Dr. Margherita Dore
[email protected]
 Hermeneutics
 Steiner’s
hermeneutic motion
 Resistant difference and elective
affinity
 Ezra Pound
 Walter Benjamin
 Deconstruction
 Abusive fidelity
 French-born
American Literary critic,
essayist and academic.
 In his influential book After Babel (1975)
Steiner approaches translation from the
point of view of hermeneutics.
 Steiner proposes a totalising model, which
he terms hermeneutic motion, in
translation.
 He believes that translation is not a science
but as an ‘exact art’.
 Term
derived from the Greek verb
hermeneuein meaning to interpret (the
bible)
 German Romantic hermeneutic tradition (for
the interpretation of all types of texts)
 George Steiner’s After Babel:

Hermeneutics is … ‘the investigation of what it
means to “understand” a piece of oral or written
speech, and the attempt to diagnose this process
in terms of a general model of meaning’ (Steiner
1975/1998: 249)
Steiner’s hermeneutic motion (Munday 2012: 245)
 Resistant


Translator’s experience of L1 and L2 is different
SL-TL relation varies (with effect on the translator’s
identity and society)
 Elective

difference:
affinity
Translator is attracted to text, recognizes
him/herself in text
 Tension
between the two produces great
translation (Steiner)
 Steiner’s
After Babel, based on Chomsky’s
generative-transformational grammar, and its
all-embracing theory of translation is now
dated.
 Male-dominated language of his (‘erotic
possession’ and ‘penetration’) metaphor and his
equating of words (and women) to the exchange
of material goods (cf. Chamberlain’s
1988/2004).
 Creative
energy of translation
 Pound’s ‘reading’ of Chinese ideograms, based
on the notes of Ernest Fenollosa (1853–1908)
 Experimental practice


Deliberately archaicizing or ‘Make it new’ (cf. His
translation of Cavalcanti’s poetry in Dolce stil nuovo
into ‘pre-Elizabethan English’)
Influenced Haroldo de Campos (1929–2003)


Transcreation
Brazilian cannibalism: revitalization of the past
(transcreation -> taking of the life energies of the
ST and their re-emergence in the TT)
Ezra Pound’s translation of Cavalcanti’s sonnet
Io vidi li occhi dove Amor si mise
Io vidi li occhi dove Amor si mise
quando mi fece di sé pauroso,
che mi guardar com' io fosse noioso:
allora dico che 'l cor si divise;
e se non fosse che la donna rise,
i' parlerei di tal guisa doglioso,
ch'Amor medesmo ne farei cruccioso,
che fe' lo immaginar che mi conquise.
Dal ciel si mosse un spirito, in quel
punto
che quella donna mi degnò guardare,
e vennesi a posar nel mio pensero:
elli mi conta sì d'Amor lo vero,
che ogni sua virtù veder mi pare
sì com' io fosse nello suo cor giunto.
I SAW the eyes, where Amor took his place
When love's might bound me with the fear thereof,
Look out at me as they were weary of love.
I say: The heart rent him as he looked on this.
And were't not that my Lady lit her grace,
Smiling upon me with her eyes grown glad,
Then were my speech so dolorously clad
That Love should mourn amid his victories.
The instant that she deigned to bend her eyes
Toward me, a spirit from high heaven rode
And chose my thought the place of love's verities
That all Love's powers did my sight accost
As though I'd won unto his heart's mid-most.
 Literary
critic and essayist, philosopher and
translator.
 Benjamin saw language as magical and its
mission to reveal spiritual content

Influence of Jewish Kabbala and German Romantics
 In
his seminal essay ‘The task of the translator’
(1923), preface to translation of Baudelaire’s
Tableaux Parisiens, ), he suggests that
translation serves to ‘express the central
reciprocal relationship between languages’
 Translation should allow ‘pure language’ to shine
through
 ‘Ideal’ translation is literal, interlinear version
of the Bible
‘ A real translation is transparent; it does not
cover the original, does not block its light,
but allows the pure language, as though
reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon
the original all the more fully. This may be
achieved, above all, by a literal rendering of
the syntax which provides words rather than
sentences to be the primary element of the
translation’
(Benjamin 1969/2004:81)
 Developed
in France in 1960s
 Dismantles some of the key premises of
linguistics, the terms, systems and concepts
which are constructed by language, starting
with Saussure’s clear division of signified
and signifier
 Rejects the primacy of meaning fixed in the
word and foregrounds or ‘deconstructs’ the
ways in which a text undermines its own
assumptions and reveals its internal
contradictions.
 Interrogates
stability of the linguistic sign, of
meaning and of the process of translation
 Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) introduced the
term in France by playing with the term
 Différance
(différer meaning both ‘defer’ and ‘differ’)
 Détour/Des
tours de Babel
ST ant TT depend on one another for their
survival
 Relevant translation vs. Uncovered assimilation

