traanslation theory

Translation -- Art or Science?

One of the most interesting examples generated by the debate over the philosophy of the North American Translation Workshop is an anecdote that chronicles the practice of an experiment of Harvard students, all of whom had to translate a passage to contextually render its meaning to individuals of their own historical place in time. It is noted that this practice, of "actual translation" or enacted translation "opened up fixed ways of seeing" these received documents of their particular culture. (15) In other words even translation of the familiar is not a literal process, where a set of words takes upon the meaning of another set of words, in a language other than the original document and other than the language of the writer. Translation is a holistic interaction of language, culture, and the individual translator's artistic sensibility.

Thus, the philosophy of the North American Translation Workshop, first and foremost explores why there was a boom or a noted increase in desire to translate the works of other cultures, customs and languages during the 1960's, yet there was no corresponding increase in including translation as a component of creative writing programs during the period. Inherent to this assumption is that translation is a less creative process than original writing process itself. However, a translator must grapple with the fact that the act of translation is itself a creative act, a negotiation between alternative creative modalities of expression in two different cultures -- the translator's and the writer's -- rather than a simple, linear mechanical work of making one word stand for another word.

This idea seems to fly in the face of the philosophy of the "Science" of Translation, which hopes to render a document as perfectly as possible into another language. The North American Translation Workshop would state that such an ideal is impossible. For instance, to read Homer as a Greek individual of so many centuries ago as a contemporary is an entirely different cultural as well as linguistic experience no human being today can attain. To render the Greek literally causes the Greek to sound stiff and archaic in a way that would never be experienced by a contemporary of the poet, for instance -- or even by the legions of Greek schoolboys who were forced to memorize and recite the verse of 'Homer' -- the verse whomever that conglomeration of those oral traditions may be said to be called 'Homer.'

It could be argued that to render Homer in vernacular English, or more vernacular poetry, is a truer example of how Greeks of the day experienced these legendary works of literature. However, to simply 'translate' Shakespearean English into modern slang would not be a true translation, either, if one were grappling with that particular project of translation, because even though the Elizabethans used a different vocabulary than us and were more comfortable with the iambic form by and large, the poetry of these plays was still 'heightened' to their ear. Individuals value the vernacular more today, and poetry less than either the Greeks or Elizabethan English, and thus any encounter with these texts will be different than theirs, will be a translation even if one is from an ancient alternative language and the other text is still in recognizable but different English.

If it is so difficult to tread a fine line between 'dumbing down' and rendering a work entirely into one's own cultural understanding to the point that its initial milieu is lost, one is best to stick with a literal mode of translation, a scientific advocate might argue. However, the creativity that is generated by individuals such as Ezra Pound, for instance, producing translations of ancient Chinese verse that are themselves both original works of art yet render the works more accessible when read in more strict translations seem to fly in the face of such a rigid assertion.