4 Translation Theories

Translation studies: a traditional theory stretching back to Schliermacher and still very much with us, frames the central question as: if all translation is "bringing over," what is being translated and where is it going? Does the translator bring the "target" language to the "source" language, or vice versa? Whats at stake in any given "bringing over"--whats gained, lost, and what does that mean in any given context?

Hugo Friedrich called translation "enrichment." That he is still working within the Schliermachian idea can be seen in Friedrich's idea that the flow of translation is always one way: something is being enriched in either the target or source language at the expense of exactitude in the other. Translation is imperfect, and one side must always suffer.

Levinas and Benjamin have slightly different takes on this, both of which I think are more dynamic and thus harder to put in practice unless you're a gifted linguist (George Steiner comes to mind as a fruitful example of the Benjaminian style).

Benjamin's The Task of the Translator is noteworthy in its celebration and indeed ennobling of the oft-neglected art of translation, here raised (in his mystical Marxist manner) to the level of "task." The task of the translator, it turns out, is a central task for humanity: it is one of the only acts (maybe the only?) through which one gets a glimpse of "pure language." Benjamin thinks translation strips language down from the physical husk that covers it (all the physical stuff we do with our voice box, mouth, and lips; all the physicality of the written word on the page) in order to reveal the pure essence at its core: MEANING. Benjamin's ideal translation, as he says at the end, would be an interlinear version of the Bible in every human language, lined up one on top of the other.

For Levinas, translation is necessary for both the translated text and the culture doing the translating. There is no one-way enrichment like there is in Schliermacher and Friedrich. In fact, translation is only the site "around" which different periods of history communicate--translation is where two periods interface. What they communicate are "thinkable meanings." Here is Levinas's idea of "exegesis" in Nine Talmudic Readings:

To evoke freedom and non-dogmatism in exegesis today means one of two things. Either it means being a proponent of the historical method...or to engage in structuralist analysis. No one can refuse the insights of history. But we do not think they are sufficient for everything...Our first task is therefore to read in a way that respects [the text's] givens and conventions, without mixing in the questions arising for a philologist or historian to the meaning that derives from its juxtapositions. Did audiences in Shakespeare's theatre spend their time showing off their critical sense by pointing out that there were only wooden boards where the stage sign indicated a palace or a forest? It is only after this initial task of reading the text within its own conventions that we will try to translate the meaning suggested by its particulars into a modern language...Our approach assumes that the different periods of history can communicate around thinkable meanings, whatever the variations in the signifying material which suggests them.

Note the phrase "thinkable meanings": if things are capable of being thought they are just as capable of not being thought. Meaning is not always there, hidden, waiting to be found, as for Benjamin. The process of translation is central for Levinas, for it is in that process where both sides start talking to one another.