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Meaning and Understanding: Translation and Translation Studies
in the Modern Foreign-Language Classroom
David JohnstonCentre for Translation and InterpretingSchool of Arts, English and Languages
ContextsEducationFall in Modern Languages enrolmentsRise in Translation Studies and translation-related programmes
CitizenshipChallenges of multi-ethnic societyGlobal and local
PracticePedagogical translationTranslation as the ‘fifth skill’
Some hold translations not unlike to beThe wrong side of a Turkish tapestryJames Howell, quoted in Tytler’s Principles of Translation (1747)
It is difficult in following lines laid down by others not sometimes to diverge from them, and it is hard to preserve in a translation the charm of expressionSt. Jerome, ‘Letter to Pamachius’ (AD 395)
Traduttore, traditoreItalian saying
‘Without translation we live in provinces bordering only on silence’.George Steiner
“Pushkin likened translators to horses changed at the post houses of civilizations”
Vladimir Nabokov (1981), Lectures on Russian Literature, Orlando, Florida: Harvest Books
The public space
The public sphere
”I shall argue that most of what interests us in translation is not meaning, in the sense that philosophy of language uses the term: in many cases . . . getting the meaning … right is hardly even a first step towards understanding” Kwame Anthony Appiah, ‘Thick Translation’, in Lawrence Venuti (ed.) The Translation Studies Reader (2000: London, Routledge), 418.
Cereal boxes to run 'Brexit means...' competition
CEREAL boxes are to run a competition to finish the sentence ‘Brexit means…what?’, it has emerged.All major cereal companies will run the government-backed contest, with the prize being a job as the UK’s ambassador to the EU.A government spokesman said: “This competition is open to patriots of all ages, although any winner under 12 will have to be accompanied to work by a parent. “Get as creative as you like - as far as we’re concerned the answer could be anything. You could submit a detailed 48-page document outlining fiscal policy, or just a nice picture of a lion”.
Instrumental method
Hermeneutic method
The instrumental model: metonymyTranslation appears to sit at one end of a spectrum of process; its goal is fidelity, while its prescriptive, quasi neo-platonic discourse expresses the values of the mirror in which success is measured by the limpid reflective relationship achieved between target and source texts.
The hermeneutic model: metaphor
At the other extreme, adaptation is held to be free, its methods and justification frequently articulated through the playful terms of a refractive postmodernism; the former, in its metonymical pursuit of textual accuracy, respects the inviolability of authorial hierarchy, while the latter, in its insistence on extending the metaphorical sweep of the original work, is frequently seen as simply bumming a ride.
All translation is necessarily characterised by decisions and processes involving some measure of adaptation
Heuristic force of creativity
“the presence of productive anomalies, the crossing of conceptual boundaries, the transformation of a subject within a given domain, and the intuition of a new order at a moment of illumination”
David Miall, ‘Metaphor and Affect: The Problem of Creative Thought’, Journal of Metaphor and Symbolic Activity (1987), 2.2, 81-96
Translation as a cultural practice
Translation as an ethical regime
As a writing practice, translation explodes the notion of textual stability
The life of the text: the death of context
“The text’s career escapes the finite horizon lived by its author. What the text means now matters more than what the author meant when they wrote it”.Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation’.
We have here indeed what may very probably be the most complex type of event yet produced in the evolution of the cosmos.
I A Richards, ‘Toward a Theory of Translating’, in Arthur Wright (ed), Studies in Chinese Thought (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1953), pp.247-262.
the interanimation of words…
Translation as an ethical regimeWhat does translation do?
Kenan Malik, Guardian 15th November 2015There are aspects of both the multiculturalist and assimilationist approaches that are valuable. The multicultural acceptance of diversity and the assimilationist resolve to treat everyone as citizens, not as bearers of specific racial or cultural histories, are both welcome. And there are aspects of both that are damaging – the multiculturalist tendency to place minorities into ethnic and cultural boxes, the assimilationist attempt to create a common identity by institutionalising the differences of groups deemed not to belong.
An ideal policy would marry the beneficial aspects of the two approaches – celebrating diversity while treating everyone as citizens, rather than as simply belonging to particular communities. In practice, though, Britain and France have both institutionalised the more damaging features – Britain placing minorities into ethnic and cultural boxes, France attempting to create a common identity by treating those
of North African origin as the Other. The consequence has been that in both Britain and France societies have become more fractured and tribal.
It inhabits the no-place, giving up entrenched notions of ownership and belonging, disallowing appropriation.
A fruitful way of considering translation?
Paul Ricoeur, ‘Reflections on a New Ethos for Europe’
Translation is really a matter of living with the other in order to take that other to one's home as a guest. We see immediately how translation constitutes a model which is suited to the specific problem that the construction of Europe poses. First, at the institutional level, it leads us to encourage the teaching of at least two living languages throughout the whole of Europe in order to secure an audience for each of the languages which is not in a dominant position at the level of communication. But, above all, at a truly spiritual level, it leads us to extend the spirit of translation to the relationship between the cultures themselves, that is to say, to the content of meaning conveyed by the translation. It is here that there is need of translators from culture to culture, of cultural bilingualists capable of attending to this process of transference to the mental universe of the other culture, having taken account of its customs, fundamental beliefs and deepest convictions; in short, of the totality of its significant features. In this sense we can speak of a translation ethos whose goal would be to repeat at the cultural and spiritual level the gesture of linguistic hospitality mentioned above.
Re:thinking relations?Vernacular cosmopolitanism
Stuart Hall (1991), ‘The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity’, Globalization and the World System
A wide range of seminal writing, from Seyla Benhabib’s Another Cosmopolitanism: Hospitality, Sovereignty, and Democratic Iterations (2006) and Kwame Anthony Appiah's Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2007) to Roland Robinson’s European Cosmopolitanism in Question (2012), has returned to interrogate the notion of cosmopolitanism as a way – perhaps the only one? – of making our planet habitable. But one of the challenges that remains to be confronted by contemporary theories of cosmopolitanism is how to pick up and develop Hall’s notion of the vernacular, how to embed cosmopolitanism not as a consumerist or elitist life-style choice but as a normal, although far-reaching, consequence of everyday diversity, as a commonplace understanding of the roots of difference that are present in all of the translational exchanges that configure the public space.
Ethno-centrismEthnic, cultural, national and linguistic identities construct themselves through narratives of organic belonging, simultaneously forging narratives designed to denaturalise and, all too often, demonise the other. A translational awareness is an antidote to that process. This is the key understanding of translation that must surely inform public policy in areas such as education, health, security, governance, welfare and urban planning, an understanding that proposes new models of narrative that prioritise European identities not as essentialised entities but rather as a series of historical and cross-cultural itineraries.
So what might a greater translational awareness bring to the teaching of modern languages…?From error terror to creative engagement with the dyadic purpose of translation;
From essentialised notions of national identity to patterns of relatedness;
From a search for meanings that are based on fixity and correctness to an understanding of simultaneity and flux;
From a pedagogical practice based on notions of substitution and sameness to cognitive processes underpinned by awareness of concepts of equivalence;
From the commodification of multilingualism to an understanding of the risks, challenges and benefits of intercultural living..
