The Hermeneutics of Translation (2003) (original) (raw)
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Bibliography Hermeneutics and Translation 2018
The article is based on aspects of a philosophical theory of understanding which were defined by the most outstanding representative of the theory of hermeneutics Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900. The hermeneutic circle describes the process of understanding a text in stages. It refers to the idea that one's understanding of the text as a whole is established by reference to the individual parts and one's understanding of each individual part by reference to the whole. Neither the whole text nor any individual part can be understood without reference to one another, and hence, it is a circle. However, this circular character of interpretation does not make it impossible to interpret a text; rather, it stresses that the meaning of a text must be found within its cultural, historical, and literary context. H.-G. Gadamer and later on other linguists linked the theory of understanding with translation and disclosed identical starting positions of understanding and translation. R. Stolze and C. Nord have focused on the theory of hermeneutics in their works from a professional angle, by developing a number of parameters of text interpretation which help to grasp the conceptual aspects of a text before translator's decisions are made and code switching is started. Two legal texts, European Convention on Human Rights and Rights and freedoms in practice Brochure were selected for a case study and analysed from the point of view of hermeneutics, i.e. from the interpretative perception of a text as an object: its situative background, discourse field, meaning dimension and predicative mode. The differences between the texts became evident after having determined the domain of these texts, the types of the texts, the level of communication (expert/ lay), their function and intention. C. Nord's extratextual factors, such as sender, intention, receiver, medium, place, time, motive and function were applied as effective tools for the development of the translator's hermeneutical circle of text interpretation.
After Babel and the Impediments of Hermeneutics: Releasing Translation into its own Territory
Yearbook of Translational Hermeneutics, 2021
This article proposes that Steiner’s account of a hermeneutic translation does not square with his deeper linguistic and literary sympathies, that he often puts himself in contradictory argumentative positions, despite the vigorous clarity of his reasoning, and that he might find a suitable home for those sympathies and some solution to his predicament in the kind of translational model that is offered here. While Steiner takes pleasure in language’s capacity to make room for individual privacies, for the contingencies of idiolect, and to create the imaginative space for ‘alternity’, that is, for the hypothetical, the suppositional, the optative and conditional, the kind of hermeneutic translation which he promotes fosters sobriety, balance and durability, and resists the excessive and the proliferative. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that many of the conclusions he draws from translation are negative and tinged with defeatism; we can only regret that he does not use ...
Translating (as) Excess: Toward Communitas in the Hermeneutics of a Saturated Phenomenon
The Comparatist, 2014
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Literary translation—as a hermeneutic event laden with competing demands, an impossibility of simultaneously performing, replicating, transferring, mediating too many functions—has been understood as something of an interpretive heresy toward the literary sublime: that untouchable, perfect complexity of the text must be profanely touched for translation. And the touch of translation is always too rough, too awkward, leaving traces, damaging delicate appendages, or knocking the structure off balance. This view posits translation as something inherently at odds with a text’s fundamental ontology: the text is always damaged or silenced piecemeal in translation. The restrictive emphasis on the ontology of a literary text allows translation critics to judge and dismiss a translated text according to impossible standards. It is not that translation itself is impossible so much as that a virtual infinitude of interpretive emphases creates or reconstitutes a text in too many ways to render in a single translation. Literary translations simultaneously face so many competing demands, it is as though in translation, a text is suddenly responsible for standing up and declaring its laden ontology in one polyphonic burst. Structure, rhythm, meter, cadence, syntax, connotation, political implications both subtle and overt, characteristic diction, allusions, allegorical suggestions, mood, tone, deconstructive gestures, affinities, aporia, latent ideologies, echoes of literary influence, diachronic literary historical relationships, genre conventions: these are the basic componential standards that variously coalesce on translated texts in addition to the supposedly basic criterion of semantic “accuracy” of varying degrees of “literalness.” Translation criticism yields abundant examples, some of which are discussed below. Although critics may not go so far as to articulate their thoughts on the categorical impossibility of translation, their critiques nonetheless effectively enforce the notion that good translation must be sublime translation, accounting for any and all meaning that hermeneutic traditions have