7 March 1997

Date: Thu, 06 Mar 1997 13:04:18 -0500
From: Robert Bononno <rb28@is4.nyu.edu>
Subject: Re: Remarks on Chaos

>Doug writes:

>black beast (in the French sense, of course). The overwhelming normativity of TS as I first began to read about it in the late 70s and early 80s felt so incredibly oppressive to me that I felt like I had to gather my most

Well, the normativity still exists in translation pedagogy. It’s hard to get away from it. Students often want to learn the “right way” of doing things and teachers and theorists have internalized that. It’s also important to consider the role of methodology in translation, which is not quite as self-evident as it may seem.

>controlled us into creative energy, and found a few, I suppose; but mostly I was driven by my sense that The Translator’s Turn was in the end too happy, too much of the smiley-face sticker plastered all over the entrance to the cave, and forced myself to explore the things that make Robert (and me) despondent.

Too happy. Yes, it was too upbeat, alas. Now we can return to being despondent and working at deepening the rut. Well, maybe there’s a dialectic at work here somewhere. Maybe there was a need to counter all that damn potential and possibility in TT with some REALITY.

>traces of those transformations for the people who pay us for the work. Dare I say it? It feels, uh … mature.

Sure, go ahead, get it out of your system.

>got active on lantra they felt isolated, small, puny; lantra gives them a sense of the massive professional body that we belong to, its competence in

It often gives me a headache.

>solving problems, its incredible knowledge base, etc. So that even though I still don’t believe that translators can or should save the world, or that translation theory needs to work to transform the translation marketplace, we are still strong enough to do our thing, make a difference in our own spheres, without the kind of cast-off-your-shackles rhetoric of The Translator’s Turn.

I think entities such as Lantra and FLEFO build awareness, but there’s plenty of dissension within our little community. I’m not sure if that strength is real or illusory, however.

>Systemic, clearly, though the specific forms they take in the translation marketplace are more or less unique. Otoh, unlike Robert, I feel it is very important to do the kind of work Pym is doing, exploring crossovers between translation and other related professional fields. Certainly the translation marketplace itself forces us to cross those boundaries all the time–to become editors, DTPers, agencies, writers, language teachers, etc.

I hope it didn’t come across that I was dismissing Anthony Pym’s work. I think that is important work and it’s important to focus on such issues. It’s simply that if you risk making a provocative statement, well…

>Or just professional ship. It’s sailing pretty well, it seems to me. And one of the signs of its seaworthiness, as I read things, is that an experienced translator and respected translation theorist like Anthony Pym can argue AGAINST the expansion of translation services. That kind of argument requires a very strong professional base. You don’t make that kind of argument from a position of weakness.

I dunno. I think there are lots of reasons one might make such a statement. It’s sort of ironic, too, since with the growth of the EU this is really the first time that translation has been institutionalized and really become a _factor_ (outside the UN) in economic and political life.

>I guess I’d say, again, that lantra is a very powerful channel for that “turn.” Go spend an hour in the lantra archives some time. Sometimes I’ll go call up a thread that I remember fondly, like our arguments over agencies vs. freelancers, and just read straight through it. Talk about empowerment! Through all the wrangling there’s a very strong sense that we already HAVE the professional community base/support that we need.

Translators are often quite opiniated. I’m not sure if that’s the result of working in isolation or not though.

>apparent flakes like McLuhan! To my mind the way to solve the problem of corporations nickel-and-diming us to death is not to teach them an economic rationalism that will in many cases encourage them to bypass us entirely; nor is it to legislate translation, as the EU has done. It’s to continue to grow as a profession, so that each member of the profession feels stronger and better able to laugh in the face of people who ask us to do too much work too fast for too little money. If enough translators become STRONG channelers of ideological and economic forces, instead of timid mice swallowing whatever shit flows downstream, that will gradually transform ALL the disaggregate agencies in which we work.

I agree with all you say but don’t see how we can achieve such strength in the face of the industry’s current disorganization and lack of power. Translators remain isolated entitites, largely unknown to end users. The other problem is the translation market itself, something largely out of our control.

>>Another
>>issue I think that needs to be sorted out is whether or not we (Doug, Anthony, et al.) feel, in discussions about the role of the translator, that such distinctions are characteristic of the inherent nature of translation or the role of the translator?

>I don’t believe in such things as “inherent natures.”

Well, perhaps then the “situation” of translation might be a better way of phrasing it. That situation may change with external forces but still may be distinct from the role of translator per se.

