Priming Translation: Cognitive, Affective, and Social Factors 2022009670, 9780367681159, 9780367681197, 9781003134312

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Introduction: Prime Time
The Structure of the Book
Part I: The Left-Brain Interpreter (LBI): Cognitive Priming
Chapter 1: The Confabulating LBI
Empirical Research Review: Confabulation
Ideas for Research: “Overtranslation” as Confabulation Primed by the LBI
Empirical Research Review: The LBI in Neurotypicals
Ideas for Research: LBI-Priming Normative Translation
Part II: The Right-Brain Interpreter (RBI): Affective Priming
Chapter 2: The Affective RBI
Empirical Research Review: Right-Brain-to-Right-Brain Affective Communication
Empirical Research Review: The Translator’s and Interpreter’s Emotional Intelligence as Primed and Organized by the RBI
Classroom Report: The RBI as a Literary Interpreter
Ideas for Research: Translating as Traveling and the Transformative Affect of Wonder
Chapter 3: The Evolutionary Origins and Function of the RBI
Empirical Research Review: Evolutionary Origins
Sociological Research Report: Bourdieu on the Affective “Secret Code”
Ideas for Research: The RBI as the “Secret Code” of Translating
Anecdote: An Interesting Series of Events in Volgograd, Russia
Ideas for Research: The Double-Binds of Translation
Chapter 4: Aprosodic Linguistics
Theory: Correctness Anxiety
Empirical Research Review: Feeling Words
Ideas for Research: Not “Mindless” but “Heartless” Translating
Chapter 5: Parasomatic Semiotics
Theory: RBI Semiotics—The Peircean Interpretant
Theory: RBI Semiology—The Saussurean Parasomatics of Language
Ideas for Research: The RBI-Priming Effects of Multimodal Translations
Theory: Affective-Becoming-Conative Emergentism
Ideas for Research: Translation as an Indirect Speech Act
Part III: The Collective Full-Body Interpreter (CFBI): Social Priming
Chapter 6: The CFBI and the Unification of Language
Theory: Bakhtinian Heteroglossia
Ideas for Research: Heteroglot CFBI Anchors and Primes for Cognitive Translation Research
Chapter 7: The Shared Interpreter
Empirical Research Review: Guidance through Social Experience
Empirical Research Review: Priming
Ideas for Research: Priming Translation with Money and Love
Conclusion
Notes
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Conclusion
References
Index

Citation preview

Priming Translation

This innovative volume builds on Michael S. Gazzaniga’s Interpreter Theory toward radically expanding the theoretical and methodological scope of translational priming research. Gazzaniga’s Interpreter Theory, based on empirical studies carried out with split-brain patients, argues for the Left-Brain Interpreter (LBI), a module in the brain’s left hemisphere that seeks to make sense of their world based on available evidence—and, where no evidence is available, primed by past memories, confabulates coherence. The volume unpacks this idea in translation research to test whether translators are primed to confabulate by the LBI in their own work. Robinson investigates existing empirical research to test hypotheses on the translational links between the LBI and cognitive priming, the Right-Brain Interpreter and affective priming, and the Collective Full-Brain Interpreter and social priming. Taken together, the book seeks to open translational priming studies up to the full range of cognitive, affective, and social primes and to prime cognitive translation researchers to implement this broader dynamic in future research. This book will be of interest to scholars in translation and interpreting studies, especially those working in cognitive translation and interpreting studies. Douglas Robinson is Professor of Translation Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. His recent Routledge books on translation include The Behavioral Economics of Translation and Translation as a Form: A Centennial Commentary on Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator”.

Priming Translation Cognitive, Affective, and Social Factors Douglas Robinson

First published 2023 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158, USA and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN, UK Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business. © 2023 Douglas Robinson The right of Douglas Robinson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Robinson, Douglas, 1954- author. Title: Priming translation : cognitive, affective, and social factors / Douglas Robinson. Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022009670 | ISBN 9780367681159 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367681197 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003134312 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Translating and interpreting--Psychological aspects. | Translating and interpreting--Social aspects. | Cognition. Classification: LCC P306.97.P79 R63 2023 | DDC 418/.02019--dc23/eng/20220309 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022009670 ISBN: 978-0-367-68115-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-68119-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-13431-2 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003134312 Typeset in Sabon by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)

Contents

Introduction: Prime Time

1

PART I

The Left-Brain Interpreter (LBI): Cognitive Priming

13

1 The Confabulating LBI 15 Empirical Research Review: Confabulation 15 Ideas for Research: “Overtranslation” as Confabulation Primed by the LBI 17 Empirical Research Review: The LBI in Neurotypicals 20 Ideas for Research: LBI-Priming Normative Translation 25 PART II

The Right-Brain Interpreter (RBI): Affective Priming

29

2 The Affective RBI 31 Empirical Research Review: Right-Brain-to-Right-Brain Affective Communication 31 Empirical Research Review: The Translator’s and Interpreter’s Emotional Intelligence as Primed and Organized by the RBI 35 Classroom Report: The RBI as a Literary Interpreter 39 Ideas for Research: Translating as Traveling and the Transformative Affect of Wonder 40 3 The Evolutionary Origins and Function of the RBI 44 Empirical Research Review: Evolutionary Origins 44 Sociological Research Report: Bourdieu on the Affective “Secret Code” 45

vi Contents Ideas for Research: The RBI as the “Secret Code” of Translating 47 Anecdote: An Interesting Series of Events in Volgograd, Russia 50 Ideas for Research: The Double-Binds of Translation 53 4 Aprosodic Linguistics 56 Theory: Correctness Anxiety 56 Empirical Research Review: Feeling Words 58 Ideas for Research: Not “Mindless” but “Heartless” Translating 65 5 Parasomatic Semiotics 72 Theory: RBI Semiotics—The Peircean Interpretant 73 Theory: RBI Semiology—The Saussurean Parasomatics of Language 76 Ideas for Research: The RBI-Priming Effects of Multimodal Translations 79 Theory: Affective-Becoming-Conative Emergentism 79 Ideas for Research: Translation as an Indirect Speech Act 83 PART III

The Collective Full-Body Interpreter (CFBI): Social Priming

89

6 The CFBI and the Unification of Language 91 Theory: Bakhtinian Heteroglossia 91 Ideas for Research: Heteroglot CFBI Anchors and Primes for Cognitive Translation Research 96 7 The Shared Interpreter 98 Empirical Research Review: Guidance through Social Experience 100 Empirical Research Review: Priming 104 Ideas for Research: Priming Translation with Money and Love 108 Conclusion 109 Notes References Index

111 114 130

Introduction Prime Time

In “Shared Representations and the Translation Process,” Schaeffer and Carl (2015) pose the question of what the source and target texts share during the act of translating, and to that end mobilize the distinction that de Groot (1997: 30) draws between “vertical” translation, where “the source text is parsed and abstracted into more or less language[-]specific concepts or even non-linguistic concepts and then re-expressed in the target language” (Schaeffer and Carl 2015: 22), and “horizontal” translation, where “items in the two languages are linked via shared representations,” so that a given syntactic structure, say, will activate “a cognitive representation which it shares with the target text” (23). As their title suggests, they find it more cognitively useful and accurate to work on the horizontal plane, where, they say, transference mostly operates through “shared memory representations” (24; emphasis added) from the formallinguistic realms of morphology, syntax, and semantics and therefore can be empirically tested through priming experiments in those specific linguistic realms. In this book, I pick up the methodological rationale for priming research in translation at this point, and, while agreeing with Schaeffer and Carl in principle— Our view is that priming forms the basis for the horizontal method: the influence of a previously processed item or structure on a subsequently processed item or structure forms the basis for horizontal translation. This is in line with Pickering and Ferreira (2008: 447, italics in the original) who argue that priming “reflects the operation of an implicit learning mechanism,” i.e., that repeated exposure to primes creates long-lasting memories. So rather than learning about translational equivalents, implicit mechanisms during repeated exposure to source and target texts establishes shared representations in the translator’s long[-]term memory. (26)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003134312-1

2 Introduction —I expand the scope of experience within which “repeated exposure to primes creates long-lasting memories” quite drastically. At the very least, one would think linguistic pragmatics might offer another realm in which “repeated exposure to primes creates long-lasting memories”— how else do we learn to manage social interactions by the time we reach majority? The social priming of levels of politeness, for example, is absolutely essential for schoolchildren in talking to teachers and other adults—and surely, as Hatim and Mason (1990) began insisting quite a while ago, of great importance in translating as well. As I have suggested (Robinson 2003, 2006a), most linguistic pragmatics remains quite formalistic—as I put it, “constative”—with a focus on abstract structure rather than the interactive performance of social identities and other realities, and that persistent formalism would seem to lend itself quite nicely to the kind of cognitivist priming studies that Schaeffer and Carl envision. But doesn’t the acquisition of social competence require “repeated exposure to primes” of a more performative nature as well? Don’t we learn to interact effectively with others by being primed in action, in actual social situations where the stakes are high—where ridicule and embarrassment all too easily flagellate the learner for the tiniest mistake? And speaking of ridicule and embarrassment: aren’t affective states the most powerful primes of all, or at least the highly charged vehicles in which primes ride? This is the realm in which I have situated my own cognitivist studies of translation since The Translator’s Turn (1991), of course, under the rubric of “the somatics of translation.” And more recently, I have begun to expand somatic theory into the “ideological” or “ideosomatic” realm of icosis, exploring how socioaffective normativities prime adherence to ideological orthodoxies.1 But to be precise, I have not explored the performativity, somatics, and icosis of translation in the explicit terms of primes. The priming of translators’ decisions has been implicit in all of my cognitivist work since The Translator’s Turn; in this book, I make it explicit. Note, however, several things that this book is not. Fabio Alves (2019: xi), in his Foreword to García (2019), distinguishes between the kind of 4EA cognitive science explored in this book and the neurocognitive science tracked by García: Recently, however, a new trend has emerged in cognitive translation and interpreting studies, advocating in favor of 4EA cognition, namely, a view which considers human cognition, and indirectly the act of translating and interpreting, to be embedded, extended, embodied, enacted, and affective (Muñoz Martín 2017; Risku 2017). When confronted with the present volume, it is then only natural that readers versed in mainstream approaches within 4EA cognition would ask: why should translation and interpreting studies be

Introduction  3 concerned with neurocognition at all? To that remark one could add an even stronger question: why is it important to locate translation in the brain when cognitive translation and interpreting studies seem to be moving away from a strict experimental paradigm towards a view of cognition which is situated and relies on contextual factors surrounding cognitive aspects related to the act of translating and interpreting? On the one hand, this is not a study of neurocognition. In García’s terms, my approach is “non-neural.” I am indeed interested in “a view of cognition which is situated and relies on contextual factors surrounding cognitive aspects related to the act of translating and interpreting.” My research is emphatically “within 4EA cognition.” On the other hand, however, that inclination does not make this book purely humanistic—purely opposed to “a strict experimental paradigm.” Priming studies are experimental research that is psychocognitive rather than neurocognitive in focus. Rather than studying neural pathways, they use priming to mobilize situated, contextual, attitudinal, and behavioral observations for empirical research into the psychology of cognition. The book is also not an empirical research report (though it contains some empirical research reports); rather, it builds on other researchers’ empirical studies to develop priming tests as a blueprint for further empirical research. Specifically, I draw on cognitive psychologist Michael S. Gazzaniga’s intriguing “Interpreter Theory” to suggest cognitive, affective, and collective priming tests for the psychology of monolingual and translingual discourse. Gazzaniga was lucky enough in the early 1960s, as the PhD student of Roger Sperry at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), to get involved with the study of split-brain patients. In one experiment, two decades in, he and his PhD student Joseph LeDoux— now one of the world’s leading affective neuroscientists—showed a splitbrain patient’s right hemisphere the instruction to stand, and the patient stood. But because the left hemisphere’s speech centers had no access to instructions given to the right hemisphere alone, the patient had no idea why he had stood up. So Gazzaniga asked him why he had stood up, and he said that he needed to stretch. That, Gazzaniga realized, was a confabulation. The left brain, without access to the full story, had invented a story that seemed to impose a plausible explanation on the standing. And from that, Gazzaniga began to theorize the existence of a Left-Brain Interpreter (LBI) whose task it was to explain the world based on the evidence available to it—and, even when no evidence was available, to invent explanations, primed by past memories of, say, standing to stretch stiff muscles. Gazzaniga doesn’t mention priming: that’s my confabulation, if you like. I argue here that the speculative path Gazzaniga sketches out for the cognitive neuroscience of language, based on the positing of an LBI, leads

4 Introduction (confabulatorily?) to the possibility of a Right-Brain Interpreter (RBI), which interprets the world affectively, conatively, and kinesthetically, through visual and auditory inputs; and, further, once the LBI and RBI in a single head have entered into heteroglot interaction with the LBIs and RBIs in other heads, to the possibility of a Collective Full-Brain Interpreter (CFBI) as well. To put that in emergentist terms, the RBI emerges evolutionarily out of primate tool use and gesture; the LBI emerges out of the RBI through the mirror-neuron systems in and near right-hemisphere Broca; and the CFBI emerges out of RBI-to-RBI and LBI-to-LBI communication with others in and through the stabilization of social interaction. Each emergence is ongoing and vulnerable to disruption. Each LBI, responding to one or more RBIs from “below” and one or more CFBIs from “above,” will confabulate in unpredictable ways. Each CFBI will consolidate “conflict management” in situated and therefore volatile ways. And so on. By way of starting us off, let’s consider a paragraph from a source text that I translated recently, Mia Kankimäki’s feminist memoir Naiset joita ajattelen öisin (2018), which I translated for Simon & Schuster as The Women I Think About at Night (Robinson 2020b): Koko talven tarvon siinä suossa päivästä toiseen, mutta en edelleenkään tiedä, miten tämä kirja pitäisi kirjoittaa. Olen niin turhautunut, että tekee mieli kirkua. Koetan ajatella sitä, mitä kuvataiteilijaystäväni Jyrki sanoi – että tämä työvaihe, niin sanottu paskan linkoaminen, kuuluu asiaan, ja että koko ammatissa on kyse vain siitä, miten tämän vaiheen kestää. Minä en selvästikään kestä. Ja koska olen ajanut itseni vapaaehtoisesti täydelliseen sosiaaliseen tyhjiöön, makaan iltaisin yksin television ääressä itseinhon vallassa. Tuntuu melkein siltä kuin olisin masentunut. Mutta miten helvetissä voisin olla masentunut, minähän olen keskellä tätä perkeleen unelmien elämää! (376; emphasis added, the first corresponding to [X] in the translation below, the second corresponding to [Y]) Let me first translate that as affect-freely as I can—not literally, just with an effort to keep affective value judgments to a bare minimum—but with two brief passages left untranslated for discussion, marked [X] and [Y]: All winter I trudge in that swamp from one day to the next, but I still don’t know how this book should be written. I am so frustrated that I want to scream. I try to think about what my painter friend Jyrki said—that this work phase, the so-called [X], belongs to the thing, and that everything in the profession is about how you withstand this phase. Clearly I’m not withstanding it. And because I have voluntarily driven myself into a total social vacuum, I lie in front of the television

Introduction  5 evenings in the sway of self-loathing. It feels almost as if I were depressed. But how the hell could I be depressed, after all I’m [Y]! Now clearly there are affect-markings there: “trudge,” “frustrated,” “scream,” “self-loathing,” “depressed,” and “the hell.” This is a paragraph about not being happy with the writing. The question, though, is how that unhappiness should be shaded. Is it real self-loathing? Is the paragraph’s affective bass note bitter, or something else? Is it possible that the author is deliberately exaggerating her frustration, her inclination to scream? Depending on which way I lean, obviously, the translation will look very different: grim, bleak, and desperate if I lean toward “real selfloathing,” or mock-histrionic, meta-exaggerated, perhaps even playful, light-hearted, if I assume that she’s pretending things are worse than they actually are. How do I decide? I can reason my way to a decision, without any kind of research or other corroboration from the outside world. This would be the LBI at work: “That book that Mia can’t write,” I can tell myself, “is the one I’m translating. She finished it, and published it, and her agent sold translation rights to it to Simon & Schuster, and the editor at S&S hired me, so how bad can things be? Maybe she was actually this miserable at this specific stage of the writing, but surely she wasn’t still feeling that way as she prepared the manuscript for publication. Surely at that latter stage, if she felt the self-loathing in this passage was too bleak she would have lightened things up a bit, and I should translate that.” But the LBI, working alone, could easily be wrong. If I’m just reasoning, without checking with the RBI or anything outside my head, I’m confabulating. I’m making things up, like the split-brain patient explaining that he stood up to stretch his muscles. What if Mia is still today, two or three years after the writing of that paragraph, clinically depressed? What if later, after my sportive translation of this paragraph has been published, I find out that, like Yukio Mishima, the poor tormented soul committed suicide before the book was published? To prevent that, I can feel my way to a decision, again without any kind of research or other corroboration from the outside world. This would be the RBI at work: dark-night-of-thewriter’s-soul passages like this one, my RBI reminds me, have occurred before in the book, and they’ve typically alternated with forays out into the world, to Africa, to Japan, to writers’ residences in Italy and Germany, which, as my vague affective memories prime my thinking unconsciously, typically move from timid and self-blaming isolation to new friendships and joyful adventures that give Mia no time to write but fill her with a love of life. I can feel, even if I can’t quite articulate that feeling to myself, that I shouldn’t let my translation of this paragraph get sucked into its ostensible despair. But notwithstanding the feeling-based hermeneutics that Friedrich Schleiermacher learned from Johann Gottfried von Herder—“feel your

6 Introduction way into everything,” including the research that the LBI reminds you to do2—the RBI too can be wrong. What if my RBI has misread the book? What if Mia hates my translation, says it’s a travesty of her memoir? Well, I can ask her about it. I can interact with her throughout the translation process, over email, in red- and green-highlighted queries and discussions in the text. I can even meet with her in Helsinki over a cup of tea, get to know her face to face. By the time this paragraph apparently full of despair comes along, 85% of the translation is behind us, and we’ve had four or five lengthy email discussions for every ten pages I’ve translated. We have not only met for a couple of hours over tea but spent another hour and a half across the table from her agent. That’s a lot of interaction. The part of my mental apparatus that channels that relationship into the translation in the latter half of the book, therefore, would be the CFBI, a Collective Full-Brain Interpreter in which author and translator partly merge. It seems fair to say that she’s exaggerating that dark night of the soul: “we” know that with a reasonably high degree of certainty. It’s “fiction,” as she said of another passage over tea. That doesn’t necessarily mean she made the whole thing up; probably something like what she describes in the paragraph did happen. But she almost certainly heightened the despair for dramatic effect. Now think of those guidance systems as primes, ways of priming the translation process: the LBI as a purely cognitive prime, the RBI as a purely affective (or perhaps affective-becoming-conative) prime, and the CFBI as a social prime. The difference between this case and most studies of monolingual, bilingual, or translingual priming, of course, is that the three guidance systems I’ve outlined are pragmatic guides to an actual translation. True, the assumption behind priming studies is that a controlled experimental situation is set up to mimic the actual guidance linguistic primes give speakers or translators; but in order that such experiments might yield verifiable empirical data about that guidance, they are specifically designed to work on subjects as unconsciously as possible. Indeed, what “working unconsciously” means is that the priming effect is mysterious. Even the LBI, though it verbalizes everything, is a mystery—one that had to wait for Michael S. Gazzaniga to ask a splitbrain patient about it to be revealed. Gazzaniga’s point is that we all have an LBI; because in neurotypicals it has access to everything the right hemisphere “knows” affectively, its confabulatory impulses are subdued, so subdued that we typically don’t notice them. Or rather, we notice them in very small children and people who are drunk, and perhaps in people with whom we have strong ideological disagreements—people who seem to be living on a different planet, because their reality is organized so differently—but not in ourselves. And not even Gazzaniga noticed the RBI or the CFBI. Indeed, as I hinted earlier, maybe Gazzaniga would say that my LBI is confabulating those two. If he did say that, he could be quite right, and I’d

Introduction  7 be the last to know. But let’s look at some evidence. How might we simulate the priming effects of the RBI and the CFBI in a controlled experiment? Look back at the Finnish paragraph above—at the spot at the end that I’ve marked [Y]. A literal translation of the five words elided there would be “in the middle of this devil’s dreams’ life.” “The devil” there is perkele— one of the strongest swear words in the Finnish language. Lutherans from Germany to Finland taboo the devil’s various names (saatana “Satan” is another strong one in Finnish). In fact, one generic Finnish term for swearing is ärrä-päitä, literally “r-heads,” because the r in perkele is rolled and often teased out for emphasis: perrrkele. In a sense, it is the emblematic Finnish swear word. Traditionally, as you might expect, Finnish women have not been allowed to use it. That’s changed now—especially younger women use it all the time—but some of the old taboo lingers. And Mia is not only in her forties, but is rather shy and timid in person— not someone you’d expect to use a word like perkele. She also told me over tea that readers of her first book were first surprisingly irate at her potty-mouth in writing, and then even more surprised to find her so shy and timid in person when she showed up for a reading or a signing. So how might we prime the translation of that phrase, “minähän olen keskellä tätä perkeleen unelmien elämää!”, in a controlled experiment? Note that this would no longer be a semantic or syntactic prime: it would be an affective prime. It would, in the terms I’m developing here, be an RBI prime. The trick would be to test which RBI primes would push the translator-subjects more in the direction of the bitter and the bleak and which would push them more toward the playfully meta. Most likely, I suggest, the primes that would tend to produce bleak anger in the translation would involve strong English swearing: “Goddammit!” or “Jesus Fuck!” This would be especially true if one used an audio prime, with a middle-aged man swearing in a bleakly angry tone of voice, rather than just the written words. A photograph of the face of that bleakly angry middle-aged man could also be used—shown to the right brain, as in Gazzaniga’s experiment with split-brain patients, even though a neurotypical translator-subject would be able to access both hemispheres of her or his brain, producing a less puzzling response than Gazzaniga and Joseph LeDoux faced. And by contrast, the primes that would tend to produce playful metatheatricality in the translation would involve a different register of swearing, with strong words but a more humorous context and tone: say, “O.M. Fucking G.!” This would again be especially true with an audio prime, this one recorded by a playfully dressed woman with a whimsical sense of humor in her voice, or a photographic or other visual prime with something playfully warped in it. If these aren’t evidence of the priming effect of an RBI, what is? Now take it one step further. The gap marked [X] in my flat-affect translation would read literally “centrifuging of the shit” or “spin-drying

8 Introduction of the shit.” The idea is that you put the shit-covered core of the thing— the book, in this case—in a metaphorical centrifuge or spin-dryer and spin it until all the shit flies off and the core remains in the center, pure and pristine. The main reason this seems like a good example to me is that I’d never seen or heard this phrase before and had to guess at it, based on the verb lingota, which can also mean “to sling.” “Slinging the shit” seemed to me to work pretty well, though I wasn’t sure it was what the author meant. I really needed a prime! Since this is a highly kinesthetic metaphor, in fact, I suggest that we would also need to simulate it experimentally with a highly kinesthetic prime: a photograph or video of an Olympic athlete midway through the windup for the hammer throw, for example. A video of a centrifuge might work as well—or of a dryer in the spin cycle, especially one that does a lot of bouncing around. (Kent 2009 might call this a “chronotopic” prime.) The idea would be to get the translator-subject to feel the spin with her/his whole body. You might want to say that a whole-body experience is not the bailiwick of the RBI, which is trapped up there in the right brain; but that’s the wrong way to think about it. When your body moves, other people experience it visually; when you feel your own body moving, by contrast—not kinesis but kin-esthesis, the feeling of movement—the feeling (called proprioception) is managed in the primary somatosensory cortex on the opposite side of the brain: right hemisphere for movement on the left side of the body, left hemisphere for movement on the right side. This means that most split-brain patients would be able to access kinesthetic/ proprioceptive sense-data (thalamocortic projections) in the dominant hemisphere but not the nondominant one. Since the central nervous system integrates proprioception with visual and vestibular data, a splitbrain patient might be able to feel, see, and report her right arm moving but only be able to report seeing her left arm moving. S/he might be able to feel it, but would not be able to report the feeling. While obviously not confined to the right cerebral hemisphere only, however, the fact that proprioception guides and primes without the LBI’s help might justify using the concept of the RBI loosely to describe its guidance. What about the CFBI, then? For that, let’s look at my translation of the paragraph: All winter I slog through that swamp day after day, still without clue number one of how I should be writing this book. I’m so frustrated I could scream. I try to focus on what my painter friend Jyrki said— that this stage of the work, what is called slinging the shit, is an unavoidable part of the process, and the key to the whole profession is how you get through it. I’m obviously not getting through it. And because I’ve voluntarily isolated myself in a total social vacuum, I lie there evenings watching TV in a state of advanced self-loathing. It’s

Introduction  9 almost as if I’m depressed. But how the hell could I be depressed? I’m living the fucking dream! (Robinson 2020b: 339) The leading edge of the CFBI, as I began to suggest earlier, is social accommodation: I sent this translation to Mia and she responded, and I responded to her responses, and we kept going back and forth until we reached a mutually satisfactory solution. To my translation of [X], “slinging the shit,” she wrote the description of the centrifugal spinning that I used above, but added “mutta tämä ehkä ok?” (“but maybe this is ok?”). I wasn’t entirely satisfied with “slinging the shit,” but couldn’t think of anything better, so I described my sense of the phrase and said I was inclined to stick with it, and she agreed. To my translation of [Y], on the other hand, she wrote “Ai että kun on ihanasti käännetty tämä, naurattaa enemmän kuin alkuperäinen” (“How wonderfully translated this is, makes me laugh more than the original”). So I had initially guessed that she was going for playful exaggeration, and with “laugh more than the original” she confirmed that her original Finnish phrase made her laugh, but my translation made her laugh harder. Does her approval make the translation “right,” or “good”? Not necessarily. What it means, at least for the purpose of this illustration, is that the CFBI that I’ve built out of my interactions with her gave me reliable guidance. I was guessing not just that she was going for playful exaggeration, but that we were. In the terms I developed in Feeling Extended (Robinson 2013a), there is an authorial/translatorial persona that is probably intracranial but feels intercranial—like Mia and I have been swapping qualia across the ether, and that one morning across the tea table as well. In other words, it may technically be lodged inside my skull (it’s a full-brain interpreter) but it feels like both of us (it’s collective). And yet another step: what would the editor at Simon & Schuster say? Would she accept “slinging the shit” and “living the fucking dream”? She did. She made only one tiny edit in that paragraph: she changed “still without clue number one of how I should be writing this book” to “still without a clue of how I should be writing this book.” Why? “A clue” is more common than “clue number one.” It’s a common idiom, a commonplace. It has been shaped by the hundreds of millions. The editor’s CFBI told her that the more ordinary usage suited the context better than mine did—mine presumably seeming over the top to her. How did I feel about that? Since I hadn’t interacted with her much, I hadn’t had a chance to build a joint editorial/translatorial persona with her in my own head; but I too am part of the hundreds of millions American speakers using the phrase “I still don’t have a clue.” And I recognized that, while “clue number one” is arguably livelier than “a clue,” it’s also more vulnerable to accusations of cuteness or preciosity. I decided the editor was smart to play it safe—especially because she toned my phrasings down sparingly. She mostly liked them.

10 Introduction The fact that she didn’t balk at [X] “shit” and [Y] “fucking,” too, says something about the ideological forces working in the background, channeled into both the editor’s decision-making through her CFBI and into mine through my CFBI. They are taboo words that would not have been allowed into a Simon & Schuster book in the late fifties, when I was little. Presumably, the editor has a much clearer sense than I do of how far she can let an author or a translator push the envelope with words that once were and still sort of are taboo in a Simon & Schuster book.

