11 March 1997

Date: Tue, 11 Mar 1997 11:30:15 +1100 (EST)
From: O_Faoláin na nDéise <o_faolain@netinfo.com.au>
Subject: Re: Listening to Portuguese

At 09:53 PM 7/03/97 -0300, you wrote:
>Doug,

>a few comments on your comments about Joao’s translation and my text:

>snip
>What could be said here, in my opinion, is that every choice, included the books to be
>translated has a strong ideological component.

snip

>Haroldo

>If the purpose of translation is commercial (‘lest we go out of business’)
on the other hand, the choice can be objectified after a fashion. I recall Michel Butor mentioning some 20 years ago that as the man responsible(?) for choosing which books should be translated for publication by Gallimard(?), he followed normal publishing practice and looked at the bestseller lists of neighbouring countries.
Of course, this leaves the choice of countries whose best seller lists will be considered subject to a range of unspoken criteria, asnd implies either a degree of commonality of cultures such that what sells well in one will sell well in translation, and/or an exotica market. Alternatively, it suggests that in the commercial world, other aspects of ‘ídeology’ (undefined) provide no clear guide to what will sell, whereas the ‘best-seller’ criterion provides a mechanistic decision-making process to chslertr behind and an excuse for getting the market wrong. The (non)-availability of competent translators also imposes a limitation which is arguably non-ideological.

Ó Faoláin na nDéise PhD
Ancien élève de l’ENA (Paris)
Diploma Superior de Español como Lengua Extranjera (Sal) Accredited by the National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters

Principal
Imprimatur Translations and Language Services 17, David Street, O’Connor ACT 2602 Australia Tel: +61 6 247 3610 Mobile: 0419 602 876e-mail: o_faolain@netinfo.com.au Fax: +61 6 247 3610

Date: Mon, 10 Mar 1997 22:09:44 -0500
From: GL252251@Orion.YorkU.CA
Subject: translation as a field

Perhaps reflection on this topic can be aided by distinguishing those (like me) who want to take what might be called a Saussurean approach to translation from those who don’t. Saussure distinguished himself from other people interested in language by saying that he was interested in la langue en elle-meme et pour elle-meme (in itself and for itself). It strikes me that much of what is written under the broad heading of translation studies uses translation as a springboard to talk about something else: the nature of human understanding (George Steiner), relations between dominant and dominated countries,the relative role of structure and agency in human history, and so on. This is all very worthwhile and of enormous human interest. But it must be distinguished from its opposite: taking information from whatever sources one wishes, but using it in order to say something about translation itself. It comes down to what one is interested in AS a theoretician (one can be interested in any number of things as a human being). I expect some people won’t like this distinction at all, but I believe that if we want to increase knowledge about translation, it’s necessary.

Brian Mossop

Brian Mossop
Translation Bureau
Public Works and Government Services Canada and York University School of Translation GL252251@orion.yorku.ca

Date: Mon, 10 Mar 1997 23:15:04 -0300
From: Haroldo Netto <haroldo@mail.rio.com.br>
Subject: <<Practicing Translator>>

I subscribed TRANSFER-L out of intelectual curiosity and also, I confess, out of a certain naivete. After 37 years working as a translator English>Portuguese (most of the time as a second occupation), with 65 translated books and many magazines (short love stories ands military matters) in my curriculum, it was a lot of naivete to believe that the practical work I perform 8 to 10 hours a day, could benefit from the translation theories I would take notice through the Colloquium.

Once more I found out that theory grows and develop itself in a ground that doesn’t have anything to do with practice. Theory is beautiful, appeals to the intellect and is much useful…to construct more theory. I’m sorry, it has to be my fault not knowing how to use so many difficult and deep considerations in my daily task.

Like Robert Bonono says: <<I think that by and large “practicing translators” don’t see the relevance of theory to their work. Their greatest concerns focus on the details of texts (terminology, obscure meanings) and general business matters, like finding work. Aside from that they are interested in public perception of the translation community, …>> As a <<practicing translator>> I could’t agree more. And I also agree with him when he says that sometimes translation also results in considerable gain. In many cases I’ve rendered into good Portuguese stories written in very poor English, what I’d tell it was a gain, not a loss.

Using a theme of today, I want also to say that it may be possible to consider a good translation as a special kind of clone: the two creatures don’t look alike but they have exactly the same DNA. Ken Follett’s The Third Twin, which I ve just finish to translate, doesn’t look alike O Terceiro Gemeo, but certainly has the same DNA structure.

It was a privilege to make contact with all of you, specially Anthony Pym, Dra. Estela Valverde and Doug Robinson, who were so gentle that read and commented my E-mails.

