Date: Tue, 04 Mar 1997 11:42:11 -0500
From: Robert Bononno <rb28@is4.nyu.edu>
Subject: Re: Some first thoughts on Doug’s piece
>Again, I agree completely. This “particularized ideology, one that has been shaped from a number of influences and sources” idea is precisely why I’m insisting on the disaggregated model of the self. I don’t believe either that a single ideology or economic invisible hand takes over a single individual and robotizes him or her.
Is this notion of “disaggregation” something devised by Adam Smith? Am I correct in assuming that it’s a model that sees influences arising from various distributed sources (ideological, economic, personal, etc.)?
>What I’m interested in knowing, though, is why it is so attractive to read my ideas along these lines. Maybe it’s me; maybe I just haven’t expressed myself clearly enough. That’s always possible. But from my own point of view the robotic conception of translation that Tony, Michael, and Robert all read into my paper is something that I’ve been fighting against in
I think is a reaction to a historical situation that many translators have tried to rebel against. Tried but not necessarily succeeded. That is, we are still trapped in our passivity in a number of ways: public perception, economic powerlessness, conflicting demands (authors, editors, readers, ourselves), historical trends, prejudice, etc. To some extent it’s a knee-jerk reaction, Hey! Who says we’re passive? I suppose in another sense it is indicative of current ways of thinking about translation, ways that have typically attempted to examine other factors in the translation process aside from some oversimplified source/target relation. The “channelling” model is both a throwback to a more painful past and a contravention of current models. It’s also somewhat disreputable academically simply from its association with spiritism, etc. WHich is to say that while such subjects may be legitmate sources of investigation, no one believes in their efficacy.
>everything I’ve written. I just don’t like either of the dualized positions
Perfectly reasonable.
>position, I insisted on the ideosomatic regulation of the translator’s creativity–and many reviewers read that book as saying that the translator is subject to no law but inner necessity, desire, whim. Now I’m leaning the
People tend to read in what they want to read in. I’m not sure there’s much you can do about that no matter how carefully structured your argument.
/robert
——————————————————-
Robert Bononno rb28@is4.nyu.edu CIS: 73670,1570
Date: Tue, 04 Mar 1997 12:47:14 -0600
From: Doug Robinson <djr@olemiss.edu>
Subject: Re: Some first thoughts on Doug’s piece
Robert writes:
>Is this notion of “disaggregation” something devised by Adam Smith? Am I correct in assuming that it’s a model that sees influences arising from various distributed sources (ideological, economic, personal, etc.)?
It’s from Daniel Dennett’s book Consciousness Explained. Robert Nozick develops it for invisible-hand theories. To put it in really technical terms, it suggests that individuals and groups are all harebrained: influences and impulses jump all over the place like 14,000 hares. You can ride hareherd over them (so to speak), as reason tries to do, but you’re never going to control them perfectly, and you are certainly never going to get them all to fit into a single “aggregate” personality or or subjectivity or intentionality or will.
>I think is a reaction to a historical situation that many translators have tried to rebel against. Tried but not necessarily succeeded. That is, we are still trapped in our passivity in a number of ways: public perception, economic powerlessness, conflicting demands (authors, editors, readers, ourselves), historical trends, prejudice, etc. To some extent it’s a knee-jerk reaction, Hey! Who says we’re passive? I suppose in another sense it is indicative of current ways of thinking about translation, ways that have typically attempted to examine other factors in the translation process aside from some oversimplified source/target relation. The “channelling” model is both a throwback to a more painful past and a contravention of current models. It’s also somewhat disreputable academically simply from its association with spiritism, etc. WHich is to say that while such subjects may be legitmate sources of investigation, no one believes in their efficacy.
Yeah. I guess I’m just interested in disreputable things! Michael’s remark about spiritualistic fakery has gotten me thinking more carefully about the Joseph Smith material I put on-line. There’s something wonderful to me–maybe because I’m not a Mormon–about the idea of a rebellious, undereducated rural kid in his early 20s who tells the story Joseph Smith told: an angel came to me, directed me where to dig, I found some golden plates and a kind of spiritualistic translation machine (the Urim and Thummim), and I started translating from the ancient Egyptian. A lot of angry debunkers have laid into this other Smith with a fury, wanting to blast his claims out of the water. Me, I’m just intrigued by the grandiose scope of the project–the gall, the imagination, the chutzpah required of Smith if it was a hoax, and the sheer unlikelihood of it all if it’s true!
Doug
Date: Tue, 04 Mar 1997 15:50:39 -0500
From: daniel simeoni <simeonid@fox.nstn.ca>
Subject: disaggregated agency
I haven’t read Dennett’s Consciousness Explained (1991) and therefore will not comment on the way Robert Nozick first, then Doug Robinson, draw their notions of “disaggregated self” and “disaggregated agency” from that book. What seems clear however is that the potential connections implied between hermeneutics, social science (of which I take translation studies to be a component), cognitive research and beyond that perhaps, neurological studies, suggest the need for a repartitioning of the disciplines. I mention this in passing, only to hint that the form taken by the present debate – much to the credit of Doug Robinson – makes it worthy of interest far beyond the confines of translation scholarship. I could not help noticing also how the exchanges cross over with a number of ongoing debates, for example around the theme of cultural “identity”.
The notion of disaggregated agency, whether applied to a “single human being”, an “ephemeral conglomeration” of agents, or even a “nation”, is indeed a productive metaphor. Its scope reaches far beyond the task of the translator, to encompass the destiny of all social agents. Although Doug Robinson assigns the genealogy of the expression to a need to “deal with the new complexities” he saw after writing his professional “declaration of independence”, it can just as well be read as a generalized reaction against the (to some, debilitating) ideas of social disaggregation, fragmentation, chaos deprived of agency. A sign of the times perhaps, as much as a personal stance.