The Structure of the Book Martin Heidegger famously wrote that “Die Sprache spricht” (1950/1986: 16): language speaks. In the terms I’m developing here, that might be translated “The LBI speaks.” Later Heidegger adds that “Der Mensch spricht, insofern er der Sprache entspricht” (33). Alfred Hofstadter translated as “Man speaks in that he responds to language” (1971: 210), but I suggest that for our purposes here it might be translated “Humans speak insofar as they are primed by the LBI.” But of course my shift to the plural there—“humans” and “they are”— is undeniably primed by my profeminist CFBI, which takes der Mensch to be somewhat more inclusive, even in Heidegger, than Alfred Hofstadter was willing to make it in 1971; and the priming or “speaking” of that CFBI is signaled to me by the tiny shudder I feel as I read “Man speaks in that he responds,” which is to say that the “speaking” of the profeminist CFBI in me primes my RBI to send me a somatic signal designed to prime the translating job that my LBI undertakes. Heidegger’s formula might be expanded, therefore, along these lines: The LBI speaks, and humans speak insofar as they are primed by the LBI. But the LBI that primes their speaking is itself primed by the RBI, which in turn is primed by the CFBI. Human utterances of all sorts, and more broadly all human communicative and cognitive acts, are primed by an oversaturated heteroglot channel of mental interpreters. In very broad strokes, at the level of its three parts, that is the book’s structure: Part I on the LBI, Part II on the RBI, Part III on the CFBI. Because the LBI is in almost every way the most obvious of the three, even the most insistent, and so has received the most attention from Gazzaniga and other cognitive neuroscientists, I have the least to say about it. Part I consists of only one chapter, on the LBI priming of monolingual speech and the LBI priming of translation (and translation studies). “Humans speak insofar as they are primed by the LBI.” This account also introduces Gazzaniga’s Interpreter Theory and attempts to provide a backstory to the existing translational priming studies, which tend to begin with formal linguistic features (morphology, syntax, and semantics) and end with

Introduction  11 translator decisions. The reigning assumption in those studies seems to be that translation is all about language, and language is all about formal features, and those formal features have no sociocultural history. They are simply stable ontological objects that can be described scientifically. Martin Heidegger’s famous post-Romantic attempt to retrieve “language” from the prison of scientific objectivity and infuse it with agency takes one step past those earlier priming studies, but a fairly cautious one; this book, and Part I/Chapter 1 in particular, seeks to push us several more steps in the same direction. The chapter offers two sets of recommendations for “priming translation”: one based on the notion that “overtranslation” or “amplification” in translation might be a kind of LBI-primed confabulation, the other on normative translation (studies) as primed by the LBI. Part II on the RBI is the longest in the book, with four chapters: Chapter 2 introducing the RBI, Chapter 3 exploring its evolutionary origins and function, Chapter 4 reviewing the empirical research into autism spectrum disorders as emerging out of a breakdown of the RBI, and Chapter 5 comparing the RBI-based semeiotic of Charles Sanders Peirce and the RBI-based semiology of Ferdinand de Saussure. The focus on affective priming in this part displays both a strong convergence with and a strong divergence from Séverine Hubscher-Davidson’s Translation and Emotion (2017). Both are obvious from her introductory description of the book’s aim as “to demonstrate the implications of emotionality for translation work and to explore the relevance and influence of emotions in translation by focusing on specific emotion traits” (2): influence would be RBI priming, but the RBI as I theorize it primes not only through emotions but through other affects3 (hopes and fears, belief and doubt, approval and disapproval, etc.), conations (motivations, inclinations, etc.), and kinesthetic orientations. I track Hubscher-Davidson’s (2013, 2017) review of trait emotional intelligence research in language learning and translation in the second section of Chapter 2 (pp. 00–00). The “priming translation” sections in the chapters of Part II include priming recommendations based on: • • • •

(Chapter 2) Carol Maier’s (2006) discussion of the translator as theôros (Chapter 3, first) the affective body language involved in speaking another language and (second) the double-binds of translation (Chapter 4) the differences between affect-rich and affect-poor translations of Finland’s greatest novel (Chapter 5, first) multimodal translations of Inside Out and (second) translating as performing indirect/periperformative speech acts, with a focus on Annie Brisset’s 1991 account of Michel Garneau’s 1978 Québécois translation of Macbeth

Part III on the CFBI consists of two chapters: Chapter 6 on Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of heteroglossia, with a section on “Heteroglot CFBI Anchors and

12 Introduction Primes for Cognitive Translation Research,” and Chapter 7 on the “sharing” of a normativizing Interpreter with other people, including a discussion of priming and what Daniel Kahneman (2013) calls “the associative machine” as themselves made possible by the CFBI, with a final “priming translation” section working with “high-money” and “high-love” primes. We end, finally, with a Conclusion linking the birth of these various Interpreters out of habit to the two different directions in which one might read the book: from the Interpreter Theory to priming research or from priming research to the Interpreter Theory. Another aspect of the book’s structure is that each section is labeled either in italics as an “Empirical Research Review,”“Theory,” or “Anecdote,” or in bold as “Ideas for Research.” For the most part, the contents of the sections identified with italicized labels construct the general cognitivescientific orientation to the Interpreter Theory in its three instantiations (LBI, RBI, CFBI), and the contents of the sections identified with bolded labels tie the cognitive science that precedes them to translation research, first to general research that links translation to the cognitive-science research in previous sections, then to recommendations for mobilizing the preceding for empirical priming research into translation. Thinking of the book in this latter way made me consider titling it “Priming Translation: A Guide to Research.” For reasons that I spell out in the final section of Chapter 7 and the Conclusion, however, I decided against that. This book can be used as a guide to research, but I didn’t want that pragmatic instrumentalization of its contents to overpower the bigger 4EA-cogsci picture mapped out by the expanded Interpreter Theory. Both the big picture and the narrower focus on priming studies of translation are important—and ideally each should inform the other. From “The Double Agent: Aspects of Literary Translator Affect as Revealed in Fictional Work by Translators” by Jean Anderson. Copyright © 2005 by Linguistica Antverpiensia. Used by permission of Linguistica Antverpiensia. From The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, edited by Michael Holquist. Copyright © 1981. Used by permission of the University of Texas Press. From “Translation and Social Discourse: Shakespear, A Playwright After Québec’s Heart” by Annie Brisset, in Mildred L. Larson, ed., Translation: Theory and Practice, Tension and Interdependence, 120-38. American Translators Association Scholarly Monograph Series V. Copyright © 1991 by John Benjamins. Used by permission of John Benjamins Publishing Company. From Tales from Both Sides of the Brain by Michael S. Gazzaniga. Copyright © 2015 by Michael S. Gazzaniga. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. From Who’s in Charge? by Michael S. Gazzaniga. Copyright © 2011 by Michael S. Gazzaniga. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers and Constable & Robinson/Little Brown UK.

Part I

The Left-Brain Interpreter (LBI) Cognitive Priming

1 The Confabulating LBI

Michael S. Gazzaniga (b. 1939) is one of the most respected neuroscientists in the United States, or anywhere. By his own account (Gazzaniga 2014), he was fortunate enough to stumble onto the problem of splitbrain patients at a very early age, in his very early twenties, at Caltech in the early 1960s—and has devoted the bulk of the half century-plus since then to the empirical lessons that those patients can teach us. These people had their corpus callosum—the thick cable of white fibers across the top of the brain by which the two hemispheres communicate— severed surgically to control the grand mal epileptic seizures that were making their lives unlivable. Until Gazzaniga and his Caltech dissertation director, Roger Sperry, began studying them, the general view was that the surgery, called corpus callosotomy, had no effect on the brain at all, except the entirely positive one of decreasing epileptic seizures almost to zero. The general view was also that the two hemispheres of the brain were largely unspecialized, undifferentiated. Gazzaniga’s research demonstrated that this was wrong: the left (or dominant) hemisphere is specialized for verbal, logical, analytical thought, and the right (or nondominant) hemisphere is specialized for visual and holistic perception. This discovery quickly entered the general discourse; today, most educated people (very roughly) know the difference between the right brain and the left brain.

Empirical Research Review: Confabulation The Interpreter Theory entered the picture two decades in. In the 1980s, Gazzaniga was driving all over New England in a specially equipped research van with a PhD student named Joseph LeDoux (b. 1949), now Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science at New York University and one of the world’s leading authorities on “the emotional brain” (see LeDoux 1998). One day, studying a patient they referred to in print as “P.S.,” they made a significant breakthrough. Let LeDoux (2010: 92) tell the story: DOI: 10.4324/9781003134312-3

16  The Left-Brain Interpreter (LBI): Cognitive Priming Patient P.S. was especially important. He could use both sides of his brain to read but only the left hemisphere to speak. Previously, the right hemisphere had been thought of as a lesser partner, with cognitive capacities like a monkey’s or chimp’s, but not like a human’s. The left hemisphere clearly had self-awareness, but whether high-level consciousness was possible on the other side as well seemed dubious. With P.S. we were able to ask whether the right side was self-aware because his right hemisphere could read. So we flashed questions to his right hemisphere and his left hand would reach out and, using Scrabble tiles, spell the answers. In these simple tests we found out that P.S.’s right hemisphere had a sense of self (he knew his name) and had a sense of the future (he had an occupational goal), both important qualities of conscious awareness. It was particularly interesting that the right and left hemispheres had different goals for the future. Might there indeed be two people in one head? In the process of testing the interactions between the two sides, one day in our camper trailer lab, Mike made an important observation. We were giving the right hemisphere written commands (stand, wave, laugh), and P.S. responded appropriately in each case. Had Mike not been there that’s probably as far as it would have gone. We would have been happy to have shown that the right hemisphere could respond to verbal commands. But Mike’s incredibly fast and creative mind immediately realized there was more to it. He started asking P.S. why he was doing what he was doing. Remember, only the left hemisphere could talk. So when the command to the right hemisphere was “stand,” P.S. would explain his action by saying that he needed to stretch. When it was “wave,” he said he thought he saw a friend. When it was “laugh,” he said we were funny. That was the birth of Mike’s theory of consciousness as an interpreter: a reason for doing these things was made up to justify the impulse to take a certain action. (quoted in Gazzaniga 2014: 149–50) Or as Gazzaniga explains: For the previous twenty years, split-brain researchers were intent on seeing what a particular hemisphere could do and could not do and whether there was information transferred between the hemispheres. This led us to ask a certain kind of question in a certain way. After we presented a stimulus to one hemisphere or the other we would ask, “What did you see?” It wasn’t until twenty years later that we finally wondered, “What does the left speaking hemisphere think about all these things the right hemisphere is doing?” After all, the left hemisphere has no clue why the behaviors are happening. Finally, it dawned on us in that cold trailer. Joseph and I asked, “Why did you do what you just did?” In simply changing the question asked of the

The Confabulating LBI  17 patient, a virtual torrent of new information and insight followed. Though the left hemisphere had no clue, it would not be satisfied to state it did not know. It would guess, prevaricate, rationalize, and look for a cause and effect, but it would always come up with an answer that fit the circumstances. In my opinion, it is the most stunning result from split-brain research. (151)

Ideas for Research: “Overtranslation” as Confabulation Primed by the LBI The dominant norm for translation, as we all know, is equivalence of sentential meaning—otherwise known as “sense-for-sense translation.” A translation should have roughly the same number of sentences as the source text, and each target sentence should have roughly the same meanings (ideas, images, etc.) as its source counterpart. Adding significantly to the structural framework of the source text is often described as “overtranslating”—and, of course, conversely, translating less than the sensefor-sense norm prescribes is known as “undertranslating.” Sometimes, overtranslating is arguably justified, when the source text contains implicatures that are understood as a matter of course in the source culture but cannot be worked out by target readers without intimate knowledge of the source culture. This is called “amplification,” and there are principled debates over when and whether the practice is justified—and whether, when it is undeniably required, the result can in good conscience still be called a translation or must be relegated to the dunce’s corner as an overtranslation. A “translation,” for certain purists, must be a text that obeys the sense-for-sense norm. Any slight deviation from that norm, even if manifestly justified as a sense-for-sense translation of implicit meanings, raises semantic red flags. This is not, however, the kind of “overtranslation” that I propose to explore as a translational counterpart to the Left-Brain Interpreter’s (LBI’s) “confabulation” in split-brain patients. Amplification based on a principled unpacking of source-textual implicatures is not confabulatory. Rather, I suggest we look at the tradition Omri Asscher (2010) tracks from the 1920s to the 1970s in the expansive Hebrew translation of British humor. Asscher shows that Hebrew translations of Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers and Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat during that specific half-century were normative in the Hebrew context, due largely to the influence of Hebrew translations by Mendele Mokher Sforim (1835–1917) of his own humorous works, especially perhaps The Travels of Benjamin the Third from Yiddish, and are no longer normative in that same cultural context, since the 1970s. In other words, even if we agree that amplificatory translations of The Pickwick Papers and Three Men in a Boat can be accurately described as “confabulatory,” those

18  The Left-Brain Interpreter (LBI): Cognitive Priming confabulations were not “pathological,” as the link-up with LBI confabulation in split-brain patients might imply, but normal, socially acceptable, expected. Part of this, Asscher explains, comes from normative traditions in Israeli humor even apart from translational discourse: where British humor is famous for its understatement, Israeli humor tends to thrive on overstatement, with “the hyperbolic features of a tall tale: an attempt to ‘stretch the boundaries of belief, and openly and deliberately cloud the borders between fact and fancy,’ which would be expressed through a ‘series of implausible though possible situations [that] culminate in a clearly impossible one’ (Oring 1981: 50–51)\(Asscher 2010: 240)”. “Broadly,” therefore, in translating British humor from the 1920s to the 1970s, “it could be said that the organizing principle behind, or the common feature of all four devices for creating humor that did ‘attract’ amplification was an initial inclination towards exaggeration or overdramatization: a germinal potential, so to speak, not realized to its fullest, but rather subdued in an understated, ‘British’ tone” (246). Why then did this tendency diminish in later translations, from the 1980s on? “I believe,” Asscher ventures, “the main explanation for this is that the later translations were produced at a time of shift in translational norms in the Hebrew literary system in general” (257). What prompted amplification of the text in earlier decades now often prompts the insertion of annotations that provide the target reader with the necessary explicitation without expanding the actual text. So if amplification in the text was normative before the 1980s and the shifting of amplifications to the notes is normative now, does that mean that no confabulation has ever been involved? I suggest not. How does anyone cultivate a sense of humor? Comedians of course make a living doing it, but most of us like to think of ourselves as having a pretty good sense of humor as well, and that requires that at least occasionally we say something that makes the people around us laugh. How do we develop that ability? There are plenty of theories of humor, but most of us don’t know those theories, and certainly don’t develop our ability to say funny things by reading theories. My suggestion is that we “find the funny” through LBI confabulation. Just as the LBI in split-brain patients doesn’t know what made its own organism laugh, because the funny happened in the right hemisphere, to which it has no access, so too do we would-be amateur comedians not know what will make others laugh, forcing our LBIs to fall back on trial and error and lucky breaks. In fact, while some comedians do sit for hours every day writing jokes, others embrace an openly confabulatory approach to “finding the funny.” Marc Maron (http://www.wtfpod.com/), for example, begins to develop new material by getting up on stage and talking about stuff, hoping the humor will emerge “accidentally.” Every bit that works sort

The Confabulating LBI  19 of well then gets reworked in subsequent performances, and reworked, and reworked, sometimes for six months with only so-so punch lines, until one night the punch line comes to him. The LBI finds it in the ether. Marc has no idea where it comes from, and no idea how to make it happen, except by getting up and riffing and hoping for the best. When he has honed his material in this way for a year or a year and a half, he has an hour of strong material and records a special—and then starts the process over again. In one episode of Maron’s podcast (#1056, September 23, 2019), Byron Allen told him that Richard Pryor used the same method: Allen watched Pryor bomb night after night at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles, until “the funny” began to emerge—or as Allen puts it, until the genius begins to emerge. For four months Pryor bombs on stage, and audiences sit in stunned silence, watching this famous comedian bomb. But then it starts taking shape—and one night coming off stage Pryor tells Allen, “You’re only as good as you dare to be bad. You have to go through this process. You have to just let go of the old, and you have to be honest and open up, and it will happen, don’t worry about it” (around minute 46). The result changed stand-up comedy forever: Richard Prior: Live in Concert (1979). So is it possible that translators of comedy do this as well? We don’t go on stage night after night, but I do know from translating Kivi’s The Brothers Seven that sometimes you just have to sit staring at the book, or the screen, or out the window, letting your LBI wander freely, till you find the funny. And I imagine that the Hebrew translators of Dickens and Jerome back in those earlier decades did the same: they didn’t amplify the comedy methodically, rationally; they let it build up inside them; they let the LBI confabulate until they began to feel the funny. And when they felt it, they translated—and sometimes the confabulation spilled over onto the page and amplified the source text in surprising ways. How might one replicate this process experimentally? In Training the Translator (1995, 45–48), Paul Kussmaul employed think-aloud-protocol priming strategies to study creativity in translation, and his method might be used here as well: have student translators work in pairs on hard-to-translate jokes and encourage them to riff on them in the target language, orally, not writing anything down at first. What Kussmaul found was that the most successful translating pairs would go off on laugh-filled tangents, coming up with hilarious bad translation after hilarious bad translation, until suddenly one would say “I’ve got it” and suggest a brilliant good translation. The bad ones, because they were deliberately and humorously bad, primed the good ones. (This passage in Kussmaul’s book also inspired my exercises in Becoming a Translator asking students to come up with the funniest bad translation—see pp. 27–28.)

20  The Left-Brain Interpreter (LBI): Cognitive Priming

Empirical Research Review: The LBI in Neurotypicals But surely that “Left-Brain Interpreter” is found only in split-brain patients? No: it is at work in all of us. It is just more obvious in split-brain patients, because their two cerebral hemispheres cannot communicate easily (internally). When the LBI in P.S. “would guess, prevaricate, rationalize, and look for a cause and effect, but … always come up with an answer that fit the circumstances,” it would do so without adequate facts from the right hemisphere—and that made the confabulatory nature of the interpreter’s rationalizations especially obvious. But, as Gazzaniga kept studying the LBI, he found that it plays an extraordinarily important role in the construction of a coherent self in neurotypicals as well, and indeed in the very possibility of conscious awareness: How come we have that powerful, almost self-evident feeling that we are unified when we are comprised of a gazillion modules? We do not experience a thousand chattering voices, but a unified experience. Consciousness flows easily and naturally from one moment to the next with a single, unified, and coherent narrative. The psychological unity we experience emerges out of the specialized system called “the interpreter” that generates explanations about our perceptions, memories, and actions and the relationships among them. This leads to a personal narrative, the story that ties together all the disparate aspects of our conscious experience into a coherent whole: order from chaos. The interpreter module appears to be uniquely human and specialized to the left hemisphere. Its drive to generate hypotheses is the trigger for human beliefs, which, in turn, constrain our brain. (2011, 102) As we’ll see in Part II, ten pages earlier in this very same book Gazzaniga (2011: 92–93) mentions the possibility of a Right-Brain Interpreter (RBI). That, obviously, would tend to undermine his claim here that “The interpreter module appears to be uniquely human and specialized to the left hemisphere.” I propose to read that line as implying “The verbal interpreter module appears to be uniquely human and specialized to the left hemisphere.” The issue before us here in Part I, however, is how the LBI’s use of language primes speech and translation (and perhaps other human social behavior), and one pathway to that concern might be found in the causal chain spelled out in the last sentence of that quotation: (1) LBI > (2) hypotheses > (3) human beliefs > (4) neural constraint. Presumably, what Gazzaniga means by (4) is various nonconscious inclinations, such as

The Confabulating LBI  21 preferences, likes and dislikes, faves and phobias—but also various socially approved orientations, such as morals, values, and ideological norms, none of which we control consciously, let alone logically or propositionally. When those (4) nonconscious predilections are found in toddlers, Gazzaniga tends to assume they are innate, hard-wired—preinstalled at the baby factory, as he likes to put it—but that is conjecture. There is no way he or anyone else can know for sure. All we can know is that they are operative in humans at a very early age. The model, which would apparently look something like Figure 1.1, does indeed seem to suggest that the (4) predilections are not innate but constraints that are implanted by (3) beliefs based on (2) hypotheses generated by (1) the LBI. But, of course, there is no reason to believe that that particular sentence in Gazzaniga (2011) is a comprehensive account of the model: there are, obviously, many nonconscious predilections constraining the brain other than (1 > 2 > 3 > 4) likes and dislikes, norms and values. Many of them, as Gazzaniga (2011: 78) notes, are habits, habitualized routines built up and eventually rendered nonconscious by long practice, like tying one’s shoes or playing the guitar—routines that have nothing to do with beliefs, hypotheses, or the interpreter. Most are probably hardwired—innate impulsions selected for by evolution.

1. Interpreter

4. Nonconscious predilecons

2. Hypotheses

3. Beliefs

Figure 1.1  The cycle of brain constraints channeled through the interpreter.

22  The Left-Brain Interpreter (LBI): Cognitive Priming But not all. According to Gazzaniga, some nonconscious pressures to act in a certain way are instilled in us through social experience and channeled into conscious awareness, or at least into verbal expression—which we do not always control—through the interpreter. Those learned “nonconscious pressures to act in a certain way” are primes. Take ideological norms, for example. Most of us—those who aren’t running for political office or writing ideological tracts—don’t really know what ideological norms we believe in. Those norms tend to prime our beliefs, preferences, and choices at a preconscious level. In Part III, again, I will be naming the collective interpreter guiding that preconscious decision-making, the Collective Full-Brain Interpreter (CFBI). For example, as Gazzaniga notes, “What people say they believe about punishment and what their actual behavior is are two different animals, and they aren’t really able to offer logical explanations why. We have run into this before, haven’t we? The interpreter is back at work trying to explain an intuitive judgment” (2011: 210). What Gazzaniga tends to make of that is that the LBI is a confabulator: it makes things up as it goes along. However, given that in this case both of the models of justice that the LBI is choosing in different contexts—the retributive and the utilitarian—are specifically (3) ideologically prestructured beliefs feeding (4) nonconscious predilections, it would seem as if two separate and conflicting lines of force were being channeled into the brain: one pushing the brain to favor retributive justice, the other pushing it to favor utilitarian justice. A more nuanced reading of the evidence would suggest that the LBI is simply priming us differently—favoring one RBI push over the other— depending on whether it is given a theoretical (abstract) question based on ideological principle or a practical (situated) question based on a hypothetical case. And that suggests that what this example actually shows is that the interpreter tends to travel around the 1 > 2 > 3 > 4 > 1 cycle differently depending on the input—even when, in both types of input (practical and theoretical), the 3 > 4 > 1 segment involves ideological norms and values (and thus what I’ll call the CFBI). Carlsmith (2008, cited in Gazzaniga 2011: 119) offers a vaguely disapproving account of the discrepancy between the two primes: people don’t know what they want, or why. Gazzaniga, however, is not surprised. The LBI, he insists, can easily be “hijacked.” Since it really only cares about creating a plausibly coherent story, and isn’t overly concerned about the plausibility of two different stories it concocts—each only has to be internally coherent, a plausible account of the facts at hand at the moment— feeding it different kinds of data sets and so prompting it to construct a series of mutually incompatible stories is easy. “Do I contradict myself?” Walt Whitman asked grandiosely in Leaves of Grass (1855/2007). “Very well, then … I contradict myself. / I am large … I contain multitudes” (104).

The Confabulating LBI  23 Most of us, perhaps, are not quite so eager to brag about self-contradiction; but we are far more tolerant of it in ourselves and others than, say, a logician might be. We mostly have a vague idea that we believe contradictory things, and do things that reflect contradictory attitudes and beliefs. But, since we are mostly primed to do and believe those things by (4) nonconscious predilections, we not only forgive ourselves but typically fail to register our self-contradictions very clearly. We can live with a very vague sense of our own contradictory natures. More clarity about all that might make us feel uncomfortable. As Gazzaniga writes: This concept that the interpreter is only as good as the data it receives is crucial in explaining many seemingly inexplicable behaviors of both normal brains and neurological patients. Indeed, if you feed the interpreter incorrect data you can hijack it. By doing this, a different story results than it may otherwise have produced. So perhaps, for our interpreter process, reality is virtual. It depends on the sensory cues that are here and now. (2011: 94; emphasis added) “Reality is virtual”—and, since everything that we know consciously is mediated to us by the LBI, all reality available to our conscious minds is virtual. This sounds suspiciously like what philosophers call an “idealist” position, according to which all reality is not Matter but Mind. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) famously claimed that we do not have access to objective reality—to what he called the Thing in Itself. Everything we take to be reality is an image in our heads—or, as Gazzaniga puts it, “reality is virtual.” That does not mean, however, that the human animal taken as a whole has no access to a material reality beyond virtuality. It means only that the reality mediated for us by the LBI is virtual. That is a lot of what we take to be reality, but it isn’t everything. If our LBI tells us we can flap our wings and fly off the top of the roof, and we enter that virtual reality (VR) so wholeheartedly that we climb up onto the roof and jump, in a second or two the ground will remind us quite forcefully that there is another reality in which we are somewhat less buoyant than we imagined. Gazzaniga (2011: 94–95) illustrates this duality with the example of a VR lab: For instance, if you with your normally functioning brain were to go to a virtual reality lab, you would notice that the lab is a large room with a flat, concrete floor. That is your current reality. Then you put on the virtual reality glasses and what you see is controlled by the guy sitting over in the corner running the computer, who is happy to play tricks on you. You start to walk and all of a sudden a deep,

24  The Left-Brain Interpreter (LBI): Cognitive Priming gaping pit pops up in front of you. Yikes! You get a jolt of adrenaline, your heart races, and you jump back. You hear laughter. But just then a narrow plank appears across the pit and you are asked to walk across it. If you are like me, you will refuse, saying “NO WAY!” If you are a thrill seeker and you do try it, you will have your arms out for balance and will proceed at a snail’s pass [sic for pace] heart thumping, and muscles tense. Of course, everyone else in the lab is laughing harder because you are on the flat, concrete floor. Even though you know this, however, your common sense has been hijacked by the perceptions of the moment. Your interpretation of the world is immediately influenced by the visual cues that have overridden what your conscious brain knows. In other words, a nonvirtual reality (non-VR) can still reach out to us from beyond that virtuality. We hear the technicians’ laughter, for example. If we tap our foot on the space over what we take to be the (VR) hole, we will feel the hard concrete floor. Because our LBI has been hijacked by the computer program coursing through the VR helmet, it is difficult for us to believe in the solidity of that floor; but we can feel both it and the tactile/cognitive dissonance between its hardness and the abyss that we can plainly see gaping before us. (In Part II, I will identify that embodied affect/conation/kinesthetics-based interpreter that can feel those things as the RBI.) Science is all about finding as many channels of reality-access that bypass the qualitative virtuality of our conscious LBI realities as we can, and using them to construct a counter-theory of reality that can account for both the flat concrete floor and the narrow plank over the abyss. Very often that counter-theory of reality is counterintuitive—just as the hardness of the floor that we feel under our feet is counterintuitive when what we see before us is a chasm. Science is an engagement not only with nonVR but with the tensions between that non-VR and the virtuality of our commonsensical beliefs and intuitions. But note that the impulse to test the LBI’s confabulatory constructions is just as human as confabulation. Think of the child at water’s edge, sticking a toe in to test for coldness; or the child who has climbed up on a high wall, and is trying to determine whether it is safe to jump. The myth of science according to which “truth” or “fact” requires total suppression of “the human element,” and thereby the channeling of a nonhuman or even post-human objectivity, is indeed wrong. What scientists do is to put two human elements into contention: an inclination to know things intuitively and a willingness to test intuitions. The former is, of course, the confabulatory bailiwick of the LBI, whose contribution to scientific method is the generation of hypotheses; the latter, sometimes enshrined as scientific method tout court, only works in tensile engagement with the former.

The Confabulating LBI  25 So what might we expect the LBI to prime in speech? One is tempted to say logic, since the LBI is supposedly all about reasoning, but in colloquial contexts “logic” is actually a loose shorthand for perceived features like internal consistency and plausibility. And since scientizing mobilizations of the LBI tend to favor abstract structure over messy human encounters, the scientific approach to this expansion of priming studies would most likely isolate internal consistency for scrutiny and abstract it out of actual language use into the null context. My approach, by contrast, tends to favor messy human encounters, and so prefers to focus not just on plausibility but on the phenomenological perception of plausibility—plausibility as a normativized audience-effect, a rhetorical construct that tends to be perceived not as a construct but as “reality.” At the very least, this latter approach shifts priming studies into performative pragmatics (Robinson 2006a), where the collective uptake of Austinian speech acts and the Gricean Cooperative Principle (CP) and its maxims hold sway. While it is still true, I believe, as I argued in Robinson (2003: 126–31), that Grice’s CP is neither necessary nor sufficient for understanding—we can sometimes understand someone who is either haplessly or deliberately uncooperative—and that his maxims are not universal, it is also almost certainly true that some kind of CP and some set of maxims are at work in every culture for the priming of language use. This would also be the place to bring in morphology, semantics, and syntax, whose purported “logic” tends to be a normative projection imposed on them by formalist linguists—specifically by formalist linguists as primed by a rationalizing/plausibilizing LBI. After all, culture tends to plausibilize and normativize “correct usage” and “good grammar” as signs not only of education or a logical mind but of sanity and a civic spirit—and the effect of that plausibilization and that normativization is to prime middle-class speech for upwardly mobile correctness. To be sure, the LBI is a priming agent wielded by deeper forces: as we’ll see in Part II, the LBI is itself primed by the RBI, through correctness anxiety; and as we’ll see in Part III, the RBI is primed by the CFBI, through normativization.