I belong to a List of Portuguese translators, which is a magnificent experience of solidarity and mutual help.We are more than 200 from three continents. Address: trad-prt@if.usp.br.

Personally, I’m at your disposal. Whoever needs anything from a <<practicing translator>>,or from Rio, Brazil, just send me an E-mail: haroldo@rio.com.br.

And, like the famous rabbit would say: * That’s All, Folks!*

Abracos,

HAROLDO

<<Reliquia desiderantur>>

Date: Mon, 10 Mar 1997 22:21:02 -0500
From: Robert Bononno <rb28@is4.nyu.edu>
Subject: Re: Thacherism?

Doug wrote in response to Anthony Pym

>The kind of god’s-eye perspective that Pym is taking, asking when translation is economically rational, is not a perspective that is pragmatically occupied (i.e., faced as a problem to be SOLVED rather than theoretically reimagined) by very many people on this earth–if in fact it is ever pragmatically occupied by ANYONE.

Doug, wouldn’t you consider attempts by the Canadian government to rationalize expenditures on translation at the *national* level to be a way of asking when “translation is economically rational?” I’m also sure there are ongoing debates among EU member countries about translation costs and what the best way might be to develop some sort of rationalized planning policy. Or would you associate these situations with the pragmatics of translation? Language directives and language planning (France and Canada, for example) are also examples of long-range planning by individuals who may assume the “god’s-eye” point of view but are also concerned with real issues of linguistic usage. Such issues may have an impact on economic realities beyond their original scope.

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

Date: Tue, 11 Mar 1997 09:13:10 +0200
From: ap@astor.urv.es (Anthony Pym)
Subject: Re: translation as a field

Brian writes:

This is all very worthwhile and of enormous human
iinterest. But it must be distinguished from its opposite: taking information from whatever sources one wishes, but using it in order to say something about translation itself.

I agree, and this is one reason why I’m interested in restrictive definitions of translation (and why I’d like to see the paper Brain’s working on!).

But I want to eat my cake too: TS for talking about translation; something like intercultural studies for the wider issues. Why not?

(You see, in between being translators and humans, some of us also like to tend academic gardens and address areas such as language/ translation policy.)

Date: Tue, 11 Mar 1997 10:19:04 +0000
From: sgolden@cc.uab.es (Sean Golden)

Anthony Pym wrote:

I talk about causes because

>1. Public debate on translation frequently invokes causal relationships that simply >don’t stand up in court. Here in yesterday’s El Pais I read that translations into Catal>an decreased by 31% between 1990 and 1995 and that this implies a lack of openness, >therefore a need for more subsidies for translations. Implication: the more transl>ations a language has, the more open it is, and the better it will be. Translations cause >improvement of some kind. Okay.

The exact quote from EL PAIS was:

Carles Jordi Guardiola, vicepresidente de la Asociacion de Editores en Lengua Catalana (AELC), califico ayer este descenso de “muy peligroso”. “Las traducciones”, senalo, “son imprescindibles al ser una puerta abierta hacia otras culturas”.

In other words, translations into Catalan (or Irish, for that matter) serve to open the “minority” culture up or out to other (majority?) cultures, not to close them in or off. Does this make the world a better place? Does it “help” Catalan culture (or Irish for that matter?)? Is this not relevant to the subject of translation as a transaction cost and/or to intercultural transfer? Is this not in some way creating an “interculture”? Why is a language policy that promotes this opening up a negative factor in your view?

>The same article adds that in 1995 (i.e. in one year?) the number of books published >in Catalan rose by 30.6 %. Now, that latter figure should indicate the strength of
>publishing in that language, thus potentially contradicting the argument that trans >ations are needed to make it stronger (or better?). Either way, it is very hard to establ>ish a direct causal connection between the two figures, and thus hard to argue, in >causal terms, why there should be more subsidies for translations into Catalan.

Here I must disagree with your analysis. The policy of translating works INTO Catalan served several purposes–providing books in Catalan with a “worthy” content as quickly as possible, to fill the gap while Catalan writers could beging writing and publishing again in a language that was suppressed by a state dictatorship during 40 years; introduce as quickly as possible information and ideas that had been censored out by the same state dictatorship; open Catalan culture up or out to world culture(s); introduce new ideas from world culture(s) into Catalan culture. It would seem to me at least equally as valid to say that this policy of promoting translation into Catalan DID serve its purpose, that the gap WAS filled, and that Catalan writing has had a chance to catch up. Result: more books being published that were written originally in Catalan, and fewer books being published that were translated into Catalan.

For me, this example and your hypotheses of tanslation as a transaction cost are quite compatible. In fact it seems to me to be an example qhich you could quite fruitfully employ.