Ideas float at certain times to be seized upon by different people, unaware that others are working along the same lines. We have all had this strange feeling of being part of an invisible cohort (again the spirit-channeling metaphor may be useful here, if we are not afraid of admitting that theoretical constructs themselves, including the most rational-looking, are just that: constructs elaborated by the scholar’s imagination on the basis of other imaginative constructs). It so happens that my personal history and positionings have made me particularly responsive over the years to the work of Pierre Bourdieu. “Disaggregated agency” could not fail to remind me of the concept of “habitus”, a stenograph for a reality that is both structured (being the result of multiple determinations) and structuring (i.e. agentive). [Should anyone be unfamiliar with Bourdieu’s work on this and related matters, see e.g. The Logic of Practice, in particular Part 1, tr. by Richard Nice. 1990, Stanford: Stanford U. P. The publisher for Europe is Polity Press, Cambridge. The original in French – Le sens pratique. 1981. Paris: Editions de Minuit – is not bad either…]. I believe Bourdieu also refers somewhere to the notion of “habitus clivé” (split habitus). Habituses are incorporated, “embodied” to the point of being instantly recognizable in the course of social relations. The notion as such is hardly new (Aristotle, St-Augustine, Elias and Panovsky among other old-hat? figures have used it productively) but it was promoted to pivotal theoretical status as part of a rich network of concepts by Bourdieu. Like Robinson’s disaggregated agency, the habitus applies differentially to the individual agent and his/her life story, Lebenslauf, etc., to groups of interest, and most notably to nation-states (or “state-societies” in Elias’s wording). Habituses are highly specific. The concept translates nicely in the different ways in which language is used, in daily life as in more restricted fields.
I am currently working on the very same notion of habitus as applies to the translator (conceived as a “single human being”). Just as Doug Robinson refers to disaggregated agency, I came out recently with the notion of a “mosaic habitus”. I found the term useful to express: (i) the particular brand of habitus required of the human being a.k.a. translator. All social agents have more or less “mosaic” habituses but the translator must cultivate this pluri-identity and modulated submissiveness, or at least make do with it willingly. This feature may provide a bridge for Anthony Pym’s notion of an intercultural space or “interculture” defining the peculiar position of the translator, although it is still not clear to me how an interculture could stand off in a balanced way between regular cultures. The prefix does not quite evoke the astounding complexity of the domain;
(ii) the tension felt while translating (not only intellectual but physical); (iii) the faculty of adaptation which is a distinguishing trait of the profession.
In this no doubt biased and partial and summary reading, the two constructs – disaggregated agency and mosaic habitus – strike me as fairly compatible. Perhaps the former is less affirmative than the latter, due to the deprivative morpheme dis-. But again, what matters is the way they can (and ought to) be made to function in case studies, to enlighten descriptions of intercultural transfer from the point of view of the agent.
A quick footnote to explain why I think it is important to rehabilitate the status of the translator in translation studies and why I view Doug’s and others’ efforts as positive for the discipline as a whole. In the field as I see it sedimenting these days, I can identify three main branches which I label, for convenience, “hermeneutic”, “culturalist”, and “empirical-mentalist”. If the distinction makes sense, then it is plausible that one common pole around which productive exchanges may develop and the (inter?)discipline preserve some coherence, is precisely, the persona of the translator. This does not mean that other approaches focussing on e.g. the larger structures bearing on the task, processes, products of translation, etc. are mistaken or should not be pursued. In fact, I take Gideon Toury’s recent DTS and beyond to be the most formidable effort to date, and a highly successful one at that, to deal with the notion of intercultural translation systemically. I see also his model as flexible enough to allow for a reprioritizing of the translator’s disaggregating agency (or mosaic habitus, whatever we choose to call this passive-agentive complex), by mere topological ‘translation’ of its structure.
While recognizing indeed the risk that an objectivist angle entails, to fragment the field into reductive specialities and therefore, to fall short of providing the conditions for a truly integrative theory of translation (such an angle would exclude, presumably, the hermeneutic branch as merely “speculative”), I am also wary of discarding all structural-systemic attempts as distant echoes of the 60s and 70s, as might be (wrongly?) deduced from Michael Cronin’s Response. As a matter of fact, and even though this may have no other value than a personal anecdote, I can vouch that reading closely Bourdieu’s systemic case studies helped me better understand where my location was and why, in the particular context of the French society where I come from. I see the effect on me to have been that of a true “socioanalysis”. Far from being disempowering, the model – because it was flexible and refined enough to precipitate the variety of forces moulding society, through a process of internalization, into the single concept of habitus – helped me gain confidence in proposing my own imaginary take on issues I view as important.
Date: Tue, 04 Mar 1997 16:19:15 -0500 (EST)
From: RBodkin449@aol.com
Subject: confused!!
Why is self-analysis dans le Freudian mode being construed as a theortical basis for discussion of translation and/or translatory praxis at this late date??
Isn’t all said up to THIS point a little retro, a little too 60ish, touchy/feely Eslenish, Californish?? and don’t we need to tweak it all for broader applicability, particularly regarding its glaring idiosyncratic application thus far, that is “I, me, translator???”
Don’t we need to sort out the difference between linguistic acquisition /analysis /application/ and behaviorial Psych 101??
Sincerely,
Robin Orr Bodkin
Date: Wed, 05 Mar 1997 05:25:29 +0800
From: chliao@farmer.cc-sun.fcu.edu.tw (Chao-Chih Liao)
Subject: My paper to present
Dear colleagues for First Online International Translation Colloquium,
With the permission of the host, Sean Golden, I would like to announce that I will put within 12 hours on my website http://www.fcu.edu.tw/Home/ Department/people/sfll/sfll.html
my article of
UNDERSTANDING SOCIO-PRGAMATIC DIFFERENCES FROM DISPARITIES OF THE CHINESE AND ENGLISH VERSION OF THE GOLDEN LOTUS
Your responses will be appreciated.
