Recent
Publications
January 2010
A collective volume on Translation and
hermeneutics:
Larisa Cercel (Hg. / éd.). 2009. Übersetzung
und Hermeneutik /
Traduction et herméneutique (Translation Studies
1), Zeta Books, 2009, 352 p.
ISBN: 978-973-1997-06-3 (Paperback)
ISBN: 978-973-1997-07-0 (eBook)
Paperback 28 EUR; eBook 9 EUR
http://www.zetabooks.com/new-releases/larisa-cercel-hg.-ed.-ubersetzung-und-hermeneutik.html
The hermeneutics of translation is one of the most
innovative aspects of translation studies. It seeks to apply the
knowledge gained by philosophical hermeneutics, literary and translation theory
to the act of translation while integrating recent developments in linguistics
and cognitive sciences into its theoretical approach. For the first time,
the present volume brings together major representatives of the hermeneutic
approach to translation and offers an interdisciplinary view of recent
discussions on this subject. The main topics include the basic problems
of translation, such as the role of the translator in the translation process
and his/her approach to the text from the point of view of comprehension,
interpretation or creativity. The contributions in this volume suggest
several ways of applying the hermeneutical approach to the didactics of
translation. The authors also examine the possibility for philosophical
discourse to lay the foundations of translation theory (F. Schleiermacher, E.
Husserl, M. Heidegger, H.-G. Gadamer, J. Patočka, P. Ricoeur).
Considering that discourse and dialogue are the essential hermeneutic
principles of translation, this volume encourages an interdisciplinary dialogue
within the approach of the hermeneutics of translation, including the
“interpretative theory” of the
Larisa Cercel: Auf den Spuren einer verschütteten Evidenz (introduction)
Radegundis
Stolze (Darmstadt): Hermeneutik
und Übersetzungswissenschaft – eine praxisrelevante Verknüpfung
Abstract: This contribution discusses the intricate
relationship between philosophical hermeneutics and translation studies. In the
first part, some relevant central concepts are introduced and discussed; these
include: the translator, subjectivity, embedding, the hermeneutic circle,
interpretation as the process of searching for meaning, the text-linguistic
basis, the over-summativity of the text’s sense, and
– finally – the problem of formulating a text when translating. All this is
explained with reference to “categories of translation” guiding comprehension
such as the cultural background, discourse field, conceptual world and the
predicative mode seen in the text. The message thus understood has to be
represented in the translation under “categories of translation” regarding mediality, stylistics, coherence and function of the target
text. This theoretical presentation is then applied to an English scientific
text with its German translation; the essay closes with a discussion of a
student translation of that text. The point is to show how this interweaving of
theory and practice is particularly adequate for the task of translation.
Lorenza Rega (Triest): Übersetzungspraxis und Hermeneutik im
Spannungsverhältnis zwischen Vergangenheit und Gegenwart
Abstract: The article proceeds from Schleiermacher’s
observation that the hermeneutical method is a necessary component in the life
of a cultivated person insofar as we have to continuously interpret the (not
especially complex) discourse of our interlocutors. This fact explains why
hermeneutics sometimes becomes banal if his further observation is not taken
into account, i.e., that hermeneutics as a technical method can be applied when
the object to be dealt with lends itself to being treated with hermeneutic
methods. The relationship between translation and hermeneutics has been object
of much research by a large number of philosophers in their reflections on the
problem of communication with and understanding “others”. Translators became
aware of the importance of hermeneutics for their work when translation evolved
into an academic discipline and a need for a theoretical basis of this
discipline arose. Hermeneutics was useful in this context. After a period of
intensive exchange between translation and hermeneutics, a certain diminution
of interest is now to be observed, possibly owing to the “obviousness” of the
hermeneutic method for translation. The author argues that hermeneutics can
still be useful for translation if it is employed within certain limits, above
all the social acceptability of the interpretation provided by the translator.
John W. Stanley (Köln): Die Relevanz der phänomenologischen
Hermeneutik für die Übersetzungswissenschaft
Abstract: While those working in the field of translation
studies in
Jane Elisabeth Wilhelm (Genève): Pour une herméneutique du traduire
Abstract: Hermeneutics may be defined as the theory or
philosophy of the interpretation of meaning, and this article examines how it
can contribute to translation studies. If modern hermeneutical theory presents
itself as an answer to the problem of understanding in the human and social
sciences, the reason is that the interpretation of meaning is truly universal.