As frequently happens, the details of the survey you mention present a more complex picture: only publishing houses that published 20 or more books a year were included in the survey for instance.

On the other hand (is that what Otoh means?), my own experience of translating great works of world literature into Catalan (from the Chinese in this case), where the subsidy went to the publisher and not to the translators, which is the policy in question (there are other subsidies for translators for translations both into and out of Catalana, or into or out of Spanish), meant that the publisher was less diligent in distributing the book (the publisher’s costs were already covered by the subsidy)–so a lot of careful translation work on our part produced a handsome edition of a book that cannot be found in the bookshops… Another example that could be fruitfully employed with your working hypothesis.

>In fact, what bothers me is that the initial argument – that more translations are n>eeded in order to keep the language open – assumes that there is some kind of >perpetual social causation involved in translation, whereas what I keep finding – al>ong with many others – is that translation works within a limited time frame, often >to help build up a language or literature which can then take off and develop largely >of its own accord. Perhaps the number of translations has dropped because they are n>o longer required, or because better education means that more people read in foreign >languages, etc. To talk about causes is to ask people to think about their arguments a l>ittle more seriously.

Let me reintroduce what I said about chaos theory–emergent behaviour based on a limited set of initial circumstances. I think that your point of view here is too short-term. The eventual consequences of short-term translation policy are unpredicatble. You yourself suggest that the short-term translation policy may have lead to better education in foreign languages. The fact that we introduced the teaching of Russian, and later of Chinese and Japanese, into our translation degree course can be quite plausibly linked to the growth and succes of Catalan commerce with those cultures (statistics, the number of our graduates working in key positions that facilitate this commerce, the changing nature of “want ads” in the newspapers in these areas, etc.) In fact, what we did here is what just about any developoing country has had to do tomodernise quickly–establish schools of translators. If we look at the history of the creation of translation schools in the last two centuries–outside of the European cultural ambit (e.g. Japan, China, Arabic countries) we will find that almost all of them were established as language academies that were adjuncts to military academies, and specifically designed to facilitate access to technological information and to facilitate commerce. Your EU model skews your own arguments to some extent, because your hypothesis is that EU translation policy is meant to further EU unity and integration. How would you apply your hypothesis to the case of Meiji Japan, late Qing China, or mid-20th century Syria? 12th century Toledo was a “branch” of Hayt el-Bikmah in Bagdad (established in 830), whose purpose was to provide the Arabic caliphate with scientific and technological information (medicine, optics, astronomy) in the first place, and philosophy inthe second place. The Bagdad school was a successor to one of the pjhases of Alexandria. I’m interested in the history of these “schools”..Alexander’ Alexandria, Xuan Zang’s school in Chan’an (mid-7th century), the Arabs’ Alexandria, the School of Bagdad, the School of Toledo, Raimon Llull’s school in Mallorca (rival of Toledo), the work of Anselm Turmeda in Tunisia, the Jesuits in Japan and Peking (16th-18th centuries), Meiji Japan, Qing China; the lack of any translation policy on the part of the East India Company, which contributed to an inversion o British and European policies toward China, with horrifying consequences (and this evaluation is certainly in line with your concern for ethics, which I share, and with the role of translation policy in making the world a better place, which I share). The EU is not yetthe greatest employer of translators in world history–Napoleon was: he had some 3000 interpreters of French patois working to spread the “ideals” of the French revolution among the populace (perhaps because he had read the French Jesuit Amiot’s late 18th century translation of the Chinese classic by Sunzi, The Art of War?). Emergent, long-term behaviour, derived from a limited set of initial short-term tarnslation conditions…

Sean Golden, Dean, Facultat de Traduccio Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona
08193 Bellaterra, BARCELONA, Spain
Tel: 34 3 5811374 FAX: 34 3 5811037
e-mail: sgolden@cc.uab.es

Date: Tue, 11 Mar 1997 10:34:13 +0000
From: sgolden@cc.uab.es (Sean Golden)
Subject: Practicing translators

Haroldo Netto wrote:

The division betweet practicing translators and translation theoreticians does seem to exits. there is another group as well–the teachers of translation. The division should not be so exclusive. I have often worked with building site foremen whose attitude toward engineers or architects is also quite skeptical; and with practicing writers whose attitude toward literature professors or professors of “creative writing” was more than skeptical. Theory with practice is empty speculation. Theory must be tested against practice. Theory provides terminology and methodologies for ananlysing practice, but does not guarantee good practice,w hichj also depends on the individual skill and taste of the practitioner. Ezra Pound once wrote that it was not necessary for a literary critic (or professor) to be a poet in order to write about poetry, but that it would help if he or she had at least tried to write a poem some time, in order to have some experiential knowledge of the difficulties involved. The Chinese Daoist theory of knowledge distinguishes between knowledge based on words and definitions (let’s say, theory) and knowledge based on practice (e.g. the skill of a carpenter), that cannot be expressed or transmitted in words.