I will send a copy on ASCII (DOS file) to transfer-l@cc.uab.es for those who do not enter my website too.
Laura Chao-chih Liao
Associate Professor
Foreign Languages and Literature Teaching Section Feng Chia University
100 Wenhua Road, Seatwen
Taichung Taiwan
E-mail: ccliao@fcusqnt.fcu.edu.tw
chliao@fruit.cc-sun.fcu.edu.tw
ccliao@dragon.nchu.edu.tw
Fax: (H) 886 4 436 7389 upon request
Tel: (H) 886 4 436 7389
Date: Tue, 04 Mar 1997 23:46:09 +0200
From: ap@astor.urv.es (Anthony Pym)
Subject: Listenin
Sean tells me there are more than a hundred of you out there, somewhere.
I might have a few things to say, about the need to envisage a future, about the virtues of addressing translation, perhaps about agency.
But for the moment I’m just listening, to you.
It might be part of appreciating the complexity of social life.
Anthony Pym
Date: Tue, 04 Mar 1997 17:49:12 -0600
From: Doug Robinson <djr@olemiss.edu>
Subject: Re: confused!!
Robin writes:
>Why is self-analysis dans le Freudian mode being construed as a theortical basis for discussion of translation and/or translatory praxis at this late date??
>Isn’t all said up to THIS point a little retro, a little too 60ish, touchy/feely Eslenish, Californish?? and don’t we need to tweak it all for broader applicability, particularly regarding its glaring idiosyncratic application thus far, that is “I, me, translator???”
I’m confused too. Who ever put it this way? Maybe my stuff is a little 60ish, but Tony Pym’s got “broader applicability” to spare. And it seems to me that the discussion so far has been anything but belly-button-contemplating.
The question as I see it (and this is pretty close to what Michael Cronin said in his response, drawing on Daniel Simeoni, whose thoughtful and provocative (and generally wonderful) response I’m going to want to respond to more fully once I’ve had a chance to read it two or three more times) is whether we’re going to center our quest for broader applicability in the text as thing, as commodity, as cultural product, as stable object, or in the translator as person, as agent, as subject. (Who or what are we going to reify?) The field looks very different from those two centers. Most of the approaches to translation that theorists have been trying to dislodge for the past two decades were focused on the text–usually, but not exclusively, JUST the text, not its broader applications. The innovative approaches since the late 70s have tended to focus either on large cultural systems (especially the polysystems approach and the original “translation studies,” later foreignism and postcolonialism) or on the translator as agent/subject/person. It would be hard to argue that the German skopos/Handlung approach (Reiss, Vermeer, Holz-Mänttäri, Nord, etc.), which puts the translator centerstage, is 60sish; they are very much engaged in a social-sciences project, examining the social/economic/professional action networks that feed and are fed by the translator. And whether we consider those networks hermeneutically, as I tend to do, or socioeconomically, as Tony Pym tends to do, we are still very much concerned with “broader applications,” not the translator as some kind of autistic or solipsistic monad.
>Don’t we need to sort out the difference between linguistic acquisition /analysis /application/ and behaviorial Psych 101??
Okay, let’s sort them out: who acquires languages? Who analyzes them? Who applies them? Or were you thinking more in terms of institutionalized and thus depersonalized linguistic “methodologies” that reify the text as a stable object in its own right?
Doug
Date: Tue, 04 Mar 1997 23:56:08 -0500
From: Robert Bononno <rb28@is4.nyu.edu>
Subject: Some first thoughts on Tony Pym To: transfer-l@cc.uab.es
From Robert Bononno (March 4, 1997):
I’m slowly making my way through the articles that were posted to the Web site, and wanted to comment now on Anthony Pym’s papers. The use of a transaction cost model for translation is interesting and appropriate in many ways, translation being one of the costs associated with the transmission of information, the requirement that information be put in a form suitable for consumption (an interesting parallel could be made here with the work of information brokers and tools for data analysis).
Pym is right in stating that translation is generally an expensive proposition (although I’d disagree that rates of pay are high compared to other “professions”). But his discussion is primarily focused on institutionalized EU practices rather than global translation practices. I think that if we were to examine the overall picture, we’d find that material for translation has already been vetted and only those texts selected for translation that actually require translation. The corporate world regards translation with considerable suspicion, in fact, and sees it as an additional and unwanted cost. As a result it attempts to minimize its dependence on translation. We’re all familiar with the bad translations so often presented as examples of what can go wrong with translation, the translations done by so and so’s wife/daughter/son/secretary, by the engineer down the hall, etc. It was such practices as these in fact that in part led to the growing awareness of the need for “professional” translators.
The EU is a different matter. Much of the work being translated is done so to satisfy legal requirements. Obviously Pym is questioning the validity of legislation that makes such requirements, but changing them is a long-term endeavor. Also, I don’t recall any mention of the fact that the EU has been using machine translation for quite a number of years, both to reduce costs and increase speed, especially with material not intended for publication. Also, I’m not sure if Pym has acknowledged the fact that the vetting process itself costs money. Is it possible that the EU has somehow determined that it is simply cheaper to translate material _en bloc_ rather than cull it for the important stuff?
The other point, and I think Pym skews his argument somewhat to reflect the situation of the EU, is that in the global sphere, *all* translation is ad hoc. There are very few entities (aside from the UN, whose situation parallels that of the EU somewhat) that translate anything more than they have to for any longer than they have to. The business contract is translated and either acted on or forgotten. Annual reports are translated, well, annually, and for obvious reasons. The problem with the transaction model is that it assumes a continuous process, whereas commercial written translation has never been any such thing at all (again outside the EU). I’m also not sure that the inevitable result of rising transaction costs is NO translation. As in other fields the solution is to find cheaper sources of supply, something that has been going on for quite some time.