Ideas for Research: LBI-Priming Normative Translation Of course, the implication of that chain at the end of that previous section—CFBI > RBI > LBI > language usage—would be that priming studies premised on the assumption that “in most cases, morphology, syntax, and semantics are the most likely locus of ‘transference’ (Toury 1995: 145) in translation” (Schaeffer and Carl 2015: 24) would occupy the final emergent stage of the chain, naturalizing (i.e., ignoring, nullifying) the priming effect of the LBI in order to focus on “language” as a stable ontological object existing in nature:

26  The Left-Brain Interpreter (LBI): Cognitive Priming The CFBI primes the RBI with group norms. 1 2 The RBI uses correctness anxiety to prime the plausibilization of “correct usage” and “good grammar” as signs of middle-class legitimacy, sanity, a good education, a logical mind, and so on. 3 The LBI primes language users to rationalize both those lower levels as the “reality” or “true nature” of language and formalist theoretical linguists as representing that “reality” and that “true nature” (la langue as a true inner logic) objectively. Because the LBI has thus (3) primed “us” to naturalize those audienceeffects as “language,” cognitive translation scholars like Schaeffer and Carl feel quite confident in (4) reducing the priming effects in “translation” to “morphology, syntax, and semantics.” In thinking about possible ways to simulate the priming effect of the LBI on translation, then, we might have to consider two levels of LBI priming. The first, numbered 3 in the above listing, affirms the priming effect the LBI (call it LBI3) has on language use, while the second, numbered 4 (LBI4), tends to elide the priming effect of the LBI and think of “language,” and perhaps specifically the stabilized formal or structural (“constative”) elements of la langue, as the originary source of all priming. In this split formulation, performative pragmatics would take its rightful place as the source of LBI3 primes—not as a linguistic subdiscipline among many such subdisciplines but rather as the meta-discipline that empowers its proponents to study the LBI-priming of language study as “linguistics” (see Robinson 1986)—while constative pragmatics as the study of abstract interpreter “types” and other information structures would hover in the wings as a shadowy source of LBI4 primes (unrecognized as involved in the priming of translation by formal linguists like Schaeffer and Carl).1 The above tabulation suggests that LBI3 primes language users to formalize usage in terms of stable abstract structures. Among other things, this would make LBI3 the performative pragmatics of the formalization of constative pragmatics. In Cognitive Translation Studies, it would make LBI3 the performative pragmatics of the normativization and formalization of (a) equivalence as the defining criterion of all translation, (b) segmentation as the defining analytic of equivalence studies, and (c) sense-for-sense translation as the defining segmentational strategy for the achievement of equivalence. Primed by LBI3 to perform these specific formalizations and normativize them, we come to believe that (a) “nonequivalent translation” is a contradiction in terms, (b) scholars who claim to study translation but do not compare source texts segmentationally with target texts are simply not translation scholars, and (c) translation scholars from Schleiermacher to Venuti who argue “seriously” for various stylized literalisms are not serious at all, but playing some kind of perverted game.

The Confabulating LBI  27 The interesting methodological question for priming studies would be how one might simulate those primes experimentally. The question is especially tricky given the fact that the LBI priming in each case is not only already operative but is also backed up by RBI primes rewarding CFBI-normative choices with feelings of satisfaction and pride and flogging CFBI-counternormative choices with feelings of anxiety and shame. One is tempted to suggest readings in translation theory as LBI primes: Peter Newmark would do nicely for the normative options in all three, for example, but so would any of the LBI4 priming studies of translation listed in note 1 of Chapter 1 (p. 111), as they all seem to be entirely content to be primed by a, b, and c. As a control one might want to suggest skopos theory for the a-prime (Christiane Nord [1991] arguing that clients always specify the kind of transformative strategy they want imposed on the source text), Nida (1964) on dynamic equivalence for the b-prime (rejecting segmentational equivalence in favor of equivalence of response in source and target readers), and one of Schleiermacher’s (1813/2002, Robinson 1997/2014 in English) less hysterical critiques of “taking the author to the reader” or “making the translation sound as if it had been originally written in the target language” for the c-prime (see Robinson 2013b: Chapter 2 for the hysterical critiques). But would such LBI primes—or any LBI primes—actually work? Wouldn’t the existing RBI and CFBI primes remain so powerfully in force that LBI primes would be powerless against them? LBI primes for the translator scholar, then, would seem to be nonstarters; what about LBI primes for the translator? I suggested in the Introduction that the LBI would prime the translator to reason her or his way through problem areas and other open questions in a given translation job. In that sense, the LBI would be the voice priming translation students assigned Becoming a Translator (Robinson 2020a: 60) in class to stop the rapid clockwise movement of the Wheel of Experience and work back around it counterclockwise, starting with rules and precepts (deduction), moving then to online and other research (induction), and finally making one’s best guess at the solution (abduction). This too might be problematic, since the fast “subliminal” translation mode to which most of the textbook is devoted is not generally available to novice translators—it requires years of thoughtful, intelligent experience in the field to develop that mode—and translation instruction tends to be focused on the slow analytical mode that would be the obvious LBI prime. In that sense, every traditional translation class would consist of a series of LBI primes. Many of the exercises I developed for Becoming a Translator, however, would work as LBI primes for both the fast subliminal mode and the slow analytical mode. Here, for example, is the second exercise in Chapter 2 (drawing on Kussmaul 1995: 45–48—see p. 19):

28  The Left-Brain Interpreter (LBI): Cognitive Priming 1 Reflect on times in your studies or a previous career when you were close to burnout—when the stress levels seemed intolerable, when nothing in your work gave you pleasure. Feel again all those feelings. Now direct them to a translation task, for this class or another. Sit and stare at the source text, feeling the stress rising: it’s due tomorrow and you haven’t started working on it yet; it looks so boring that you want to scream; the person you’re doing it for (a client, your teacher) is going to hate your translation; you haven’t had time for yourself, time to put your feet up and laugh freely at some silly TV show, in months. Pay attention to your bodily responses: what do you feel? Now shake your head and shoulders and relax; put all thought of deadlines and critiques out of your head. Give yourself ten minutes to do nothing; then look through the source text with an eye to doing the silliest translation you can imagine. Start doing the silly translation in your head; imagine a group of friends laughing together over the translation. Work with another person to come up with the funniest bad translation of the text, and laugh together while you work. Now imagine yourself doing the “straight” or serious translation— and compare your feelings about the task now with your feelings under stress. (2020a: 49) In the first paragraph, there is a series of LBI primes designed to push students to dislike the slow analytical mode, and the second paragraph primes them to like the fast subliminal mode. Since translation students have already been primed, over and over—not just in their translation classes, but throughout their secondary and tertiary educations—to work slowly and analytically, I didn’t think they needed more priming in that direction. Note, though, the emphasis placed on feelings in both paragraphs. Because the instructions are all in words, they are technically LBI primes; but they clearly draw heavily on RBI primes as well. Ultimately I believe that LBI primes are ineffectual without the support of RBI primes. So perhaps it’s time to turn to the RBI now?

Part II

The Right-Brain Interpreter (RBI) Affective Priming

2 The Affective RBI

Michael S. Gazzaniga has been telling us for years that “Only the left brain has an interpreter” (1998: 25, emphasis in original; see also Gazzaniga 2005: 148; 2011: 102; 2014: 114, 150–53) because only the left brain has language. In Gazzaniga (2011: 92), however, he reports on the speculation launched by his former PhD student Paul Corballis that there is a RightBrain Interpreter (RBI) as well: Paul Corballis, studying split-brain patients in our lab, proposed that the right hemisphere has a visual interpreter dedicated to resolving the ambiguities of representing a three-dimensional world on the basis of a two-dimensional image inherent in spatial vision. … Corballis emphasizes that profound intelligence is required to create an accurate representation of the world from the information provided by the retinal image and suggests a right-brain “interpreter” process accomplishes this. In his next few paragraphs, Gazzaniga (2011: 92–93) summarizes five research publications from the Corballis team,1 on four of which he is listed as second or third author, all having to do with an RBI performing various tasks involving visual perception, such as temporal discrimination, the perception of illusory contours and illusory line motion, and visual memory for “a picture of a chessboard with all the pieces set in a pattern that makes chess sense” (93).

Empirical Research Review: Right-Brain-to-Right-Brain Affective Communication I do want to take Gazzaniga and Corballis up on their proposal that the right cerebral hemisphere has an “interpreter.” I have, however, two problems with these arguments for a visually oriented RBI.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003134312-5

32  The Right-Brain Interpreter (RBI): Affective Priming Problem 1. The arguments are based on studies of the relative strengths of the right hemisphere in split-brain patients: unlike the Left-Brain Interpreter (LBI), which is easily distinguishable as the voice of the left hemisphere, the RBI can only be speculatively identified through broad hemispheric skills. There is no reason to assume that the LBI is the left hemisphere; it only speaks for the left hemisphere (and ultimately the whole body-self). Since the RBI, if it exists, doesn’t speak, it can’t speak for. Speculation about its existence and focus, therefore, seems doomed to rather vague meanderings through various skills attributed to the right hemisphere. Problem 2. What makes the LBI the Left-Brain Interpreter is not that it is somehow holistically typical of the left hemisphere, but that it interprets, verbally, and the ability to communicate verbally is located in the left hemisphere. That to me suggests that the rightbrain counterpart would need to be an interpretive function of some sort—not just a skill area, like visual discrimination, but a neural spin-doctor—that channels its interpretations of the basic situations it finds itself in through a communicative ability that is mostly located in, or typical of, the right hemisphere. (How is the ability to remember a chess situation an “interpretation”? How is the ability to “detect[] whether two images are identical or mirror-reversed, detect[] small differences in line orientation, and mental rotation of objects” (92), and so on, an “interpretation”?). I wonder, too, why the Gazzaniga/Corballis team gives consideration only to visual discrimination and memory. In the very next section, for example, Gazzaniga (2011: 94–98) discusses what he calls “hijacking the Interpreter”—by which, as we’ve seen, he means hijacking the LBI. “If you feed the interpreter incorrect data,” he says, “you can hijack it” (94). One of his examples of the hijacked LBI is Capgras syndrome, “where the problem is in the system that monitors emotions” (96; see Robinson 2017d: First Essay). Because face recognition is channeled through two systems, the facial fusiform area, which analyzes lines and shapes, and “the system that monitors emotions,” damage to the latter makes the LBI confabulate imposture: this person looks exactly like my father, but can’t possibly be my father, because I don’t feel toward him what I feel toward my father, so he must be an imposter. The “incorrect” input is emotional; the voice interpreting that input is the LBI. But why, I wonder, can’t that incorrect emotional interpretation be the affective “voice” of an RBI? Why can’t we talk about the hijacking of an affectively channeled RBI? Think of the use of advertising or propaganda to hijack desire. Think of the use of self-help books to redirect motivation. In the Rhetoric Aristotle would have called this latter kind of hijacking the use of λόγος/lógos (the LBI) to manipulate πάθος/páthos (the RBI).

The Affective RBI  33 Another of Gazzaniga’s LBI-hijacking examples has to do with the effect of anti-anxiety drugs on adrenaline production in cases where a real danger exists: “If you are taking a drug to suppress anxiety … you don’t get that increased arousal and wariness when you see a menacing situation. Your monitoring system has been hijacked and feeds the interpreter bad information” (97). Here, obviously, “the interpreter” is the LBI. It never seems to occur to Gazzaniga to attribute the affectively tranquilized (anxiolytic) interpretation to an RBI: it’s just random input from somewhere else in the brain. Because the LBI talks, all interpreting functionality is attributed to it. But imagine, in this next passage, that “your interpreting system” is not localized entirely in the left hemisphere: “You don’t feel anxious and your interpretive system doesn’t classify the situation as dangerous; it makes a different interpretation and you don’t take special care” (97). Feeling anxious and taking special care could well be nonverbal interpretations undertaken by your right hemisphere: you cross the street away from the threat, you duck behind an obstruction, and so on. Not taking special care could be the RBI’s failure to initiate affective-becoming-conativebecoming-kinesthetic action. Without words, “your interpretive system … mak[ing] a different interpretation” could well be the RBI working alone. Nor do we need a theory of “hijacking the LBI” to provide evidence of an RBI. As Gazzaniga explains, even split-brain patients are able to experience the right brain’s emotional response in their verbal left brains: The [case of P.S.] was a typical example of the speaking left hemisphere piping up with some kind of story to explain the actions that were initiated by the right hemisphere without the knowledge of the left hemisphere. At other times the left hemisphere would explain away emotional feelings caused by the right hemisphere’s experiences. As I have mentioned earlier, emotional states appear to transfer between the hemispheres subcortically, and this transfer is not affected by severing the corpus callosum. Thus, even though all of the perceptions and experiences leading up to that emotional state may be isolated to the right hemisphere, both hemispheres will feel the emotion. Though the left hemisphere will have no clue why or where the emotion came from, it will always try to explain it away. For example, I showed a scary fire safety video about a guy getting pushed into a fire to the right hemisphere of V.P. When asked what she saw, she said: “I don’t really know what I saw. I think just a white flash.” But when asked if it made her feel any emotion, she said: “I don’t really know why, but I’m kind of scared. I feel jumpy. I think maybe I don’t like this room, or maybe it’s you, you’re getting me nervous.” She then turned to one of the research assistants and said, “I know I like Dr. Gazzaniga, but right now I’m scared of

34  The Right-Brain Interpreter (RBI): Affective Priming him for some reason.” The left hemisphere felt the negative valence of the emotion but had no knowledge of what the cause was. The interesting thing is that lack of knowledge does not stop it from coming up with a “makes sense” explanation that fits the circumstances: I was standing there and she was upset. Her interpreter put the two together into a cause-and-effect conclusion. I must have scared her. (2014: 151–52) V.P.’s left brain had no verbal access to the fire safety video that her right brain was interpreting as frightening, so her LBI confabulated a bogus explanation. But it should be clear that her right brain was interpreting that video affectively. And certainly in neurotypical subjects the LBI would have verbal access as well to that right-brain interpretation— would be able to say, “That was a scary movie.” In fact, isn’t there a reasonable case to be made for an RBI that interprets situations affectively? Or, more specifically, following Hiram Brownell’s (2011/2013) research on communicative deficits associated with right-hemisphere injury, an undamaged RBI that interprets communicative acts in terms of nonliteral language (e.g., metaphor, irony, and indirect requests), speech prosody, discourse (e.g., humor and story comprehension), and related cognitive abilities, such as inference, working memory, and Theory of Mind (ToM; i.e., using the beliefs and emotions of other people to interpret their behavior)?2 Note, in that list, that speech prosody is specifically affectively channeled nonverbal language (tonality, pitch, volume, etc.) and that there is a neurological disorder called aprosodia (reviewed in Chapter 4, pp. 58–65) involving a right-hemisphere Broca lesion, or what I will read speculatively as damage to the RBI. The ability to read nonliteral speech acts, humor, and “story”—especially characters’ desires, and how they keep trying and failing and then finally succeed in realizing those desires, and the attendant audience feelings of suspense and hope—is saturated in affective priming. And Brownell’s definition of ToM as “using the beliefs and emotions of other people to interpret their behavior” obviously supports the notion of an affect-based RBI priming behavioral interpretations as well. What I would like to suggest, therefore—provisionally, hypothetically—is that the “explanatory” function of the LBI is also at work in the RBI, just through different channels: affectively and kinesthetically rather than verbally. Specifically, I propose, the RBI communicates its “explanations”—which are more accurately inchoate attitudinalizations, inclinations, orientations, and situated preferences—through the five

The Affective RBI  35 senses, especially (as per Paul Corballis’s “visual interpreter”) but not exclusively the eyes, proprioception and enteroception, and styles of physical movement, including that sense of movement that we call kinesthetics. Another way of putting all that would be that the RBI communicates through performative body language, both by displaying it and by reading it on other people’s bodies. (The RBI can also interpret memories and imagined scenarios, and will strive to stage its interpretations of those things on the body.)

Empirical Research Review: The Translator’s and Interpreter’s Emotional Intelligence as Primed and Organized by the RBI The preeminent scholar of the translator’s and interpreter’s trait emotional intelligence (EI) is Séverine Hubscher-Davidson (2007, 2009, 2013, 2017). As someone who has been promoting a “somatic” study of translation since 1991 without much uptake—and see Hubscher-Davidson (2017: 87) for an acknowledgment of that first foray I made into the field3—I stand in sincere admiration of the compelling and comprehensive work she has done in this important area. Rather than attempting to summarize even just the massive ground she covers in Translation and Emotion (2017), I propose to limit myself generally to the trait EI research she reviews in her excellent article “Emotional Intelligence and Translation Studies: A New Bridge” (2013), simply updating her research-review from the 2017 monograph in this note4; but first a few quick summary statements from early in the monograph: Research shows, however, that emotions are involved in all kinds of decision-making and problem-solving behaviours, and one can argue that there are three distinctive areas where emotions influence translators: emotional material contained in source texts, their own emotions, and the emotions of source and target readers. The first area involves emotion perception, the second area involves emotion regulation, and the third area involves emotion expression. This book therefore seeks to explore further the translator’s handling of these emotions by investigating specific aspects of translators’ trait emotional intelligence profiles. (2017: 2) Her interventions emerge out of translation process research (TPR): The benefits of adding a psychological perspective in Translation Studies have been acknowledged for some time. Process-based studies have employed various methods (eye tracking, keyboard logging, thinking aloud, etc.) to investigate translator behaviour and the

36  The Right-Brain Interpreter (RBI): Affective Priming translation process. However, translation process research (TPR)—an offshoot of Holmes’s (2000/1972) descriptive sub-branch of ‘pure’ Translation Studies—has generally focused on exploring translators’ mental processes and human information processing skills (Bell 2001). This book argues that, alongside the study of purely cognitive processes, the psychology of translation must also encompass the study of attitudes, personalities, and dispositions. (3; see also 27–29) Agreed—and her follow-up observation that “if the work they are engaged so closely with happens to contain explosive emotion-eliciting material, the translator may become destabilised, shaken, unsure, fearful even” (4) coincides nicely with sections in this book, like Chapter 3’s “The RBI as the ‘Secret Code’ of Translating” (pp. 47–50), perhaps because Hubscher-Davidson too draws on Jean Anderson’s thought-provoking article “The Double Agent: Aspects of Literary Translator Affect as Revealed in Fictional Work by Translators” (2005), which informs both “Ideas for Research” sections in Chapter 3. In her 2013 article, Hubscher-Davidson tracks the emergence of the EI construct, first in psychology, in response to the pioneering work of Howard Gardner (1983) on multiple intelligences, “including interpersonal intelligence, the ability to understand other people, and intrapersonal intelligence, the ability to understand yourself and develop a sense of your own identity” (2013: 326). A few years after Gardner’s groundbreaking work, Salovey and Mayer (1990/2004: 189, quoted in Hubscher-Davidson 2013: 326) consolidated the emerging research paradigm in order to offer a formal definition, according to which EI was “the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions”—which is to say, in my terms here, EI would be something like the maturity and managerial competence of the RBI, its ability to manage affect for the priming of thoughts and actions. A new distinction also began to develop between “ability EI,” a task-specific RBI that you work up in order to maximize situated performance, and “trait EI,” a durable personality feature; studies increasingly began to link trait EI to mental health and well-being (Petrides et al. 2007; Cordovil de Sousa Uva et al. 2009) and the moderating effects of trait EI on mood deterioration in response to acute, intermediary and chronic stressors in both experimental and lab-based conditions, the results of which indicate that individuals with high EI demonstrate a recurring resilience in response to life stressors (Mikolajczak, Petrides et al. 2009). (328; see also Mikolajczak and Luminet 2008)

The Affective RBI  37 Because most of the studies were conducted at universities with students as their subjects, they tended to focus on RBI priming for academic success, through, for example, group belonging and commitment (Quoidbach and Hansenne 2009), proactive problem-solving (Petrides et al. 2007), creativity (Sánchez-Ruiz et al. 2011), and the ability to organize experience around emotional positivity (Mikolajczak et al. 2007). One study, Hubscher-Davidson suggests, is particularly applicable to Translation Studies (TS): Petrides, Frederickson et al.’s 2004 study is significant for TS in two ways. Firstly, it highlights a link between performance and stress/anxiety, and suggests that trait EI might have a more prominent impact on the academic performance of students when the demands of a situation tend to outweigh their intellectual resources. The results are in line with those of other studies that corroborate the link between trait EI and coping with stress (e.g. Ciarrochi, Deane et al. 2002; Mikolajczak, Nelis et al. 2008; Mikolajczak, Roy et al. 2009). This finding is clearly relevant for translation and interpreting students, as managing the uncertainty inherent to translation can be quite stressful and impact on problem-solving (Tirkkonen-Condit 1997; Fraser 2000). Studies of interpreter performance have highlighted the impact of stress on the quality of performance and the need for successful coping mechanisms. (Seleskovitch 1978; Henderson 1987; MoserMercer 2008; Timarová and Salaets 2011). It could be hypothesized that translating and interpreting students with high trait EI – as measured by self-report instruments – are therefore also likely to perform successfully in certain translation or interpreting tasks where coping with emotional stress and anxiety is a necessity. (331) Another study with direct applicability to translators and interpreters, undertaken by Dewaele et al. (2008), explored trait EI in 464 multilingual subjects, and found that “those with higher than average levels of trait EI suffered significantly less from communicative and foreign language anxiety, and that a higher level of self-perceived proficiency in a language (i.e. confidence in one’s proficiency) was also linked to lower levels of anxiety.” (332) As Hubscher-Davidson notes, “the observed link between high levels of trait emotional intelligence and low levels of anxiety in certain language learning situations is particularly relevant for interpreters who need to be able to cope with their anxiety when speaking in public” (332); but also, higher confidence levels in one’s ability to communicate in a foreign language would obviously correlate negatively with anxiety and positively with communicative success.

38  The Right-Brain Interpreter (RBI): Affective Priming More broadly, too, trait EI is relevant not only to getting by in a foreign language, and indeed not only in mediating between languages in translating and interpreting, but in managing the business of freelancing: As mentioned earlier, the role of personal and emotional characteristics in translation and interpreting performance has been acknowledged for some time. Being able to appraise and communicate one’s own and other people’s emotions is a key aspect of intercultural communication, and therefore a key skill for translators and interpreters. Along with being a competent linguist, a translator arguably needs to mediate effectively between cultures, to understand a target reader’s needs, expectations, and how to communicate a source author’s message in a successful way to target readers, or to a target audience in an interpreter’s case. Being able to recognize what a client, author or reader feels or requires, and finding ways to handle and transfer their perspectives is necessary for successful translation/interpreting performance and part of what psychologists call emotional intelligence. (332–33) Other research on translators, Hubscher-Davidson notes, finds them to be “emotionally engaged individuals (Fraser 1996: 95) who derive personal and contextual meanings from texts (Boase-Beier 2006: 53) and create interpersonal relationships with source text authors and assumed target text readers (Jääskeläinen 1999: 224)” (334). Hubscher-Davidson also tracks the research into translatorial creativity, not just in literary translation (Jones 2006; Lin 2006; Ellender 2006; Munday 2008; Winters 2009; Saldanha 2011) but more generally in terms of the creativity required to flesh forth an effective target reader-construct as a guide to translating any kind of text. Perteghella and Loffredo (2006: 2), for example, “exhort readers to rethink translation in terms of a creative writing practice, and suggest that creative writing has become ‘the next contender field promising an insight into the process of translation’” (quoted in Hubscher-Davidson 2013: 333). On that basis, she suggests, some of the many research studies of trait EI features generally found in creative writers should also be applicable to translators (Barron 1969; Davou 2007; Pourjalali et al. 2009; Perry 2009; Waitman and Plucker 2009; Piirto 2009). By 2013, when Hubscher-Davidson published her review, the research targeting trait EI in translators and interpreters was still just a trickle; she mentions specifically Bontempo (2009), Bontempo and Napier (2011), and Rosiers et al. (2011) as well as her own 2009 study, based on her 2007 dissertation, but also looks back to pioneering work in TS—especially “Lörscher’s study of translators’ performances and strategies (1991), Tirkkonen-Condit’s work on how translators manage uncertainty and ambiguity when translating (1997), and Fraser’s investigation of levels of confidence in high and low risk-takers (2000)” (336)—that laid the

The Affective RBI  39 groundwork for later EI studies. While these studies do not specifically mobilize trait EI or other psychological constructs, she notes, “these (and subsequent) process studies are particularly valuable as they serve to highlight the significance of studying personal and individual traits of translators and interpreters” (336). Since that review publication, too, the trickle has expanded—not quite into a flood but certainly into a viable subfield: see, for example, Kallay and Visu-Petra (2014), Varzande and Jadidi (2015), and Odacıoğlu et al. (2017). I would also mention earlier studies by Jiménez Ivars and Pinazo (2001) and Shangarffam and Abolsaba (2009) that perhaps didn’t fit Hubscher-Davidson’s review parameters but are surely also relevant. Note that trait EI can be thematized as the governing of unruly affect by the cognitive rule of some executive function: keeping your emotions under control. As the trait EI construction is studied by psychologists, however, it is not emotion controlled by reason but thoughts and actions primed and guided by mature emotion. EI research provides massive support for the RBI construct I am developing here, where the RBI interprets emerging situations affectively and manages them through various nonverbal priming channels.

Classroom Report: The RBI as a Literary Interpreter I have spent the bulk of my career as an English professor, and several times I have taught Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal For preventing the Children of Poor People From being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, And for making them Beneficial to the Publick” (1729). As you probably know, Swift proposes in it that Irish babies be sold to England as food, to feed the poor. Whenever I’ve taught it, invariably some student has been shocked out of his or her mind at the sheer inhumanity of this proposal: sell babies as food!? So my question is, how are students supposed to recognize that the piece is satire? (A related question, raised in first-year writing classes: how does one write satire? How does one know what will prime readers to register the satirical intent?). Is the only recourse to be told—by me, the professor, or by a classmate who had the “Modest Proposal” assigned in high school, or by Wikipedia— that Swift doesn’t mean his proposal seriously? That he’s satirizing the exploitation of the Irish by the English? Would it be better to draw their attention to the one line in the piece that gives the game away—“I grant this food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children”—and, rather than out-and-out calling the piece satirical, let them draw their own conclusions from that line? Or is there a way to train students to recognize on their own what’s going on in the text? Satire is often driven by anger, but the anger is typically masked as something else—in Swift’s case, as helpful advice. If the students were

40  The Right-Brain Interpreter (RBI): Affective Priming listening to Swift delivering a lecture version of “A Modest Proposal,” and he was visibly angry, his body language would help them identify what he was trying to do; but he could mask his anger in speech as well. The RBI would easily and accessibly read angry body language experienced in person and prime an interpretation of the piece as obvious satire; the written traces of anger and other emotions are harder to catch. One of the things we English professors do in teaching students to read literature, in fact, is to train them to read written traces of body language— to sensitize them to the cues writers use to trigger RBI priming. We also typically use LBI priming—otherwise known as “professing,” which is to say lecturing or explaining—to develop RBI priming in our students. I remember, early in my career, trying to teach Sylvia Path’s “Daddy” to undergraduates in my department at the University of Tampere, Finland, and feeling stymied because the LBI priming that we professors specialize in—explaining things in great detail, with clear categories—seemed so reminiscent of the fascistically methodical German father that Plath attacks so mercilessly in the poem that I couldn’t bring myself to teach the poem in that manner. As a result, I didn’t know what to do, and found myself saying lame things like “Do you feel that? Isn’t that powerful?” I would later learn other strategies for teaching a poem, like having students read it once and write a one-paragraph response, then read it a second time and write another one-paragraph response, then do the same a third time—and leading a discussion about what the students found themselves learning over the course of the three responses. But I was young then, in my late twenties, and clueless about alternatives to direct LBI priming. Note further that in the interpretation of Swift’s “Modest Proposal” the Collective Full-Brain Interpreter (CFBI) also provides important priming to the RBI. The CFBI instantly primes the utterly disastrous wrongness of “Eating babies is acceptable”—hence the students’ shock at Swift apparently suggesting that very thing. But also, at the next level or perhaps at a metalevel, the suggestion that “Eating babies is acceptable” is so obviously and overwhelmingly horrific that anyone suggesting that babies be sold as food must be using that proposal to do something else— say, to convey the concealed message that “Exploiting the poor for profit is wrong.” Something like that reasoning process—primed by the LBI as primed by the RBI as primed by the CFBI—is what we hope our students will learn to undertake, in figuring out what Swift was trying to do. But how do we get them to read the text attentively and sensitively enough to set them on the path of that interpretive priming chain?