>And yet you hear stories of high-powered legal translators between Japanese and English getting paid $.80 a word for rush jobs on tenders. The money is

I hear lots of stories, but I’m not concerned with them since they don’t really represent the general condition of translators (or my specific situation either for that matter). Clients, *some* clients, in certain circumstances are willing to pay top dollar because they have little choice. But the industry as a whole is a buyers’ market. All of the major European languages are over-represented at present. The other problem is that training a translator is a lifelong endeavor. It’s not as if you can simply switch languages to keep up with the market (which may have changed by then anyway).

>there, and companies are willing to pay it for things that matter to them, so long as they believe that the service they are getting for the money is professional–and, of course, so long as it’s the accepted thing to pay a lot for it.

Yes, well traditionally the accepted thing has been to pay very little for translation. Costs were marginally above the cost for clerical services and still are in many respects.

>>There is no
>>doubt that translation itself, the process, inhabits a kind of nebulous space between two realities that it can never quite bring together. Arguments about creativity, originality, etc., are valid, useful, and fruitful, but fail to make the connection between the position of the translator and the position of translation.

>Really? It mostly seems like a PR problem to me.

A PR problem for translation? Could be but it’s not something we’ve been good at addressing.

>Maybe so. I hope so. I guess I’m just leery of claiming too much for theory as a remedy for practice. The most thoughtful people on lantra ARE theorists–not in the academic sense, but in the pragmatic sense of thinking complexly and self-reflexively about what they do. That not all translators are like that doesn’t necessarily mean, to my mind, that a hefty dose of MY theory or anybody else’s would do them a heap of good. They need to be encouraged, maybe, to become theorists themselves.

Yes, yes, but exposure to theory can help promote that I think.

/robert
——————————————————-
Robert Bononno rb28@is4.nyu.edu CIS: 73670,1570

Date: Fri, 07 Mar 1997 08:34:28 +0800
From: chliao@farmer.cc-sun.fcu.edu.tw (Chao-Chih Liao)
Subject: Some comments to Pym and Robinson To: transfer-l@cc.uab.es

I read your articles twice, carefully for me.

I like all three of them. (I didn’t read the one with Non-English title) For me the invisible hand is partly the author’s hand. The metaphor of a woman in translator’s clothes, which may mean false beauty, infidelity or ugliness.

At present I’m involved in comparing the Englih version and Chinese version of three works:

The golden lotus
The STory of the stone
The journey to the west

The four translators (two for The Story of the Stone) have their unique ways to transmit Chinese culture to the English readers. They also show common traits in considering the target-language readers.

False beauty, indifelity or not, I appreciate their efforts and would like to say they all own eligible knowledge in Chinese and Chinese culture for their tasks.

========
There are a lot of mixed feelings after reading the three articles. In Taiwan, at junior high and senior high school, English teachers apply the grammar-trans lation method in teaching. Students are used to it. If a teacher takes the direct method, or so-called communicative approach, they are almost intolerable. Finally, Mandarin is used more than English in EFL classes.

Concerning the English version of the three great novels. Without reading and/or having no ability to read them, Chinese people would comment ‘The English version is unable to transmit the Chinese ideas, and they are badly written.’

A third phenomenon existing at a little higher place: those who think their English is good enough to write directly in English would do so and then send their composition to the translation service to have their Englsih fixed. As a translator in practice for 9 years, I would like them to write in Chinese, because I could not figure out what they wanted to say.

Surely, if the translation service would like to expose their Wealth God, the customer to the translation, I would have done what Pym did to Spanish Scientist by charging the English instruction hours…

I learned a lot from the three articles written by Pym and Robinson. Thank you both.

Laura Chao-chih Liao
Associate Professor
Feng Chia University
Taichung, Taiwan

Date: Fri, 07 Mar 1997 17:05:52 +1000
From: E.Valverde@mailbox.uq.oz.au (Estela Valverde)
Subject: On Robinson’s remarks

Doug says:

The world I live in has a big middle; I
live in it. It’s the middle class, as the name implies. Or it’s translators as middle(wo)men, intercultural mediators. There are a lot of middles. It’s only when you get in the habit of dualizing that the world looks that polarized.

But it is precisely because the translator is in the middle, in the “boundary”, that he/she is pulled in both directions: the inhabitants of the interstice are marginalized by both sides and (let’s don’t fool ourselves) are powerless. And don’t get me wrong, I think the intertice is the most exciting place to be, but very diffifult to apprehend for the dichotonomical rational (phallocentric?) world we inhabit and very difficult as well for the inhabitant who attempts to defy the centrifugal forces of power. However, I do appreciate your optimism Doug and I look forward to read your new book.

I wish I had the time to get more involved in the discussion. Bye for now.