Another problem with the transaction model and the idea of the necessity of long-term cooperation rather than short-term solutions is that Pym is mixing two separate phenomena: language learning and translation (and I also think we need to separate out oral from text translation here since they serve very different purposes). While I am very much in favor of language learning and multilingualism, this is neither a substitute for or an equivalent of translation, an idea which has been nearly beaten to death here and in other venues. They serve two different audiences and separate needs. For it’s not just the participants in an exchange that need to communicate. There is also the question of the non-participants, the “folks” back home, the media, researchers, etc. I think Pym is trying to force the facts to fit the model here. There is a great deal of bi- and multilingualism in Europe, yet the volume of translation is greater than anywhere else. It’s not because the participants can’t understand one another (they can) or that there is no lingua franca (there is, French and English), but that their interaction doesn’t serve the long-term needs of the community. It may be true that there is a considerable amount of unneeded translation, but it’s probably just as true that there’s a great deal of unneeded writing as well. Cutting down on the one will cut down on the other.
In several places Pym intimates that translators can and should play a broader role in the process than as _mere_ translators (my emphasis). He doesn’t specify exactly what this might be or what other skills they might need to carry them out. There are already a sufficient number of people to carry out the vetting process (authors and a small army of bureaucrats, as well as translators), so what role would they perform? UN translators do precis writing in addition to translation, it’s part of their duties. Would he have them serve as bureaucrats themselves? Low-level functionaries? Clerks? Typists? Translation schools have become more commonplace not simply to serve nationalistic language policies but because there was also a need to train translators and provide a supply of skilled practitioners with more than a superficial knowledge of their responsibilities. It has also served as a means to empower translators, something I don’t think Anthony Pym is against.
The notion of “intensive source-text analysis” has its place in translation, although Pym feels it creates unnecessarily high costs. Clearly this contradicts and belittles the efforts of many translation programs throughout the world, which are designed to train students in such matters. Pym feels that this deterministic approach belongs in the schools, however. I’m not sure what this means really. Is Pym saying that translation is not that important to spend so much time over it? That we should work faster? That we needn’t belabor the fine points of translation? I find this especially strange and a bit galling in light of the constraints and unrealistic expectations placed on most commercial translators. Is it worth mentioning the issue of responsibility, liability, professional pride? Translators today are under enormous pressure to produce high-quality, fluent, and terminologically correct texts of sophisticated and often esoteric material in record time, and at a price point that hasn’t changed in ten years. One of the ways to achieve Pym’s goals is to graduate well-trained and highly skilled professional translators, capable of providing such services on a restricted number of texts. This, by the way, is another route to creating translators who do the “something more” that Pym feels they should do. They can become specialists in a given field. The problem with this is that, with certain rare exceptions, there is not enough specialized translation work available to make it worth anyone’s efforts to achieve such a level of specialization. It’s a model that is often talked about but not supported by economic trends.
Pym repeats the same mantra in _Transferre non…_, admonishing *translation* for building walls between peoples (wasn’t this the price of our fall from grace?) and generally creating a lot of busy work for people with no other useful purpose in life. I think my above comments apply equally well to this text, and I’m not entirely sure if Tony Pym believes what he writes or is playing the devil’s advocate to drum up excitement, the inevitable “Harumph” of indignation. In Transferre Pym again introduces the relative merits of long-term language learning vs. short-term translation (a stop-gap measure as he sees it). There are a number of problems here. First, many of the EU administrators and negotiators are already bilingual and this has not reduced the need for translation, which transcends the immediate needs of the bargaining table (are the negotiators supposed to keep it all in their heads?). Second, language-learning and translation skills are entirely different animals. Why must we belabor this point? They serve very different needs and have different audiences. Third, translation, perhaps with the exception of literature, *is* ad hoc and ephemeral. Even literature (especially?) in translation dates and needs to be reassessed periodically. Fourth the 40% figure cited for “language policy” includes more than translation alone. Obviously this expanding budget is important and with the addition of new official languages it’s going to require some serious rethinking on the part of the EU’s language planners.
The symbolic importance of translation is certainly a factor. Is there a workable alternative? Pym himself seems to acknowledge the inherent drawbacks of the lingua franca of Euro-English himself in describing the minutes of a meeting that took place in English. Is this supposed to be a workable alternative to translation?
The claim that translation studies programs exclude the “communicative possibilities of nontranslation, notably the many modes and degrees of language learning” makes no sense to me at all. If translation studies and language learning have been separated, it is for obvious reasons. I think everyone here know this. Translators have typically been viewed (and I don’t see this trend changing) as a necessary evil in the process of intercultural communication. Well, I suppose we are. Is Pym proposing some model of many-to-many communication in which everyone talks to and understands everyone else. Universal polyglossia? It would seem odd to criticize the EU of all places rather than, say, the United States, for lack of understanding in this matter. European negotiators, because of Europe’s geopolitical situation, have always been multilingual. It will certainly come as an unwelcome surprise to them that English will be their new home from now on. It would also appear that centuries of multilingualism haven’t cured us of the need for translation in Europe. Could it be that an effort is being made to maintain diversity in spite of the purported benefits of economic union? And that translation is a component of this situation (not as Pym believes the driving force, though translators clearly have their self-interest at heart).
Anthony, what is an interlanguage supposed to mean in this context? You mention it in your “Fourth” paragraph.
