’t believe that anything can ever be untranslatable — or, moreover, translatable.” He goes on to explain this seemingly unintelligible and contradictory paradox as follows:

On compte et on rend compte, one counts and one accounts for. A relevant translation is a translation whose economy, in these two senses, is the best possible, the most appropriating and the most appropriate possible. [. . .] Any given translation, whether the best or the worst, actually stands between the two, between absolute relevance, the most appropriate, adequate, univocal transparency, and the most aberrant and opaque irrelevance.

The underlying premise of the 2005-2006 Humanities Institute is that, as Steiner puts it succinctly, “a theory of translation is in fact a theory of language.” We intend to refer not simply to interlingual exchanges, to the emission of significant messages between languages. Rather, we wish to ally ourselves more broadly with a “working model of all meaningful exchanges, of the totality of semantic communication.” Translation will be approached as one of the many forms in which language is involved in the movement of meanings, whether that implies:

• denoting the intertexualities or semiotic polyvalence of which a text is constructed, and the transposition of one or more sign system(s) into another, initially designated as a “revolution in poetic language” by psychoanalyst, linguist, and cultural theorist Julia Kristeva;
• examining the process of translatio (a Latin phrase
  referring to the transfer or translation of culture or knowledge) as it applies to Petrarch’s rewriting of        Dante, as investigated by scholar of medieval French and Italian literature Kevin Brownlee
• revealing the ways that English traditions were refashioned as a result of the translation of French culture into West End London during the Caroline period (1625-1649), as undertaken by scholar of early modern English literature Jean E. Howard;
• grappling with the cultural politics of translation and gender, particularly the untranslatabilility of feminist wordplay, as reflected on by translator and critic Luise von Flotow.

Humanities Institute 2005–06 Faculty Coordinators
Katherine M. Faull, Professor of German
Susan L. Fischer, Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature
Allison M. Stedman, Assistant Professor of French and Italian
Department of Foreign Language Programs