Ideas for Research: Translating as Traveling and the Transformative Affect of Wonder Carol Maier (2006) reads Andrea Wilson Nightingale’s “On Wandering and Wondering: Theōria in Greek Philosophy and Culture” (2001) as a

The Affective RBI  41 way of connecting translation up with the ancient Greek etymology of θεωρία/theōría as a journey away from one’s home and city and everything that is familiar in order to “see” (the sense of theōría that first emerged metaphorically from the journeying) and then, upon the return home of the θεωρός/theōrós, to “theorize” or explain (the second metaphorical sense of theōría to emerge from the journeying) to one’s compatriots what one has seen. (First the RBI, then the LBI.) “Theōria,” Maier adds, particularly in the case of the civic or secular theōros, also meant taking the risk of rejection when the theōros returned home bearing information about ideas and customs that were alien and unwelcome when he told others about them, or ‘if he brought bad news’ ([Nightingale 2001]: 32) (169). Nightingale also, however, stresses the key element in this process of wonder (Greek θαῦμα/thauma) as the “‘radically different orientation to the world’ involved in theōria (2001: 24)” (Maier 2006: 169). Both Plato and Aristotle stress this thaumatic purpose as key not only to all philosophizing but to “all vigorous praxis” (Nightingale 2001: 34) in Plato and the greatest human happiness (41) in Aristotle. Both Platonic wonder and Aristotelian wonder, however, Nightingale stresses, are associated with the wonder that results from experiencing and the need to think not only about conjunctions but also about the ways in which one will convey those conjunctions to others and the ways in which they might alter the spectator. It is wonder (and implicitly not solely travel), Nightingale argues, that we “in the postenlightened age” (ibid.: 53) can learn from the Classical theōria as an “intellectual activity” (ibid.: 23). “We may be able to live w ­ ithout certainty”, she suggests. “But”, she asks, “can we really live without wonder?” (ibid.: 53). (Maier 2006: 169) The application to translating as a metaphorical (and often quite literal, geographical, as well) journey abroad to find and bring back a foreign text for one’s compatriots to read back home should be obvious, but apart from Friedrich Schleiermacher’s (1813/2002) discussion of translating as either bringing the reader to the author or bringing the author to the reader and James Clifford’s “Notes on Travel and Theory” (1989), it hasn’t really taken hold as a way of thinking about translating. Maier argues that the recent spate of fictional accounts of translators and interpreters has tended to embrace this model far more trenchantly, and thus to draw translation theorists’ attention to this peripatetic image of translating-as-theorizing. What is missed in thinking about the transformative effects of travel, translating, and wonder as an “intellectual activity,” however, is how “to theorize those unfamiliar things and events was to be affected by them”

42  The Right-Brain Interpreter (RBI): Affective Priming (Maier 2006: 169; emphasis added). Wonder is not really a cognitive state, though it can inspire cognition: it is an affect. We are, Maier adds, “moved to wonder” (169; emphasis added). “Depending on the purpose of the theōria, that wonder could alter one’s world view considerably; in this sense, it involved a danger: the risk of one’s certainty, even one’s sense of identity” (169). Translating as traveling was and is a way of putting yourself in that danger, of walking into situations in which the RBI can jump out at you, surprise you, prime you, in exciting but also risky ways. Maier devotes a good half of her article to discussions of fictional accounts of translating, in which, “confronted with foreign, seemingly untranslatable situations, and often responsible for conveying those situations in another, less hospitable language to a less-than-receptive audience that undervalues their work, those characters struggle to find a way to establish continuity and promote communication. If they feel unsuccessful they may commit acts of desperation; or they may go mad” (170). And yet, “if the practice of translation inevitably implicates the translator in unsettling and, implicitly, altering not only a text but also the individual who translates it, must translators think about the effects of that alteration in solely negative terms?” (165). That rhetorical question implies a “no” answer, of course, and Maier’s article seems to suggest that the positivity in the risks translators-as-theōroí take is the transformative effect/affect of wonder. The RBI lies in wait to prime the traveler-translator with the realization of what a wonderful world it is we live in, and how wonderful it is to be alive in it. The question to ask the RBI in a priming study, of course, is just how much the translator or interpreter must be willing to risk in order to become susceptible to such priming. Is it necessary to travel? Well, no. Is it necessary to translate radically transformative literary, philosophical, or esoteric works? No. Is it necessary to foreignize those works? That last seems at least implicit in Maier’s article, when she suggests that theōría requires “taking the risk of rejection when the theōros returned home bearing information about ideas and customs that were alien and unwelcome when he told others about them” (169). One justification Friedrich Schleiermacher could have proffered for translating as if taking the reader to the author, had he thought about it—he had, after all, recently finished translating the complete works of Plato, so he would have encountered the thinking in Nightingale’s and Maier’s articles in his translational wanderings—would have stressed the necessity of “taking the risk of rejection.” Bringing the author to the reader, or what Venuti calls domesticating, would then become a cowardly way of avoiding that risk. But, of course, foreignizing strategies are not the only risky way of translating new ideas and experiences for the RBI-primed (wonderstruck) LBI-priming of the people back home. If we take “translating” in the broadest possible sense, including intersemiotic and multimodal translations, then any edgy translation that makes its audience

The Affective RBI  43 uncomfortable in transformative ways will have the potential to RBIprime audiences for wonder, and possibly also to RBI-prime translators to RBI-prime audiences for wonder. This kind of priming through cinematic texts is a billion-dollar business: try to think of a Marvel screen adaptation (intersemiotic translation), for example, that does not take its characters on a journey across the galaxy in quest of wonder. For the purposes of RBI-priming translator-subjects for wonder experimentally, though, I’d personally lean toward clips from Hayao Miyazaki’s anime Howl’s Moving Castle (2004)—from anywhere in the movie, in fact, but perhaps prefaced by truncated plot summaries leading up to each clip, or by a paragraph from Diana Wynne Jones’s original novel (1986) for each clip. The basic premise of Howl’s Moving Castle, in fact, where turning a dial takes you to a different destination, might serve as a kind of cinematic objective correlative of a freelance translator’s daily life: working on several jobs in turn, translating one, editing another, revising a third, doing research for a fourth. Click: next job! One could use Hubscher-Davidson’s account of translator’s or interpreter’s EI as the target state, with a scale of intensity for each of her categories; then prime subjects’ affective attitudes toward translating a brief passage with (a) clips or paragraphs from Howl’s Moving Castle, (b) clips or paragraphs from a film or novel of domestic realism, and (c) a training video or instruction guide book for new employees.

3 The Evolutionary Origins and Function of the RBI

One way to study the priming chain CFBI > RBI > LBI > language is to study the evolutionary structure of the brain and to speculate on the evolutionary emergence of language. Since that sort of evolutionary history tends to leave structural and functional traces of earlier stages in the brain, evolutionary psychologists have been able to use those traces as the basis for a theory of the development of language out of a “motor breakthrough” in primates,1 involving the processing of visual information and imitative planning of action sequences (Donald 1991).

Empirical Research Review: Evolutionary Origins In his 1995 “Decade of the Brain” lecture at the Silver Jubilee meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, the cognitive neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran identified “mirror neurons and imitation learning as the driving force behind ‘the great leap forward’ in human evolution”—the evolutionary “big bang” that occurred roughly 40 millennia ago, in which our ancestors developed cave art, clothes, and language. He goes on: [Giacomo] Rizzolatti’s discovery [of the mirror neurons] can help us solve this age-old puzzle. He recorded from the ventral premotor area of the frontal lobes of monkeys and found that certain cells will fire when a monkey performs a single, highly specific action with its hand: pulling, pushing, tugging, grasping, picking up and putting a peanut in the mouth etc. Different neurons fire in response to different actions. One might be tempted to think that these are motor “command” neurons, making muscles do certain things; however, the astonishing truth is that any given mirror neuron will also fire when the monkey in question observes another monkey (or even the experimenter) performing the same action, e.g. tasting a peanut! With knowledge of these neurons, you have the basis for understanding a host of very enigmatic aspects of the human mind: “mind reading” empathy, imitation learning, and even the evolution of language. DOI: 10.4324/9781003134312-6

The Evolutionary Origins and Function of the RBI  45 Any time you watch someone else doing something (or even starting to do something), the corresponding mirror neuron might fire in your brain, thereby allowing you to “read” and understand another's intentions, and thus to develop a sophisticated “theory of other minds.” He goes on to suggest that “a loss of these mirror neurons may explain autism—a cruel disease that afflicts children. Without these neurons the child can no longer understand or empathize with other people emotionally and therefore completely withdraws from the world socially”—a topic to which we will return in Chapter 4 (pp. 58–65). Ramachandran also notes that Rizzolatti finds the ventral premotor area in macaques to be homologous to Broca’s area in humans—the left inferior frontal gyrus in the frontal lobe, which, as has been well known since Paul Broca (1824–1880) identified it in 1861, is involved in speech production. Significantly, however, Broca’s area is far more versatile than its popular reputation: Rizzolatti and Craighero (2004: 186) find that Broca’s area is a neural grab-bag in which “phonology, semantics, hand actions, ingestive actions, and syntax are all intermixed.” Citing the close links between hand-related motor neurons in macaques and Broca’s area in humans, Michael Arbib (2012a) argues strenuously for the role played by hand gestures in language evolution (see also Corballis 2003).2 Or as Arbib et al. (2014: 4–5) summarize this research: A mirror system for grasping was found in the human brain in or near Broca’s area, traditionally thought of as a speech area but better thought of as a language area since it is involved in sign language as well as spoken language (Poizner et al. 1987). This fueled the socalled mirror system hypothesis that mirror neurons for grasping evolved into mirror systems for communication via manual gesture as a major step toward the evolution of the human language-ready brain (Arbib 2012a; Rizzolatti and Arbib 1998). Evolution as emergence: the human language-ready brain as an emergent transformation of the primate gesture-ready brain. “Mirror systems for communication” as an emergent transformation of “mirror systems for grasping.” The LBI as an emergent transformation of Broca’s-areacontrolled hand gestures and tool use.

Sociological Research Report: Bourdieu on the Affective “Secret Code” The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) pauses in Language and Social Power (1991) to track, in “crises characteristic of the domestic

46  The Right-Brain Interpreter (RBI): Affective Priming unit, such as marital or teenage crises,” the priming power of something like the RBI: There is every reason to think that the factors which are most influential in the formation of the habitus are transmitted without passing through language and consciousness, but through suggestions inscribed in the most apparently insignificant aspects of the things, situations and practices of everyday life. Thus the modalities of practices, the ways of looking, sitting, standing, keeping silent, or even of speaking (“reproachful looks” or “tones”, “disapproving glances” and so on) are full of injunctions that are powerful and hard to resist because they are silent and insidious, insistent and insinuating. (It is this secret code which is explicitly denounced in the crises characteristic of the domestic unit, such as marital or teenage crises: the apparent disproportion between the violence of the revolt and the causes which provoke it stems from the fact that the most anodyne actions or words are now seen for what they are—as injunctions, intimidations, warnings, threats—and denounced as such, all the more violently because they continue to act below the level of consciousness and beneath the very revolt which they provoke.) The power of suggestion which is exerted through things and persons and which, instead of telling the child what he must do, tells him what he is, and thus leads him to become durably what he has to be, is the condition for the effectiveness of all kinds of symbolic power that will subsequently be able to operate on a habitus predisposed to respond to them. The relation between two people may be such that one of them has only to appear in order to impose on the other, without even having to want to, let alone formulate any command, a definition of the situation and of himself (as intimidated, for example), which is all the more absolute and undisputed for not having to be stated. (Bourdieu 1991: 51–52) Bourdieu is describing embodied speech acts, obviously: “injunctions, intimidations, warnings, threats.” Because the embodied channel of communication is not explicitly verbalized, however—because it is mobilized by the RBI rather than the LBI—it is easy for us to miss it altogether and somehow convince ourselves that “language” is a series of words. Hence, of course, Bourdieu’s depiction of the embodied medium of speech acts as a “secret code.” Because that “code” operates in stealth mode, under the radar of conscious awareness, it tends to have plausible deniability: when it “is explicitly denounced in the crises characteristic of the domestic unit, such as marital or teenage crises,” it tends to provoke puzzled denials. “I’m not trying to control you; I just care about you! It’s love! I want what’s best for you!” and so on.

The Evolutionary Origins and Function of the RBI  47 Bourdieu notes that “the apparent disproportion between the violence of the revolt and the causes which provoke it stems from the fact that the most anodyne actions or words are now seen for what they are—as injunctions, intimidations, warnings, threats—and denounced as such, all the more violently because they continue to act below the level of consciousness and beneath the very revolt which they provoke”; but I submit that the frustrating nature of such denunciations stems from the fact that the accused is himself or herself typically completely unaware of the stealth “injunctions, intimidations, warnings, threats” launched through those “anodyne actions or words.” In other words, those speech acts are not “seen for what they are”—or perhaps are seen only by their victim, not by their perpetrator, who remains blissfully (and sincerely!) blind and deaf to the affective “secret code” s/he is mobilizing. So blind and deaf to the affective “secret codes” undergirding speech acts are the “perpetrators” of stealth “injunctions, intimidations, warnings, threats,” in fact, that theorizing them is an uphill battle. Talk of an affective charge to language is almost always met—even among highly educated audiences, at least in the West—with incredulous dismissal. Even Bourdieu, in theorizing that charge, believes that the affective “secret code” is not itself (part of) language but a separate thing that somehow gets attached to language. He seems to be following the posthumously edited structuralist “Saussure” in seeing la langage as consisting of two parts, la langue (abstract structure) and la parole (speech), and merely splitting speech internally into la parole and les manières de parler—which is to say, a disembodied proto-langue-like structure that does not transmit habitus (“verbal language”) and an embodied undercurrent that transmits habitus (“body language”). Bourdieu’s assumption seems to be that language is not body; it’s pure mind. Not only is it pure disembodied structure as la langue; it’s pure disembodied structure even as la parole, speech. Corpus linguists, after all, studying written transcriptions of speech, believe that they are studying real language. They can’t study its body, its affect, its situated performativity—the way it is primed by the RBI—but since language is pure structure, since pure structure is its Deep Ontology, all the rest of that stuff isn’t really language at all. The notations on the page or screen capture the structural core of “real language.” One of my core arguments in this book is that all of the assumptions in that previous paragraph are debilitatingly bad theory.

Ideas for Research: The RBI as the “Secret Code” of Translating One of the recurring tropes in the so-called “fictional turn” of Translation Studies, in which we learn about translation from fictional portraits of translators and interpreters, is that the “official” account of translation

48  The Right-Brain Interpreter (RBI): Affective Priming among translator scholars tends to be repressively idealizing, heroizing the translator and the interpreter as intercultural mediators who stand above the monolingual and monocultural beings on both sides of the boundary and sovereignly facilitate their communicative encounters— and that the best way for us to get past that repressive idealization is to read novels about translators. Jean Anderson (2005), for example, says she is “working from the assumption that such literary texts may provide an opportunity for translator-authors to express precisely those affective elements which have no official place in the translation process” (171–72) and promises to “explore the representation of this fictional character as transgressive” (172; emphasis added). The fictional translator or interpreter Anderson studies, in other words, is represented as transgressing against the idealized imagenorm—partly because that transgressor’s RBI, in Bourdieu’s terms, is an affective “secret code” that undermines the cherished values of social life, but partly also because the idealized image of the translator or interpreter is purely cognitive, a language professional for whom language is an abstract sign system that s/he has mastered intellectually, logically, analytically. The translator as a manipulator of black marks on the page, like the translator scholar as a corpus linguist who processes millions of black marks on the screen digitally, is ideally affectfree. There are no affective secret codes. There is no RBI. Everything is above-board. The first fictional translator Anderson studies, for example, is Cassandra Reilly, a lesbian American translator-sleuth created by Barbara Wilson, who also translates from Norwegian. Anderson describes the character: While Reilly has occasional romantic encounters, generally with other lesbian interpreters or translators, she is essentially a loner, clearly an outsider figure, not merely in the foreign cultures she visits but within her own, having grown up poor, Irish and Catholic in a predominantly WASP environment. Her second language, Spanish, was in fact an escape route for her, an opportunity to move beyond the limits imposed on her by this upbringing. Shifting identities is, significantly, a large part of the attraction of her chosen career as a translator. (173) Translators have lives away from the purely linguistic transition from the source text to the target text; those lives are lived in the body, and it’s not always pretty. It’s also not always predictable: the poor/Irish/Catholic-toWASP loner/outsider dynamic of Reilly’s childhood shifts to the Spanishto-English loner/outsider dynamic of her adulthood, and whatever pattern there is to that shift is one that must be imagined and imposed after the fact. The impulse to explain through patterns is complicated

The Evolutionary Origins and Function of the RBI  49 even further by the new embodied identity tensions that the character herself describes: It is one of the remarkable aspects of language that we can appear to take on different personalities simply by making different sounds than the ones to which we are accustomed. […] When I speak Spanish, the language I know best besides English, I find my facial muscles set in a different pattern, and new, yet familiar gestures taking over my hands. I find myself shrugging and tossing my head back, pulling down the corners of my mouth and lifting my eyebrows. I touch people all the time and don’t mind that they stand so close to me and blow cigarette smoke into my face. I speak more rapidly and fluidly and I use expressions that for all my experience as a translator, I simply can’t turn into exact equivalents. To speak another language is to lead a parallel life; the better you speak any language, the more fully you live in another culture. (Wilson 1993: 159–60; quoted in Anderson 2005: 175) Anderson links this to “what language-acquisition theorist Guiora [et al.] (1972) has called ‘ego permeability,’ the ability to open oneself to the foreignness of another language at the level of one’s personality” (175), but it seems to me that that ability is even more visceral than the performance of “the level of personality” when “tak[ing] on different personalities simply by making different sounds than the ones to which we are accustomed” in and through a hundred different micro-embodiments. It certainly is true that “the better you speak any language, the more fully you live in another culture,” but this account delves far deeper than just “living more fully,” into the code-shifting performativity of alternative kinesthetic identities. Reilly doesn’t just “live” in Spanish culture when she speaks Spanish; she feels Spanish in and with her whole body. Her RBI performs a Spanish identity with subtly but still radically transformed body language.3 The embodied (indirect) speech acts that here perform Reilly’s Spanish “personality” are not the “injunctions, intimidations, warnings, threats” of the “secret code” of which Bourdieu writes, but they are, nevertheless, still part of an embodied “secret code” of enlanguaged and encultured identity. The translator in this account doesn’t just learn morphology, syntax, and semantics, and she doesn’t just learn formalized pragmatics, either—abstract codes of politeness and relevance, say. She learns the (or a) secret embodied code of Spanishness. Because that code doesn’t directly speak—because it is primed by the RBI rather than the LBI—it seems to be unrelated to language; but that RBI-primed kinesthetic identity-performativity is at the very core of linguistic and cultural competence. It is only through that performativity that the foreign learner begins (and continues) to feel the words.

50  The Right-Brain Interpreter (RBI): Affective Priming How might that RBI-performativity be primed experimentally? My favorite story about the non-universality of body language comes from Bulgaria, where my family and I spent a week in a village, trying to communicate with our hosts in Bulgarian, of which my first wife and I spoke not a word when we arrived. We learned as much of it as we could, as fast as we could, in a few days; but what stymied me at first was a horrible suspicion that there was something terribly wrong with these people psychologically. I couldn’t figure out why I felt that way, until a vague distant memory came to me, that Bulgarians shake their heads yes and nod their heads no. Could the “problem” I was projecting onto them be nothing more than a mismatch between my habitualized (and therefore universalized) expectations for body language and the “deviance” of the local cultural variant? The next time I laid eyes on the one Bulgarian present who spoke English—our 16-year-old exchange daughter, whose family we were visiting, but who was mostly off with our kids—I asked her, and she confirmed it, and demonstrated the body language for us: actually, a tipping back and forth from left to right for yes and a backwards jerk for no. I tried and tried, the rest of that week, to combine the falling-rising tonality for yes with the side-to-side tilt for да/da—and never once succeeded. Every time, I would nod as I said да/da and then do the side-toside tilt. The interesting aftermath of that week, though, was that as we drove back across Europe to Charles de Gaulle Airport to drop off the rental car, through Greece, Italy, and Germany, to France, every time I tried to say “yes” in whatever language we were passing through, what came out was not ναι/nai, si, ja, or oui: it was да/da. Somehow my failed attempts to learn the Bulgarian body language overpowered my ability to say “yes” in any other foreign language. So try that prime. Show the experimental group YouTube clips of people from Bulgaria and the control group clips of people from another culture saying “yes” and “no” in their languages. Have the translatorsubjects practice mimicking their body language—not just what their heads do, but tone of voice, facial expressions, and the actual pronunciations of the words. See what happens to their translation readiness and performance.

Anecdote: An Interesting Series of Events in Volgograd, Russia A few years ago, while I was on a Fulbright grant in Voronezh, Russia, my second wife’s hometown, I was invited to give a two-day workshop on translation at Volgograd State University. One of my wife’s best friends, a Russian woman from Volgograd who had moved to the United States, was going to be visiting her family while we were there, so we

The Evolutionary Origins and Function of the RBI  51 made plans to meet up—and my wife’s friend invited us to dinner with her family. At the dinner were also the friend’s sister and brother-in-law and their three-year-old son. My Russian was just about right for conversing with the three-year-old, and I played with him a lot that evening. At one point we had an interesting conversation. The boy had a balloon to which he was extremely attached. He carried it with him everywhere. He cradled it in his little arms. The interesting thing happened when I asked him, playfully, if I could squeeze the balloon really hard. He turned suddenly, with anxiety in his eyes, holding the balloon farther away from me, and said: “Нет, ёпит” (“Nyet, yopit”). Suddenly I felt an uneasy affect in the room. I didn’t understand his word “ёпит/yopit,” but sensed from the uneasy affect that it was something somehow problematic. His mother said in a carefully controlled adult voice, with deliberate neutrality (in Russian): “He means ‘лопнет/lopnet.’” Then I got it: “лопнет/lopnet” means “it will pop,” which made sense in terms of his attachment to that balloon; but that knowledge plus the odd affect in the room—and the mother’s tonally calibrated explanation, attempting to master or tame the affective volatility—made me remember that the first syllable of his pronunciation of “лопнет/lopnet,” “ёб/yob” (pronounced “yope”), means “fucked.” So the next day at the workshop I told this story, as an illustration of the somatics of language. All the students in the workshop were Russian women and needed no explanation: they got it immediately. The instant I said “ёпит/yopit,” their eyes went wide, and they glanced around anxiously. Some then covered their mouths; others burst out laughing. What was going on there? First off, taboo words do tend to be weaponized affectively. They wield what power they wield because people react to them with such strong affect. (How did they come to react that way? Did someone “teach” them, in the propositional sense, with verbal explanations? Almost certainly not.) Second, the little three-year-old boy did not know he was uttering a taboo word. It was just the way he pronounced “лопнет/lopnet.” He turned the [l] into a [j] and dropped the [n]. In adult terms, it was an “error”—an inadvertent mispronunciation. (Did he know it was a mispronunciation? Probably not. Eventually, of course, he would learn not to say “ёб/yob.” But how?) Third, the mother’s intervention was for our sake, the other adults— the ones who didn’t know the boy’s idiophonology the way his parents did. But her intervention operated on (at least) two levels: the semantic, explaining what the word meant, and the affective, attempting to smooth out any affective disturbance caused by the taboo word.

52  The Right-Brain Interpreter (RBI): Affective Priming On that latter level, she was attempting to put the best possible face on the situation: we’re all adults here; we are not bothered by a child’s mispronunciation, even if it comes out sounding like a taboo word; in fact, it’s sort of cute, if you think about it; but let’s not express our sense of its cuteness, lest he get the idea that he can get the same reaction over and over by repeating it. (How can she convey all that with a tightly controlled tonality?) And, fourth, the whole thing changed when I told the story to my female students in the translation workshop the next day. Now the taboo word was something reportedly said by a small Russian child—but actually told (reported) by a male foreigner. Now it was a story with a purpose, designed to illustrate a point the male foreigner was making—but the point was channeled through an affective response that took the students by surprise, and put them somewhat at a social disadvantage. Whereas the adults in the room the previous evening had responded by clamping down hard on their affective response, the students in my workshop responded with a sudden panicky affect that some found unpleasant, others found funny, but all were able to master by remembering that I was making a point about our affective response to language, and reminding themselves that the taboo word had been uttered not to shock them but “cutely,” by a three-year-old who couldn’t quite pronounce the word he wanted to say. (How do I know all that? Well, I’m cheating: we discussed it, at some length. We tracked the complexity of the various affective responses to that “ёб/yob.”) The interesting point in all this has to do with the presumed effect of the mother’s tonally controlled explanation on the boy—specifically, the effect of that explanation on him in the context of general affective volatility. As far as I could tell, it had no effect at all. The affective complexities were all adult complexities, way over the boy’s head. Indeed, I’m guessing one of the mother’s purposes in reacting that way was to hide the adult affective complexities from her son. Let him say the word any way he says it. No need to correct him; no need to laugh at or with him; no need to create general merriment around the mispronunciation. All that would just be confusing for him—or, if he got it, or got some inkling of it, he might get carried away, start saying “ёпит/yopit” for the effect it has on adults. Best to foreclose entirely on affective response. Maintain affective neutrality. But what do you think: would the mother’s attempt at a regulatory affective neutrality really convey affective neutrality to the boy? I suggest not. I suggest that it would have conveyed regulatory affect to him. It’s not clear how much of the intended regulatory impact would have gotten through to him on that specific occasion, of course; but it seems undeniable to me that the mother’s intervention was intended to regulate not only the guests’ affective response but the boy’s as well. I suggest also that the regulatory effect of the mother’s intervention worked much better on the adults in the room than on the boy. Why

The Evolutionary Origins and Function of the RBI  53 would that be? Because, I suggest further, the effect of regulatory affect on speakers is cumulative. As we grow into late childhood and adolescence, the impact of other people’s affect on us becomes excruciatingly powerful—that “secret code” Bourdieu talked about (p. 46). So powerful is that impact, in fact, that as we grow into adulthood we begin to develop defenses against the most painful results of that impact. We say we “grow thicker skin.” Some people develop such thick skin that it becomes almost impossible to hurt them with words. That is a relief for those so protected, mostly; but it also means that it is almost impossible to touch them with words, even in sweet, loving ways, which is not such a good thing. I’m thinking here, of course, about the traditional patriarchal training that males get in armoring themselves (ourselves) against emotional injury. Females have traditionally been conditioned to thinner skin, and thus greater sensitivity to the emotions of others. We have fairly negative slang terms for women whose skin is so thick that they wield power with “impunity”—emotional self-protection, which feels like coldness, aloofness, even monstrous psychopathic inhumanity. We also have negative slang terms for men whose skin is so thin that they explode with narcissistic anger or hurt at every tiny (even imagined) slight. Such thick-skinned women and thin-skinned men are not “normal”— which is to say that their relative levels of emotional self-protection do not conform to the standard gender norms on which we base our sense of what is normal for men’s and women’s behavior. Language-acquisition experts like to point out that parents don’t often correct their toddlers’ grammar—how then do they learn? Is it not possible, I wonder, that children’s first language is “acquired” in large part with affective guidance from the older people around them? Could we learn our first language with regulatory priming from an adult RBI to a child RBI?

Ideas for Research: The Double-Binds of Translation In Jean Anderson’s “The Double Agent,” after she discusses Barbara Wilson’s translator-sleuth Cassandra Reilly, she tracks similar complexities in other novels featuring translators: Suzanne Glass’s character Dominique in The Interpreter (1999) in Section 2 and the Native Tongue trilogy (1985) by Suzette Haden Elgin in Section 3. In Section 4, she quotes Michael Cronin’s Across the Lines on the dangers of reperforming oneself as someone else—“If the speaker of a foreign language is taken to be a native speaker of that language, after the initial feeling of self-congratulation, is there another sense of acting under false pretences, of pretending to be another and so losing one’s identity?” (Cronin 2000: 48)—and then quotes the passage about Cassandra Reilly RBI-performing her whole body as Spanish that I discussed above (p. 49). Then, in Section 5, she surprises me by discussing a scenario that she takes not from a novel

54  The Right-Brain Interpreter (RBI): Affective Priming about a translator or interpreter but from a familiar work of speculative scholarship: In Who Translates? (2001) Douglas Robinson provides a thoughtprovoking exposé of what he terms, following Gregory Bateson, the translator’s double bind. It is as well to note here, even if only in passing, that Robinson’s concept differs considerably from Bateson’s original one, which referred exclusively to a schizogenic family situation. Here key factors come into play, such as repeated experience of conflict between family members, leading to a habituated response, and a qualitative difference between opposing injunctions, one of which must be less overt or concrete than the other. For Bateson, the debilitating power of the double bind resides in the fact that the victim’s survival depends on his or her ability to resolve the insoluble and unacknowledged, because unspoken, conflict (Bateson et al. 1956/1972: 206–212). Robinson’s notion of the double bind, as he himself points out, modifies Bateson’s concept considerably, notably in suggesting that the two conflicting imperatives are of “precisely the same level” (Robinson 2001: 175). It is perhaps more appropriate then to refer instead to a “no-win situation” where Robinson’s vision of the translator is concerned. He develops this notion over a number of pages in a complex chapter entitled “The Pandemonium Self”, from which I cite the following example: to practice his or her craft appropriately the translator must “internalize the command to be both a neutral anonymous invisible channel (1) and a fully alive and creative artist (2) and expect censure for failure” (Robinson 2001: 175). In other words, he or she must be both a creative human being and a simple conduit. Despite the inherent contradiction of this statement many literary translators can indeed see the value of both functions: such an imperative – however we may label it – can only add to the stresses of the profession, a point developed extensively by Robinson. (Anderson 2005: 176) What Anderson helps me realize about those double-binds of translation—I’ve written quite a few (1995; 2001: 175–79; 2006b; 2017c: 68–75)—is that the “voice” that speaks those conflicting “commands” is an affective rather than verbal/cognitive command-giver. The doublebinds of translation are primed by “the” RBI—though rethinking them now makes me wonder whether there aren’t several, each primed independently by a different CFBI, with affective safeguards built in against becoming aware of the contradictory pressures any two bring simultaneously to bear on the translator.

The Evolutionary Origins and Function of the RBI  55 And those verbalized RBI pressures now seem to me ready-made as experimental primes: For the experimental group: (1)  Be a human translator. (a) Translate in a human body: not just skin and bones but emotions, motivations, prejudices, and a rich private and public life beyond translation. (b) Let your humanity flow into and through your work as a translator, and (at least partly) shape the work you do, and the way you do that work. (c) Love or hate individual words and phrases and entire translation jobs you do, and the profession as a whole, and the various people you work with and/or for. Feel excitement about some aspects of the job, frustration at others. (d) Gravitate toward certain types of work (translating or interpreting; literary, technical, commercial, legal, medical; in-house or freelance) because of your personality, your personal preferences, your ethical predilections. (e) Let your work as a translator (at least partly) define your humanity, your personality, your sense of your place in the world. For the control group: (2)  Be a machine translator. (a) Train yourself to suppress your humanity when you translate. (b) Translate without emotions, without extratranslational motivations, certainly without prejudices. Allow yourself these things when you are not translating, but remind yourself that their effect on a translation is invariably to distort the meaning of the source text, and that must be avoided at all costs. (c) Take guarded pleasure in your success at the suppression of your humanity while translating. But allow yourself to feel that pleasure only when you are not translating. (d) Take classes in translation in order to enhance your ability to translate in machine-like ways. Shy away from translation teachers who do not preach strict neutral objective accuracy. (e) Think of translation as basically a machinic process. So primed, the translator-subjects in each group should translate the same paragraph of, say, ad copy. See what transpires.