I’d also like to close with a remark about the use of a lingua franca (English) and the growth of the Internet. I don’t know if anyone here is aware of it, but Georgia Tech University/Lorraine (France) was recently brought to task for setting up an English-only Web site at their annex in France. Apparently they were unaware of the current law, requiring that Web sites “physically” residing on French soil be available in French. Now, there was an interesting though rather myopic comment in an editorial in Wired this month. The author remarked on the narrowmindedness of the French in trying to police such a thing as a Web site. In cyberspace no less! The administrator of the site (who is French), claimed that “We are not against English–we are for the French language. We are in France, after all.” The author sarcastically shot back, “Hmmm. You might just want to check your dictionary for a definition of cyberspace.” Comments such as this are disquieting for several reasons: their unabashed nationalistic myopia, their implied paranoia, and the underlying assumption that the de facto language of the Internet is English. This is one of the dangers and drawbacks of the effort to promote a single language as a global lingua franca.
That’s all for now.
/robert
——————————————————-
Robert Bononno rb28@is4.nyu.edu CIS: 73670,1570
Date: Wed, 05 Mar 1997 03:47:58 -0300
From: Haroldo Netto <haroldo@mail.rio.com.br>
Subject: Re: Listening
Pym and Everybody else at the Colloquium:
1. Sean tells me there are more than a hundred of you out there, somewhere.(A. Pym)
Yes, it seems that we are more than one hundred out here. Like me, a Brazilian translator who works as a translator since 1959, and, besides having translated more than 60 books from the English into Brazilian Portuguese, has worked for a year in Gaza Strip, Palestine, as an Interpreter for a Brazilian Battalion integrating the United Nations Emergency Force.
2. But for the moment I’m just listening to you.(A. Pym)
I considered this an invitation, as well as a challenge. It explains why I am sending this e-mail. Giving to all of you an opportunity to meet someone from a distant country and who works in a very different environment, as far as Translation is concerned.
3. Transferre non semper necesse est (A. Pym)
Não cheguei a saber se havia uma língua oficial no Colóquio. Como se trata de uma reunião virtual de tradutores, afins e simpatizantes, uso o argumento de A. Pym contido em <<Transferre…>> para me expressar em portugues do Brasil, com acentos e tudo. Concordo com ele: nem sempre é necessário traduzir. E uso o português brasileiro pura e simplesmente para testar esta tese. Mas quero apontar o caso que vivi, como integrante de uma Força de Paz da ONU: lá, mesmo que fosse ideal que todos os membros daquela Babel soubessem , alem da lingua de trabalho (ingles) no mínimo o arabe e o hebraico, ainda assim seria indispensavel que houvessem tradutores/intérpretes oficiais, donos da Responsabilidade de traduzir e/ou interpretar textos e falas mais importantes.
4. The Invisible Hands (Doug Robinson)
A metáfora é muito boa, mas é impossível deixar passar: o autor não tem o poder de iniciar a comunicação com o público-alvo, e sim o tradutor, por iniciativa própria ou do editor. Particularmente quando o autor, o que não é pouco frequente, já morreu. Mesma se tratando de espíritos, estes sempre falam quando evocados ou conjurados, e só me vem à memória duas exceções, uma da Bíblia, Pentecostes, e a outra da ficção moderna do cinema, Poltergeist. A metáfora, por sinal, é excelente, e eu a uso constantemente, para indicar os motivos que diferenciam uma tradução em rapidez e facilidade de outra, menos fácil: <<Baixou em mim o espírito do autor e a coisa fluiu…>> O ponto deste trabalho que me chamou mais a atenção, contudo, foi a referência à perspectiva ideológica, a qual vem junto com o texto traduzido para a língua-alvo, justamente por NÃO sermos tradutores/cyborgs e sim por traduzirmos, junto com o texto, o espirito do autor.
4. Translation as a Transaction Cost
Pela densidade e tamanho do texto, vê-se a importância da tradução dita técnica na Europa, com seus problemas linguísticos resultantes da Unificação.No que me diz respeito, quanto à tradução literária, vejo nesta atividade um trabalho de dedicação, onde não vale leitura dinâmica, não se pode pular linhas e muito menos parágrafos ou páginas e que, com todo o risco do erro envolvido no processo, é também um trabalho de amor, que alimenta o ego dos obstinados (sem lhes encher os bolsos) que enfrentam o desafio de “recriar uma obra na sua língua sem lhe defornmar o conteúdo”, na expressão irretocável da escritora/tradutora brasileira Lya Luft.
Foi um prazeresta tentativa de me dirigir a todos Vocês,
HAROLDO NETTO, Rio de Janeiro, BRASIL
Date: Wed, 05 Mar 1997 08:48:14 +0200
From: ap@astor.urv.es (Anthony Pym)
Subject: Re: Listening to Portuguese
For Haroldo Netto,
I *love* listening to Brazilian Portuguese. But I think Seán mentioned that the colloquium language would be English.
Just one question: How long were you stationed in Gaza? How long were/are UN forces expected to be there? i.e. what is the approximate time frame for the need for interpreters/translators?
Anthony Pym
Date: Wed, 05 Mar 1997 10:11:00 +0200
From: ap@astor.urv.es (Anthony Pym)
Subject: Re: Some first thoughts on Tony Pym To: transfer-l@cc.uab.es
>Brief notes on Robert Bononno’s comments
>The comments are much appreciated. A full reply might come in a few days’ time (I’m still listening). For the time being, just the following:
>1.
>>in the global sphere, *all* translation is ad hoc.
>Yes. I think this should be an essential point for anyone trying to conceptualize the complex social causality of translation. For me, it means that many social determinants come together within a limited spatio-temporal frame, to be thought about in terms of kairos, the ‘ideal moment’. The problem is, this implies a form of ad-hoc aggregation.
>2.
>>If translation studies
>>and language learning have been separated, it is for obvious reasons. I think everyone here know this.
>>Anthony, what is an interlanguage supposed to mean in this context?