I think that almost al, if not all of the people who are theorising here are in fact also practitioners (and not just practitioners of literary translation either)–I certainly am (of both professional and of literary translation). Perhaps a more important difference is that some earn their living in the “Academy” where theorising is a necessary part of their work (and they have time to do so, are in fact paid to do so), while others earn their living outside of the “Academy”, where it is not.

Stay with us, and answer back from the point of view of experience.

Sean Golden, Dean, Facultat de Traduccio Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona
08193 Bellaterra, BARCELONA, Spain
Tel: 34 3 5811374 FAX: 34 3 5811037
e-mail: sgolden@cc.uab.es

Date: Tue, 11 Mar 1997 11:02:23 +0200
From: ap@astor.urv.es (Anthony Pym)
Subject: Short or long term?

Sean wrote, on the setting up of ‘Schools of Translators’ (not quite the same thing as translation schools):

>Emergent, long-term behaviour, derived from a limited set of initial short-term tarnslation conditions…

I plot graphs showing the historical frequencies of translations from specific langauges into specific languages. I get the same sort of parabolas for Arabic-Latin in c12th, Arabic-Castilian in c13th, French- German and German-French in late c19th (and that’s the end of my data). Similar things happen when you play with the CD-ROM catalogue of translations into French in the early c19th (the Leuven bibliography). Parabolas: translation comes and goes; what has to be rendered is rendered, then we go back to phatic ‘background’ translations, awaiting the next moment of more massive transfer.

On the purely quantitative level, then, I find it hard to describe this in terms of long-term behaviour.

(I don’t want to go back to the old mechanistic theories of ‘generations’, but most of the parabolas stretch over periods of about 30 years, although the shifts are also marked by policy changes, political ruptures, and wars.)

Date: Tue, 11 Mar 1997 11:35:04 +0000
From: sgolden@cc.uab.es (Sean Golden)
Subject: Re: Practicing translators

I wrote:

>skeptical. Theory with practice is empty speculation. Theory must be tested against practice. Theory provides terminology and methodologies for

I meant

Theory without practice is empty speculation…

Sorry.

Sean Golden, Dean, Facultat de Traduccio Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona
08193 Bellaterra, BARCELONA, Spain
Tel: 34 3 5811374 FAX: 34 3 5811037
e-mail: sgolden@cc.uab.es

Date: Tue, 11 Mar 1997 11:39:30 +0000
From: sgolden@cc.uab.es (Sean Golden)
Subject: Re: Short or long term?

>Sean wrote, on the setting up of ‘Schools of Translators’ (not quite the same thing as translation schools):

>>Emergent, long-term behaviour, derived from a limited set of initial short-term tarnslation conditions…

>I plot graphs showing the historical frequencies of translations from specific langauges into specific languages. I get the same sort of parabolas for Arabic-Latin in c12th, Arabic-Castilian in c13th, French- German and German-French in late c19th (and that’s the end of my data). Similar things happen when you play with the CD-ROM catalogue of translations into French in the early c19th (the Leuven bibliography). Parabolas: translation comes and goes; what has to be rendered is rendered, then we go back to phatic ‘background’ translations, awaiting the next moment of more massive transfer.

>On the purely quantitative level, then, I find it hard to describe this in terms of long-term behaviour.

Where we disagree is not on the importance of these wave-crests of translation activity, but on the importance of all of the other soico-economic-political forces that thes wave-crests of activity have set in motion–their ripples if you like. This emergent behaviour assumes a life of its own–after the initial conditions, as a result of emergent behaviouyrs stimulated or facilitated by the inital activity. Were you to plot graphs of the changes in socio-economic-political status of the same cultures, and superimpose the two sets of graphs, what relations might emerge?

Sean

Sean Golden, Dean, Facultat de Traduccio Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona
08193 Bellaterra, BARCELONA, Spain
Tel: 34 3 5811374 FAX: 34 3 5811037
e-mail: sgolden@cc.uab.es

Tue, 11 Mar 1997 10:41:46 +0000 (GMT)
From: Willard McCarty <Willard.McCarty@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: encoding as translation, continued

This in reply to Robert Bononno’s, included below.

I see that I did not haul along enough of my context to make clear that I meant by “encoding” and why one would want to do it. Let me try to enlarge on the situation I’m in and what I’ve done about it.

