A year abroad is coming to an end

11:23 AM

Friedrich Schleiermacher was himself a masterful translator, whose German translations of Plato are still widely used and admired today, nearly two hundred years after they were done. So his views on translation carry a certain amount of authority.
In his text “On the Different Methods of Translating”,Schleiermacher presents the ever-present dilemmas of translation, which are fundamentally related to language (as language is both the content and the medium of translation).
Language - as he mentions on page 47 - is namely both 1) an act of the speaker, and 2) something that acts upon the speaker - this dualistic relationship hinges on the necessity that the speaker can only express his thoughts through language, while at the same time the creation of (new) language (usage) is dependent on the speaker.
In trying to identify differing methods of translation, Schleiermacher creates two categories between which - supposedly - all translation work can be divided: that of the interpreter and that of the translator.
The interpreter - in this sense primarily a figure utilized for business transactions

“Thus is translation in this realm little more than a mechanical task which can be performed by anyone who has moderate knowledge of the two languages, with little difference to be found between better and lesser efforts as long as obvious errors are avoided.” (p. 45)

The translator, on the contrary, is a associated with the areas of science and art, which necessitates something other than direct, factual translation, as he notes on page 45:

if indeed only the narrative content of - for instance - a work of fiction were relevant “… then all translation in the areas of art and science, assuming the sole matter to be communicated was the information contained in the utterance or piece of writing, would be as purely mechanical as in business transactions” … “one might claim of any given translation that it placed the foreign reader in the same relationship to the author and his work as was the reader of the original.” (p. 45)

As subgenres of the translator’s work, he further points out two different methods of approaching translation; paraphrase and imitation.
Where the paraphrast seeks to trace the connections between thoughts in the original work by interpolated sentences and sometimes, running commentary, in order to present the reader with a full idea of the content of the original, the imitator focuses more on reproducing the experience and effect of reading the original for his own readers:
“given the differences between languages, with which so many other differences are essentially caught up, we have no other recourse but to contrive a copy, en entire work comprised of part that differ noticeably from the part of the original, yet which in its effect comes so close to the original as the differences in the material permit.” (p. 48)

While reading, I identified seven points in the text, which I’ve summed up

(1) Translation typically faces the problem of a conceptual gulf between the language of the text to be translated and the translator's home languag
(2) This situation makes translation an extremely difficult task, posing a major obstacle to the attainment of translation's primary goal, the faithful reproduction of meaning. In this connection, Schleiermacher in particular notes the following problem, which one might dub the paradox of paraphrase: If, faced with the task of translating an alien concept, a translator attempts to reproduce its intension by reproducing its extension through an elaborate paraphrase in his own language, he will generally find that as he gets closer to the original extension he undermines the original intension in other ways. For example, faced with Homer's word chlôros, which Homer sometimes applies to things that we would classify as green (e.g. healthy foliage) but at other times to things that we would classify as yellow (e.g. honey), a translator might attempt to reproduce the extension correctly by translating the word as “green or yellow.” But in doing so he would be sacrificing the original intension in other ways -- for Homer did not have the concept green (only chlôros), and in addition for Homer chlôros was not a disjunctive concept. (Schleiermacher also identifies a number of further challenges which often exacerbate the difficulty of translation. For example, he notes that in the case of poetry it is necessary to reproduce not only the semantical but also the musical aspects of the original, such as meter and rhyme -- and this not only as a desideratum over and above the main task of reproducing meaning, but also as an essential part of that task, because in poetry such musical features serve as essential vehicles for the precise expression of meaning.
(3) Because of this daunting difficulty the translator needs to possess hermeneutical expertise and to be an “artist” if he is to cope with the task of translation at all adequately.
(4) The conceptual gulf which poses the central challenge here might in principle be tackled in one of two broad ways: either by bringing the author's linguistic-conceptual world closer to that of the reader of the translation or vice versa. The former approach had in fact been championed by Luther in his classic essay On Translating: An Open Letter (1530) and practiced by him in his translation of the bible (he called it Verdeutschung, “Germanizing”). However, Schleiermacher finds it unacceptable, mainly because it inevitably distorts the author's concepts and thoughts. Schleiermacher therefore champions the alternative approach of bringing the reader towards the linguistic-conceptual world of the author as the only acceptable one.
(5) According to Schleiermacher, the key to the solution lies in the plasticity of language. Because of this plasticity, even if the usages of words and hence the concepts expressed by the language into which the translation is to be done as it currently exists are incommensurable with the author's, it is still possible for a translator to “bend the language of the translation as far possible towards that of the original in order to communicate as far as possible an impression of the system of concepts developed in it.”
(6) This approach makes for translations which are considerably less easy to read than those which can be achieved by the alternative approach (Verdeutschung). However, this is an acceptable price to pay given that the only alternative is a failure to convey the author's meaning at all accurately. Moreover, the offending peculiarities have a positive value in that they constantly remind the reader of the conceptual unfamiliarity of the material that is being translated and of the “bending” approach that is being employed.
(7) Even this optimal approach to translation has severe limitations, however. In particular, it will often be impossible to reproduce the holistic aspects of meaning -- the several related usages of a given word, the systems of related words / concepts, and the distinctive grammar of the language. And since these holistic features are internal to a word's meaning, this will entail a shortfall in the communication of its meaning by the translation. Reading a translation therefore inevitably remains only a poor second best to reading the original. Translation is still justified, though -- not only by the obvious consideration that it makes works available to people who want to read them but who are not in the fortunate position of knowing the original languages, but also by the less obvious one that through its “bending” approach it effects a conceptual enrichment of their language.

Sommer Thyme

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