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Translation Theory

Translation theory asks what it is to say in one language what was said in another: what is carried across, what is left behind, and whose language is served in the carrying. The practice is as old as contact between peoples, and its theory is nearly as old, since every translator has had to decide between the words and the sense. The discipline that now studies it, translation studies, took its name in the 1970s, but the questions it inherits run from Cicero’s Rome, the sutra translators of China and the translators of Abbasid Baghdad through the German Romantics and twentieth-century linguistics and philosophy to the machine systems that now translate much of the world’s text. Three conflicts organise the field and none has closed: fidelity against freedom, what equivalence between two texts could mean, and what a translator owes the foreign text, the home reader and the languages between them.

The branches

• The words or the sense — the founding opposition and its independent recurrences: Cicero and Jerome; Kumārajīva and Xuanzang in China; Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq in Baghdad; Dryden’s three heads, Tytler’s laws and Yan Fu’s three difficulties.
• The foreign and the home — Schleiermacher’s two roads, Berman’s Romantic tradition and Benjamin’s pure language; Venuti’s domestication and foreignisation with the criticisms it drew; the cultural and postcolonial turn of Bassnett, Lefevere and Spivak.
• Equivalence and its limits — Jakobson’s three kinds and equivalence in difference; Quine’s indeterminacy; Nida’s formal and dynamic equivalence; the working taxonomies of Vinay and Darbelnet and of Catford.
• Target and purpose — the descriptive turn: Holmes’s map, Even-Zohar’s polysystems and Toury’s norms; skopos theory and its standing criticism.
• The original and the untranslatable — Derrida and de Man on the original’s dependence; Ricoeur’s linguistic hospitality and Steiner’s hermeneutic motion; Cassin’s untranslatables.
• Machine translation — from Weaver’s memorandum through statistical and neural systems to language models, and what the theory’s questions become when no translator made the translation.

Meaning — what translation is for the theory of language

Translation is where a theory of language is tested against a second language. Every position in the branches above answers, explicitly or not, the question of where meaning lives: in a sense that survives the change of words (Cicero, Nida), in the way a language means and not only what it means (Benjamin, Jakobson), in nothing determinate at all (Quine), in the target culture’s norms (Toury), in the purpose of the act (Vermeer), in an original that was never whole (Derrida, de Man), in a hospitality between tongues (Ricoeur), or in the residue a term leaves as it crosses (Cassin). The field has not converged and its practitioners do not expect it to, because the disagreements are disagreements about language, and a translator’s working answer to them is visible in every sentence rendered.

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Persons

Schleiermacher · Benjamin · Jakobson · Quine · Chomsky · Derrida · de Man · Ricoeur · Gadamer

External: Cicero · Jerome · Kumārajīva · Xuanzang · Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq · John Dryden · Alexander Fraser Tytler · Yan Fu · Jean-Paul Vinay · Jean Darbelnet · J. C. Catford · George Steiner · Eugene Nida · James Holmes · Itamar Even-Zohar · Gideon Toury · Hans Vermeer · Antoine Berman · Lawrence Venuti · Susan Bassnett · André Lefevere · Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak · Barbara Cassin · Donald Davidson · Charles Taber · Katharina Reiss · Anthony Pym · Minako O’Hagan · Dorothy Kenny

See also: Hermeneutics · Deconstruction · Structuralism