Apart from wordprocessing and communications, the computer is primarily of use to the literary scholar for what we call “text-analysis”. This is in brief a generalisation of concording in the sense that concording is only one of an indefinitely large number of ways in which a text can be dissassembled and reassembled. (Indeed, the meaning of the term “concordance” is historically much more various than most of us realise.) Text-analysis, however, runs into very big problem, at the root of which is the inability of the computer with current analytic software to do much more than match character-strings — not “words”, which have meaning, but sequences of characters delimited by the space character, marks of punctuation, etc. I would suppose that at the limits of what is now commonly possible is translation-assistance software that you all probably know well enough.

For the literary scholar dealing with imaginative language, there appear to be two choices. The first is to wait until our colleagues in hardware, AI and related fields to achieve enlightenment for the machine. A long wait, I think. The other is to modify the text under investigation by inserting into it tags that render some aspects of its meaning into a form the computer can process. At this point the practice becomes various, but for me the only useful results are obtained by encoding textual phenomena in a strictly consistent fashion based on a set of rules or guidelines. To continue the example I used before, if there is some question as to whether the sun is personified in one place rather than in another, then one must be able to specify the conditions in language under which one says a personification occurs and adhere to those conditions. The alternative is to encode one’s unjustified judgement — “I say that here X occurs”. Such majesterial behaviour might be useful to an individual for his or her own purposes but won’t be very useful to anyone else.

Once one has a set of phenomena in a text encoded in this fashion, then one can apply software of whatever kind to do whatever kind of analysis can be specified algorithmically. In my case, I use what is essentially indexing software to produce lists of “persons” in the Metamorphoses of Ovid, which I and a couple of assistants have encoded for all devices of language by which persons are indicated, i.e. “names” in a very broad sense. (See <http://www.kcl.ac.uk/kis/schools/hums/ruhc/wlm/Onomasticon/> or <http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/Onomasticon/> for more than you possibly want to know about my project.) Production of my Analytical Onomasticon is a matter of textual engineering from one perspective, not very interesting to this group, I’d suppose. The perspective from which I hope that it is worthy of your time is in the “translation” from ambiguous poetry — Ovid’s could be used for a definition of what “ambiguous” means! — into utterly unambiguous computational metalanguage.

Again to follow my example, the scholarship here lies, for example, in the question of which conditions of language one says are responsible for a personification. If one were translating Ovid into a modern language, for example, one would have the luxury of carrying over the ambiguity — providing one interpreted an instance as ambiguous, i.e. as unambiguously ambiguous. With the kind of translation I am describing here, there is no such luxury. Thus, I would think, I hope, the dilemma I so often find myself in is one you all understand well, or at least recognise and can comment intelligently on.

Thanks for your patience!

– ————-
>Whether a computational metalanguage can encode some form of the meaning in a natural language text is, I think, not at all a big “if”. Let’s suppose for the sake of argument that we have a text in which love is personified. I can signify this meaning by means of some code within the text, e.g.

>…Then love <person=love> touched his heart with a fire of longing…

>The tag means only that at the marked point in the text occurs a “person” with the name of “Love”, whatever the encoder happens to mean by “person”.

Well, you’ve selected a tag and reduced the meaning to the contents of a tag. I’m not sure I’d qualify that as encoding meaning. I find this personally problematic to the extent that meaning is associated with utterance and utterance is usually context bound. You also limit meaning to the “encoder’s” interpretation. Is the encoder a human or a machine?

>The situation becomes more interesting when the personification is ambiguous, e.g.,

>…She stretched her arms to the sun and cried, “Why have you done this to me?…

>If the encoder puts in a tag that says <person=sun>, then he or she is resolving the ambiguity, which impoverishes the meaning — but which can be an interpretatively useful act providing that consistent rules are followed for when a personification is declared and when it isn’t.

Useful under what circumstances?

>Let’s not confuse here encoding as a kind of translation with machine translation, which as far as I understand it is quite a different

My error then, I assumed you were talking about a machine translation metalanguage.

>proposition. Machine translation aims, does it not, to render into a target language a text written in another language (both of these being “natural”

Absolutely.

>languages). Encoding (in my sense) aims at reducing the meaning of a text to unambiguous values, as in the act of indexing, with definite interpretative goals in mind.

Is it used for other purposes than indexing? Like keyword selection from a corpus?

>The notion of loss-in-translation cannot really be argued here, only admitted. Whether translation of a poem by Hoelderlin into English results in loss is different, and I suppose a real argument.

Very real. But I also said “gain”. There are times when things are not simply lost but gained in translation. The notion that all translation is loss is far too limiting and inaccurate.