From natural to social sciences, not to mention history, theology, sociology,
anthropology or literary criticism, the crucial question of interpretation
appears to be an essential aspect of all knowledge. Since its origins in
Ancient Greece, the aim of hermeneutics has been to establish
methodological
principles, philological rules and norms for the interpretation of sacred,
legal or literary texts. Therefore, the text as writing, calling for its
reading and interpretation, represents the meeting point of hermeneutics and
translation theory. Translation, according to Paul Ricoeur
or Hans-Georg Gadamer, is the “paradigm” of
hermeneutics, the model of the basic interpretative process of “bringing to
understanding” what is foreign, strange or unintelligible. Since there are two
worlds, the world of the text and that of the reader, there is always a need to
mediate or “translate” from one to the other. Translation makes us aware that
language itself, the medium through which we exist, contains the overarching
interpretation of the world. The question “What is understanding?” remained
unanswered until the time of Friedrich Schleiermacher, a theologian,
philosopher and translator of Plato, who is regarded as the father of modern
hermeneutics. His argument against imitation, formulated in favor of a foreignizing strategy, can be viewed as an ethics of
translation, and his theory is presented here in the context of its influence
on translation studies. Schleiermacher’s “hermeneutical circle” as the
fundamental structure of understanding and Heidegger’s later contribution in
its ontological setting outline the principles of the hermeneutical or
translation process.
Following
Heidegger’s analysis on the prestructure (or
projective character) of understanding, Gadamer’s
concept of the “hermeneutical dialogue” as dialogical interaction with the text
culminates in a “fusion of horizons”. Since understanding is basically a
referential operation, the hermeneutical circle operates in every act of
understanding, and the spatial image suggests an area of shared understanding.
In describing this process and focusing on the problematic of interpretation,
philosophical hermeneutics can thus contribute to the epistemology of
translation studies. Ricoeur’s theory of
interpretation, centred on the concept of the text,
provides an answer in the long debate in translation studies on the author’s
intention and the meaning of a text. The “work” of the translator (referring to
Freud’s famous notion) is to expropriate oneself as one “appropriates” the
other. The task of translation, as Ricoeur argues, is
double: it is both internal and external. His philosophy of translation,
entailing difference and dialogue between the self and the stranger, is an
ethics of translation as linguistic hospitality. Ricoeur
goes on to suggest that the hermeneutical model of translation, with an
exchange of memories and narratives between different nations, could be the
future ethos of European politics.
Arno Renken (Lausanne): Oui – et non. Traduction, herméneutique et écriture du doute
Abstract: This essay examines and questions the meaning
of the "and" between "translation and hermeneutics".
While hermeneutics has become a privileged form of discourse in translation,
translation has had, in return, strong effects on hermeneutics. By taking my
cue from Gadamer's reflection on language and his
examination of the multiplicity of idioms, I wish to illustrate how translation
shows the immanent limits of the hermeneutically assumed universality of
language, and thereby of hermeneutics itself. Thus, translation is not only the
central question of hermeneutics, but it is also its disquieting other:
translation happens as an incomprehensible event which no normative discourse
can encompass; translation appears, therefore, as that which threatens
hermeneutics because the latter cannot apprehend it. Gadamer
expresses this incomprehensible event of translation in a discourse that
hesitates between saying "yes" to translation and opposing a
principled "no" to it. It is this suspended hesitation – which is
also contained in the "and" – that this essay proposes to examine.
Inês Oseki-Dépré (Aix-en-Provence): Traduction et herméneutique
Abstract: The word “hermeneutics” can refer to
translation both as a practice (where the translator is an interpreter) and,
according to George Steiner’s and Antoine Berman’s definition, as a critique of
translation. The aim of this paper is to clarify this definition. As Antoine
Berman puts it, hermeneutics in its classic sense legitimates ethnocentric
translations. Practiced from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, this classic view of
hermeneutics (also endorsed by philosophers such as Paul de Man), suggests that
the signification of the text exists beyond ist
material support. Conversely, according to George Steiner, translation is a
“hermeneutic path” that has to take into account every aspect of the text
beyond moral, historical and contextual considerations. In order to produce an
equivalent text in the target language, translation – conceived both as
practice and critique – has to take into account all the aspects that make a
text unique such as prosody, grammar and style. From this point of view,
hermeneutics reveals itself as a poetic of translation.
Domenico
Jervolino (Naples): À la recherche d’une
philosophie de la traduction, en lisant Patočka
Abstract: Jan Patočka, who
was always particularly attentive to the question of language, wrote sin many
languages and was himself a translator. Although he spent his life immersed in
languages and translations, he was unable – for chronological reasons – to
participate in the tournant philosophique de la traduction of
the last decades of the twentieth century. Thus my essay is not aimed at
illustrating Patočka’s theory of translation.