>Interlanguage: In second-language acquisition, historically a response to transfer theory, associated with names like Selenker and Corder. I don’t have a standard definition at hand, but it basically involves studying the learner’s language in systematic terms, i.e. as a series of systems in itself, rather than describing it as a series of mistakes or deviations from the standard systems of L1 and L2.
>The notion of interlanguage has been mentioned by Toury in a 1979 article in Meta,
>and I think by Kiraly in his 1995 book. But I’m not aware of many other uses.
>Now, if we are trying to study the use of language in intercultural space, we are facing much the same problems confronted by SLA theorists many years ago, basically that of envisaging something that is between two or more standards (cultures, languages).
>If translation studies and SLA have been separated, it may have been to the detriment of theory in both disciplines. Perhaps it’s time to start thinking
of them – and everything between them – within the one frame? Couldn’t that frame be called ‘intercultural communication’?
>(I might also add that I work in a small department that trains students in three main areas: translation, SLA and sociolinguistics. I currently teach the sociolinguistics.)
>>The notion of “intensive source-text analysis” has its place in translation, although Pym feels it creates unnecessarily high costs.
>Yes. I was worried about things like Christiane Nord’s *Text Analysis in Translation* (1991: Textanalyse und Übersetzen, 1988) where I counted some 76 questions that students are apparently supposed to ask of a source text before
>translating. With experience, those 76 should become just an (invisible) handful.
>More later,
>Anthony
>(Tony to friends and cricket players)
Date: Wed, 05 Mar 1997 10:43:32 +0000
From: sgolden@cc.uab.es (Sean Golden)
Subject: ‘Offical’ Opening Day
It is now 10:00, local time in Barcelona, on 5 March, and the On-line Colloquium, which is already in swing, may be informally declared officially open, and enter into full swing.
At the moment there are more than 130 subscribers from the following countries:
Armenia, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Columbia, China, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Turkey, UK, USA, Yugoslavia, plus many addresses ending in <.com>, <.edu>, <.net>, <.org> that I cannot place geographically.
Like Anthony Pym, I am listening, with great interest, to the discussion that is already taking place. If I have a chance (i.e., if coordinating the colloquium leaves me enough time), I would like to comment on the intercultural space that Pym has marked out–but from my own point of view of course.
Some “housekeeping” details: 1) this on-line colloquium is itself an example of intercultural transfer–at the same time that we are observing and observing upon the questions involved in intercultural transfer we are also engaged in the very process we are observing; 2) language usage is not ideologically neutral–“English” is being treated as the “lingua franca” of the colloquium, and this decision is open to debate as well (personally, I have no objection to other languages being used in the discussion, nor have I any personal commitment to the English language (my parents spoke to me in Irish when I was a child), but the use of other languages could restrict the intercultural transfer we are trying to carry out (some people will not be able to follow the discussion, depending on the language used)–that is, in itself, an interesting component of the debate, I think; 3) there are many people working in the field of translation who are doing many interesting things and who have many interesting things to say–if people want to announce on this list that they have material that may be of interest that is stored at their home Web site(s), then I would have no objection to such announcements being sent out across the list; on the other hand, I would refrain from sending a great deal of documentation across the list, because we cannot yet predict the volume of daily messages that may appear that are directly related to the debate at hand (if anyone on the list would like more documentation from individuals, they could contact those individuals directly, at their own e-mail address, which appears in each message, instead of across the list); 4) we will have to accustom ourselves to the global nature of this colloquium–each afternoon at 17:00 Barcelona time, I load the messages I have received during the day onto the “Messages” Web site–participants in the Americas become active that same day after I have gone home, and while participants in Asia and Oceania are already asleep, and viceversa; 5) this on-line colloquium is an experiment in chaos as chaos is currently understood by scientists–emergent behaviour based on a limited number of predefined conditions (we will all learn about “virtual” organisation and “virtual” communication as the colloquium unfolds, in addition to learning about translation and intercultural transfer); 6) it may also be an example of game theory–we may discover how to carry out communicational “transactions” that are “cost” efficient in a “disaggregate” virtual time-space continuum (i.e., we may learn how not to “overload” the “virtual” time-space continuum with too concentrated an information load per message, because that might put off efficient communication, nor to “underload” the virtual continuum to the point where it loses interest); 7) translation is a form of communication, so translators would be communicators, and that should help us; 8) even though the initial topic might not have had a direct appeal for every participant, I think we are already seeing how the initial topic facilitates debate in a number of related areas without losing sight of the initial topic.
Keep up the good work.
Sean Golden
e-mail: sgolden@cc.uab.es
Date: Wed, 5 Mar 1997 18:19:26 +1000 (GMT+1000)
From: E.Valverde@mailbox.uq.oz.au (Estela Valverde)
Subject: Re: Listening to Portuguese
>Pym says: I *love* listening to Brazilian Portuguese. But I think Seán mentioned
>that the colloquium language would be English.
>And I question: Perhaps because our Portuguese interligua is not enough to understand the subtleties of the argument? Can a translator please come to our rescue?….
>Perhaps Netto -through his UN experience- can comment on Pym’s suggestion that translators (I guess he really is talking more about interpreters) should act and be trained as mediators.
>Dr. Estela Valverde
>Assoc. Prof. in Spanish
>Dept of Romance Languages
>The University of Queensland
>St. Lucia
>Qld 4072, AUSTRALIA
>Phone: 61 7 3365 2277
>Fax: 61 7 3365 2798
>E-mail: E.Valverde@mailbox.uq.oz.au (Estela Valverde)
Date: Wed, 05 Mar 1997 12:36:27 +0000
From: E.Valverde@mailbox.uq.oz.au (Estela Valverde)
Subject: Robinson’s paper
>Thank you all for a very interesting discussion. I guess you guys in the Northern hemisphere are winding down at the moment while we are here just starting the first week of semester! Despite of that here are some more thoughts on your papers:
>While Pym is urging the Ts to politize themselves, question their function and take sides, Robinson is reminding us of the pressures of the market forces through a very sophisticated and well articulated argument that goes from “spirit-chanelling” to “invisible hands”, both metaphors finding the T as a passive object, his body inscribed by these external forces. The truth however must, like always, fall somehow in the middle.
