Tidings of Holiday Joy to All Linguists Everywhere!!!

[Alexander Gross]

I am delighted to extend the warmest of greetings to all my colleagues on
the occasion of Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanzaa, the Solstice, and all other
such festivals regardless of name or alleged occasion.  And of course New
Year's as well.

And I am also pleased to announce the publication of my most recent paper by
J. Benjamins, entitled "Teaching Translation as a Form of Writing" and
contained in "Beyond the Ivory Tower: Rethinking Translation Pedagogy," Vol.
XII of the American Translators Association Scholarly Monograph Series,
Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 2003, edited by Brian Baer and Geoffrey Koby.

In this paper by means of a simple and transparently commonsensical
Gedankenexperiment, I manage--without once mentioning the names of those
connected with the Cambridge-on-Charles school of linguistics--to demolish
the basic assumptions advanced by members of that school.

It starts from the notion that everybody is translating all the time, even
within a single language, continually explaining events, processes, and
arguments to each other so that the people they are talking to can share--or
at least come to appreciate--their understanding.  And in so doing, they
often have to come up with slightly different explanations for different
people.

We may prefer to call this process paraphrase rather than translation when
the
process is carried out in only one language, but what is truly going on is
remarkably similar.  This can be proved by the simple Gedankenexperiment of
seating a group of trained journalists in a room, handing them a paragraph,
and asking each of them to write a paraphrase of it.  Each of the
journalists, even if they have all attended the same journalism school under
the same professors, will turn in clearly different paraphrases of that
paragraph, just as a group of professional translators will all turn in
different translations from a passage in a foreign language.

And if you read all the paraphrases aloud to the class, since all people
have their own idiolects and understand even their native language somewhat
differently, you will find quite a few questionable departures from the
original paragraph, just as can be the case with translations from foreign
languages.  And in a few cases, you will even find so great a departure from
the sense of the original paragraph that you will be obliged to call it an
"error in paraphrase," similar to the "errors in translation" that
unfortunately also crop up.

Said another way, translation is a form of paraphrase, one that merely
happens to be dependent on the structures, available vocabulary, and
cultural outlook of two languages rather than one.  Or, alternately,
paraphrase is a form of translation carried out in a single language.

This means that the flaws so often imagined to be inherent in the process of
translation are in fact entirely inherent in the process of language itself
and little more than a reflection of those more basic flaws.  In other
words, it's not translation that is basically at fault, but in fact
language.

Which in turn means that language itself is subject to its own
indeterminacy, a  basic imperfection which can be partially remedied in the
case of written or spoken language only by highly skilled writers and
speakers and in the case of translation only by highly skilled translators
and interpreters. This applies to all languages, to any language, and to the
abstract construct of "Language." What is patently true within a single
language is also even more true for a process expressing one language and
culture in the terms of another.

In this context, the notion of any ultimate universal scheme providing a
foundation for all languages everywhere, whether structural or theoretical,
such as the ruminations from Cambridge-on-Charles, becomes so untenable as
to be risible.

Once more, with all possible joy for the holidays!

alex gross