A/Prof. Estela Valverde
Coordinator of Spanish
Dept. of Romance Languages
The University of Queensland
St. Lucia Qld. 4072
Australia

Fax: (61-7) 3365 2798
Telephone: (61-7) 3365 2277

Date: Fri, 07 Mar 1997 12:03:02 +0000
From: sgolden@cc.uab.es (Sean Golden)
Subject: Some observations on the functioning of the

It is now 11:300 on Friday, 7 March, Barcelona time. Participation has stabilised at about 140-145 subscribers (a few people leave every day and another few join). The geographical representation has also stabilised:

Addresses ending in <.edu> (24), Spain (16), Canada (14), addresses ending in <.com> (13), Australia and addresses ending in <.net> (7 each), Brazil, Sweden, UK (5 each), Italy (4), Belgium, Ireland, the Netherlands, South Africa (3 each), Germany, Finland, Greece, Norway, Portugal, Yugoslavia (2 each), Armenia, Argentina, Colombia, China, Denmark, France, Hong Kong, Korea, Luxembourg, Malaysia, addresses ending in <.org>, Poland, Turkey, Taiwan, <.us> [USA] (1 each).

The volume of information has been very large, and I am happy to see that there are participants who are willing to characterise it as “excellent”. The volume of messages has not been that large (although we have no way of knowing what will happen over the weekend, or next week).

I would not want to think that the preponderance of English as a “lingua franca”, nor that the preponderance of messages written in English by native English speakers, should “put off” more active involvement by other participants. The appearance of messages written in Brazilian Portuguese has put to the test one of Anthony Pym’s hypotheses, and has also encouraged the appearance of “helping” hands.

I would cautiously invite participants who feel more free to express themselves in a language other than English, to do so. Depending on the language used (and this is in itself interesting within the terms of the discussion), more or fewer participants will understand the messages. But then again, other helping hands may appear.

I would also like to take this opportunity to mention the fact that the organisation of this on-line colloquium has benefitted greatly from my having participated last autumn in a three week long on-line congress dedicated to the life and work of the great Catalan language medieval poet Ausias March, that was organised by Dominic Keown at Cambridge University, and housed on Web pages of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Open University of Catalonia, http://www.uoc.es), a university that has a very good claim to being the first truly “virtual” university in the world.

I would like to receive comments and suggestions from participants in this on-line colloquium about its organisation and about future developments of similar ventures.

Sean Golden
sgolden@cc.uab.es

Date: Fri, 07 Mar 1997 09:07:38 -0500
From: daniel simeoni <simeonid@fox.nstn.ca>
Subject: resurfacing

A general comment on Doug’s response to my reading of his position paper. Our approaches clearly converge but from different perspectives. He starts from hermeneutics while my anchoring is in social science. The focus is the same. It might make good sense perhaps to start thinking about a theoretical status for the TRANSLATOR – beyond its corporeal manifestations.

Some remarks. I find the information on Douglas Hofstadter’s forthcoming book fascinating and have already put it on my list of readings this summer. The relationship between hermeneutics and cognitive science is also very illuminating. In my own tripartite hermeneutic-culturalist-empirical mentalist classification, I was hoping social science ‘in the middle’ could ease the communication between the other two components. I took these to be more distant and therefore at risk of alienating each other, but it turns out the trees can be set even more tightly. The metaclassification was never meant to be more than a convenient shortcut anyway, and in no way foolproof.
To answer Doug’s question, yes I would locate Pym strategically in the middle ground, while Skopostheoreticians might be leaning more towards the empiricists, for methodological reasons. For me, the core of the empirical mentalist group consists of those experimentally prone researchers who embarked in the 80s on an ambitious cognitive programme designed to find out “what goes on in the translator’s head”.

“Mosaic habitus?” No, the article has not appeared yet. I hope it does! I have just submitted it and still have to hear from the Editors. The detailed process that you describe regarding your suspicion of doing a backtranslation etc., as an example of how a translator’s habitus may be acquired, is exactly how I imagine research in this area developing. Based on concrete examples of that kind, the notion could then be problematized in ways that may even prove useful in more homogeneous fields where it has been used more or less exclusively so far.