>Perhaps in the field of translation studies all this is quite stale. I will

Well, the value of MT is to many, a tired argument, but I see that this is not your purpose.

>have to take your word (all of your words) for that. But ideas have a way of becoming re-freshed when applied to a new context, and as re-freshed ideas of returning to their point of origin reinvigorated. To paraphrase a old professor of mine, there’s no such thing as a dead idea, only a dead thinker.

Sure, it’s often interesting to recirculate ideas.

>Comments? Or have I wandered into the wrong room?

No, not at all, everyone’s welcome here.

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

———-
Dr. Willard McCarty
Senior Lecturer, Centre for Computing in the Humanities King’s College London
Strand
London WC2R 2LS
+44 (0)171 873 2784 voice; 873 5081 fax
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/kis/schools/hums/ruhc/wlm/

Tue, 11 Mar 1997 13:39:12 +0000
From: iuts2@cc.uab.es (Doug Robinson)
Subject: Re: Thacherism?

Robert writes:

>Doug, wouldn’t you consider attempts by the Canadian government to rationalize expenditures on translation at the *national* level to be a way of asking when “translation is economically rational?” I’m also sure there are ongoing debates among EU member countries about translation costs and what the best way might be to develop some sort of rationalized planning policy. Or would you associate these situations with the pragmatics of translation? Language directives and language planning (France and Canada, for example) are also examples of long-range planning by individuals who may assume the “god’s-eye” point of view but are also concerned with real issues of linguistic usage. Such issues may have an impact on economic realities beyond their original scope.

I agree that questions of the economic rationality of translation on a large scale–say, between two or more language communities, rather that at the level of specific texts–are pragmatically considered by a few people, especially in the kind of government bodies Robert mentions. And I think that’s important. I also think it’s important for theorists to raise these issues, as Pym has done. And as I said somewhere, taking the god’s-eye view is sort of what theorists DO.

My remarks along these lines were mostly directed at Pym’s rhetoric: his self-presentation as someone engaged in pragmatic problem-solving. “When to translate.” This didn’t seem to me to be the kind of pragmatic problem translators OR theorists face; it’s a pragmatic problem for a very few people in the world. I guess I was mostly pushing on Pym to call a spade a spade: to portray himself as the visionary or utopian thinker that he seems to be, someone considered with changing the translation (and generally intercultural communication) marketplace on a very large scale, and not as some kind of homegrown fixit man who repairs the items people bring to him. Not only is nobody bringing the translation marketplace to him to fix; most people don’t believe it’s broken. His job as a utopian or visionary thinker is to CONVINCE people that it’s broken, or at least that it would be made to work better–and that his model would actually improve things in significant ways.

I hope people don’t take this the wrong way. For me the words “utopian” and “visionary” are words of praise, not ridicule. I think it’s an enormously important thing Pym is doing–even when I disagree with him on specific diagnoses and cures. Most of my comments on Pym’s posts yesterday were directed at his rhetoric rather than the substance of his remarks.

Doug

Tue, 11 Mar 1997 14:14:25 +0000
From: iuts2@cc.uab.es (Doug Robinson)
Subject: moving hands and complex economies

Just found this question from John Milton in Brazil from the day I spent on the plane coming here:

4) And Doug, isn’t the moving hand a little too naive for a complex economy?

Look how the hand moves: I started off talking about invisible and hidden hands; Pym shifted that to guiding hands; now John gives us the moving hand. I’m not quite sure what John means; presumably he’s alluding to the phrase “The moving hand writes,” though for the life of me I can’t remember whose phrase it was or what it was supposed to mean …

If however the question is whether the INVISIBLE hand that Adam Smith talked about is “a little too naive for a complex economy”, the answer would have to be I don’t know. I don’t think anybody else does either, because, as I said in response to Pym (in the response stored on the website), nobody knows what Smith meant by the invisible hand. All we have is interpretations, applications of a very suggestive image or metaphor to modern (or for that matter historical) economies. My guess is that what John means when he doubts the applicability of Smith’s metaphor to complex economies is that some interpretation that he’s read or heard about or imagined seems naive or otherwise inadequate to modern political economics. Without knowing what that interpretation is, without knowing how John is imagining the invisible hand working, it’s pretty hard to tell whether that particular construction is naive or not.

In this sense John’s question is very much like Pym asking whether the conceptual tools currently at TS’s disposal are adequate to the “major questions” facing us. It’s not so much a matter of the adequacy of the images or tools in and of themselves as it is of our ability to put them to work in productive ways.