4 Aprosodic Linguistics

While I was traveling with my eight-year-old daughter Agnes a few years ago, we were approaching our gate at Hong Kong International Airport along a series of moving walkways, and she ventured the opinion that we needed to take only one more moving walkway to Gate 30. I corrected her: “One moving walkway takes you to Gate 28; two walkways takes you to 30.” And then an internal voice that I’ll call my LBIx launched a quibble: two walkways takes? Shouldn’t it be two walkways take? Word’s grammar checker seconds the motion: as I write the line here, it puts two blue lines under takes and suggests take instead. But then LBIy stepped in, reasserting the original grammar as “better” or “more natural.” Why? Because “two walkways” is a unit of distance and thus a singularity. And to that LBIz added that there might be an implicit gerund in the phrase: (traversing) two walkways takes. So is that series of squabbling LBI voices just a product of my profession, not only as an English professor but as a writer and a translator, someone who is professionally (and indeed obsessively) attuned to the best wording? Perhaps, partly. Probably not every speaker would worry so extensively about that takes; certainly not every speaker would project an implicit gerund before the plural noun. My LBIs have been educated in a particular way by the work I do. I am, I suppose, what Steven Pinker (1994/2007: Chapter 12) disparages as a “language maven.” I care rather obsessively about linguistic correctness. Incorrect usage makes me feel anxious. Does that make me a freak, an aberration, unlike most other human beings?

Theory: Correctness Anxiety What Pinker means by language mavens is the popular prescriptivists who teach all of us to avoid “bad grammar” and “incorrect usage” and so on, and in the process indict ordinary speakers of English as hopeless manglers of the language. DOI: 10.4324/9781003134312-7

Aprosodic Linguistics  57 But I wonder. Is the prescriptive work done by the language mavens all that different in the end from what we all do, every moment in which we use language? Could that prescriptive work be primed unconsciously, affectively, by the Right-Brain Interpreter (RBI), whose right-brain interpretations nag at us voicelessly through what I call correctness anxiety? On those same moving walkways at the airport, on that same walk out to Gate 30 to fly to Spain, Agnes developed a game where she staggered from side to side, crashing into me and then staggering away. She loves to crash. After doing that three or four times, she observed, “I keep comeovering to your side,” and then, a moment later, corrected herself to “I keep coming over to your side.” That error was made by her LBI—but so was the correction. And it occurred to me that, even though I’m not eight, and have far more training in grammar than she does, I could easily have made the same mistake in speech (and obviously would have corrected myself in the same way). There is, after all, something about a phrasal verb like “to come over” that makes it feel (to an RBI?) like a single coherent unit—and thus that seems to encourage us to add the continuous -ing suffix to the end of that unit, overing, or the participial -ed suffix to “cut up,” upped. It’s the same kind of uncertainty about word boundaries that inclines us to say things like “two daughter-in-laws” and then, perhaps, to correct that to “two daughters-in-law.” More humorously, it is the same kind of mental pattern that encourages us to play with the verb “to hiccup” with cute solecisms like “I keep hicking up,” as if it were a phrasal verb like “to pick up.” The fact is, every language is klugey around the edges (Marcus 2008)— full of illogicalities that are more or less difficult for the more logically minded LBI to manage. Those difficulties are especially evident in speech, but people who hate to write typically feel thwarted by such difficulties in writing as well. (In writing studies—see Robinson 2012: 199–200— this is called “writing apprehension.” Writing apprehension is also managed by the RBI.) In order to speak and write more or less coherently, we all police our own grammar more or less consciously, and more or less effectively. The less consciously we police it, the more we rely on internalized feelings of rightness or wrongness—the “correctness anxiety” that I’m suggesting may be marshalled by an RBI. Jonathan Haidt writes of “the sudden appearance in consciousness, or at the fringe of consciousness, of an evaluative feeling (like-dislike, goodbad) about the character or actions of a person, without any conscious awareness of having gone through steps of search, weighing evidence, or  inferring a conclusion” (Haidt and Bjorklund 2008; see also Haidt 2001).

58  The Right-Brain Interpreter (RBI): Affective Priming I’m suggesting that those “social moral intuitions” (about which Haidt is writing) are also at work in the unification of language around regulatory norms. The RBI sends an “evaluative feeling (like-dislike, good-bad)” into “the fringe of [LBI] consciousness” about the correctness of one’s own or someone else’s discourse, “without any conscious awareness of having gone through steps of search, weighing evidence, or inferring a conclusion.” To the extent that this feeling actually enters LBI-consciousness, and even gets expressed verbally, it sounds the klaxon horn of the language maven; but becoming more conscious of grammatical problems and solutions does not mean banishing this affective orientation to correctness. It just adds a step. Grammatical self-policing is always affective-becomingcognitive. It just doesn’t always become fully cognitive.

Empirical Research Review: Feeling Words One of the great ironies about the belief that language is pure disembodied structure is that the inability to read other people’s utterances as anything but that disembodied structure is a recognized neurological disorder called aprosodia, caused by right hemisphere damage. Because aprosodiacs are unable to read other people’s “prosody”—the tonalizations, rhythms, generally the affective charge of speech—they fail to parse the emotional nuances that organize conversational “meaning” far more significantly than the semantics and syntax of the individual words and phrases do. This makes their lives nearly unlivable. The disembodied semiosis that seems “normal” to most neurotypical language theorists is an aprosodiac’s nightmare. To be fair, though, not only are neurotypical speakers’ successful interpretations of those bodily signals handled by the visual-affective RBI, and therefore largely unavailable to the verbal-intellectual left brain—i.e., “unconscious,” hence easy to ignore—but the RBI’s attempts to interpret the prosody of other people’s utterances are not always successful. The bodily signals that indicate an ironic or joking twist to an utterance, for example, may be so subtle that even neurotypical interpreters may miss them if they are not quite paying attention, and may therefore take their interlocutor to mean the utterance straightforwardly, when in fact s/he was undermining that straightforward meaning in some way. And at some level we all know this. We have all attempted to joke about something, or made an ironic remark, and felt dismayed when people took us seriously. And even if we are hardcore purists who despise, and so refuse to employ, “Just joking!” or “That was irony” qualifications, we typically feel a certain frustration when people don’t get the prosodic complexities that we build into what we say—and may attempt, just slightly, to escalate the body-language hints that signal our intentions.

Aprosodic Linguistics  59 No matter how much we cherish the subtleties of subtext, we also long to be understood, and appreciated for our cleverness. And the point is that aprosodiacs are typically unable to get any of those nuances. They can’t even get the most obvious ones, the ones that neurotypicals never miss, like a man shouting angrily and waving his arms about. Other people’s words and phrases for them are always straightforward, always meant “literally,” in terms of the dictionary semantics of the utterance. As Thompson and Thompson (1999/2009: 381) note, neurologists distinguish between two types of aprosodia, “sensory” and “motor”: “Sensory aprosodia refers to an inability to correctly interpret social innuendo, either verbal or nonverbal”—“that is, they do not get the messages conveyed by tone of voice or gestures”—whereas “motor aprosodia refers to an inability to use emotionally appropriate vocal tones in conversation.” Sensory aprosodia, in other words, is the inability to sense the emotional nuances in other people’s speech; motor aprosodia is the inability to produce those emotional nuances in one’s own. Both types make social interactions, and thus life, extraordinary difficult for aprosodiacs. Remember at this point the opening section in Chapter 3 (pp. 44-45) about the evolution of spoken language out of gestural body language. Think “messages conveyed by tone of voice or gestures.” Sensory aprosodiacs are unable to interpret people’s verbal intentions because they get none of the prosodic priming on which neurotypicals rely almost exclusively—38% on tone of voice and 55% on gestures, in Albert Mehrabian’s (1972) famous rule—for conversational understanding. Motor aprosodiacs are unable to prime others tonally and gesturally with their underlying intentions. Many people, most notably those with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs), including Asperger’s syndrome, are afflicted with both. Thompson and Thompson go on to link aprosodia to lesions in the mirror-neuron systems (MNSs) of Broca’s area in the right hemisphere: The importance of imitation in social learning has been well described (Meltzoff and Prinz, 2002). Imitation can be directly linked to the MNS. Structural abnormalities have been found in the MNS system in autistic spectrum disorders and are significant in understanding ASD (Hadjikhani et al., 2006). Delayed conductivity in the MNS for imitation has been found in ASD (Nishitani et al., 2004). It has also been shown that children with ASD have reduced activity in MNS regions during tasks that require the child to mirror facial expressions of different emotions (Dapretto et al., 2006). Given these findings it is not surprising that deficiencies in this system are being hypothesized to be a core deficit in ASD. Given the clear relationship of the MNS to ASD, it seems reasonable to hypothesize that normalizing what we have turned the hub of the affective nervous system, the AC, may have been responsible for

60  The Right-Brain Interpreter (RBI): Affective Priming the normalizing of the sensory aprosodia symptoms in clients with Asperger’s who did training at our Center. (383) These specific MNS deficits in ASDs, however, long remained hypothetical. Thompson and Thompson originally wrote their chapter in 1999; when they updated it in 2009, they included references to the quantitative electroencephalogram (EEG) research of Vilayanur S. Ramachandran. Together with his PhD students at the University of California at San Diego, Ramachandran had been studying whether dysfunctionalities in the nondominant MNS might explain ASDs, which typically involve deficits in imitation, empathy, theory of mind (ToM), and what is called “pragmatic language”—the kind of practical social communication that relies on empathy and ToM. Their idea was that the disruption of social skills in ASDs might be caused by the inability to mirror other people’s body movements, including body language, especially gestures, facial expression, and tone of voice. One of Ramachandran’s PhD students in experimental psychology, Lindsay Oberman, was the first author on a series of coauthored papers (see for example Oberman et al. 2007) coming out of that work, based on the presumption that the activation of mirror neurons in neurotypical subjects registers as what is called “mu suppression” (lower EEG oscillations in the mu frequency [8–13 Hz]) over the sensorimotor cortex. What they found was that, while (neurotypical) control subjects showed mu suppression for both their own movements and the movements of others that they observed, high-functioning ASD subjects showed mu suppression only for their own movements, not for the observed hand movements of others. They also tested MNS activation for movements that are taken as socially significant and movements that are taken to be random, and found that the more socially interactive a gesture or facial expression was, the more mu suppression was found in neurotypicals—even when the socially interactive movement was nonvolitional, and even when it was performed by a humanoid robot. They explored the effect of concealing different parts of facial expressions on the ability to simulate and thus to recognize emotions, and found that “facial mimicry differentially contributes to recognition of specific facial expressions, thus allowing for more refined predictions from embodied cognition theories” (2007: 167). This research into the relationship between the MNS and social skills took a turn toward language abilities in Oberman and Ramachandran (2008), driven by the hypothesis that ASD might be an impairment in “multisensory integration (MSI) systems,” including the MNS, which “convert[s] sensory stimuli into motor representations” (348).

Aprosodic Linguistics  61 To test this hypothesis, the team asked subjects to match nonsense shapes with nonsense words (a task that they called “the bouba-kiki task”). They found that “neurotypical children chose the nonsense ‘word’ whose phonemic structure corresponded with the visual shape of the stimuli 88% of the time,” but that “individuals with ASD only chose the corresponding name 56% of the time” (348). They speculatively attribute this difference to the guidance provided to neurotypical children by “mirror neuron-like multisensory systems that integrate the visual shape with the corresponding motor gestures used to pronounce the nonsense word,” and the lower success rate in the ASD group to “a deficit in MSI, perhaps related to impaired MSI brain systems” (348). Lindsay Oberman defended her dissertation in 2007 and accepted a postdoc at the Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation at Harvard Medical School; there she began working with repetitive ­transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) over the right hemisphere to study brain plasticity and excitability in ASD individuals. What came out of this research was a series of articles (Oberman and Pascual-Leone 2014; Oberman et al. 2010, 2012a, 2012b, 2014; Cohen et al. 2010; Stamoulis et al. 2011; Fecteau et al. 2011; Lapenta et al. 2012) studying the effects of rTMS—either on its own or in conjunction with EEG, transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), or theta burst stimulation (TBS)—on subjects with Asperger’s. What is most interesting for our purposes here, obviously, is the effect of rTMS on the language skills of Asperger’s subjects. Especially significant are the results of Fecteau et al. (2011), who report on their testing of the hypothesis that in Asperger’s subjects “the dynamics of languagerelated regions might be abnormal, so that repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) over Broca’s area leads to differential behavioral effects as seen in neurotypical controls” (158). In other words, they hypothesized that applying rTMS over nondominant/right-hemisphere Broca would enhance multisensory integration in Asperger’s subjects, and so enable them to “read” speech prosodically, to “get” the affective charge in spoken language. And their research findings tended to bear that hypothesis out. I was directed to Oberman’s research by the “Frame of Reference” episode (July 8, 2016) of National Public Radio’s Invisibilia podcast, hosted by Lulu Miller, Hannah Rosin, and Alix Spiegel, where Alix interviewed a subject in Oberman’s experiments, called only “Kim” in the podcast. Born in 1954, Kim was only (self-)diagnosed with Asperger’s late in life, some time after the turn of the millennium; although she is an intelligent and successful physician, her life has in many ways been a wretched puzzle to her, and it wasn’t until she participated in Oberman’s study that she began to realize why. As Alix puts it in her narration, “the goal of the study Kim showed up for in May of 2008 was very modest. Lindsay wanted to see if shooting

62  The Right-Brain Interpreter (RBI): Affective Priming the focused magnetic pulses [rTMS] could change the way people like Kim process language—their ability to pick up subtle shifts in inflection and tone of voice.” The protocol was that Kim was shown a series of sentences on a computer screen and asked to read them out loud. She remembers sentences like: Is this a holdup? I don’t drive a car, I drive a pick-up truck. Did they make up? This box is too heavy to pick up. As Kim remembers that first step, “I read the sentence, ‘Is this a holdup?’, … just as words, ‘Is this a holdup?’, and there was a question at the end so you raise your voice at the end of the sentence.” The words were recognizable English words, abstract semantic entities whose meanings Kim understood, nothing more. But then the rTMS was applied, for about a 30-minute period, while Kim read the sentences again. And now the sentences felt different to her: And then all of a sudden it’s like [she gasps, then says with dramatic feeling]: ‘Is this a holdup?’ So there was this sense of Oh my gosh, this would really be fearful, if somebody was thinking they were being held up! Now, for the first time in her life, Kim was feeling the affective charge of the words. Her interpretation of this was telling: she felt as if she was now finally understanding what was happening. She felt that this ability to read through words to feelings was what she had been lacking. For months after the experience of rTMS, she struggled to process what this meant for her life—for the painful puzzle that had been her life. She had been bullied mercilessly as a child. It had often seemed to her as if she must have done something terrible to the other children, but she had no idea what that could have been. Nothing other people did made sense to her. People were complete mysteries to her. Fortunately, she was bright, and was able to withdraw into her studies, and also, as she herself reports, into a defensive arrogance—the reason the other kids were incomprehensible to her, she began to tell herself, was that they were stupid and she was smart—and eventually she became a physician; but she could never comprehend her employees either, and went through medical assistants at a disturbing clip. They kept quitting on her, and she could never understand why. Two years later, in 2010, she joined another study Oberman was conducting at Harvard’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Kim describes it as based on responses to videos this time:

Aprosodic Linguistics  63 There was a guy sitting at a computer and a woman walked up and said “hi” to him, and they exchanged pleasantries, and then he said, “Oh, John returned your DVDs.” And she said “Okay, great.” And then he said “Do you want to check them?” And she said “Oh, okay.” So she picks up the first DVD, and opens it, and the camera shows that there’s nothing in there. And then she closes it and puts it down. And then she picks up the second one and opens it, and it’s empty again. And she closes it and puts it down. And then the guy says, “Are they okay?” And she goes “Yep, they’re okay.” And then the guy says “Would you lend him your DVDs again?” And she goes “Sure, I would lend them again.” So I’m looking at this and I’m thinking, oh my gosh, I can’t believe she’d actually be willing to lend the DVDs again, after they were returned empty. Wow, she’s really a generous person! Then began the rTMS: Okay, now we watch the same video again. So she walks up, they say “hi,” she opens the first video, it’s empty, she’s angry, she slams it down. She opens the second one, she’s angry, she slams it down. He says to her “Are they okay?” and she says in a very sarcastic tone of voice, “Yes, they’re okay.” He asks “Would you lend them again?” and she says in a very sarcastic tone of voice, “Sure, I would lend them again,” clearly meaning “no way would I lend this guy any videos again.” Wow. Everything that was intended in this went completely over my head. And now I saw it. The body expression, the facial expression, and the tone of voice, in that whole interaction—I completely missed the meaning of the whole thing, until after the TMS. And then I saw the whole thing clearly. This is what life could be like. At this point, Alix gently asks, “What do you mean when you say ‘this is what life could be like’?” Kim replies: “I could actually understand conversation. I could understand people, rather than be completely oblivious to all of the social signals that are flying around. Wouldn’t that be nice …” What Kim has lacked most of her life can be thought of as affectbecoming-conation-becoming-cognition: affect gradually transformed into group pressure to understand things in a certain way, and that pressure displayed visually and auditorily on and through bodies, so that it can be “read” and understood by other people’s visual-affective RBI, and eventually, at least in some cases, articulated by the verbal-cognitive LBI. And as I began to suggest at the beginning of this section, Western thinking about language has been confidently aprosodic for over two thousand years. Language in that tradition is an abstract sign system that we use logically, analytically, following abstract rules, without embodiment.

64  The Right-Brain Interpreter (RBI): Affective Priming The retort to the “aprosodic linguistics” that I’ve been postulating here in Part II is an RBI, which communicates with other people’s RBIs. Without this affective-becoming-conative “voice” or “force” in the right hemisphere, we would be severely impaired. Bourdieu’s habitus model (pp. 47–50) suggests that without RBI-toRBI communication throughout our lives, speech would not consist of affective-becoming-conative acts; it would be a series of abstract formalisms, like logical or mathematical notation. Affective-becoming-conative speech acts, he suggests, are not necessarily the sweet, harmonious experiences celebrated in sentimental propaganda like Hallmark greeting cards; they include unpleasant experiences like “injunctions, intimidations, warnings, threats,” and sniping or screaming matches between spouses, or between parents and children. But without the ability to experience those unpleasant things, the research on Asperger’s and other aprosodias suggests, we would be completely lost in the world of social interaction. We would be unable to pressurize our own words affectively, or to receive, process, understand, and act on other people’s affectively pressurized words. Now, of course, it should go without saying that the existence of a “Right-Brain Interpreter” is pure speculation—indeed, really more like a useful shorthand than it is full-on neurophilosophical speculation. It is a shorthand based, obviously, on the usefulness of Michael S. Gazzaniga’s theory of the LBI. Given that the LBI can talk, and indeed is talk, Gazzaniga’s theory is easier to evidence than mine: there is all this verbiage that arises in response to a documentable need and confabulates in documentable ways. This makes it plausible to suggest that the LBI may be a localized brain function or module, and that LBI-to-LBI communication is akin to ToM. But, of course, if the LBI is talk, then everything everyone says is always the LBI at work—all verbal communication is LBI confabulation—and that is an extreme kind of explanatory overflow that I have never seen Gazzaniga attempt to theorize. By the same token, if the RBI is affect, then everything everyone feels is always the RBI at work, and that is an equally extreme kind of explanatory overflow that I am not qualified to theorize. Hence: shorthand. It’s useful, I suggest, to localize these functions, even if only provisionally, as research hypotheses. Specifically, I propose, the RBI communicates its “interpretations”— which are more accurately inchoate attitudinalizations, inclinations, orientations, situated preferences—through the five senses, especially (as per Paul Corballis’s “visual interpreter”) but not exclusively the eyes and styles of physical movement, including that sense of movement that we call kinesthetics (proprioception). Another way of putting all that would be that the RBI communicates through body language, both by displaying it and by reading it on other

Aprosodic Linguistics  65 people’s bodies. This would constitute RBI-to-RBI communication, which would be akin to a feeling of mind. (See Robinson 2023: Norms section 2 for discussion.) What remains to be explored is collaboration between the LBI and the RBI. That is, properly speaking, the task of Part III.

Ideas for Research: Not “Mindless” but “Heartless” Translating Douglas Hofstadter is one of our most innovative cognitive scientists, but he has also done a fair amount of literary translating, and has published rather extensively on translation, at (long) book length in Le Ton Beau de Marot (Hofstadter 1997), in his Translator’s Preface to his verse translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (Hofstadter 1999), and in the 100-page essay he published in an omnibus edition with his English translation of Françoise Sagan’s La chamade, as That Mad Ache (Hofstadter 2009). As I’ve noted elsewhere (Robinson 2022: 31–38), however, he has some blind spots in his discourses on translation. One is his claim that wordfor-word translation is so mindless (“without thoughts intervening”) that to insist on it is to “deny[] what makes us human”: Words trigger thoughts, and thoughts trigger words. This little loop is really the most central facet of what makes us human beings. If you eliminate the thought part of the loop, though, and insist that in translation, words must trigger words without thoughts intervening, then you are denying what makes us human, and any translation based on such a philosophy [i.e., a literalist one] will turn out arid and wooden at best, and absurd and incomprehensible at worst. (Hofstadter 2009: 37) That is, of course, simply not the case: not only are literal translations not invariably “arid and wooden at best, and absurd and incomprehensible at worst,” but the notion that it is possible for a human translator to translate literally “without thoughts intervening” is risible.1 What I’d like to suggest in this section, however, is that it is entirely possible to translate “without feelings intervening,” which is to say, not mindlessly but heartlessly, with flat affect. This wouldn’t necessarily bother Douglas Hofstadter, who doesn’t believe feelings even exist—they are for him mere mental awareness of body states (2007: 276)—but that seems odd, given not only his heart-wrenching declarations of love for his deceased wife Carol (2007: 227–40) but his assertion that if he were forced to translate literally he would simply quit translating, because that “would turn me into a dull automaton, and it would remove all joy from the act” (2009: 64). So he feels joy while he translates, and in fact it seems to me I can feel that joy as I read his translations—but feelings don’t exist.

66  The Right-Brain Interpreter (RBI): Affective Priming Please note that in pointing to “heartless” or affect-free translating, I’m no longer talking about literalism. It certainly is possible to translate literally without joy or other affects, but it’s also possible to infuse literal translation with incredible passion. Nor am I talking about the opposite translational pole, sense-for-sense translation, which Hofstadter champions. Any kind of translation can be “heartless”—unprimed by the RBI— and any kind of translation can be passionately felt, because viscerally primed and guided by the RBI. Let me take a quick look at a translation history that I dealt with at some length in Aleksis Kivi and/as World Literature (Robinson 2017a: 99–103), dealing with the great 1870 novel by Finland’s greatest writer, Aleksis Kivi (1839–1872), Seitsemän veljestä, which I translated as The Brothers Seven (2017b). In the scene in question, an altercation breaks out among the brothers when the oldest, the blustery and rather boneheaded bully Juhani, decrees that any brother who will not yield to the will of the group will be shut up in a cave in the mountain for several days. Aapo, the calmest and most rational of the brothers, begs to differ, and Juhani explodes with anger. In “Creative Manipulations of Outlaw Narrative in Kivi’s Seitsemän veljestä,” however, Eric Schaad (2010) doesn’t notice Juhani’s anger, and so misreads the passage—because he is reading Richard Impola’s flat-affect 1991 translation: AAPO:  Sallitaanko minulle sananvuoro? JUHANI:  Kernaasti. Mitä mielit sanoa? AAPO: Etten kiltaa minäkään tuota rangaistus-parakraaffia,

jonka tahtoisit käytettäväksi välillemme asettaa, vaan katsonpa sen veljesten keskenä liian törkeäksi, pedolliseksi. JUHANI:  Vai et kiltaa? Etkö kiltaa? Etkö totisesti kiltaa? Sanoppas sitten viisaampi parakraaffi, koska minä en milloinkaan käsitä mikä on oikein, mikä väärin. (Kivi 117) AAPO:  Could I have the floor? JUHANI:  Gladly. What’s on your mind? AAPO:  I don’t approve the proviso for punishment

that you want to set up for us either. I think it’s too harsh and brutal to apply among brothers. JUHANI: So you don’t approve? You don’t approve? You really don’t approve? Tell us a wiser one then, since I never know right from wrong. (Impola 1991: 98) Schaad’s reading of that is that “two suggestions are put forth—one by Juhani and one by Aapo—and Kivi underscores the difficulty of arriving at a solution through the voice of Juhani, who, in frustration, says he never knows right from wrong” (186). In this reading, Juhani knows he’s an idiot, and rather than screaming abuse at Aapo, is humble before that knowledge, and so bewails his ineptitude at decision-making.

Aprosodic Linguistics  67 What Impola’s translation fails to convey to the target reader, however, thus leaving Schaad interpretively in the lurch—a bit like Kim, in fact—is that Aapo uses two pretentious words in airing his disagreement with Juhani’s decree—the high-falutin’ legalism of “parakraaffi”/“codicil” and “killata”/“hold with,” which Impola renders “proviso” and “approve”— and Juhani explodes at the pretentiousness. The brothers are illiterate Finnish peasants in the 1840s, after all: what call does Aapo have talking like some lawyer? It’s true that Juhani feels insecure in a debate with Aapo—he knows that Aapo is much smarter than he is—but that insecurity sparks not humble frustration but blind sarcastic rage. Juhani heaps abuse on Aapo, trying to goad him into saying what his own decree would have been, apparently hoping to browbeat Aapo into helping him both to solve the problem and to save face, and Aapo reacts by shutting down, battening the hatches, refusing to say anything. Because his text is Impola’s flat-affect translation, Schaad reads “Tell us a wiser one then, since I never know right from wrong” as a calm, straightforward utterance—exactly like Kim reading “Sure, I would lend them again” without bitter irony, and thinking “Wow, she’s really a generous person!” Here is a slightly longer quotation, with my rather vociferously RBIprimed translation: AAPO:  Sallitaanko minulle sananvuoro? JUHANI:  Kernaasti. Mitä mielit sanoa? AAPO: Etten kiltaa minäkään tuota rangaistus-parakraaffia,

jonka tahtoisit käytettäväksi välillemme asettaa, vaan katsonpa sen veljesten keskenä liian törkeäksi, pedolliseksi. JUHANI:  Vai et kiltaa? Etkö kiltaa? Etkö totisesti kiltaa? Sanoppas sitten viisaampi parakraaffi, koska minä en milloinkaan käsitä mikä on oikein, mikä väärin. AAPO:  Sitä en sano. JUHANI:  Sanoppas se uusi, killattava parakraaffi, sinä Jukolan tietäjä. AAPO:  Kaukana tietäjän arvosta. Mutta tämä … JUHANI:  Parakraaffi, parakraaffi! AAPO:  Tämähän on … JUHANI:  Parakraaffi, parakraaffi! Sanoppas se viisas parakraaffi! AAPO:  Oletko hullu? Huutelethan tuossa kuin istuisit tulisissa housuissa. Miksi kirkut ja keikuttelet päätäs kuin tarhapöllö? JUHANI:  Parakraaffi! huudan minä huikeasti. Se ihka uusi ja vanha, viisas parakraaffi! Sanoppas se, ja minä kuultelen äänetönnä kuin särki sammakon motkotusta. AAPO:  May I speak? JUHANI:  Gladly. What would you say? AAPO: That I hold not with that punitive

codicil that you would set amongst us either, but find it too severe, too brutal amongst brothers.