>While Robinson seems to sport a passive attitude of acceptance of the status quo, Pym is inciting us to dissidence. But T schools and the general ethics of the profession teach us quite the opposite. They teach us invisibility. We are the “invisible hands” of negotiations! If we follow Pym’s advise we could even become some day the “invisible hands” of peace!
>However, I do not seriously believe that dissidence can in the long term be part of the T’s ideological framework (unless we just do it as an academic exercise). Derrida would not agree here, but surely anybody in the T business who uses T to expand and enrich the original would soon encounter the “invisible hand” on his way to the press or the police in the way out of court.
>Another point on Robinson’s paper: I am not convinced on his interpretation of Smith’s “invisible hand” as market forces. Agnostics have sometimes a rather weird metaphysical outlook…
>Dr. Estela Valverde
>Phone: 61 7 3365 2277
>Fax: 61 7 3365 2798
>E-mail: E.Valverde@mailbox.uq.oz.au (Estela Valverde)
Date: Wed, 05 Mar 1997 12:38:36 +0000
From: sgolden@cc.uab.es (Sean Golden)
Subject: More housekeeping
Please note that, the way this list is set up, if you use the REPLY function on your mailer to reply to a message you received on the list, your reply will go to the private mail address of the person who sent the message– it will not appear on the list.
In order for your message to appear on the list you must send it to
Sean Golden
e-mail: sgolden@cc.uab.es
Date: Wed, 05 Mar 1997 12:53:24 +0000
From: sgolden@cc.uab.es (Sean Golden)
Subject: Geographical representation
Korea is now represented on the list as well.
Sean Golden
Date: Wed, 05 Mar 1997 13:32:10 +0000 (GMT)
From: LD067@mdx.ac.uk
Subject: channeling
question for doug from lisa dillman
with regards to the channeling metaphor, how applicable is it to translators who do NOT regard themselves as neutral and noncommittal? i agree that there are always unseen ‘forces’ involved in the production of a tranlation (in the form of other people, machines, etc) but as far as the role of spirituality is concerned, is there any room in this model for, say, feminist translators (or others) who are aspiring for visibility/agency, etc? i am sure that there are ways (well, ok, not sure, but wondering [?]) to conceive of translation as a practice that, while of course not rational, or at least not entirely so, is also simultaneously something that is very much controlled by the translator who molds the text to fit her/his needs, desires, etc.
let me also say that, one, i am not trying to say that you are calling for the implementation of this metaphor but simply wondering if you see ways for it to fit various types of translators; and two, i have not yet been able to wade through a good portion of the questions i have received from the colloquium (and am increasingly panicked at the number of new messages which keep appearing and which i wonder when i can read) and so apologize if this issue has already arisen.
thanks,
lisa
Date: Wed, 05 Mar 1997 09:04:46 -0600
From: Doug Robinson <djr@olemiss.edu>
Subject: Re: Robinson’s paper
>>From: E.Valverde@mailbox.uq.oz.au (Estela Valverde)
Subject: Robinson’s paper
>>While Pym is urging the Ts to politize themselves, question their function and take sides, Robinson is reminding us of the pressures of the market forces through a very sophisticated and well articulated argument that goes from “spirit-chanelling” to “invisible hands”, both metaphors finding the T as a passive object, his body inscribed by these external forces. The truth however must, like always, fall somehow in the middle.
Well, I won’t rearticulate my opposition to this continuing characterization of my claims as urging or accepting the translator’s “passivity.” And I think Daniel Simeoni did a really wonderful job of demolishing that one-sided interpretation yesterday anyway. That “middle” where the truth must fall is mostly where I try to hang out, hoping to catch some truth as it drops to the ground.
>>While Robinson seems to sport a passive attitude of acceptance of the status quo, Pym is inciting us to dissidence.
Interesting caricature of my position. Good to know I’m sporty, though.
>>Another point on Robinson’s paper: I am not convinced on his interpretation of Smith’s “invisible hand” as market forces. Agnostics have sometimes a rather weird metaphysical outlook…
Hoo! Now I’m really confused. MY interpretation of Smith’s invisible hand as market forces? Given that last sentence, which seems to me to be referring to spirits and such (otherwise why drag agnostics into it?), surely you mean my interpretation of Smith’s invisible hand as SPIRIT forces?
One more time. Smith never specified just how the invisible hand works. In his first mention of the metaphor, in 1750 or thereabouts, it was the “invisible hand” of Jupiter, which superstitious people see everywhere. It was a spirit force which Smith himself, an agnostic of some sort, was ridiculing. In his second and third mentions, in the 1770s, it became a force in an economic context, but no one knows exactly how he meant it, whether it was a market force, the byproduct of economic agents cooperating, as most liberal political economists (including Pym) have assumed, or something else. Till the middle of the nineteenth century a lot of people assumed it was God. Emma Rothschild argues from a close study of Smith’s attitudes that he may still have intended something vaguely spiritualistic by it, and wanted to distance himself from it, because he was a liberal rationalist who wanted to believe that economic agents are (collectively) in control of the economy. No invisible hands, please!