As for the complex economy: does this imply that today’s economy is complex and the economy in Adam Smith’s day was simple? I guess I’m hearing a kind of temporal chauvinism in John’s remarks: homespun metaphors like the invisible (or for that matter moving) hand may have been good enough for the 18th century when things were really simple, but not any more. I don’t know. Certainly the global economy is more complex today than it was three centuries ago; but are we talking quantum leaps in complexity? Or, worse, are we talking night and day, black and white, simple and complex? Adam Smith simple, today complex. Adam Smith moving hand naive but fine for simple economy. Today economy complex naive not so fine. Doug naive for thinking Adam Smith fine for today.

Or something like that.

John: do you really think the Nozick interpretation of invisible-hand theory that I developed in my paper, in terms of disaggregated agencies, is naive? If so, how? It seems pretty damned complex to me–to the point that it’s hard for me to keep track of all the variables I’m trying to hold in my head at once. As an ideal model of how economic agents operate it’s far from ideal, because it’s so complicated. So I’m thinking that either I’m stupider than I think I am, or you didn’t read what I wrote–that you saw Adam Smith’s name and thought “oh THAT’s what he’s on about is it!” and stopped reading.

But maybe there’s something I’m missing here.

Doug

Date: Tue, 11 Mar 1997 14:40:02 +0000
From: iuts2@cc.uab.es (Doug Robinson)
Subject: invisible hands and gas chambers

Still taking things off the website from when I was up in the air:

I wrote to Estela:

>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
oon 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 Estela replied:

>I think YES.

Yes translation is powerless?

>Beyond the single defiant or subversive gesture your “invisible hands” would destroy the reputation of that translation that infringes the law of the father. If Schmidt would have misinterpreted Hitler he would have ended in the gas chamber.

In what sense “beyond” that gesture?

And I really don’t see the pertinence of this stuff about reputations and gas chambers. So what? The question was not whether a translator could GET AWAY with translating subversively (though I think it could be done, and no doubt has been done many times), but whether translators have power. Okay, so Schmidt’s reputation is destroyed. So he’s killed. A personal tragedy for him and his family and friends. But suppose in the process he undoes some of the English naivete about Hitler in 1938, so that they are able to mobilize against him earlier and destroy him sooner. Suppose by sacrificing his reputation and perhaps his life Schmidt was able to save millions of lives. Then isn’t it rather childish to whine about the loss of his reputation or life? And isn’t it obvious that in that moment when he “mistranslated” Hitler (regardless of what might have happened to him afterwards) he would have wielded enormous power?

But again, as with Laura’s response to this hypothetical case I proposed, it is fascinating to me to watch the conditioned fear response kick in when anyone even MENTIONS the possibility of radically subversive translation. We have been so powerfully conditioned NOT TO THINK about transgression and translation that hypothetical cases like the one I mentioned generate massive anxieties and anger, leading to a desire to silence the source of the bad feelings.

Despite the obvious power not only of the interpreter in the Hitler-Chamberlain summit of 1938 but of the example as well, Estela and Laura want to go on insisting that translators have no power. Not because it’s true, but because it’s dangerous to start thinking it MIGHT be true. Thinking like that might lead to acting as if translators had power, and that would be REALLY scary.

>Translators’ accuracy is
>checked by the same “invisible hands” that constraint our performance.

Perfectly? Is the accuracy of every interpretation checked? No. Are there always other interpreters present to check the accuracy of one interpreter’s work? Nowadays in summit meetings, yes–but not in every act of interpreting. I don’t even want to count the number of times that I’ve translated into Finnish, not my native language, some horrible piece of gibberish written in bad English by a Japanese engineer, and been told that my translation would not be edited by anyone; it would go straight into print. (And, of course, sometimes the translation is edited by another engineer, who corrects two words that are slightly wrong and then makes absolute hash out of the rest of the translation.)

The point is not only that the “checking” of our work by various “invisible hands” is less than perfect, and that there is therefore plenty of room for subversion, if the translator or interpreter is so inclined. It is also that the belief structure that Estela here evinces–we’re completely powerless, we’re totally under the control of external forces–is a myth. We are controlled, yes–but never perfectly or completely. And the channeling of ideology means in large part that a significant factor in our control by “xternal forces

Date: Tue, 11 Mar 1997 15:02:18 +0000
From: iuts2@cc.uab.es (Doug Robinson)
Subject: more on invisible hands and power

Well, Eudora decided to screw with my msg–wouldn’t let me edit a word, and then when I insisted, sent the whole thing to the list as it was, unfinished.

So here’s what I was writing in response to Estela:

and now let me finish:

… by “external forces” is our internalization of those forces, our willingness to “channel” them without actual external enforcement (this is standard ideology theory from Nietzsche to Althusser). Hence the importance of not letting anybody talk about the translator’s power, and of denying that power in face of counterexamples. That repression is part of the channeling of the ideology that keeps us in check–that keeps us powerless.