68  The Right-Brain Interpreter (RBI): Affective Priming JUHANI: La,

you hold not withal? You hold not withal? Soothly, you hold, you hold not, you hold not withal? Hoyday, then, give us a wiser codicil, Mr Aapo the Capo, King Aapo the Wise, seeing’s how I ne’er wot what’s right and what’s wrong. AAPO:  Nay, I nill say. JUHANI: Tell us the new codicil you do hold withal, say us sooth, you Jukola soothsayer. AAPO:  I ain’t no soothsayer, far from it. But this … JUHANI:  The codicil! The codicil! AAPO:  This is … JUHANI:  The codicil! The codicil! Tell us the wise codicil! AAPO: Gone barmy, have you? You’re skriking like your strossers was ablaze. Wherefore be you whooping and wauling and waggling your head like a woodcock? JUHANI: The codicil! ‘Tis that I’m whooping and wauling anent. That new and old wise codicil! Say it, and I’ll sit here mum, bending a mum ear like a paddlefish to the parping of a paddock. (Robinson 2017b: 141) The dramatic dialogue format in which Kivi writes most of the novel, without a narrator to describe tones of voice and other body language, does leave room for divergent interpretations. Maybe I’m reading too much anger into Juhani’s words? Maybe Schaad is right? But Aapo does explicitly tell Juhani (and indirectly us as well) that he’s shouting like a madman—“Oletko hullu? Huutelethan tuossa kuin istuisit tulisissa housuissa. Miksi kirkut ja keikuttelet päätäs kuin tarhapöllö?”/“Gone barmy, have you? You’re skriking like your strossers was ablaze. Wherefore be you whooping and wauling and waggling your head like a woodcock?”— and Juhani can’t help but agree: “Parakraaffi! huudan minä huikeasti”/“The codicil! ‘Tis that I’m whooping and wauling anent.” Strong affect rolls and roils through the passage—but not in Impola’s translation or in Schaad’s commentary. Aprosodiac translation? ASD translation? The question, again, is how we might simulate the RBI-priming of reader response that Impola neglected to build into his Kivi translation. Impola’s and my translations might be used to prime commentaries like Schaad’s—for example, a series of reader-response protocols such as I described in connection with teaching Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” (p. 40); but how might we test the RBI-priming of translators’ work? One might protest that not all translation work should be this emotional—that, even if I’m right about Kivi’s novel, not even every novel in the world would be so roiled with strong affect, and certainly not every translation job in the world is even of a literary nature that might potentially call for RBI-priming. And that’s true enough, as far as it goes. What is perhaps misleading about this example is that, to illustrate the

Aprosodic Linguistics  69 disastrous readerly effects of a flat-affect translation, I picked a novel whose emotions run very high, which perhaps makes RBI-priming sound like something that would or should be restricted to novels—and not just any novels, but only the most emotional ones. But isn’t there an affective charge in every text? It may be very subtle, in say the bureaucratese of a toxic-waste environmental impact statement, or the medicalese of a pharmaceutical insert; but surely any text is written to engage a human reader, and surely human readers are not artificial intelligences that process texts with cold reason alone? A toxic-waste environmental impact statement and a pharmaceutical insert (especially one for patients) are both written to be reassuring, aren’t they? “This stuff isn’t going to poison you … so long as we all follow the instructions.” Reassuring— right around the corner from the carefully shrouded warnings. During the three decades I spent translating technical, medical, commercial, and legal texts from Finnish to English, I often felt like a freak, in fact, because I was the only contributor to the creation of a successful translation that cared about prosodics—because, I suppose, I was the only one who thought of any translated (or otherwise written) text as an affective/prosodic encounter. Sometimes I wondered whether that was because I was originally trained as a literature scholar—was I just trying to imagine that I was translating literature? Now, however, I do exclusively translate literary, dramatic, and cinematic texts, and I still run into translations like Impola’s of Kivi that seem completely oblivious to the RBI-priming of what they’re translating. How might we prime them to pay more attention to the RBI-priming? Music might be an effective prime. As I mentioned in Robinson (2017a: 229), while I was translating Kivi’s novel someone gave me Bruce Springsteen’s Pete Seeger Sessions CD, and as I translated along I found the rambunctious rhythmic nonsense of some of the songs rocking the inside of my head: Old Dan Tucker was a fine ole man, Washed his face in a frying pan, Combed his hair with a wagon wheel, And died with a toothache in his heel. And surely that primed me to cut loose with Kivi as well, in passages like this one: Siitä, hetken päästä läksivät veljekset, varustettuna seipäillä, köysillä ja kuristimilla, saavuttamaan saalistansa. Mutta tyhjä oli kuoppa heidän ehdittyänsä esiin. Pitkin tikapuita, jotka Timo oli jättänyt jälkeensä kuoppaan, oli heidän sutensa koreasti astunut ylös ja vilkaisnut tiehensä, kiittäen onneansa. (1870/1984: 134)

70  The Right-Brain Interpreter (RBI): Affective Priming Here’s Impola’s translation: The brothers soon left the house, equipped with clubs, ropes, and nooses to catch their prey. But when they reached the pit, it was empty. The wolf had climbed neatly up the ladder left behind by Timo and scooted away, thanking its lucky stars. (1991: 114) But here’s how I translated it: In a trice birr’d the boys to the pit, arm’d to the teeth with their stangs and their ropes and their noose wands, to seize their spoils. But whenas they ‘d hove into view of the pit, la, ‘twas empty. Featly ‘d debouch’d de loop up de stee delaps’d by de man in de pit and dash’d to freedom, thanking his loopy luck. (157) My wordplay there was partly primed by France Verrier’s 2006 adaptation of Jean-Louis Perret’s 1926 French translation of Kivi’s novel for children in the bilingual Les 7 frères de finlande/Seitsemän veljestä Suomesta: she wrote “Le loup avait emprunté l’échelle et s’était enfui” (n.p.) (“The wolf had borrowed the ladder and fled”), which Maria Hujala and Kaisa Leino translated into Finnish as “Susi oli vuorostaan käyttänyt tikapuita ja juossut karkuun!” (n.p.) (“The wolf had in turn used the ladder and escaped!”). It was also partly primed by childhood memories of my father chanting “Defeat of deduct went over defense before detail,” focusing my attention on the serendipitous alignment of the French-derived “debouch’d” (lit. “from out of the mouth”) with “(loop-)de-loop”—the kind of silly dumb language-based humor that my father and I both loved when I was growing up, adding the punch of love for a now-deceased dad to the RBI prime. But then there was also the fact that I’d been primed, repeatedly, over several months, by Old Dan Tucker: »Porsaan pahnan pöllyttäjä, Sikoläätin lämmittäjä!» Jussi, pussi, Jukolan Jussi! (150) Gassy Jussi, grassy snuffer, Piggy-wiggy wonkle-whiffer, Fronkle pigfrank farmer-warmer! Jussi, pussy, Juicily Jussi! (170) One of the things I love about Kivi’s novel is that he too is a sucker for silly language-based humor. That song is dumb doggerel verse parodying

Aprosodic Linguistics  71 folk ballads. It goes on for several pages, and just keeps getting sillier and wilder and more nonsensical. What would a flat-affect/aprosodiac translation of that look like? “‘Pig’s-litter dust-raiser, pigsty-warmer’: Jussi, bag, Jussi of Jukola.” (Those exclamation marks reek of affect. They have to go.) For a test of RBI-priming effects on translators, these ruminations suggest, all you’d have to do is play one kind of music to the experimental group and another kind to the control group, and see what difference it made in their translating. Almost certainly, my Kivi translation would have sounded and felt different if I’d been primed by, say, Philip Glass’s Music in Twelve Parts, Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name,” or Karen Carpenter singing “Close to You.” You could choose snatches of different pieces of music in different styles to experiment with different RBI-priming effects on translation. A lot of translators listen to music while they work anyway; it would be interesting to know whether the music they play in the background has a priming effect on their translating, and if so, what kind. The difficult question, though, would ultimately be: how do you prime flat affect? Muzak? A white-noise machine?

5 Parasomatic Semiotics

We have two names for the study of signs: “semiotics,” coined by Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), and “semiology,” coined by Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). In the standard histories of sign science, originally canonized by structuralists, both are concerned with signs as abstract structure; the main difference between them is that Peirce understood everything triadically, in three-step movements, while Saussure reduced everything to dualisms: langue and parole, signifier and signified, and so on. There are, however, serious problems with that account—most having to do with the problematic textual criticism that has mediated both thinkers to us. Saussure died of cancer at 55 with most of his brilliantly transformative thinking about linguistics around the turn of the century still unpublished; the work on which linguistics as a new discipline was based, the Cours de linguistique générale (Course in General Linguistics, 1916), was posthumously edited by two of his postgraduate students, Charles Bally (1865–1947) and Albert Sechehaye (1870–1946), from their lecture notes. It was not until much later in the twentieth century that Saussure’s original notes for that course began to surface; Rudolf Engler published a critical edition of the Cours in 1967–1974 and 1989–1990, with multiple variants from the notes; and in 1996 a set of Saussure’s manuscript pages entitled “The Double Essence of Language” was found in the Saussure family orangerie. In 2002, Engler and Simon Bouquet published a volume entitled Écrits de linguistique générale (published four years later in Sanders and colleagues’ English translation as Writings on General Linguistics), which attempted to reconstruct the earlier notes as a more or less coherent text based on “The Double Essence of Language” manuscript. That work shows us a very different Saussure than the one we’ve come to know from the Cours. For one thing, as I began to show in Robinson (2015: 115–41), Saussure turns out to have been much more intensely interested in the social project of unifying language than one would have assumed from the Cours. For another, as we’ll see more focusedly here, he DOI: 10.4324/9781003134312-8

Parasomatic Semiotics  73 was also intensely interested in the affective grounding of language—and what he was apparently inclined to call the “parasomatics” of language or of semiosis is manifestly triadic, very much in the same mode as Peirce’s. The textual criticism mediating Peirce to us is perhaps more reliable than for Saussure, in that many of his works were published during his lifetime; but the original complete works (Peirce 1931–1958) were very far from complete, and it took the unfortunate tack of attempting to divide Peirce’s writings up into tiny fragments and to cobble together out of those fragments a series of thematic wholes. This made it extremely difficult to develop a sense of the development of Peirce’s thought over the half century or so of his philosophical output. The new Indiana edition of his work (1982–, 1992–1998) is remedying that flaw; but it is still in progress, and more of his work remains unpublished than the substantial amount that has seen the light of day.

Theory: RBI Semiotics—The Peircean Interpretant From his late twenties until his death at 74 in 1914 in abject poverty, Peirce was a triadic thinker. Over that half century, he theorized thousands of triads, each of which he presented as Three Universes: a First, which was always an abstract potentiality; a Second, which was always an engagement with real-world complications; and a Third, which was a law or precept, a generalized organization of the messiness introduced by the Second. For example, in 1895–1896, in a paper entitled “That Categorical and Hypothetical Propositions are one in essence, with some connected matters” (1931–1958: 1.564), Peirce defined a sign or “representation” as “that character of a thing by virtue of which, for the production of a certain mental effect, it may stand in place of another thing. The thing having this character I term a representamen, the mental effect, or thought, its interpretant, the thing for which it stands, its object.” Peirce’s idea early on was that the “representamen” or sign-vehicle as First is an abstract potential that enters into conflict with its real-world object as Second—as when an avid young English-speaking reader reads an unfamiliar word, like “ennui,” and then hears that word spoken, with a surprising pronunciation, as on-WEE, and doesn’t make the connection. Or vice versa: the young reader first hears the word, then goes looking for it in the dictionary, and can’t find it. The cognitive dissonance between the First and Second then “determines” (shapes, constrains) the interpretant as Third. The interpretant, an interpretive functionality inside the interpreter’s mind, is perhaps what Michael S. Gazzaniga simply calls “the Interpreter.” For Gazzaniga, that would mean the Left-Brain Interpreter (LBI), but, I’m suggesting, for both Peirce and Gazzaniga it should perhaps be understood more broadly as the Right-Brain Interpreter (RBI) > LBI.

74  The Right-Brain Interpreter (RBI): Affective Priming If we begin by associating the interpretant with the LBI alone, we could say that it has the task of imposing explanatory order on the signal clash between the representamen as First and the object as Second. The young English-speaking reader, for example, asks how to spell on-WEE, and is surprised to see it spelled as if it were pronounced EN-you-eye, and learns some principles of French pronunciation. And, once the interpretant has successfully aligned the Second with the First, the resulting Third becomes a new First, which will re-enter the real world for new engagements with Seconds. Each successive interpretantas-Third develops more nuanced complexity in its First-Second interpretive alignments. In 1903, then, in two lecture series, one at Harvard (1992–1998: 2.133–241) and the other at the Lowell Institute (2.258–299), Peirce further specified those three Universes of the sign by exploring the triadicity of each. A sign-vehicle, for example, could be a qualisign (determined by some singular quality, like the color of a paint-chip) as First, a sinsign (determined by existential facts, like smoke as a sign-vehicle of fire) as Second, or a legisign (determined by conventions or laws, like a traffic light) as Third. An object could be an icon (determined by qualitative resemblance, like a portrait) as First, an index (determined by existential relationships, like an arrow that points you in a direction) as Second, or a symbol (determined by a convention or a law, like a word) as Third. Even as he theorized this triad, however, in 1903, he began to undermine it, recognizing considerable overlap among icons, indices, and symbols and admitting that there is probably no such thing as a pure icon or index. Peirce offered several interpretant triads; the one I want to highlight here came in his late period (1904–1910), in an unpublished article written (between 1903 and 1907) as a letter to the editor, entitled “Pragmatism”: In all cases [the interpretant] includes feelings; for there must, at least, be a sense of comprehending the meaning of the sign. If it includes more than mere feeling, it must evoke some kind of effort. It may include something besides, which, for the present, may be vaguely called “thought.” I term these three kinds of interpretant the “emotional,” the “energetic,” and the “logical” interpretants. (1992–1998: 2.409) This obviously expands the initial equation between Peirce’s interpretant and Gazzaniga’s (Left-Brain) Interpreter by introducing the RBI. Call the emotional interpretant as First an affective RBI, and the energetic interpretant as Second a kinesthetic RBI; the logical interpretant as Third would then obviously be the LBI, whether the LBI speaks outwardly, in verbal language, or inwardly as thought. (Peirce here restricts the logical

Parasomatic Semiotics  75 interpretant to unspoken thought, but it is easy to demonstrate the fuzzy logic connecting unspoken thought with spoken thought; see Robinson 2013a: 80–89, 114–18 for discussion.) For example, you read the first six words of e. e. cummings’s famous poem, pity this busy monster, manunkind, not. How do you figure out what he’s trying to do there? What does your “interpretant” do by way of interpreting it? Peirce would say that, First, your emotional interpretant brings feeling to bear on the line. You feel the feeling-word “pity,” of course. You feel your way to the feeling-word “unkind” and the negated kindness behind it. “Monster” is an emotionally loaded word as well; so is “busy,” especially, perhaps, in the RBI’s affective memories of childhood (“too busy to be with me”). You feel the word-formation pun in “manunkind,” mankind’s lack of kindness—especially alongside the appositive “busy monster.” But that feeling for apposition begins to awaken Peirce’s Second, the energetic interpretant—or the kinesthetic RBI. You sense the nestling, or perhaps the jostling, of that “un” as it elbows its way into the middle of “mankind.” You also begin to sense the movement of feeling in linear reading-time and page-space: not just the double negation “un- … not,” for example, but the back-loading of that negation. We begin with pity, an apparent nudge toward pity, and move slowly, perhaps rather grudgingly, toward pity’s negation. The RBI’s kinesthetic/energetic participation in the disintegration of positive, supportive feeling lands with a smack on the flat slap of “not”— on a new line. “Not” comes not only after a line-break, but after a stanzabreak. The kinesthetic RBI’s participation in that blank line between “pity this busy monster, manunkind” and “not” is an energetic suspense, perhaps even an energetic frustration at the delay. Note also that this energetic experience of cummings’s line is not yet syntax or a syntactic analysis; it is what we might call energetic or kinesthetic presyntax. It is only after “we” (in the wordless “voice” of our RBI) have moved slowly, affectively-becoming-kinesthetically, toward meaning that we are able to make the leap to a logical interpretant, or LBInterpretation, that might include a syntactic analysis. Note also that “feeling” for Peirce as it feeds into and through the emotional interpretant as First is not “first” in any absolute sense—not prior, say, to any experience of the world. It is only First in a specific given encounter. What feels like Firstness in that specific encounter will, of course, be made up to a very large extent of previous Thirds, which is to say, previous triadic semioses culminating in Thirdness.

76  The Right-Brain Interpreter (RBI): Affective Priming Our past experience with pity, for example, and with busy-ness, and with affectively charged attitudes toward busy-ness, all come into play here—are all marshalled for LBInterpretive orientations by the RBI. Our past experience with movie and fairy-tale monsters colors our attitudes to busy-ness. Are we ourselves those busy monsters? Do we feel like the victims of those busy monsters? And by the time we get to “manunkind,” we have an emergent affective template into which that portmanteau word may be slotted. Humanity is unkind because humanity is a busy monster. Our past experience with commands, and with pressure from others to act in a certain way, also colors our affective-becoming-conative response to being told first to pity this busy monster, then to not-pity it. We know, our RBIs know, without necessarily being able to articulate what we know, what it feels like to be given a command and to wonder how to respond. Note finally the pedagogical implications of all this. We can, of course, if we are teaching cummings’s poem to undergraduates, give them the logical interpretant’s word: a simple polished critical analysis. Or we can walk them through the full triad, getting them to provide their own emotional interpretants and energetic interpretants before proceeding to “the” logical interpretant. And I put scare quotes around “the” because, obviously, there is absolutely no guarantee that the students will arrive safely and stably at “the” “one” “correct” interpretation to which you are trying to lead them. Interpretation is a dissipative system. Interpreters move up through Peirce’s late interpretant triad in a state of disequilibrium. Their emotional and energetic participation in the process can tip their RBInterpretation in surprising and unpredictable ways at any stage; the logical conclusions they draw from that triadic movement can tip their LBInterpretation in surprising and unpredictable ways as well.

Theory: RBI Semiology—The Saussurean Parasomatics of Language As we’ve seen, in the traditional narrative of the history of the study of signs, Peirce and Saussure invented their own versions of it, independently, and not only called them different things—Peirce referring to semeiotic or semiotics, Saussure to sémiologie—but imposed different numeral systems on them. Saussure’s system is binary (signifier-signified); Peirce’s is ternary, or triadic. As we’ve also seen, the problem with that traditional narrative is that it is based on the version of Saussure’s thought that comes down to us as edited after his death by his two postgraduate students, Charles Bally (1865–1947) and Albert Sechehaye (1870–1946)—and Saussure’s actual thought, as revealed by his notes, published in 2002 as Écrits de

Parasomatic Semiotics  77 linguistique générale and translated in 2006 by Sanders et al. as Writings in General Linguistics, is actually considerably more nuanced. Most notably, he seems to have been gearing up to theorize a triadic parasomatics of language, as a viable conceptual framework for the scientific study of language. He derived his base term for these ruminations from the Greek word σῶμα/sōma “body,” namely what he called the sôme. This would appear to refer to some material substratum in language, perhaps even the body language—the “tone+gesture” that for Albert Mehrabian (1972) constituted 93% of conversational meaning— that helps Kim (Chapter 4, pp. 61–63) recognize that the woman who loaned John her DVDs is not generous but angry. The ability to read that sôme—an ability that Kim chronically lacks because of her Asperger’s but achieved fleetingly in Lindsay Oberman’s experiment with the aid of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation— would then be more or less what Saussure called the parasôme: What is called signification is what we call the parasôme and, unlike the sôme, it can never be detached so as to constitute in itself an object of research or observation. Let us be clear: it may to a degree constitute just such an object of research and observation as long as reference is continually made to the seme, to the various semes which unite this parasôme to something material, i.e. to the sôme, but this in no way similar to the study of sômes, whose independence we have recognized. (Sanders et al. 2006: 79) This is still very sketchy—Saussure had clearly not yet worked out all the kinks in his idea—but it seems to be saying that the parasomatic interpretation/understanding of semantic meaning depends on the affiliation of a seme (the smallest unit of disembodied meaning) with a sôme (the smallest unit of embodied meaning). Sômes are presumably “independent” in the sense that various embodied vocalizations and gesticulations can somatically convey meaning even apart from the “semic” (or semantic) action of words; “tone+gesture” can “be detached so as to constitute in itself an object of research or observation.” Instead of saying “I don’t know,” for example, we can shrug our shoulders, twist our lips, and look pointedly to one side; while chatting away cheerfully on the phone, we can shake our fingers and glare angrily at a misbehaving child without having to say “Stop doing that!” The RBI can communicate without mobilizing the LBI. “If looks could kill …” But even when words are used, the parasomatic interpretation of those semes “may to a degree constitute just such an object of research and observation as long as reference is continually made to … the various semes which unite this parasôme to something material, i.e. to the sôme.”

78  The Right-Brain Interpreter (RBI): Affective Priming In other words, in the framework Saussure seems to be attempting to theorize here, the sôme is the material anchor of human verbal communication. Without a (para)somatics of language, or what we might paraphrase as a prosodics of language, verbal communication is dangerously hobbled: aprosodic. Without the materiality of tone and gesture, grammar as “form-meaning pairs” is cut adrift from meaningful exchange. Even a toxic waste environmental impact statement, in other words, is primed by the RBI. And so is its translation—at least a good one. It should go without saying, however, why this line of thinking never made it into the posthumous founding text of modern linguistics, which determinedly set the stage for the exclusion of embodied speech—la parole, or what Noam Chomsky called performance, or especially what Pierre Bourdieu called les manières de parler “the manners of speaking”—from linguistic study. It was not just that, in Saussure’s own hesitant theorization, the somatics of language was not quite ready for prime time: it was also just too weird. It implied that “language” rests on the foundation of something that our intellectual traditions incline us to think is not quite language, but in fact would appear to be the most important part of language. One last note: in calling the sôme the “material anchor” of human verbal communication, I am not referring to the famous “anchoring effect” that is linked to the priming effect in the decision sciences. In one anchoring experiment that Daniel Kahneman (2013: 119) reports he and Amos Tversky conducted, subjects were asked to spin a wheel of fortune rigged to stop only at 10 and 65, write down the number they got, and then answer two questions: Is the percentage of African nations among UN members larger or smaller than the number you just wrote? What is your best guess of the percentage of African nations in the UN? The average guess of those who got 10 on the wheel of fortune was 25%; the average guess of whose who got 65 was 45%. Their guesses were primed by the random anchor from the wheel of fortune. The ratio of those two average guesses (25/45) expressed as a percentage (44% in this case) is called an anchoring index. None of that would apply to Saussurean parasomatic linguistics, obviously. (See Robinson 2023 for an extended discussion of the behavioral economics of translation.) What would be interesting to explore, however, would be the anchoring effect of idealized segmentational theories of translation on actual translatorial decisions. It is well known that perfect sense-for-sense translation and perfect word-for-word translation are impossible; the old chestnut according to which you must translate “as closely as you can and as freely as you must” might be thought of as a kind of rough

Parasomatic Semiotics  79 anchoring index between the two idealized poles as anchors. But, then, so might a reverse spin: “as freely as you can and as closely as you must.” The former index would track a skew toward slavish literalism, with target-language idiomaticity a fallback position (think Nabokov’s Onegin); the latter would track a skew toward free recreation, Umdichtung, with traditional translation equivalence anchoring the creative impulse in something recognizably translational (think the translation chain). It would be difficult to assign these anchoring effects numerical values, of course—but not impossible, if readers agreed to take your arithmetic approximations with a grain of salt.

Ideas for Research: The RBI-Priming Effects of Multimodal Translations The Pixar animated film Inside Out features five emotion-characters who together guide the actions of the main character, Riley—we might call them the five RBIs. Significantly, of course, that film has also been translated into many different languages, and part of that translation process has involved “localizing” the film’s visuals—also called intersemiotic or multimodal or multimedia translation. In the U.S. version, for example, the Anger RBI (voiced by Lewis Black) primes little Riley to throw a temper tantrum at the dinner table when she is served broccoli. Japanese kids, however, love broccoli, so the production team for Japan changed the image to green peppers, which apparently Japanese kids hate. (The “translated” images from Inside Out, and others like them, are available at https://www.translatemedia.com/ translation-blog/localisation-in-the-film-and-tv-industries/.) The study of multimedia/multimodal translation is burgeoning; but priming researchers can also use visual images, melodies, and the like to prime differential translation strategies.

Theory: Affective-Becoming-Conative Emergentism So how might we understand the role played by the RBI in regulating social communication as an emergent property of two or more LBIs interacting? Imagine a conversation with friends. What are the odds that the conversation will stabilize the group’s bond—the friendship among all friends and between any two friends—and what are the odds that the conversation will destabilize the bond in some way? There is no way of predicting those odds. Friendship is a conversational dissipative system. Friends tend, in other words, to use conversation to maintain the friendship bond; but sometimes something that one person says causes irritation, frustration, disaffection, sniping, accusations, and so on; and sometimes the conversational strategies that friends launch to smooth

80  The Right-Brain Interpreter (RBI): Affective Priming out such disruptions only make them worse. Sometimes long-term friendships are destroyed by feuds that seemingly emerge out of nowhere, over nothing. What kind of “nothing”? A stray word. The tonalization of a stray word. A look. Prosody, interpreted as hostile or otherwise insulting. The hostile intent is denied, but to no avail. A “secret code” (pp. 47–50). The feud is on. And sometimes former friends who have been feuding for decades wake up one day and realize that they’re no longer angry at each other. The old simmering hostility has dissipated. Friendship once dissipated into a feud; the feud now dissipates back into friendship. In Gazzaniga’s terms, the “chaotic” trigger for the dissipative “tip” either way is the work of the interpreter—or, rather, the interaction between the interpreters in two or more friends’ heads. One RBIconditioned LBI constructs the conversation in a certain way and signals its construction tonally and otherwise prosodically; another RBIconditioned LBI reads that tonal/prosodic signal in its own way, which may or may not align with the first RBI-conditioned LBI’s construction. Or the internally dialogized interpreter-encounter could engage on different levels. Imagine a conversation between two male friends, A and B. A cares more about clothes and fashion than B, and often ribs his friends about their style choices. So one day they meet, and A says to B, “Nice shirt!” a b c

Aprosodic (RBIa-unconditioned) LBIa: praise for the shirt Higher-level prosodic (RBIb-conditioned) LBIb: sarcasm, implying “I despise you” Lower-level prosodic (RBIc-conditioned) LBIc: friendly banter, implying “I really like you”1

Three interpreters? The interpreter count is a theoretical judgment call: do we imagine the LBI intending three different speech acts, one pretend and one real? Or do we imagine three different LBIs, one praising the shirt without RBI conditioning, a second conditioned by an RBI to intend a sarcastic speech act, a third conditioned by an RBI to intend a friendly one? Michael Gazzaniga only ever writes about a single LBI; but what if there are three in front speaking and three in back conditioning the speakers? Do we imagine LBI-RBI alliances and feuds, RBIc mobilizing RBIb to “masculinize” LBIa’s friendly praise as faux-sarcastic friendly banter, and implicitly sneering at the aprosodic LBIa that doesn’t get it? What if there are more—dozens, hundreds, thousands? What if Daniel Dennett’s (1991) pandemonium model is neurophilosophically accurate, and LBIs and RBIs are expressive “demons” competing for access to the expressive organs of the mouth or fingers?

Parasomatic Semiotics  81 Now imagine the ensuing conversation: A1:  Nice shirt! B1:  What do you mean by that? A2:  What do you mean, what do I mean? I mean “nice shirt!” B2:  Why do you despise me so much? A3:  What, are you crazy? I don’t despise you. We’re best friends! B3:  Then why do you always make fun of my clothes? A4:  Because I like to joke around! I don’t mean anything by it. B4:  If you don’t mean anything by it, why do you say it? A5:  What’s gotten into you? Is it such a huge crime to joke around? B5:  It is when it hurts my feelings. A6: What, now your feelings are hurt? What are you, a girl

or something? B6:  Oh, now you’re questioning my manhood? Great. A7:  Come off it! You’re taking everything wrong today! Let’s just forget about it, okay? B7:  Easy for you to say. You’re the superior one who wants to crush me. I should just suck it up, right? A8:  Crush you? Jeez, what a drama queen. B8:  Keep it up. Now I’m finding out how you really feel about me. A9:  Okay, okay, I apologize all over the place! I abase myself! I’m dirt. Feel better now? B9:  Look, I don’t really feel like getting coffee. I’m going to head home. A10:  Hey, wait! What—? Clearly, there, A wants “Nice shirt!” to (be taken parasomatically to) mean “I really like you”; B takes it, perhaps, equally parasomatically but in the opposite direction, as the last straw in a cumulative series of such “friendly”/sarcastic speech acts over the previous few years, to mean “I despise you.” Or, perhaps, we could reconstruct the layered RBI/LBIstructure of A’s “Nice shirt!” remark as understood by B’s parasomatic RBI-becoming-LBI like this: Higher-level RBIa > LBIa: sarcasm, implying “I despise you” Lower-level (pretend) RBIb > LBIc: friendly banter, implying “I really like you” Lowest-level (actual) RBIc > LBIc: contempt, implying “I despise you” That would be the interpretive tendency tracked from B2 to B3 to B5, after which everything A says just makes things worse. B4 insists that the repetition of RBIa > LBIb’s sarcasm implies an indirect but inexorable route through to RBIc > LBIc’s actual contempt; A4 and A5 scoff at that interpretation, apparently implying—what?

82  The Right-Brain Interpreter (RBI): Affective Priming Our uncertainty about A’s implicature there, or anywhere, is partly a by-product of the written text: without A’s “prosodics” to help us read his intentions parasomatically, we are forced to fall back on our experiencebased imaginations, and to project the imagined somatics of body language on both speakers’ written words, in a recursive back-and-forth between imagined “semes” (word-meanings) and imagined “sômes” (affect-meanings). But partly also, as we saw in the “Correctness Anxiety” section of Chapter 4 (pp. 56–58), the prosody staged in body language is often difficult to read—even for the person staging it. Not only is the RBI sometimes extremely subtle; it is also sometimes conflicted and confused. Or perhaps we should say that there are several conflicting RBIs competing for expression on the body’s stage? In any case, because A “sounds” rather aggressive, we may imagine an arrogant and dismissive “humor” behind his body language; but note what happens if we imagine him using those aggressive semes/words (“Jeez, what a drama queen”) with the sômes of soft, hesitant body language. Then the parasomatic “meaning” we attribute to his words changes, becoming more complexly layered; perhaps, for example, he is working hard to project a tougher persona than he is actually capable of feeling; perhaps he is suffering under the force of B’s accusations. One way of thinking about the somatic body language “behind” the semes on the page would be to imagine that brief dialogue as a play script at an actors’ read-through. How do the actors “create character” out of the written words? At a read-through, their embodiment of the two characters may be tentative, exploratory; they may try out a series of different somatizations, embodied characterizations, by changing the prosodics with which they read (pitch, tone, rhythm, etc.). The director may suggest a directionality: “Yes, A looks pretty aggressive on the page, but what if he’s actually a timid mouse trying to act like a bully?” I suggest, too, in anticipation of Part III that follows next, that there are ideological habitualizations/collectivizations involved in A’s “easy”/uneasy jocularity. As A6 makes explicit and A8 hints, and as I began to hint in the Volgograd section of Chapter 3 (pp. 50–53), it is normatively feminine to get one’s feelings hurt at light affectionate banter; and it is even, perhaps, normatively feminine to have feelings to get hurt at such banter. And let me stop to underscore the implications of “normative”: this is what we expect women to be like. And because we expect it, because we consider this kind of thin skin to be normal in women, we train women for it. It’s not what all women are like; it’s what all normal (norm-conformist) women are supposed to be like. And when A9 apologizes, he does so in a ramped-up satirical mode that, by exaggerating his self-abasement, again not only pokes fun at B for pressing for some sort of remorse, or even just self-awareness, in A but implicitly associates B with the icotic powerlessness of women.

