Notes on Translation

Insofar as there is a common theme running through these entries, translation plays a central role. Whether in wondering about the translation of 'catastrophe' into Turkish (or out of Turkish), in my own halting work with Tanpınar (most recently here), or in the research I continue to do, translation figures prominently. I've stumbled across a small book of Paul Ricoeur in the past week, and have been skimming through it while I pass through a city whose infrastructure seems too big for its people (this, I think, a legacy of time in Istanbul). A few choice quotes, to which I hope I'll return soon.

There are two access routes to the problem posed by the act of translating: either take the term 'translation' in the strict sense of the transfer of a spoken message from one language to another or take it in the broad sense as synonymous with the interpretation of any meaningful whole within the same speech community. (Paul Ricoeur, On Translation, p. 11)

He continues:

I repeat the theoretical alternatives: either the diversity of languages is radical, and then translation is impossible by right, or else translation is a fact, and we must establish its rightful possibility through an inquiry into the origin or through a reconstruction of the a priori conditions of the noted fact. 

I suggest that we need to get beyond these theoretical alternatives, translatable versus untranslatable, and to replace them with new practical alternatives, stemming from the very exercise of translation, the faithfulness versus betrayal alternatives, even if it means admitting that the practice of translation remains a risky operation which is always in search of its theory. (14)

Rethinking translation in terms other than right/wrong helps Ricoeur make a move that reminds me of what Donna Haraway has done with 'situated knowledges':

Indeed, it seems to me that translation sets us not only intellectual work, theoretical or practical, but also an ethical problem. Bringing the reader to the author, bringing the author to the reader, at the risk of serving and of betraying two masters: this is to practise what I like to call linguistic hospitality. It is this which serves as a model for other forms of hospitality that I think resemble it: confessions, religions, are they not like languages that are foreign to one another, with their lexicon, their grammar, their rhetoric, their stylistics which we must learn in order to make our way into them? And is eucharistic hospitality not to be taken up with the same risks of translation-betrayal, but also with the same renunciation of the perfect translation? I retain these risky analogies and these question marks. (23-23)