George Steiner's After Babel in contemporary Translation Studies (original) (raw)
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GEORGE STEINER'S PHILOSOPHY: TRANSLATION AS A NEW PARADIGMA
The legitimacy of historical and cultural Western identity cannot disregard the importance of rethinking the act of translating: what would have happened if Luther hadn't translate the Bible? How much would be lost if Shakespeare hadn't been tralslated in Italian, if Dante had not been translated in English, Hegel in French? After Babel, a George Steiner's controversial work, offers a new reading of the anthropological significance of the biblic myth. Scorned in academic circles, as it was the role of comparative study of language and literature in the last century, this work has now been handled differently and exerted its influence in various fields, from linguistic up to aesthetics, so that now a reinterpretation of his ideas may seem trivial, if not operated with critical consciousness. In order to understand how a work written more than 30 years ago can tell us something, we have to analyze what our author means talking about translation. Transalation it's meant as controversial concept, a fertile soil for a comparation beetween different parts of human spiritual life, a concept that can report on the plan of interdisciplinary many aspects of humanistic research.
Steiner, George. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation
Language Problems and Language Planning, 1979
Ce la koro de ciu ago de homa interkomunikado trovigas la tradukado kaj interpret-ado. Jen la tezo de la nova libro de Steiner. Traktante tiun temon, li cerpas el fontoj de Aristotelo gis Zamenhof. La tradukado en kaj inter la lingvoj estas grava, vasta afero. Steiner, trilingvulo (angla-franca-germana) estas taŭga fakulo. La tradukado estas malfacila. Oni argumentis, ke gi estas neebla. Sed neniu homa produkto estas perfekta, kaj por la realeco de la tradukado parolas gia fakta abunda ekzisto. Laŭ Steiner, gi estas bazo de la civilizo. Cu fidela traduko eblas? Steiner ne subtenas pure sciencan sintenon al la traduka teorio, nek al la lingvo entute. La titolo mem de lia libro aludas al la deziro de grupo, lau Steiner, konservi sian identon per lingva aparteco. La multeco de la lingvoj montras, ke tio estas forta deziro. Tiusence, do, ciu traduka ago estas perfido, fordono de sekretoj. Tio estas jam konata ideo. La multeco mem de la lingvoj estas grava fakto ce iu teorio de la lingvo...
Hermeneutics, Social Criticism and Everyday Education Practice, 2020
R. Włodarczyk, Hermeneutics of Translation – the Fundamental Aspect of Dialogue. Around the Concept of George Steiner, [w:] Hermeneutics, Social Criticism and Everyday Education Practice, ed. R. Włodarczyk, Wrocław 2020, pp. 47-59. George Steiner is one of the leading contemporary comparativists and philosophers of literature. One of the most important themes of his book from the 1970s, "After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation", focus on the claim about the identity of understanding and translation, which in effect links dialogue to translation competence. In the article, referring to the thought and tradition of Judaism and Steiner’s original approach to understanding, I analyse and discuss the premises of his basic claim in relation to the phenomenon of dialogue, I study the consequences and draw conclusions from Steiner’s concept for the theory and practice of education.
2021
I was very pleased to be asked to contribute to a volume of essays celebrating the life and work of Erich Steiner, a distinguished scholar and a valued personal friend. Sadly, I have not been able to produce a paper in time; so I have asked the editors to allow me, as a favour, a couple of pages for a short and, I hope, unobtrusive congratulatory note. Erich stands out for me, above all, as a scholar who understands about language. Let me try and spell out what I mean by this. We all recognise the problems there are in getting the systematic study of language-linguistics-accepted, naturalised and valued in our universities: those who are in charge don't know where to put it, and it is the first thing to be dispensed with when they need to make economies in the budget. I used to think that this was because they found it threatening: language is too close to the bone, and the study of language brings out awkward truths-or can do, if it is pursued effectively, with a clear commitment and without fear or favour. I still think this is one part of the story. But linguistics is always at risk for another reason: simply because it has no home; it does not fit into the pattern of knowledge that emerged and became established in the twentieth century. Like the platypus and the pangolin, linguistics is an anomaly: it is neither art nor science-or rather, it is both. And the anomalous nature of linguistics derives, of course, from the nature of language itself. Language can be, and in my view must be, studied scientifically, with data, and theory, and constant consultation between the two. After all, language evolved along with the human brain, as a theoretical modelling of human experience: each language is itself, in its lexicogrammar and semantics, a natural science of life, and is apprehended as such by its speakers. But language is also the enactment of human relationships, those of the family, and the neighbourhood, and of communities of all shapes and sizes: each language is the carrier of human sensibilities, loving and hating, pleasure and pain, celebrating the beautiful and the ugly. So language is also apprehended and valued artistically. Language itself is at once both science and art. These two angles are sometimes seen by our literary colleagues as being irreconcilably opposed, which is why departments of literature can turn out to be among the less friendly environments for hosting the scientific study of language. But the two modes of being are not separate. They cannot be prised
Engaging with Translation. New Readings of George Steiner’s After Babel , 2021
The present article aims to draw attention to the fact that George Steiner, in After Babel, a book now more than forty-five years old, makes statements that are still valid today not only with regard to translation in the narrow sense (translation proper), but also concerning the genesis and intercultural transfer of non-verbal or polysemiotic artifacts. In contrast to what has been done so far, Steiner can be considered a pioneer of a comprehensive semiotics of translation, along with Roman Jakobson and others. The following remarks pursue this idea primarily on the basis of Steiner's sixth chapter, entitled "Topologies of Culture", and show that there are still points there that can be taken up today and in the future.
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 ...
Introduction: A Linguistic 'Re-Turn' in Translation Studies?
Belgian Journal of Linguistics, 2007
In its early, pre-theoretic stage, Western Translation Studies took most of its inspiration from Bible translation study and the study of literature and philosophy. Heated debates concerned the balance between source and target text orientation, matters of loyalty and treason, freedom and literalness. The writings on translation were speculative, or prescriptive, or both. Only the second half of the twentieth century witnessed the advent of Translation Studies (TS) as a descriptive discipline. However, the complexity and multi-facetedness of translation as a research object does not allow descriptive Translation Studies to rely on just one research design or paradigm of general application. The hybrid and in some sense still emerging (inter)discipline of Translation Studies is characterized by trends and changes, giving rise to the "turn" metaphor which is so popular in precisely this research area (cf. Snell-Hornby 2006), as it fits in so well with the concept of a discovery journey with travellers following different and unpredictable paths. When Translation Studies finally set out its project as a descriptive science-the term "Translation Studies" was coined by Holmes in the seventies-many authors defined it as a branch of linguistics. As in the earlier days, it was still the relation between the source text and the target text which was at the forefront, and notions like "procedure" (Vinay-Darbelenet 1958) and "shift" (Catford 1965) became pack and parcel of the discourse on translation, both of them intimately tied up with the muchdebated notion of "equivalence". The early linguistic approaches had a tendency to view the translation operation as primarily a transcoding operation, a narrowing down of the scope which explains much of the criticism levelled against this approach in subsequent years. These years, then, saw a widening of the research scope to functional, cultural, sociological, political and ideological matters, a process reflecting an inside-out movement from the centre to the periphery, much like the recording of an onion peeling being projected backwards. The functional and the cultural moves constituted acts of contextualizing, not only of the translation phenomena in themselves, but also of the whole translation enterprise. The perspective was rightly broadened up by those writers who were pointing at ideology and oppression, and bringing to the fore the translators themselves with the social, professional, ethical, ideological conditions within which they perform their mediating role. Every new layer to be explored in the translation