Parasomatic Semiotics  83 More: the subtle, understated, but tangible power differential between A and B, at least on this issue, suggests an extension of the masculine/ feminine binary not only to a no-feelings/hurt-feelings binary but to a dominant/submissive hierarchy. Because by getting his feelings hurt B is “normatively” dumped into the “feminine” category, he is also implicitly but unmistakably subordinate to A. The interesting question is, how do A’s and B’s LBIs know how to invoke these ideological habits? Clearly they have learned them, as part of their language-learning. Toddlers can’t interact with this kind of complexly layered subtlety. A and B have probably learned these power hierarchies (between male friends, between men and women) in adulthood, or at the earliest in adolescence. But surely these power hierarchies are also examples of Bourdieu’s “secret code” (pp. 47–50), disseminated and discharged through RBI-toRBI affective communication? A’s inclination to deny that, to insist that only “girls” and “drama queens” care about feelings and affective tonalities, is normative, of course—primed by the Collective Full-Brain Interpreter (CFBI) in A’s head. The collectivized tendency to deny affect in men and project it onto women is a foundational move in Western thought. The reason that it is so difficult for men, women, or others to challenge is that such codes “continue to act below the level of consciousness and beneath the very revolt which they provoke.”

Ideas for Research: Translation as an Indirect Speech Act The idea that a translation is a speech act—that in translating the translator performs a speech act—is relatively new. The traditional idea, of course, is that translations reproduce speech acts, don’t perform them. Even at the turn of the millennium, when I was writing Performative Linguistics (Robinson 2003), the notion that translating might be thought of as “doing things with words” was virtually heretical. The source author communicated, acted; the translator was the translingual vehicle for that communicative act. Kirsten Malmkjær (1988: 35–36) had argued that translators can’t perform speech acts, because they do not intend the message that they mediate; only the source author intends it. Eight years after that, translation scholars like Theo Hermans (1996) and Giuliana Schiavi (1996) had begun to find evidence in translatorial style that translators were actually doing something with words, infusing them with their own unique personalities (see also Baker 2000); I explored that line of argumentation in one of the chapters that I cut from Robinson (2003), entitled “Adding a Voice or Two” (Robinson 2009). The reigning view, however, remained that even in doing something with words, translators weren’t performing speech acts—possibly because one fairly entrenched assumption in speech-act theory was that to perform a speech act you had to have access to the “I.” You could elide the “I” and still perform a speech

84  The Right-Brain Interpreter (RBI): Affective Priming act, as when you shouted “Look out!”, because implicit in that shout was “[I am warning you to] look out!” Anthony Pym (1993: 49) argued specifically that because translators-while-translating and interpreters-whileinterpreting have no access to their own “I,” “Chairpeople can open conferences; interpreters cannot.” However, in the same year that Performative Linguistics came out, Eve Sedgwick published a groundbreaking application of affect theory titled Touching Feeling, and one of her chapters dealt with Austin’s performativity (2003: 67–91)—with a twist. The performative, Sedgwick noted there, is what “I” do to “you”; but surely that performative dyad is complexly conditioned by the “witnesses” to it (“them”), which is to say by what is going on “around” the performative. Sedgwick accordingly called these conditioning acts—ratifying or disqualifying, contextualizing or conditionalizing acts—“periperformatives,” and argued that they dramatize “(what Neil Hertz refers to as) the pathos of uncertain agency, rather than occluding it as the explicit performative almost must” (76; emphasis added). Because the agency in these periperformative acts is uncertain, it’s often difficult to tell who is performing them, or whether they are being performed at all (and the passive voice in that last clause is commonly used for such acts). To my mind, this solves the problem of the translatorial speech act: it’s not a performative utterance, explicit or implicit, but a periperformative one. The translator or interpreter may not have access to the “I,” but that does not foreclose on her or his ability to contribute in a significant way to the speech act. In the previous section, we saw indirect speech acts being performed by the same “I”-sayers who were also performing direct speech acts; but perhaps Sedgwick’s notion of periperformativity will let us explore the periperformance of indirect speech acts by translators-in-translating and interpreters-in-interpreting who cannot perform direct speech acts? A classic instance of the translatorial periperformance of indirect speech acts would be Michel Garneau’s 1978 Macbeth, the first play to be written and performed in joual, the Québécois dialect of French. The classic account of those indirect speech acts is Annie Brisset’s “Translation and Social Discourse” (1991): Consider, for example, Macduff’s reaction to the news that his estate has been destroyed and his wife and children massacred: I cannot but remember such things were, That were most precious to me. Did heaven look on, And would not take their part! (p. 865) Garneau retains the impersonal character of the object of the first sentence, but notice how he changes the second:

Parasomatic Semiotics  85 C’que j’ava’s d’plus précieux dans l’monde, chu t’oblige d’commencer A m’en souv’nir. Comment c’est que l’bon dieu peut laisser fére Des affe’res pareilles? Sans prende la part des faibes! (p. 125) The semantic neutrality of the “C(e)” is faithful to the original, but Garneau then proceeds to transform the possessive pronoun their into a collective les faibes which is much more encompassing. This collective has an open referent which Québec’s audiences can easily apply to themselves. The original passage renders an emotional state, this deadly grief that must be overcome (Dispute it like a man). In Garneau, the outcome is a personal resolution: I must remember from now on that I have lost what was most precious to me. The wording of this resolution echoes the declaration Je me souviens (“I remember”) which is such a prominent feature of Québécois social discourse. (It is on every vehicle’s license plate.) Injunctions such as this, that closely link words to deeds, are called performatives in speech act theory. In this speech, the efficiency of the performative is directly linked to the shift to first person. One need only compare “Remember” to “I remember” to be convinced. In the second case, saying is definitely doing. (126) Well, technically, “I remember” is a constative; but then at the end of lecture VII Austin (1962/1975: 91–93) “realized”—i.e., led his audience to the realization—that all constatives performed actions too, and might be called “declaratives” or “assertives.” If however we follow Brisset (and in a sense Austin as well) in grandfathering in a declarative like “A m’en souv’nir” or “Je me souviens” as an honorary performative, the interesting question is: who is performing it? Not Garneau, the translator; and not Shakespeare, the source author, either. Technically the character Macduff is performing it—but in Québécois French. The Québécois actor on stage in Montreal speaking those words is staging the performance of that performative by Macduff. That complication, in fact—that an actor on stage performed the performative—was too much for Austin: famously, or infamously, he declared that kind of performed performative “parasitic” on the “serious” performative performed “in real life.” It was around that failure to deal with a fairly ordinary kind of theatrical performative that Jacques Derrida (1972/1988) built his brilliant deconstruction of Austin, developing his notion of “iterability” as the repeat-performability that is necessary for meaningful communication to occur. But what Brisset is addressing here adds an extra twist to that initial complication, namely that by insistently translating impersonal statements as personal ones in the first-person singular Garneau not only “makes the text coincide with Québécois social discourse” but intensifies the impact of that “subjectivization … by the abolition of the difference

86  The Right-Brain Interpreter (RBI): Affective Priming between the protagonist or, rather, the actor who says these lines and the spectator who hears them” (127). At work in that account is a series of steps past Austinian performativity, in fact right into the realm of the periperformative, which was still 12 years in the future when Brisset published this piece in 1991: Shakespeare writes the line “I cannot but remember” for Macduff. 1 2 Garneau translates 1 as “A m’en souv’nir.” 3 The Québécois actor playing Macduff in the 1978 production of (2) Garneau’s translation says “A m’en souv’nir.” 4 The Québécois audience in the house at that performance in 1978 hears (3) the actor saying “A m’en souv’nir.” 5 By the force of the shifter “je” (“I”), (4) each audience member also seems to be saying “A m’en souv’nir” in her or his head. 6 Still in each audience member’s head, 5 resonates with the Québécois slogan on the license plates “Je me souviens.” Technically, again, while “A m’en souv’nir” is a speech act, it is performed by no one in that list. The performer of the performative is Macduff, and I have deliberately left him off the list. Everyone listed there—Shakespeare, Garneau, the actor playing Macduff, and the audience—is what Sedgwick calls a “witness” to the performative. Writer, translator, actor, and audience are all gathered around the performative, witnessing it, ratifying it, participating in it as the social support network for the action being performed—but also disseminating it as an audience-effect throughout the social realm. In this case, especially (2) the Québécois translator, (3) the Québécois actor, and (4–6) the Québécois audience together form the periperformative community that not only disseminates the audienceeffect but renders it personally and collectively meaningful, as a nationalist slogan. That Québécois collective—translator, cast, and audience— together “ratify” the performative as an indirect speech act, one that is not directly performed by Macduff. It should be clear how this nationalist periperformative response was primed affectively by individual Québécois RBIs, and how those individual RBIs were in turn primed by a Québécois CFBI. Brisset spells this collective affect out at some length: The theme of individual and collective alienation is central to the literature of this period. It is constantly reiterated in terms that are remarkably similar. All of the following quotations could be summarized as “Because I have no country to call my own, I am ailing to the point of being terminally ill.” … The significance of these statements is linked to the ideologeme that underlies them: “The Québécois are not their own masters.” (128)

Parasomatic Semiotics  87 The alienation, the sense of “ailing to the point of being terminally ill,” is primed by the RBI; “the ideologeme that underlies them: ‘The Québécois are not their own masters’” is primed by the CFBI, to which we turn next. Before we do that, however, the usual question: how might we experimentally simulate the RBI-priming of Garneau’s nationalistic tristesse in translating Macbeth for Québec? How, to generalize that somewhat, might we simulate the affective priming of indirect periperformative speech acts in and through translating? Photography might work nicely, in fact. The fact that it is a visual medium might usefully prime the feeling of voicelessness that comes with not having direct access to an “I,” and different photographs could be selected for the experimental and control groups—black-and-white art photos, especially of suffering and degradation, violence and homelessness, to RBI-prime a sense of alienation and despair, and crisply cheerful, brightly colored photos of beautiful landscapes and famous tourist destinations to RBI-prime a sense of national pride. There are, after all, different affective nationalisms. National branding through advertising, patriotic jingoism, and red baseball caps tends to feed one kind; the nationalistic tristesse that Brisset identified in Québec in the late 1970s would need a different kind of RBI priming.

Part III

The Collective Full-Body Interpreter (CFBI) Social Priming

6 The CFBI and the Unification of Language

The mainstream linguistic model of language that dominated linguistic thought for most of the twentieth century was first built out of Ferdinand de Saussure’s lecture notes by his PhD students, who depicted language as a stable synchronic logic that could be studied scientifically, which is to say objectively, as an unchanging object. The linguists who have studied the morphological, syntactic, and semantic priming of translation over the last decade or so no longer model language in quite this naïve way— an attention to priming effects is far more dynamic than abstract structure—but they do seem, methodologically at least, to act as if there were nothing priming the formation and formulation of language structure. This book obviously explores the “nothing” doing that priming: the LeftBrain Interpreter (LBI) priming the words and the structures and the logics, the Right-Brain Interpreter (RBI) priming the affects and the kinesthetics (the sômes, the emotional and energetic interpretants), and the Collective Full-Brain Interpreter (CFBI) priming the norms and values behind it all.

Theory: Bakhtinian Heteroglossia Beginning in the late 1920s, when “Saussurean” structuralist linguistics was still quite young, a thirty-something Russian literature scholar named Mikhail Bakhtin began to develop a refutation of it—a radically different model of language and method for studying it. By the mid-1930s, as he was turning 40, he had written a book-length treatise entitled Слово в романе/Slovo v romane, literally “Word in the Novel,” translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist as Discourse in the Novel (1981), laying out his new approach to language as discourse, as situated embodied utterances. Since he was a literature scholar, he applied this method to the study of the novel—but his background study of language in social life has remained even more vital and current. One of his key coinages for the state of language is разноречие/raznorechie, translated by Emerson and Holquist as “heteroglossia.” In Bakhtin’s conception, heteroglossia is the force driving all language change, powered DOI: 10.4324/9781003134312-10

92  The Collective Full-Body Interpreter (CFBI): Social Priming by the difference between individual speakers, the fact that we inhabit different “biological skinbag[s]” (Clark 2003: 4), digest only the food that we personally ingest, see the world from a slightly different angle (cannot see the backs of our own heads, as Bakhtin puts it), and above all “accent [everything we say] as an individual utterance” (1934–1935/1981: 272). But it is also the force driving all language unification, powered by the social project of imposing group norms on communication. In the terms of this book, that social project is the work of the CFBI. In order to facilitate mutual understanding, those forces seek to unify language, to impose centripetal normativities on the centrifugal tendencies that everywhere tend to spin out of normative control. Heteroglossia as opposed directionalities: centripetal and centrifugal; toward normative regulation and unification and toward creative differentiation and individuation. That latter tendency, toward divergent individuation, is sometimes mistaken for heteroglossia per se; but as Michael Holquist (1990: 428) shows, heteroglossia for Bakhtin is actually the whole embodied dissipative system of language. It is “the base condition governing the operation of meaning in any utterance”: It is that which insures the primacy of context over text. At any given time, in any given place, there will be a set of conditions—social, historical, meteorological, physiological—that will insure that a word uttered in that place and at that time will have a meaning different than it would have under any other conditions; all utterances are heteroglot in that they are functions of a matrix of forces practically impossible to recoup, and therefore impossible to resolve. Heteroglossia is as close a conceptualization as possible of that locus where centripetal and centrifugal forces collide; as such, it is that which a systematic linguistics must suppress. Heteroglossia is linguistic “chaos” not as disorder but as the tension between order and disorder: “that locus where centripetal and centrifugal forces collide.” It is the project of ordering, organizing, and stabilizing a volatile dynamic—and it is the destabilization that inevitably results from that ongoing project. Needless to say, this is a rather more dynamic model of language than that offered by Saussure’s postgraduate students and structuralist followers. Formal linguistics attempted to “recoup” and “resolve” those forces by idealizing them out of the equation: language is not forces but structure. Bakhtin insists on the forces, and the unresolvability of those forces. “The authentic environment of an utterance,” Bakhtin writes, “the environment in which it lives and takes shape, is dialogized heteroglossia, anonymous and social as language, but simultaneously concrete, filled with specific content and accented as an individual utterance” (272).

The CFBI and the Unification of Language  93 Think about the noun phrase that forms the grammatical subject of that sentence: “The authentic environment of an utterance, the environment in which it lives and takes shape.” First, he’s not talking about sentences, the purview of syntacticians, let alone propositions, the purview of logicians; he’s talking about utterances, things people utter to each other. The authentic environment of such an utterance is not the page, or a searchable file in an online corpus, or a grammatical tree diagram on a whiteboard or PowerPoint slide. It’s situated, embodied conversation. It’s people talking at a specific time and place. Second, an utterance is not a rule-governed structure created by a rational subject. It has some kind of (perhaps metaphorical?) agency: it “lives and takes shape.” At the very least, it exceeds or surpasses the utterer’s rational control. A theory or model of language designed to minimize that vulnerability has to situate discursive control at a bare minimum inside the speaking subject, or, at worst, inside the rational exchanges among speaking subjects. A model of language designed to eliminate it entirely has to ignore and suppress the communicative use of language and focus on abstract structure. As Bakhtin understands it, discourse lives “outside itself,” and that is precisely why it needs to be stabilized and unified; and that stabilization and unification is an ongoing centripetal project. But the very “accentual” forces that serve that project also serve centrifugal needs for individuation, creativity, and change, and the “tipping point” between them is present at every moment in every language-use situation—and utterly unpredictable. Because “the word lives, as it were, on the boundary between its own context and another, alien, context” (Bakhtin 1934–1935/1981: 284), every word is a tipping point at which symmetry may be broken. (“Symmetry breaking,” Michael S. Gazzaniga explains, “is where small fluctuations acting on a system cross a critical point and determine which of several equally likely outcomes will occur. A well-known example is a ball sitting at the top of a symmetrical hill, where any disturbance will cause it to roll off in any direction, thus breaking its symmetry and causing a particular outcome” [2011: 120].) As Bakhtin writes: Every concrete utterance of a speaking subject serves as a point where centrifugal as well as centripetal forces are brought to bear. The processes of centralization and decentralization, of unification and disunification, intersect in the utterance; the utterance not only answers the requirements of its own language as an individualised embodiment of a speech act, but it answers the requirements of heteroglossia as well; it is in fact an active participant in speech diversity. (272)

94  The Collective Full-Body Interpreter (CFBI): Social Priming They “intersect” in the utterance—which is to say, every utterance can tip either way. “It is in fact an active participant in speech diversity.” Note, though, that it is misleading to think of centripetal/centrifugal1 forces, or order/disorder, as a binary. It’s not like Bakhtin is theorizing a choice between order and disorder. Rather, everything in language is both orderly and disorderly—both intertwined. The tensions between the forces create the disequilibrium that makes language a dissipative system. Both forces are always at work in language. Even when the tension manifests in centrifugal or divergent tendencies, there is a whole complex range of heteroglot speech acts playing dynamically with the collision point between centripetal and centrifugal forces. And when the tension manifests in centripetal or stabilizing tendencies, those heteroglot speech acts continue to play dynamically with and at and around the same collision point: A common unitary language is a system of linguistic norms. But these norms do not constitute an abstract imperative; they are rather the generative forces of linguistic life, forces that struggle to overcome the heteroglossia of language, forces that unite and centralize verbalideological thought, creating within a heteroglot national language the firm, stable linguistic nucleus of an officially recognized literary language, or else defending an already formed language from the pressure of growing heteroglossia. (1934–1935/1981: 270–71) Read again what “the authentic environment of an utterance” is for Bakhtin: “dialogized heteroglossia, anonymous and social as language, but simultaneously concrete, filled with specific content and accented as an individual utterance” (272). Those “accents” are what Saussure calls sômes, what Peirce calls emotional and energetic interpretants, or what I am calling the RBI at work: embodied tonalizations that help neurotypicals tell the difference between a friendly and an angry response to the return of empty CD cases (p. 63); and for Bakhtin, those accents are organized into meaning-stabilizing “accentual systems” (which also destabilize communication). If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to end this chapter by quoting at some length, italicizing the key phrases and then commenting and adding research ideas: What is more, all socially significant world views have the capacity to exploit the intentional possibilities of language through the medium of their specific concrete instancing. Various tendencies (artistic and otherwise), circles, journals, particular newspapers, even particular significant artistic works and individual persons are all capable of stratifying language, in proportion to their social significance; they are capable of attracting its words and forms into their orbit by

The CFBI and the Unification of Language  95 means of their own characteristic intentions and accents, and in so doing to a certain extent alienating these words and forms from other tendencies, parties, artistic works and persons. Every socially significant verbal performance has the ability— sometimes for a long period of time, and for a wide circle of persons—to infect with its own intention certain aspects of language that had been affected by its semantic and expressive impulse, imposing on them specific semantic nuances and specific axiological overtones; thus, it can create slogan-words, curse-words, praise words and so forth. In any given historical moment of verbal-ideological life, each generation at each social level has its own language; moreover, every age group has as a matter of fact its own language, its own vocabulary, its own particular accentual system that, in their turn, vary depending on social level, academic institution (the language of the cadet, the high school student, the trade school student are all different languages) and other stratifying factors. All this is brought about by socially typifying languages, no matter how narrow the social circle in which they are spoken. It is even possible to have a family jargon define the societal limits of a language, as, for instance, the jargon of the Irtenevs in Tolstoy, with its special vocabulary and unique accentual system. And finally, at any given moment, languages of various epochs and periods of social-ideological life cohabit with one another. Even languages of the day exist: one could say that today’s and yesterday’s socio-ideological and political “day” do not, in a certain sense, share the same language; every day represents another socio-ideological semantic “state of affairs,” another vocabulary, another accentual system, with its own slogans, its own ways of assigning blame and praise. (290–291; emphasis added) Each of these languages, of institutions, workplaces, age groups, time periods, and so on, has its own centripetal forces unifying it, regulating its members around group norms, and that unificatory impulse is directed against the centrifugal forces; but the overlapping and interacting multiplicity of languages within a single “national” (or international) language itself constitutes its own super-centrifugality as well. It’s heteroglossia all the way down. And the heteroglot “accentual systems” manage and channel both forces, emergently—sometimes clamping down on deviations from norms, other times flaunting differences, depending on the specific situated ways in which, “at any given moment, languages of various epochs and periods of social-ideological life cohabit with one another.” “As a result of the work done by all these stratifying forces in language,” Bakhtin says, “there are no ‘neutral’ words and forms—words

96  The Collective Full-Body Interpreter (CFBI): Social Priming and forms that can belong to ‘no one’; language has been completely taken over, shot through with intentions and accents” (293). Beware there, however, of radical dualism: “can[not] belong to ‘no one’” does not imply “must belong to individuals” as its opposite. Bakhtin’s idea is that “language has been completely taken over, shot through with intentions and accents,” not by individuals—rational subjects—but by relationships, dialogicalities, betweennesses. Words are shared phenomena that belong to interlocutors. “Each word,” he goes on, “tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life; all words and forms are populated by intentions” (293), but populated specifically by the intentions, again, not of individuals but of encounters, engagements, exchanges. Certainly the “contextual overtones [that] are inevitable in the word” are “individualistic” as well as “generic” and “tendentious” (293)—but the overtones are “shot through” with clashing individualisms, contentious tonalizations. Behind this concept of the dialogical betweenness of every word is Bakhtin’s conception of dialogue itself, which is always complexly recursive, in the sense that every utterance not only is addressed to someone (обращенность/obrasshennost’ “addressivity”) and anticipates an answer (ответственность/otvetstvennost’ “answerability”) but is prestructured toward the anticipated answer. This dialogistic model weaves or striates three vocal strands through every utterance: one winding back into the past (with all of its previous use-situations as tonal fibers), one engaged in the present interactive moment, and a third winding into the immediate and imagined future.

Ideas for Research: Heteroglot CFBI Anchors and Primes for Cognitive Translation Research Every translator faces the problems posed by the slippages that Bakhtin identifies in language, of course. How does each deal with those slippages? How does this or that translator manage transitional semantics, where target readers in their sixties and seventies will understand a word or phrase one way, target readers in their thirties and forties another way, and target readers in their teens yet a third way? What about transitional case endings, verb tenses, and specificity workarounds in languages that don’t have definite and indefinite articles? The easy answer is that each translator will manage those slippages situationally, as each context seems to demand. But surely some translators will be primed by a “centripetal” CFBI to impose more rigid rules on such cases, while others may be primed by a “centrifugal” CFBI to gravitate with secret glee toward the weirder new usages? Surely, in other words, translators’ decisions are often collectively organized and socialized by Full-Brain Interpreters inside their own heads? And surely those “own heads” have been shaped and conditioned by interactions with other heads?

The CFBI and the Unification of Language  97 To simulate the divergent primes implicated by Bakhtin’s centripetal/ centrifugal binary gate, I suggest two steps. First step: use those transitional structures as primes. Write sentences in the source language that would typically be translated into English with say dived/dove (“I got up my courage and ________ head-first off the high dive”) or lie/lay/laid/lain (“I found myself wishing I’d ________ down full-length on the sofa for ten minutes before they arrived”). Second step: anchor those primes with images of order and disorder. Video clips of an iconic government building in the sunshine, with a patriotic march playing in the background, and of the same building as an airplane crashes into it in a disaster movie, with scary horror-movie music playing in the background. Video clips of a potter shaping a beautiful vase on the wheel and of clay being slung randomly off a potter’s wheel run amuck. See how the images of order and disorder anchor the priming effects of the transitional structures on how the translator-subjects translate.

7 The Shared Interpreter

In terms of Michael S. Gazzaniga’s Interpreter Theory, statements taken to be true are spoken by the Left-Brain Interpreters (LBIs) in individual heads. As we’ve been seeing, however, the value-driven nature of ideological truth-claims points to the kinesthetic-becoming-affectivebecoming-conative involvement of the Right-Brain Interpreter (RBI) as well. Ideology, in other words, would seem to require that the LBI and the RBI work together. But then isn’t that true of all human interaction, except among split-brain patients? What makes ideology different from most verbal communication is that the ideas-as-beliefs-as-truth-claims that express and instantiate it are shared. The ideas are believed to be true, and stated as truths, because they are held in common by large groups of people. That sharing of LBI/RBI-orientations from body to body is my topic in Part III. How does it work? How is it possible? This is not a question that is often asked by ideology theorists. The putative answer to the question “How are beliefs shared in a group?” is apparently so obvious to all involved that the question doesn’t need to be asked: people converse, exchange ideas, agree on some, disagree on others, and the clusters of agreement become ideologies. In other words, the “sharing” of ideas is the result of rational debate and negotiation. Everything is conscious, overt, and public. But there are (at least) four problems with that assumption. Problem 1. Most people don’t know what they believe, and become rather confused if they are pressed to articulate their ideological orientation with any kind of specificity. Problem 2. As Gazzaniga (2011: 174–215) shows at useful length, when asked what they believe in general, people tend to answer in ways that are at odds with how they answer when they are asked what they believe in specific cases.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003134312-11

The Shared Interpreter  99 Problem 3. Ideological orientations do not tend to be open to rational discussion. They are just right, or true, or patriotic, or whatever. Even the people who can and do articulate their ideological orientations with intellectual specificity typically don’t know why they adhere to a specific ideology. Because they have naturalized their ideology as true, or as universal human nature, they tend to mystify it. Problem 4. The irrefutable destruction of an ideological orientation tends to be traumatizing. Ideology is more than a coherent system of beliefs; it tends to serve as a kind of psychosocial foundation for all reality. Indeed, it seems to its adherents to be coterminous with reality. Destruction of an ideology feels like the destruction of reality. Another way of putting that: the usual assumption about ideology, that it is the product of rational negotiation, attributes the sharing of beliefs entirely to the interaction of (rational) LBIs alone; but the four problems listed above suggest the collaborative work of affective-becoming-conative RBIs as well. James and Steger (2016: 26) write that “ideologies are patterned clusters of normatively imbued ideas and concepts, including particular representations of power relations. They are conceptual maps that help people navigate the complexity of their social universe. They carry claims to social truth as, for example, expressed in the conventional ideologies of the national imaginary: liberalism, conservatism, socialism, communism, and fascism.” That sounds very reasonable. But: What does it mean for “ideas and concepts” to be “normatively imbued”? How are “clusters” of ideas “patterned”? How conscious is anyone of those “particular representations of power relations”? How “conceptual” are those “conceptual maps”? “Maps” and “navigate” there are obviously metaphors for some kind of ideational guidance; but what? What kind of “complexity” is a feature of “their social universe,” and how do ideologies help people map and navigate it? “Carry” is another metaphor; how do “ideas and concepts” “carry claims to social truth”? How are ideologies conventionalized, and what exactly is a “national imaginary,” and where is it stored? There is in fact one definition of ideology that theorizes the formation of an ideology: that offered by the coiner of the term, Antoine Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836), who suggested that ideology consists of two phenomena: (1) people’s sensations of the world and (2) their ideas built on and out of such sensations (see Kennedy 1979). The (1) sensational basis of ideology-formation suggests embodiment and thus, potentially, the work of the RBI. That to my mind is a step in the right direction. But note that Tracy’s founding definition still

100  The Collective Full-Body Interpreter (CFBI): Social Priming fails to account for the emergence of (3) shared “ideas and concepts” that are “normatively imbued” out of the transition from (1) the RBI to (2) the LBI.

Empirical Research Review: Guidance through Social Experience Michael S. Gazzaniga never (to my knowledge) theorizes a “shared interpreter” or “collective interpreter”—but some such entity would appear to be required by his insistent pleas for a more social focus in neuroscience: I think that we neuroscientists are looking at these capacities from the wrong organizational level. We are looking at them from the individual brain level, but they are emergent properties found in the group interactions of many brains. Mario Bunge makes a point that we neuroscientists should heed: “[W]e must place the thing of interest in its context instead of treating it as a solitary individual.” (2011: 133) Compare Bakhtin’s focus on “dialogicality” as a betweenness: neither your words nor mine but both. Or again: Brains are automatic machines following decision pathways, but analyzing single brains in isolation cannot illuminate the capacity of responsibility. Responsibility is a dimension of life that comes from social exchange, and social exchange requires more than one brain. When more than one brain interacts, new and unpredictable things begin to emerge, establishing a new set of rules. Two of the properties that are acquired in this new set of rules that weren’t previously present are responsibility and freedom. (Gazzaniga 2011: 136) Paraphrase that: “Language is a dimension of life that comes from social exchange, and social exchange requires more than one brain.” And of course, to the extent that ideology is channeled through language, “Language-becoming-ideology is a dimension of life that comes from social exchange, and social exchange requires more than one brain.” And further: to the extent that ideology is embodied and situated in individuals, and so channeled through feeling, “Sensation-becomingaffect-becoming-conation-becoming-language-becoming-ideology is a dimension of life that comes from social exchange, and social exchange requires more than one brain.” All of which is to say that ideology is produced and maintained by a Collective Full-Brain Interpreter (CFBI).