ascribed to the original. As an alternative to this critical mode, translation practice must face excess as “saturated phenomenon” (building on Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenological notion) by shifting toward regarding translation as a mode of invitation: acknowledging the “excessive” demands on translation and its essential incompleteness and, instead, offering its object as an index of other texts—both the translated text itself as well as future texts (interpretive, translational and creative)—that will function systemically. Translation can only respect the primary excess of the text when it declares itself a node and invites infinite linkages. The concept of “excess” always implies a judgment, be it critique or celebration, of a degree or magnitude of a quality or substance without which the thing to which that quality pertains could (somehow, essentially) still successfully exist. With literature in particular, the “excess” of textual meaning should neither be thought as an essence, nor as an ontological fact inherent to the text, but as something produced through multiple communicative contexts articulated across multiple interpretive engagements and multiple (hermeneutic) discourses. If the excess of the “original” text can be thought as a product of interpretive communities and networks of meaning they generate in traditions of cross-reading, then translational communities can function analogously by translating transparently in excess; that is, sublime translation requires a hermeneutic excess that only begins with the act of translation proper. Rather than yield to the reductive impetus implicit in crediting translations as even partially complete avatars of “originals,” translation should be understood as matching an excess of meaning in the text as sublime with a parallel excess of hermeneutics as communitas of interpretation, wherein excess is regarded as infinite invitation rather than repellant, scornful ideal. The latter would demand that translation retreat or admit defeat. “Retreat” here designates the kind of extreme of anti-translation, the demand that the excess of the text be met with the infinitude of language proficiency and a congruently sublime hermeneutic; and “to admit defeat” is typified in the trope of the translator’s humbly apologetic preface. This essay proposes a third route for translation, where the incompleteness of translation is neither an inherent weakness nor a shameful confession; instead, translation of the text as excess, as unattainable nexus of hermeneutic demands, must be practiced with the a priori understanding that the translation process always only opens into the hermeneutic communitas.
Phenomenology and Rhetoric in Hermeneutic Translation
Crossroads. A Journal of English Studies, 2018
Abstract: Translational Hermeneutics as a discipline is central in Translation Studies. It redi-rects academic interest from language structures and cultural differences onto the person deal-ing with them, the translator. The translator, with intellectual, social and individual aspects of identity, combines intuition with reflection in the mediating process. S/he has in his or her strategy a dual perspective on the texts: s/he asks for their socio-cultural background, and analyses holistically the level of the text’s language structure, never proceeding in a word-for-word manner. Comprehension requires relevant cultural and specialist knowledge guiding the phenomenology in understanding, whereas proficiency in specific text genres and styles, tex-tual logic, and semantic webs with cultural key words is rhetorically necessary for writing a translation. The application of this dynamic translation competence is demonstrated using an example.
Journal of Cultural and Religious Studies, 2021
This article is devoted to the study of one of the most important questions of philology-translation which throughout its centuries-long and rich history has been considered a sphere of philological activity of utmost significance providing an exceptional possibility for recoding and bringing philological and cultural traditions within the reach of people at large. Through the application of a variety of methods (linguo-stylistic, linguo-poetic, and comparative), the author attempts to study the process of translation, the clash of difficulties inevitably arising in that process, and offers solutions that will help recreate the vitality of the original and the uniqueness of linguistic thinking. Emphasis on the importance of the consideration of intra-and inter-linguistic correlations of language units in the original work of literature drives the author to the conclusion that the most reliable approach to literary translation is to be guided by the principle of "metaphoric displacement".
The Double Experience of Translation in Hermeneutics
Internationales Jahrbuch für Hermeneutik, 2011
This essay shows that contemporary hermeneutic conceptions of translation derive from two difference experiences of the foreign language, namely the hermeneutic experience and the experience of the foreign. It is discussed what these two experiences are, how they are present in the work of Gadamer, Ricoeur, Heidegger and Berman and how they derive from German Romantic notions of translation. In particular, it is shown that the former experience focuses on the process of formation, cultivation and expanding of one’s own experience of the world by means of translation, whereas the second experience interprets translation as a form of hospitality that allows the linguistic body of the foreign language to appear in one’s own language.