Instead, it seeks to identify a series of elements in Patočka’s
work, which may serve as a basis for my own personal research in the area of
philosophy of translation as inspired by Ricoeur’s
hermeneutic phenomenology. I focus on two fundamental moments: the great
chapter on language and speech in Patočka’s
early 1936 thesis and Patočka’s “a-subjective
phenomenology” of his later years. Between these two moments, the perspective
on language and communication is completely inverted: language is no longer
understood through speech. It is not what we communicate, but that which
makes communication possible. When applied to translation this
inversion of perspective associates Patočka with
Walter Benjamin. In other words, what occurs in translation is not solely the
encounter between two languages, two cultures, or two individuals. A third
element is ultimately involved: our relationship with what founds us and allows
us to communicate. Let us call it, following Benjamin, the “pure language”. It
is this pure language, the language of the world or of being, that interpellates us in the encounter with the other.
Heinz Otto Münch & Ingrid Steinbach (Heidelberg & Worms): Verstehen und
Geltung. Gadamers Hermeneutik im kritischen Licht der
Übersetzungswissenschaft
Abstract: This essay deals with
the relationship of Gadamer’s philosophical concept of hermeneutics to modern
translation studies. The basis
is a critical discourse on how Gadamer develops his
arguments in “Wahrheit und Methode”
(‘Truth and Method’) which is guided by critical positions in science and
ideology in “Kritische Theorie”
(‘Critical Theory’) and “Kritischer Rationalismus” (‘Critical Rationalism’) represented by Habermas and Albert. It is an established fact that
theoretical statements can only be transformed in practice – here in the sense
of applicability in individual scientific fields – if they can claim
“validity”. Translation
studies
prove to be a representative set of evidence for the practical derivates of
hermeneutics concerning Gadamer’s concept which is
limited to ontology, as well as our critically-historically extrapolated
concept. Perfect examples are approaches in translation studies which are above
all not explicitly geared to hermeneutics.
Bernd Ulrich Biere (Koblenz): Die Rolle des Übersetzers:
Bote, Ausleger, Verständlichmacher?
Abstract: What’s new in viewing the translator as
communicator? In this paper, first, it is argued that communication – and
translation as well – cannot be represented in terms of ‘encoding’ and
‘decoding’, i.e., using a technical model of communication, in as much as we
are concerned with processes of understanding, whereby “understanding” here
includes understanding the text of the source language (by the translator as a
first reader) and understanding the translated text in the target language (by
a second reader). Thus the crucial problem in the science of translating,
“equivalence in difference” (R. Jakobson), may be
regarded as one of equivalence or identity in understanding. Furthermore the
communicative role of the translator may be regarded in terms of a specific
kind of ‘messenger’ who not only has to ‘deliver’ the message, but who is also
expected to ‘explain’ it as well. Historically the need for translating and
explaining can be found very early in the ‘institution of missi
’ (under Charlemagne in the early 9th century), while in the history of
hermeneutics we once again may perceive a kind of pedagogical situation, where
for some readers there is a need to get more (e.g. historical) explanative
information to fully understand some ‘hard’ parts of a text or book (J. M. Chladenius). Thus, the role of the translator should not to
be described via thedichotomy “communicative” or “not
communicative”. The translator or interpreter is as well communicating as
comprehending (for himself ) and explaining (for others): as ‘true’ as
possible, and as much as necessary ‘adapted’ to the rules of the target
language and to the linguistic competence of the reader.
Ioana Bălăcescu & Bernd Stefanink (Craiova & Bielefeld): Les bases scientifiques de l’approche herméneutique et d’un enseignement de la crétivité en traduction
Abstract: The hermeneutic approach in translation studies
has not received the attention it deserves. Because of its metaphorical
language scientists who are used to logical, “vertical” (de Bono), or
“convergent” (
Marianne Lederer (Paris): Le sens sens dessus dessous: herméneutique et traduction
Abstract: In this essay the general approach of
hermeneutics and the interpretive theory of translation to translation studies
is discussed. The main area of overlap is that both deal with the comprehension
of texts, i.e., their interpretation, and both put the emphasis on the role of
the interpreter: sense is not “given” by the text, rather it is developed by
the reader. Hermeneutics and the interpretive theory differ, however, on
various points: hermeneutics looks at comprehension from a philosophical angle,
the interpretive theory from a pragmatic one; hermeneutics does not make a
distinction – as does the interpretive theory – between the
interpreter
/ reader of the original and the interpreter / translator, and while
hermeneutics holds that language and thought are inseparable, the interpretive
theory feels that, most of the time, dissociating them in translation is
necessary, etc.