Now I basically introduced all this history in order to mortar together two parts of a very loose historical argument, spirit-channeling (a more “primitive” and “spiritualistic” and “metaphysical” approach) and ideological/economic agency (a more “modern” and “sociologistic” approach). I’m mostly interested in precisely what Pym writes of, economic agents (he says actors, we could also stretch Greimas a little and say actants, but basically we mean the same thing) like translators, editors, project managers, clients, etc. But I think it’s interesting that there are strong ideological isomorphisms between the way we think about these economic forces acting on and through us and the way “primitives” thought/think about spirit-channeling.
What exactly is the metaphysics you’re wondering about here?
Doug
Date: Wed, 05 Mar 1997 08:42:48 -0600
From: Doug Robinson <djr@olemiss.edu>
Subject: Re: Some first thoughts on (An)T(h)ony Pym
Pym writes:
>>Yes. I was worried about things like Christiane Nord’s *Text Analysis in Translation* (1991: Textanalyse und Übersetzen, 1988) where I counted some 76 questions that students are apparently supposed to ask of a source text before
>>translating. With experience, those 76 should become just an (invisible) handful.
I agree. And surely internalized experience is one of the major channels of socioeconomic as well as translational and other professional invisible hands.
Doug
Date: Wed, 05 Mar 1997 09:21:00 -0600
From: Doug Robinson <djr@olemiss.edu>
Subject: Re: channeling
lisa,
>with regards to the channeling metaphor, how applicable is it to translators who do NOT regard themselves as neutral and noncommittal? i agree that there are always unseen ‘forces’ involved in the production of a tranlation (in the form of other people, machines, etc) but as far as the role of spirituality is concerned, is there any room in this model for, say, feminist translators (or others) who are aspiring for visibility/agency, etc? i am sure that there are ways (well, ok, not sure, but wondering [?]) to conceive of translation as a practice that, while of course not rational, or at least not entirely so, is also simultaneously something that is very much controlled by the translator who molds the text to fit her/his needs, desires, etc.
Yeah, and arguing something very much like that is pretty much the horse I rode in on back in 1991, in a book called The Translator’s Turn. As I said in one of my responses, I think to Pym (stored on the website), I used to hate this channeling/instrumentalizing/neutralizing stuff with a passion, and have attacked it for years. This new book is for me primarily an exploration of the black beast.
(And in fact if you go to my original paper, scroll down a screen, and click on the HERE after the Kantian Ding-an-sich, you’ll find an argument that more or less theorizes the position you’re talking about.)
>let me also say that, one, i am not trying to say that you are calling for the implementation of this metaphor but simply wondering if you see ways for it to fit various types of translators; and two, i have not yet been able to wade through a good portion of the questions i have received from the colloquium (and am increasingly panicked at the number of new messages which keep appearing and which i wonder when i can read) and so apologize if this issue has already arisen.
This IS pretty time-consuming, isn’t it? I’m on sabbatical, but the colloquium is still keeping me from jobs that need doing, like a 10,000-word translation about the allocation of dependability requirements in product development, Finnish to English. (Like a lot of us theorists, I’d much rather be jawing about translation than doing it. Fortunately, I enjoy it just enough to find the money worth the effort.)
Another thing I keep putting off: packing for Barcelona. Hope to see some of you Barcelona-based transferites next week!
Doug
Date: Wed, 05 Mar 1997 10:26:09 -0600
From: Doug Robinson <djr@olemiss.edu>
Subject: Re: Listening to Portuguese
Haroldo,
Trying to piece out your Portuguese with my bad Spanish …
>A metáfora é muito boa, mas é impossível deixar passar: o autor não tem o poder de iniciar a comunicação com o público-alvo, e sim o tradutor, por iniciativa própria ou do editor.
I don’t understand “deixar passar” (to say to pass?), so I may be missing some of that. But as far as I can tell you’re saying that the metaphor is very good, because the author doesn’t have the power to initiate communication with the public without the translator, on either his/her own or the editor’s initiative?
>Particularmente quando o autor, o que não é pouco frequente, já morreu.
Especially when the author is dead, which is not an infrequent event? I guess so far you’re summarizing me.
>Mesma se tratando de espíritos, estes sempre falam quando evocados ou conjurados, e só me vem à memória duas exceções, uma da Bíblia, Pentecostes, e a outra da ficção moderna do cinema, Poltergeist.
Spirits try to do the same thing, always talk whether evoked or conjured (something very wrong with the translation there), don’t quite get that next part, something about you only remembering two exceptions (or excesses?), one from the Bible, Pentacost (which I discuss in one of the sidescreens linked to my article, called Paul.html), the other from a modern fixation of da moovies, the Poltergeist?
>A metáfora, por sinal, é excelente, e eu a uso constantemente, para indicar os motivos que diferenciam uma tradução em rapidez e facilidade de outra, menos fácil:
The metaphor, for signal (don’t know that idiom), is excellent, and something about being used constantly to show the motives that differentiate a translation in rapidity and ease from other, less easy? Hoo! This translation I’m doing here is neither rapid nor easy … guess ten days in Brazil wasn’t long enough to make the leap from Spanish to Portuguese …
<<Baixou em mim o espírito do autor e a
>coisa fluiu…>> O ponto deste trabalho que me chamou mais a atenção, contudo, foi a referência à perspectiva ideológica, a qual vem junto com o texto traduzido para a língua-alvo, justamente por NÃO sermos tradutores/cyborgs e sim por traduzirmos, junto com o texto, o espirito do autor.
Uhh … sorry, translator just maxed out. Something about the spirit of the author being a fluid thing? And a bridge to work? Just wandering, here, mostly UNDER bridges … Can anybody help me out here?
I guess all I got was the summary of my position, which looked pretty accurate.
Sure wish I had the knack of channeling source authors. Maybe Haroldo coulda spoken THROUGH me in English. Woulda been lots easier than doing it the long and hard way.
Doug of the sweaty palms
From: sgolden@cc.uab.es (Sean Golden)
Subject: Geographical representation
Argentina is now represented on the list as well.