“What would constitute a case-study approach” in this mode of subject-centered conceptualisation? I agree that it is futile to reject studies of translatorial behaviour based on personal experience, as ‘tainted’, subjective, unfalsifiable, the works. After all, the knowledge we are interested in exists in practice. The real expert is the translator, even if s/he cannot synthesize the experience – not the translation scholar. The latter’s expertise anyway depends on the consistency of the theoretical constructs with the translator’s prior knowledge. When the translator also studies transfer, the term ‘schizophrenia’ is often heard. Am I right in supposing that what Doug is after is a way to reconcile the two activities, so translation and translation studies become less disjointed?
Basically, it is only a very restricted group (even if it is influential) who promote quantitative ONLY, A.P.A-formatted, supposedly “objective” science. In the paper I am submitting, I cite also the fact that we are in sore need of sociographies of single translators in TS. Let us have honest introspection then, interviews, socio-historical contextualisation, and good old textual analysis – either hermeneutic or semiotic, but modulated to bring the translator center stage.
Actually, I do not see why Anthony’s engagement with socio-economic factors could not be part of this (disaggregated yet motivated) movement as well. Instead of socio-economic pressures being exposed OBJECTIVELY, the constraints could be analysed from the point of view of the agent. I’m really musing here and playing wildly with the idea, but when Anthony says that “the complex social causality (ah but is the word ‘causality’ helpful here?) of translation […] implies a form of ad hoc aggregation” that remains a challenge to conceptualization, I wonder whether a socio-economic explanation centered on the subject might not be a first step. Back to the need for sociographies… Is Anthony still listening?

There is, in my view, a sense of coherence in this rough translator-grounded project which, in itself, should facilitate communication within TS and between TS and translation practice and yes, since Michael was very kind to refer to my piece in META in his Response, I think it could provide some kind of epistemic middle ground.

As to the difficulty of ‘translating’ Toury’s model to promote the status of the translator within it, I do not see why it cannot succeed. The details are too complicated to work out here (I have a short piece coming out in The Semiotic Review of Books that refers to this) but I can give a clue or two. As a matter of fact, Gideon’s model can be read as a slight but decisive transposition of a former conceptualisation, a tribute he has acknowledged for years. Building on Holmes’s original model of Translation Studies, he has foregrounded the descriptive component in a landscape where, before, there was perfect equal-handedness between the branches – theory, description, applied work were all on the same footing under the theorist’s detached gaze. By raising the descriptive component to prominence he was able to rebuild the landscape and imagine a Descriptive Translation Studies that cohered the various parts hierarchically around observable norms. Now why not make the translator the implementer as well as the instrument of norms, via the habitus or disaggregated agency that you suggest? I do not see the system imploding at all. In fact, I view it as strengthened. Norms do not make sense without a habitus, no more so than the habitus makes sense without norms. The huge difference of course, is that a mosaic habitus goes a long way towards accounting for the creative, imaginary, chaotic results sometimes observed in practice. In no way does it deny the power of norms at every stage of the implementation.

As to your post-scriptum on Bourdieu, I understand the irony. I can only say that the model applies to him too. Actually, I remember a similar question put to him in the middle of a talk, in which he described in scathing terms the elite’s race for distinction; he was heckled for seemingly abstracting himself from the game. On a related theme, an interesting piece was written by Rakefet Sheffy about the canonization of Bourdieu. It is called “Rites of Coronation” and appeared in Poetics Today 12: 4 (1991). More seriously, Doug’s question of course was, how can you AT THE SAME TIME draw the map AND be on the territory? It seems fake. Well, maybe. I only know that I feel I can place myself on the map too fairly easily – I recognize not only the position but the itinerary – and draw it at the same time. The real obstacle is when there is no field as such yet, as with TS. But we are all working to build one, aren’t we?

Date: Fri, 07 Mar 1997 08:33:07 -0600
From: Doug Robinson <djr@olemiss.edu>
Subject: Re: On Robinson’s remarks

Estela,

>But it is precisely because the translator is in the middle, in the “boundary”, that he/she is pulled in both directions: the inhabitants of the interstice are marginalized by both sides and (let’s don’t fool ourselves) are powerless.

If translators are powerless, why does everyone get so upset if they make mistakes or, worse, deliberately distort the text? An example I used in The Translator’s Turn: what if Schmidt, Hitler’s English interpreter, had told Chamberlain in 1938 not to trust the Germans. Hitler’s nuts, he’s bent on world domination, etc. He could have pretended to be interpreting Hitler’s German and instead warned the English about his boss. Powerless? I think not.

>And don’t get me wrong, I think the intertice is the most exciting place to be, but very diffifult to apprehend for the dichotonomical rational (phallocentric?) world we inhabit and very difficult as well for the inhabitant who attempts to defy the centrifugal forces of power.

Difficult, yes. Probably impossible in any absolute sense: some form of cooptation is unavoidable. But defiance at all kinds of levels is still possible.

>However, I do appreciate your optimism Doug and I look forward to read your new book.

Thanks!