Cognition and Comprehension in Translational Hermeneutics
Zetabooks, 2021
The fundamental aim of translation studies in general is to better understand the practice of translation. Insofar as hermeneutics can be regarded as an approach to understanding the nature of understanding itself (and in this it finds alliances with phenomenology), the task of this volume is to demonstrate that hermeneutics can accordingly provide a means to better apprehend the subtle complexities of translation. At issue are translators’ myriad decisions, reactions, negotiations and compromises as they practice their craft. At stake is translation knowledge – what translators must know, how they know what they know, and how such savoir faire is deployed in specific instances of translation. Essays in this volume address the somatic and the cognitive, questions of experience and expertise, empirical practice, methodological protocols and suitable philosophical models in order to gain better insight into the challenging task of the translator. An additional highlight of this volume is the sustained assessment of Fritz Paepcke, one of the pioneers of what, today, is called translational hermeneutics, Paepcke being a scholar who proposed new ways to consider the delicate, but necessary negotiation between translation theory and translation practice.
Translation, understanding and interpretation [in Greek]
Apart from its philosophical significance, the relationship between understanding and interpretation is of crucial importance for translation theory as well. For it is iή this relationship that the hermeneutic conditions of translation are brought into relief. Drawing οη the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Ludwig Wittgenstein, we outline a general approach to translation that is both hermeneutically inspired and praxeologically oriented.
Reconsidering Translation as Interpretation
The Criterion : An International Journal in English , 2021
The act of translation as a literary phenomenon lends itself to varied critical and theoretical approaches and one such approach perceives it as an act of interpretation that can be strongly linked to twentieth century German philosopher Hans Georg Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics. While conceiving and putting forward the act of translation as a specific hermeneutical experience, Gadamer, in his writings states that translation is itself a linguistic act and that language is inextricably tied with man's being in the world. His analysis of the process of translation has deeply influenced the critics and theoreticians of translation studies. My paper is an attempt to grapple with the aforesaid conception of the process of translation as interpretation.
Journal of Vasyl Stefanyk Precarpathian National University, 2020
The present study focuses on the application of the hermeneutic method within translation process. The examination of the issue draws on the already established concepts of translational hermeneutics, which consider this method as a part of the initial pha se of the translation activity. However, the study presents the approach according to which hermeneutic activity is present throughout whole translation process. The author thus examines deployment of Ricoeur's hermeneutic concept of interpretation and understanding of the complex translation activity. Finally, a new hermeneutic-pragmalinguistic conceptualization method is introduced applying the hermeneutic approach within the complex translation process. It is noted that on a semantic level the person who pronounces the word I, which is associated with a specific name, forms personal identity. At the pragmatic level, the meaning of the word I become contextually dependent on the discourse in which it is constantly formed. On the borderline between semantic s and pragmatics, a person becomes a reflexive Self, capable of hermeneutical activity of understanding. The author focuses on Ricoeur's research, which defines language as an objective system and / or code and discourse. He also argues that language as a code is collective in that it exists as a set of parallel rules (synchronous system) and is anonymous in the sense that it is not the result of any intention. The language is not conscious in terms of structural or cultural unconsciousness. The author focuses on the stages of hermeneutic activity. This indicates that the first step reveals the essence of interpretation as an important part of the hermeneutical method, which is a dynamic process that includes a non-methodological moment of understanding and a methodological moment of explanation. Characterizes the second stage of hermeneutic activity it is the stage of configuration. That is, the stage of conceptualizing meaning in language. The third stage, that is, the stage of refiguration, is a complete understanding of the discourse and its interpretation. Hermeneutic activity is fully realized in reading, which represents the space between pragmatics and semantic structure. This phenomenon is described as the stage where a person operates with all their knowledge, pragmatic language and experience, not yet structured to solve one particular cognitive-reflexive task. With regard to the thematic and non-thematic cognitive abilities of each person, the translator, as a professional user of at least two languages, has a cognitive-reflexive knowledge in which at least two language cultures interrelate and intersect. It is vaccinated that, at the interlingual and interlingual levels of hermeneutic activity (in interpretation and understanding), an individual not only uses language but also changes and transforms it.