 Introduced
by Philip Lewis (1985/2004)
while translating Derrida
 Drawing on Deconstruction
 Radical, risk-taking approach to literary
translation
 Experimentation with rhetoric and patterns
of language
 Give renewed energy to ST
 Compensate for inevitable losses
Taken from Camilleri’s ‘La sigla’ (as suggested by Cipolla 2006)
Calorio non si chiamava Calorio,
ma in tutta Vigata lo conoscevano
con questo nome. Era arrivato in
paisi non si sa da dove una
ventina d’ anni avanti, un paro di
pantaloni ch’ erano più pirtusa
che stoffa, legati alla vita con una
corda, giacchetta tutta pezze
pezze all’arlecchino, piedi scavusi
ma pulitissimi. Campava
dimandando la limosina, ma con
discrezione, senza dare fastiddio,
senza spavintare fimmine e
picciliddri. Teneva bene il vino,
quando poteva accattarsene una
bottiglia, tanto che nessuno
l’aveva veduto a malappena
brillo: e dire che c’erano state
occasioni di feste che di vino se
n’era scolato a litri.
Calorio was not his name, but in Vigata
the whole town knew him as Calorio.
About twenty years back, he had
turned up in town from God knows
where, with a pair of britches that
were draftier than a barn on account of
the many holes, tied with a rope around
his waist, and with a raggedy jacket so
patched up he looked like a circus
clown. He walked barefoot, but his feet
were spotless. He scraped along by
begging but without making a nuisance
of himself, never bothering nobody, or
scaring the womenfolk or young’uns.
He held his liquor so well, when he
could scare up enough to buy himself a
bottle, that nobody ever saw him even
slightly pickled; although there had
been times on Feast days when he had
put away quite a few quarts.
 Do
you agree with the feminist criticism against
Steiner’s metaphors? Can you find more in
translation?
 There is a strong ethical element to
philosophical approaches to translation. Identify
where these ethical points are in the theorists
considered in this chapter.
 HOMEWORK:
think about a possible research
project and be ready to present and discuss it
in class during the next lecture.
What we studied so far:
 Munday, Jeremy (2012, Introducing Translation
Studies. Theories and Applications, 3rd
edition, Routledge, London/New York –
CHAPTERS 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
Dr. Margherita Dore
[email protected]

Corpus-Based Translation Studies
 Consilience
in translation studies
 Translation commentaries
 Translation strategies
 Microlevel textual analysis
 Research projects: Questions and hypotheses
 Writing the research proposal
A
branch of the discipline that draws on the
tools and concepts of corpus linguistics,
initiated as a lexicographical tool for the
Collins COBUILD dictionaries in the 1980s.
 The ‘corpus’ (plural ‘corpora’) refers to an
electronic collection of naturally occurring
texts, selected and gathered for a specific
purpose, which can then be processed and
analysed with software to investigate the use
and patterns of the word-forms it contains.
 Suggested as a ‘new paradigm’ by Laviosa
(1998, 2002)
 Analysis
of large electronic collections of
texts

Monolingual corpora collections of STs to
identify common patterns in a language

Comparable bilingual corpora (similar STs in the
two languages which can be used to find
specialized terms in the TL)
Parallel corpora (aligned pairs of STs and TTs that
are used to investigate translation phenomena)

The major reason for using computer corpora is
the quality of linguistic evidence, vastly
superior to the analyst’s intuition,
particularly on collocations and typical uses
of lexical items, and stylistic features.
The corpus-based approach links with
methodology centred in Descriptive
Translation Studies and to analyse typical
features of translation, such as universals of
translation.
 Huge
breadth of research in translation
studies
 Danger of fragmentation
 Consilience, or complementary (though
overlapping) approaches (Chesterman 2005):
Textual (investigating the translation product)
 Cognitive (investigating the translation
process)
 Sociological (investigating the human agent)
 Cultural (investigating power play)

 Commentaries:


Reflective learning and insights into translation
process
Bringing together of different translation
strategies
 Research


projects:
Matching questions and hypotheses
Writing the research proposal and interacting with
other research
Example Translation Specification sheet (Munday 2012: 300)
Terminology for orientation of strategies (Munday 2012: 304)
 Metalanguage
of translation shifts and
decision-making (Chapter 4)
 Nord’s intratextual factors (Chapter 5)
 Register and discourse analysis (Chapter 6)
 Focus on a few problematic features:
Subject-specific or culture-specific
terminology, part of FIELD
 Writer-reader relationship, part of TENOR
 Cohesion and thematic structure, part of MODE

 Questions
 Definition
 Data
 Descriptive
 Causes
and effects
 Hypotheses
 Interpretive
 Descriptive
 Explanatory
 Predictive
 Topic
 Scope
 Relevant
research questions
 Literature review – interacting with
previous research
 What methodology?
 Is the project manageable?
 Students’
proposals for possible research
projects in TS
 Question time
 Feedback
What we studied so far:
 Munday, Jeremy (2012, Introducing Translation
Studies. Theories and Applications, 3rd
edition, Routledge, London/New York –
CHAPTERS 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7,8, 9, 10, 11
(p.283-290), 12