Alexis Nouss (Cardiff): La relation transhistorique
Abstract: In a given society, the practices of
translation depend from historical norms but they reflect as well its
philosophy of history; they convey its answers about the chronological
question. They help to build the past in the way they deal with original texts,
giving them a new life – or sometimes failing to do so. Metahistoricism and transhistoricism
are the broad conceptual categories which illustrate the two possible
positions: one aiming at an order of reality beyond the flow of time, the other
attempting to create a relationship between separate historical entities.
Translations of Homer and Sophocles by Hölderlin to
Kazantzakis and Baricco, George Steiner’s and Antoine
Berman’s theories, Walter Benjamin’s and Édouard Glissant’s philosophical impulses are discussed here to
provide insights into this study of translation as history in the making.
Alberto Gil (Saarbrücken): Hermeneutik der Angemessenheit. Translatorische
Dimensionen des Rhetorikbegriffs
decorum
Abstract: This article is about the translational
dimensions of the central rhetorical principle of decorum from a
hermeneutic point of view. Given that translation always involves
interpretation, and vice versa, the understanding of translation as an act of
interpretation includes important anthropological issues related to
interpersonal communication. Hermeneutics is often considered as an
appropriation of the text with the aim of identifying oneself with it. The
concept of decorum, however, highlights the necessity – in interpersonal
communication – to keep the other at a both adequate and respectful distance,
and therefore making out of this distance the base for true community building,
as explained in the dialogical philosophy. The transposition of these ideas
into the field of translation offers
a new
point of view in the hermeneutic approach to translation studies – a
perspective developed in this essay.
Larisa Cercel (Freiburg i. Br.): Übersetzen als
hermeneutischer Prozess: Fritz Paepcke und die
Grundlagen der Übersetzungswissenschaft
Abstract: This article is a first attempt to reconstruct
Fritz Paepcke’s hermeneutical translation theory and
to determine its importance within the current translation studies. The thesis of
this article is that translation studies nowadays – in their search for firm
scientific foundations which could serve to secure their status as a recognized
scientific discipline – risk loosing sight of precisely these foundations.
Fritz Paepcke’s hermeneutical translation theory
postulates the basic relationality to the subject of
the translation process. Hence it restores the grip on reality of the “things
themselves”, i.e., of the translation act performed by human translators.
Translation studies, having become more and more abstract, must strive to
reincorporate the simple translation conditions the theory of Fritz Paepcke reminds us of in the theoretical consideration.
* * *
From Target
21:10 (2009)
Downie, Jonathan.
2009 Are you using the right Bible translation? A professional
translator’s perspective on translation choice. The Pneuma Review 12:3. Summer 2009.
24-43
* A plea in favour of using skopos theory as
the best theoretical framework for Bible translation.
.
Špirk, Jaroslav. 2009. Anton Popovič’s
contribution to translation studies.
Target 21:1. 3-29.
* Popovič
(1933-1984) was an important Slovak personality in the field of TS who is
considered by many one of the founding fathers of DTS. In this paper, the
author highlights in particular “Popovič’s role
in developing the field of Czechoslovak and international translation studies,
most importantly of descriptive translation studies and the manipulation
school”.
Lung, Rachel. 2009. Interpreters and the Writing of History
in
* This article argues that
interpreters are crucial figures in the recording of history. Evidence taken
from historical texts in ancient
Keywords: interpreting history, Bureau of historiography,
pictorial documents, written documents, interpreters’ roles, ancient
*
* *
Nicodemus, Brenda. 2009.
Prosodic markers and utterance boundaries in American Sign Language
interpretation.
* This book discusses the prosodic
features of spoken and signed languages, and reports the findings of research
on prosodic markers in ASL interpretation. Reports on the characteristics of
the ASL markers, including their frequency, number, duration, and timing. Among
other findings, the results show that sign language interpreters produce an
average of seven prosodic markers at each boundary point. The markers are
produced both sequentially and simultaneously and under conditions of highly
precise timing. Further, the results suggest that the type of prosodic markers
used by sign language interpreters are both systematic and stylistic.
For those interested in
prosody in simultaneous interpreting in spoken languages, this study could be
of special interest (D. Gile)