I can see that I have an uphill battle to fight with this channeling idea. It’s too much of an excluded middle to make much sense to a lot of people. At the beginning of the colloquium everybody was reading it to mean the translator’s total passivity, and protesting that translators do have SOME power; Laura and Estela now seem to be saying exactly the opposite, that translators ARE totally passive, perfectly controlled by invisible hands. Yesterday Pym wrote me privately to protest some critique I’d written of him, pointing out what he took to be a discrepancy between my invisible-hand theory and my notion that translation scholars generate problems “out there” by seeing them, constructing them as problems, and in fact do that by attempting to solve problems that no one else THINKS are problems. How can I simultaneously be arguing an invisible-hands thesis and a constructivist thesis? Which is it going to be, are we passive or active?

Well, the answer is BOTH. But that seems to be an incredibly hard case to make. The ghosts and the ideologies and the problems and the rest do come from the outside, they do exist “out there”–AND they exist in the subject’s imagination, are invented by him or her, are constructed AS ghosts or ideologies or problems by the subject. Both the one and the other. In the simplest terms possible, the problem of “too much translation” that Pym addresses ISN’T a problem until he addresses it as one–and then, of course, after that it has always been a problem. It simultaneously is and is not “out there”–and by the same token he simultaneously is and is not inventing/imagining it. It IS a problem, and it isn’t until he CONSTRUCTS it as one. And I’m trying to do the same thing with the “spirits” that some translators have claimed to channel in their translations. (It does help enormously that Derrida made an analogous case about ghosts in Specters of Marx.)

Frightened of simplicity? Pym implied yesterday that some of us, maybe including me, were. Personally, I’m pretty suspicious of it, but only frightened of the dogmatic forms simplicity takes when it is driven by powerful ideological repressions.

Doug

Tue, 11 Mar 1997 16:29:04 +0200
From: David Baron <Davidb@accentsoft.com>
Subject: Perusal of the online colloq

I finally was able to read the two lead articles. The server is so slow that it was nigh impossible to get them.

My reactions as a non-scholar in this field, being more active in software dealing with language problems is:

1. The first article comparing translation to spirit-mediums or in more modern idea, cyborg process, to me is off the mark. If hired to translate, I have the original document, presumably know the language and something of the subject field, and am accountable for the output. If Urim and Thumim are useful tools to do the work, use them, but the accountablility remains. If the pervayer of the “Book of Mormon” never even read his source, how does he or his readers know he really translated anything? While the help of G-d as partner in work is needed, accountability of the human output remains in force!

2. The second article, while a simplistic model described quite abundantly, show some sense: The idea that there comes a point when one should teach/learn/master a language for long term benefit rather than continue to rely on translation is sound and important. Not all of us can learn a languages so easily, however. I actually used a translation project as a means of learning a language, somewhat successfully. The author’s assessment of the European Community’s language problem demands attention. National pride would not be hurt by improving communication at a practical and personal level.

Date: Tue, 11 Mar 1997 16:05:26 +0000
From: sgolden@cc.uab.es (Sean Golden)
Subject: Re: moving hands and complex economies

>Look how the hand moves: I started off talking about invisible and hidden hands; Pym shifted that to guiding hands; now John gives us the moving hand. I’m not quite sure what John means; presumably he’s alluding to the phrase “The moving hand writes,” though for the life of me I can’t remember whose phrase it was or what it was supposed to mean …

The moving hand writes upon the wall, and having writ, moves on…

From the Bible (guess who’s hand iy is that writes publically, on the wall, the private sins of guess whom…)

Sean Golden, Dean, Facultat de Traduccio Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona
08193 Bellaterra, BARCELONA, Spain
Tel: 34 3 5811374 FAX: 34 3 5811037
e-mail: sgolden@cc.uab.es

Date: Tue, 11 Mar 1997 16:11:29 +0000
From: sgolden@cc.uab.es (Sean Golden)
Subject: Re: Perusal of the online colloq

>I finally was able to read the two lead articles. The server is so slow that it was nigh impossible to get them.

At the beginning of the collouquium I sent a plain text version of each of the position papers and/or responses that are housed at the Web site. I did this because there are time delays and protection problems. A number of people have joined the list since then (I’ll send out a new statistical/geographical breakdown soon). So I am going to resend the plain text versions for the benefit of new people (apologies to those who already received them). There are seven plain text versions.

Sean Golden, Dean, Facultat de Traduccio Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona
08193 Bellaterra, BARCELONA, Spain
Tel: 34 3 5811374 FAX: 34 3 5811037
e-mail: sgolden@cc.uab.es

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