December 17, 2015 - 00:46
*pre-apologies and warning: abstract
The Question within the Answer
George Steiner in After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, has argued:
“any model of communication is at the same time a model of trans-lation... No two historical epochs, no two social classes, no two localities use words and syntax to signify exactly the same things, to send identical signals of valuation and inference. Neither do two human beings.”
The Contact Zone of Translation
We are so different, and yet – you will hopefully gather some meaning from this essay. You will read my story and imagine it as you do, which is entirely different from my envisioning of my own words. The scene of a Persian bazaar, hustling with life and breath, smelling of petrol and spices, is something I could write about forever. My already over-analyzed interpretations of the contact zone know no end.
My Understanding of Translation
The structure of translation works from a source language and moves to a target language – though it is not quite so simple. Differences between communities separate us in ways of thinking. Not every word has an equal other in another language, as each word is reflective of the culture and history from which it came. Translation is much more than just communicating across language.
In addition to acts of translation that are connected to speech, written texts, and physical objects, translation extends to the non-verbal. This is encompassing of facial expressions, gestures, dress, art.
There is always a loss in translation: there is no possibility that any translation will be an exact replica of the source language. In this dichotomy between the source and the target, a translator cannot focus as much on the source as much as the perspective by which the target will be viewed, and this depends entirely on the translator.
In raising this issue, the treachery of translation comes forth. How does one measure how faithful one text is to another, what does it mean to be faithful to the source test? How does one translate as accurately as possible? Is there a right way to translate?
The role of a translator is to interpret a text to the best of their capabilities, though some may say that translators have a sort of artistic freedom. In saying so, a translator could possibly fly away with a writer’s words, without responsibility to the source text. This is how I would imagine a treachery of translation. However, I would also imagine that the various interpretations of a source text to be necessary to acquire a fuller more rounded target text. No one translation will work on its own to reflect the source, and so no translation is truly treacherous, is it? In saying so, the notion of objectivity is also gone. It is the collective ability to perceive that will stop the inconvenient truths.
Translation and the Senses
Sound doesn’t exist in text. As you read this, most probably in your head – do you imagine the sound of my voice? Do you wonder about the pauses I hope to create between words and phrases, about the meaning of the space between?
While sound is integral to the meaning, so is the silence.
How does one translate silences? The cadence of a verse, in which two deliberate words may frame ‘the space between’ is integral to meaning in many cultures.
Translation and the Self
I live my culture outside of its zone of living; a space between divides me from the insignificant significance – that which the people living in the Persian context, can pick up without my uttering of a single word – that which I hope to understand, but never will. What is stopping me?
Is this not what we must destroy?
Must not we rid ourselves of the space between, of the separations that hinder our capabilities to be one?
What about the other spaces between? The one between my mind and my hand, which punches the letters out to form these words, the one between you and your screen, the one between me and you, between us and the earth?
Will we ever be one?
What I’m trying to say, to myself and to you – is that I can sit here all night and contemplate how ecological intelligence is very relevant though our way of thinking and understanding is flawed. And the way in which we change this, is by returning to the beginning – with our senses. Once I control my senses fully, then I can take the next step.