The Shared Interpreter  101 The question: how does a CFBI emerge out of social interaction between and among individual LBIs and RBIs? Modern neuroscience is happy to accept that human behavior is the product of a probabilistically determined system, which is guided by experience. But how is that experience doing the guiding? If the brain is a decision-making device and gathering information to inform those decisions, then can a mental state that is the result of some experience or the result of some social interaction affect or constrain future mental states? (Gazzaniga 2011: 137) Social experiences generate mental states, which not only “affect or constrain future mental states” but shape the future social experiences that generate future mental states. The priming effect of social experiences is an emergent group property of what, again, Bakhtin calls dialogized heteroglossia: the beyondness or betweenness of human interaction. Thus, when Gazzaniga notes that “We are just now understanding the neuroscience of the influences of social interactions” (144; emphasis added), I assume that he doesn’t mean simply social neuroscience in general. By 2011, social neuroscience had been around for roughly two decades, since the discovery of the mirror neurons in the early 1990s. But the emergent neural influence wielded in, on, and through individual brains by social experience—priming and anchoring as a symmetrybreaking event—was by the end of the first decade of the new millennium just beginning to come into focus. Gazzaniga cites developmental psychologists who explain this guidance by looking back to Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934): To be successful in a social group involves more than competition. One must also cooperate; otherwise such activities as joint hunting wouldn’t work. To address this issue, developmental and comparative psychologists Henrike Moll and Michael Tomasello have suggested the Vygotskian intelligence hypothesis, named after Lev Vygotsky, an early twentieth-century Russian psychologist. They propose that while cognition in general was driven mainly by social competition, other aspects of cognition that they consider to be unique to humans (the cognitive skills of shared goals, joint attention, joint intentions, and cooperative communication), were driven by or were constituted of, social cooperation, which is needed to create such things as complex technologies, cultural institutions, and systems of symbols, and not by social competition. (149)

102  The Collective Full-Body Interpreter (CFBI): Social Priming Gazzaniga footnotes the mention of Vygotsky, noting that he “investigated how child development and learning was guided by social interactions with parents and others, through which the child learns the cultural habits of mind, speech patterns, written language, and symbols” (149n). Obviously, language is one of the channels of social cooperation that rely on and prime “shared goals, joint attention, [and] joint intentions”: shared communicative goals, joint communicative intentions—and verbal communication requires joint attention in the form of eye contact, turn-taking, a shared sense of relevance, and so on (see Robinson 2006a: Part II). But note that, Paul Grice’s (1989) Cooperative Principle notwithstanding, not all verbal communication is cooperative (see Robinson 2003: 128–31). In Bakhtin’s terms, not all language is centripetal, tending toward regulatory unification. Some is centrifugal. Gazzaniga’s deeper analysis of social experience invokes affect, and thus, implicitly, the interpretive functionality of a social, collective RBI: Research has shown that 150–200 people are the number of people that can be controlled without an organizational hierarchy. It is the number of people one can keep track of, maintain a stable social relationship with, and would be willing to help with a favor. Yet, why is our social group size limited? To have social relationships, you call on five cognitive abilities: (1) you must interpret visual information to recognize others, then (2) be able to remember both faces and (3) who has a relationship with whom; (4) you must process emotional information, and then (5) manipulate information about a set of relationships. Dunbar [1996] has found that it is the ability to manipulate information about a set of relationships that is the limiting factor. The other processes are not running at capacity. Information about social relationships requires additional processing capacity, as well as specific standardizations, while the others do not. (2011: 150) As Paul Corballis would insist, the RBI (1) facilitates face recognition by interpreting the visual information and (2) remembers faces; the RBI is almost certainly heavily involved in remembering relationships as well, though the details would have to be verbalized by the LBI. The (3) affective complexity of relationship networks would include managing the situationally appropriate levels of friendliness and distance in verbal and body language, expressing the appropriate levels of interest (without prying), sympathy (without creepiness), pressure (without giving the impression of coercion), and so on. What Gazzaniga only sketchily hints at in referring to (4) emotional information, however, is the grounding of the RBI’s interpretive work in affect: the lesson learned from Capgras syndrome, that for (1 > 2 > 3) to

The Shared Interpreter  103 work properly, FFA (face fusiform area) analysis of the lines and contours of faces must be confirmed with the affective glow of familiarity (p. 32). It is that RBI-mustered glow that structures the reality of what feels familiar. Gazzaniga (2011: 160–65) reviews the mirror-neuron findings explored in Chapters 3 and 4: The mirror-neuron systems (MNSs) found in humans are more complex than those that the Italian team of Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues found in macaques. In macaques, the mirror neurons are goal-directed (fire only when the monkeys are trying to achieve something) and limited to movements of hand and mouth. In humans they fire when we see, hear, or even remember or imagine movements anywhere in the body, and are involved in understanding what other individuals mean or intend by their actions. This last is especially true of mirror-neuron systems in the insulae, “mediated through the visceromotor response” (161), which help us understand other people by simulating in our own body states what other people are feeling and doing (161–62). Giles and Powesland (1975) have shown that “we mimic the facial expressions, postures, vocal intonations, accents” (Gazzaniga 2011: 163) of others, and even mimic their words, phrases, and other speech patterns (see Chartrand et al. 2005 for a review). “Nonconscious imitation, or mimicry” (163; emphasis added). Chartrand and Bargh (1999) have shown that this internal simulation of other people’s body states happens too fast for us to perceive it. Dimberg et al. (2000) have shown that “A 30-millisecond (ms) exposure to happy, neutral, and angry faces (too fast to consciously register that a face was even seen) will cause you to have measurable facial muscle reactions that correspond to the happy and angry faces” (Gazzaniga 2011: 163). Liking and disliking. We tend to “like” and agree with people who mimic us and not to mimic those we dislike (van Baaren et al. 2004; Chaiken 1980) or with whom we are in competition (Lanzetta and Englis 1989). Affiliation and disaffiliation. “It is looking like mimicry is not purely automatic and reflexive; occasionally brakes are applied based on social context. It is an affiliative signal that is a major player in maintaining and regulating social interactions, especially within a social ingroup” (164). These brakes are more commonly applied by men than by women (Yabar et al. 2001), and tend to limit men’s mimicry of negative emotions like anger or sadness to intimates (close members of the in-group). Happiness, however, is always mimicked. “This binding of people together through enhancing prosocial behavior,” Gazzaniga sums all this up, “may have adaptive value by acting as social glue that holds the group together, fostering safety in numbers” (2011: 164).

104  The Collective Full-Body Interpreter (CFBI): Social Priming And, I would add, not just “safety in numbers” but collective identification, which also enhances collective normativization. When we feel we belong, when we identify with a group, we tend to conform our words, thoughts, feelings, and attitudes to the norms of the group. Not only that: we put pressure on the others, as well as ourselves, to conform. We circulate normative pressures through the group. And those normative pressures give icotic shape and heft to what we take to be real and true, including our own identity.

Empirical Research Review: Priming As we move toward the end of this book, it’s worth noting and discussing a possible misreading of what you and I have been doing throughout it. It seems to me that it may be tempting to objectify the Interpreter Theory as potentially “true” and methodologize the priming strategies as a mere test of the theory’s possible cognitive-scientific “truth.” Both mental adjustments would serve to instrumentalize the ruminations running through the book as just a research guide: a series of procedures possibly (but only secondarily) leading to a better understanding of the cognitive psychology of translating and interpreting, but primarily leading to the effective organization and approval of doctoral dissertations and the publication of high-impact articles in top-tier journals, and thus to job offers, promotion and tenure, and raises. I would not want to dismiss those academic goodies as worthless. I am not a purist. I play the academic game as well, and even take considerable pleasure in it. But I do strongly resist the instrumentalization of the scholarly and generally intellectual work we do. Ultimately, the goal for intellectuals has to be not fame and fortune but understanding—beginning with an understanding of oneself, and moving outward from there into an understanding of one’s relations with others, and how those relations intertwine with larger communal collectivities, and so on, until we reach the biggest questions of all, like the sustainability of life on this planet, or, possibly, for believers in the supernatural, what comes after we’re dead. The important step beyond instrumentalizing the cognitive neuroscience of Michael S. Gazzaniga’s Interpreter Theory and the priming research methods recommended here as tests of that theory would be to recognize that what makes priming work is also what makes it possible for us to internalize collective norms. In other words, the various cognitive and affective and social Interpreters hypothesized in this book are not only involved in priming: they are the primers. They organize and channel the primes. As I’ve noted several times along the way, the CFBI primes the RBI and the RBI primes the LBI—and the LBI, depending on how we frame it, either just blurts out the results or primes the language centers in left-hemisphere Broca to blurt them out.

The Shared Interpreter  105 Not only that: the fact that we are cognitively, conatively, affectively, and even kinesthetically susceptible to priming is precisely what makes it possible for us to be “organized” into normative groups, into communities that recognize and obey shared norms. Because we can so easily be primed, and because the ease of priming has a lot to do with our lack of awareness of being primed—because, to put it technically, the mirrorneuron system simulates other people’s body states below the radar of consciousness (Chapters 3 and 4)—we develop an ideological CFBI and an affective RBI as part of a whole mental apparatus for organizing thought and behavior. Primes Я Us. But don’t take my word for it. Read the priming research that Kathleen Vohs and her colleagues reported on in “The Psychological Consequences of Money” (2006): People long have debated the effects of money on human behavior. Some scholars have pointed to its role as an incentive, insofar as people want money in order to trade it for prized goods or services. Others, however, have deplored money for undermining interpersonal harmony. We propose that both outcomes emerge from the same underlying process: Money makes people feel self-sufficient and behave accordingly. (1154) This is, of course, careful understatement. It may be true that having money is an incentive to work harder, and also to feel self-sufficient and therefore to care less about harmonious relations with others; but what Vohs and her colleagues tested empirically was not the incentivizing etc. effect of having money, but rather the priming effect of the image of money: In this Report, “money” refers to a distinct entity, a particular economic concept. Consistent with other scholarly uses of the term, we use the term money to represent the idea of money, not property or possessions. Our research activates the concept of money through the use of mental priming techniques, which heighten the accessibility of the idea of money but at a level below participants’ conscious awareness. Thus, priming acts as a nonconscious reminder of the concept of money. (1154) In the terms I am developing from Gazzaniga, “the idea of money” might be thought of as spoken by the LBI; but I would argue that that LBI talk of money is primed by the RBI’s feeling of having (or not having) money, which in turn is primed by the CFBI’s ideology of money. Let’s see how that works.

106  The Collective Full-Body Interpreter (CFBI): Social Priming The research team writes that they tested “whether activating the concept of money leads people to behave self-sufficiently, which we define as an insulated state wherein people put forth effort to attain personal goals and prefer to be separate from others” (1154). “The concept/idea of money” is obviously something that every participant in a money economy shares—cognitively (we know what money is and basically how it works), conatively (we feel the incentives it collectively represents), affectively (we want it, we lust after it, we’re afraid of being dominated by it, etc.), and kinesthetically (we can feel ourselves punching the keys on the ATM to get cash, digging in our pockets and purses and wallets to fish out cash, counting it, paying with it, etc.). When Vohs and her colleagues write that “the term as we define it does not imply a value judgment and encompasses a mixture of desirable and undesirable qualities, which may help explain the positive and negative consequences of money” (1154), therefore, they emphatically do not mean that there are no value judgments linked to “the concept/ idea of money” in society (or our heads). Rather, the implication is that they as empirical researchers are studiously avoiding “imposing” those existing value judgments on their work, for fear of distorting—or giving the impression of distorting—their findings. If we as human beings are so powerfully and unconsciously susceptible to being primed by the RBI’s affective inclinations and the CFBI’s communal/normative inclinations, if our LBIs will freely and blithely parrot whatever the RBI and the CFBI prime it to say, it is important for empirical researchers to “bracket the human element”—which is to say, to block the priming effects of the various Interpreters in their heads, so as the more convincingly to study the priming effects of the various Interpreters in their subjects’ heads. Daniel Kahneman (2013: 55) usefully summarizes the three experiments that Vohs and her colleagues performed: Participants in one experiment were shown a list of five words from which they were required to construct a four-word phrase that had a money theme (“high a salary desk paying” became “a high-paying salary”). Other primes were much more subtle, including the presence of an irrelevant money-related object in the background, such as a stack of Monopoly money on a table, or a computer with a screen saver of dollar bills floating in water. And, as Vohs and her colleagues hypothesized—“we predicted that reminders of money would lead to changes in behavior that suggest a feeling of self-sufficiency. When reminded of money, people would want to be free from dependency and would also prefer that others not depend on them” (1154)—“money-primed people become more independent than they would be without the associative trigger” (Kahneman 2013: 55):

The Shared Interpreter  107 They persevered almost twice as long in trying to solve a very difficult problem before they asked the experimenter for help, a crisp demonstration of increased self-reliance. Money-primed people are also more selfish: they were much less willing to spend time helping another student who pretended to be confused about an experimental task. When an experimenter clumsily dropped a bunch of pencils on the floor, the participants with money (unconsciously) on their mind picked up fewer pencils. In another experiment in the series, participants were told that they would shortly have a get-acquainted conversation with another person and were asked to set up two chairs while the experimenter left to retrieve that person. Participants primed by money chose to stay much farther apart than their nonprimed peers (118 vs. 80 centimeters). Money-primed undergraduates also showed a greater preference for being alone. And note that these undergraduate research subjects had been primed unconsciously with images of money. They were not instructed to think or talk about money. If they had been asked why they acted as they did, their LBIs would not only not know about the money-priming, but would not know that their bodies had kinesthetically acted in organized ways: stubbornly staying on task, not being willing to pick up pencils, sitting farther away from others, and the rest. If as I’m suggesting these subjects were primed not just with the “idea” or “concept” of money but with the CFBI’s ideology of money and the RBI’s affective orientations to money, that complexly layered priming nevertheless leaves the LBI in the dark. Kahneman builds the explicit bridge to ideological conditioning that Vohs and her colleagues strategically neglect to mention: [Vohs’] experiments are profound—her findings suggest that living in a culture that surrounds us with reminders of money may shape our behavior and our attitudes in ways that we do not know about and of which we may not be proud. Some cultures provide frequent reminders of respect, others constantly remind their members of God, and some societies prime obedience by large images of the Dear Leader. Can there be any doubt that the ubiquitous portraits of the national leader in dictatorial societies not only convey the feeling that “Big Brother is Watching” but also lead to an actual reduction in spontaneous thought and independent action? (56) Yes, “living in a culture that surrounds us with reminders of money [or of humility before God or the Dear Leader] may shape our behavior and our attitudes in ways that we do not know about and of which we may not be proud”: that is how CFBI priming works. Vohs and her colleagues comment in conclusion:

108  The Collective Full-Body Interpreter (CFBI): Social Priming The self-sufficient pattern helps explain why people view money as both the greatest good and evil. As countries and cultures developed, money may have allowed people to acquire goods and services that enabled the pursuit of cherished goals, which in turn diminished reliance on friends and family. In this way, money enhanced individualism but diminished communal motivations, an effect that is still apparent. (1156)

Ideas for Research: Priming Translation with Money and Love Given that we mostly translate for money, but often push back against the notion that we translate only for money—that payment is or should be our only motivation for translating—the priming experiments of Vohs and her colleagues could well be used in a priming study of translation as well. In their first and third experiments, the research team created two conditions, one primed by money and the other not primed at all; in the second, they again created two conditions, one primed by images of having a lot of money, the other primed by images of living on restricted funds. Both priming oppositions could be applied to the priming of translation; but I would also recommend a third opposition, between what Vohs and her colleagues call “high money” (getting rich) and what I would want to call “high love” (translating texts that you love, translating with a deep and complex passion for the source text, the target language, and the act of translating). High-love primes might include still photographs of passionate facial expressions and postures. I would expect high-money primes to increase both translating speed and the use of high-frequency lexical items, and high-love primes to increase the intensity and duration of revision and the proliferation of prosodic effects (tensile rhythms, resonant euphonies, consonance and assonance, etc.).

Conclusion

The cognitivist Interpreter Theory around which this book is organized is something of a mystery to its discoverer, Michael S. Gazzaniga. Because the Left-Brain Interpreter (LBI) seems to be present in all humans, and is only most easily distinguishable in split-brain patients, he guesses that it must be a hardwired brain module; yet “people become experts,” he notes, “by developing automatic pattern recognition for a particular job” (2011: 81). This makes me wonder: is it possible that some nonconscious processes of which the LBI knows nothing are in fact the products of habitualization rather than of innate brain modules?1 Take, for instance, the uneasy feeling of incorrectness experienced by our Right-Brain Interpreter (RBI) while listening to someone else speak: somebody says something that our RBI intuits is not correct, mispronounces a word, uses a word wrong, or has confused word order, and the RBI signals a certain affective discomfort. In the first section of Chapter 4 (pp. 56–58), I called this “correctness anxiety.” Typically, as the priming research shows, we are primed by that RBI signal nonconsciously, leaving our LBI unable to identify the prime—though, of course, that inability rarely prevents the LBI from coming up with some kind of confabulatory explanation. And what would have primed the RBI to respond to a mispronunciation, or an incorrectly used word, or a confused word order, with anxiety? How does it come about that we have not just an LBI primed to use language according to centripetal regularities but an RBI primed to react to centrifugal irregularities with jittery apprehensions? Obviously, this double enforcement regime is effective: the LBI wields the carrot, the RBI wields the stick. But where does it come from? What is the priming agent that organizes and runs that regime? That agent is what I’m calling the Collective Full-Brain Interpreter (CFBI), of course. Something like that hypothesis is required, I argue— but is the CFBI precisely what the situation requires? That is something to debate in future; but also, possibly, something to test with the Ideas for Research that I’ve laid out in Part III. DOI: 10.4324/9781003134312-12

110 Conclusion As I’ve suggested, the argument in this book can be run in either direction: (a) from the Interpreter Theory to the priming research, or (b) from the priming research to the Interpreter Theory. The b-direction would make this book a research guide: you start with primes and draw conclusions about the Interpreter Theory based on how the primed translatorsubjects translate. The a-direction would make the book a theoretical statement about the role that priming plays in the cognitive/linguistic, affective/kinesthetic, and ideological/regulatory brain: you start with the Interpreter Theory, expand it from Gazzaniga’s claim that it is “specialized to the left hemisphere” to an RBI and a CFBI, and then think about how the “interpreting” work this collection of Interpreter modules (or whatever they are) does involves priming our thoughts, feelings, utterances, and other actions. In the final section of Chapter 7 (p. 104), I lodged a gentle protest against any attempt to “instrumentalize” the key concepts in this book; but I didn’t mean that I am strenuously opposed to the b-direction, using priming strategies to test the applicability of the expanded Interpreter Theory to translating and interpreting. What I am opposed to is a reductive running of only the b-direction: treating the Interpreter Theory as a simple hypothesis that can be tested, and thereby proved right or wrong, through experimental priming. My preference would be for a cycling of a through b and of b through a: understanding the Interpreter Theory as a hypothesis that works through priming and priming strategies as an experimental research strategy that relies on the Interpreter Theory. Rather than favoring a rigid, static hierarchy, in other words—you climb the steps of priming research to the peak of objective proof (or disproof)— I favor a hermeneutical circle in which each circuit opens up more complexity, and thus more principled resistance to reductivism.

Notes

Introduction 1 For the development of my somatic theory, see Robinson (1991, 2008, and 2013a). Icotic theory began to emerge as an extension of somatic theory in early drafts (from about 2009) of what eventually became Robinson (2016a); see also Robinson (2013b, 2013c, 2016b, 2017a, 2017c, 2017d, and 2019). 2 For the actual quotation about “feeling your way into everything,” see Herder (1774/1967: 37, Forster 2002c: 292 in English); for Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics, see Schleiermacher (1959; Duke and Forstman 1977 in English); for further discussion, see Forster (n.d., 2002a, 2002b, 2005) and Robinson (2013c: 28–29). 3 Hubscher-­Davidson (2017: 12) uses the terms affect, emotion, and feeling synonymously; in other work, I use the neo-­Jamesian affective-­neuroscience distinction between emotion as a body state and feeling as a cognitive mapping of that state, but here use affect very broadly to cover right-­brain arousals that affect (elicit and shape) action. Pragmatically our terminological usages in this realm are ultimately congruent: “The following chapters,” Hubscher-­Davidson writes, “combine research from the study of long-­term affect with short-­term fluctuations in emotion in order to obtain a more integrated view of translators’ emotional processes” (13). The main difference there is that I am less determined “to obtain a more integrated view of translators’ emotional processes”: this FOCUS monograph employs a hit-­or-­miss shotgun approach.

Chapter 1 1 For other studies of translational priming based on LBI4 naturalizations, see Stamenov et al. (2010), Hoey (2013), Bangalore et al. (2016), Carl et al. (2016), Schaeffer et al. (2016), and Calzada Pérez (2017).

Chapter 2 1 For the original scientific publications on which Gazzaniga is reporting here, see Corballis and Sergeant (1988), Corballis et al. (1999, 2002), Corballis (2003), Handy et al. (2003), and Funnell et al. (2003). 2 This paragraph from Brownell’s 2011 Medlink Neurology paper summarizes a number of studies published by his team: Brownell et al. (1992, 1994, 1995, 1997, 2000); Brownell and Martino (1998); Brownell and Stringfellow (1999); Rehak et al. (1992); Winner et al. (1998); Happé et al. (1999). For an application of Theory of Mind to translation, see Sturm (2020).

112 Notes 3 See also my explicit accounts of translator EI that I first added to Becoming a Translator (Robinson 1997: 106–7) a good decade before Hubscher-­ Davidson’s 2007 PhD dissertation. Unlike my speculative account, however, hers was research-­based. 4 The trait EI sources that Hubscher-­ Davidson (2017) adds to Hubscher-­ Davidson (2013) include O’Brien (2012), Shao Kai et al. (2013), Apfelthaler (2014), Bolaños Medina (2014), Bontempo et al. (2014), Halverson (2014), Hild (2014), Oatley and Johnson-­Laird (2014), Ramos Caro and Rojo (2014), Risku (2014), Siegling et al. (2014), Merlini (2015), Andrei et al. (2016), McCartney (2016), Muñoz Martín (2016a, 2016b), Petrides et al. (2016), Ramos Caro (2016), Rojo and Ramos Caro (2016), O’Connor et al. (2017), and Rojo (2017).

Chapter 3 1 The striking thing about Gazzaniga’s LBI theory, from a linguistics or philosophy of language perspective, is that for Gazzaniga the LBI is language— or, perhaps, more precisely, the source of language, the original impulse to turn motor capacities into verbal communication. To the extent that human verbal communication is an emergent phenomenon, it emerges through the LBI. 2 See also Arbib (2005, 2012b, 2016a, 2016b), Arbib and Bonaiuto (2007, 2016), Bonaiuto and Arbib (2010), Fagg and Arbib (1998), Guazzelli et al. (1998), and Dominey et al. (1995). 3 Compare this kinesthetic RBI priming in Reilly as she learns/speaks Spanish with the more abstract observation of Hubscher-­Davidson that “it is important to consider that, even if major traits are resilient in the face of normal life events (Matthews, Deary, and Whiteman 2003, 75), it could be that moving to a different country or learning new languages qualify as major life events inducing some level of trait change over time” (2017: 16). Agreed—but the embodied RBI priming of such “trait change over time” tends to perform the changes on the stage of the body.

Chapter 4 1 For the “literal translation hypothesis,” according to which “a literal translation is the first or default solution a translator applies to the source text, often only as an interim solution before a less literal translation is considered or produced” (Schaeffer and Carl 2015: 189), see also Chesterman (2011) and Carl and Schaeffer (2017).

Chapter 5 1 Note that what I am identifying as “higher-­level” and “lower-­level” LBIs here are usually identified as “direct” and “indirect” speech acts, respectively. See Robinson (2013a: 114–18) for discussion, and pp. 83–87 in the text for an application to the priming of translation.

Notes  113

Chapter 6 1 Thanks to Sveta Ilinskaya, a student of Russian political performances and cultural space(s), for her observation that it all depends on where you place the “center.” There is never just one—say, Red Square. There are always multiple centers, and the centers intersect and interact with each other, and resist each other, and so on.

Conclusion 1 For discussion, see the habitualization model I develop out of Peirce in Robinson (2020a and 2015).

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Index

4EA cognitive science 2, 3, 12 Abduction-­induction-­deduction triad (Peirce) 27 Accentual systems (Bakhtin) 95 Across the Lines (Cronin) 53 “Adding a Voice or Two” (Robinson) 82 Addressivity (Bakhtin) 96 Affect 2; and aprosodia 61–64; and the body language of speaking another language 11, 49; and Capgras 31, 102, 103; and correctness anxiety 57, 58; and the double-­bind 54–56; and the emotional interpretant (Peirce) 74–76, 91; flat in translation 4, 5, 11, 65–71; and the management of taboos 51–53; marked in the text 5; and nationalism 87; and the nervous system 59; the neuroscience of 3, 111; and primes 2, 43, 86, 87; and the RBI 4, 6, 7, 11, 24, 32–34, 57, 64, 76, 83, 98, 99, 102, 105, 106, 110; and the “secret code” (Bourdieu) 45–48; and the sôme (Saussure) 73, 77, 78, 82, 91; and trait EI 35–39; and wonder 40–42 Aleksis Kivi and/as World Literature (Robinson) 66, 69, 111 Allen, Byron 19 Alves, Fabio 2, 3 Amplification 17; as LBI confabulation 11 Anchoring effect 78 Anderson, Jean 36, 48, 49, 53 Answerability (Bakhtin) 96 Aprosodia 34, 58–60, 64; in linguistics 63, 64; in translating 68, 71

Arbib, Michael 45, 112 Aristotle 32, 41 Asperger’s syndrome 59–61, 64, 77 Asscher, Omri 17, 18 Austin, J.L. 25, 84–86 Autism spectrum disorders 11, 45, 59–65 Baker, Mona 82 Bakhtin, Mikhail 12, 91–97, 100–2 Bally, Charles 72, 76 Bateson, Gregory 54 Becoming a Translator (Robinson) 19, 27, 28, 112, 113 Behavioral Economics of Translation, The (Robinson) 78 Black, Lewis 79 Boase-­Beier, Jean 38 Body language, in Bulgaria 50; and the performative 35; and the RBI 50, 64; in speaking another language 11, 49 Bontempo, Karen 38 Bourdieu, Pierre 45–49, 53, 64, 78, 83 Brisset, Annie 11, 84–86 Broca’s area: in the left hemisphere 45, 104; in the right hemisphere 4, 34, 59, 61 Brothers Seven, The (Kivi/Robinson) 19, 66–71 Brownell, Hiram 34, 111 Capgras syndrome 31, 102, 103 Carl, Michael 1, 2, 25, 112 Carlsmith, Kevin M. 22 Carpenter, Karen 71 Centripetal/centrifugal (Bakhtin) 92–97, 102, 109 Chamade, La (Sagan) 65 Chesterman, Andrew 112

Index  131 Chomsky, Noam 78 Clark, Andy 92 Clifford, James 41 “Close to You” (Bacharach/David) 71 Cognitive: neuroscience 2, 10; science, 4EA 2, 3, 12; Translation (and Interpreting) Studies 2, 26 Collective Full-­Brain Interpretant (CFBI) 4, 6–10, 12, 22, 44, 91, 96, 105, 110; and correctness anxiety 25, 26, 56–58, 82, 109; and the double-­bind 54; and gender stereotypes 83; and heteroglossia (Bakhtin) 96; implicit in Gazzaniga 101–4; priming language unification 92; priming the RBI through normativization 25–28, 86, 87, 104, 106, 107; see also Left-­Brain Interpreter; Right-­ Brain Interpreter Conation, and the RBI 4, 6, 11, 24, 33, 63, 64, 76, 98–100, 105, 106 Confabulation 3–6, 11, 20, 22, 24, 34, 64, 109; and Capgras 32, 103; and overtranslation 17–19 Constative (Austin/Robinson) 2, 26, 85 Cooperative Principle (Grice) 25, 102 Corballis, Paul 31, 32, 35, 45, 64, 102, 111 Correctness anxiety 25, 26, 56–58, 82, 109 Cours de linguistique générale (“Saussure”/Bally/Sechehaye) 72 Course in General Linguistics (“Saussure”/Baskin) 72 Critical Translation Studies (Robinson) 111 Cronin, Michael 53 cummings, e.e. 75 “Daddy” (Plath) 40, 68 Dao of Translation, The (Robinson) 72, 113 Davou, Bettina 38 de Groot, Annette M.B. 1 Deep Ecology of Rhetoric in Mencius and Aristotle, The (Robinson) 111 Dennett, Daniel 80 Derrida, Jacques 85

Destutt de Tracy, Antoine 99 Dialogicality (Bakhtin) 96, 100 Dickens, Charles 17 Discourse in the Novel (Bakhtin/ Emerson/Holquist) 91 Displacement and the Somatics of Postcolonial Culture (Robinson) 111 “Double Essence of Language, The” (Saussure) 72 Double-­binds of translation (Robinson) 11, 54, 55 Dynamic equivalence (Nida) 27 Écrits de linguistique générale (Saussure/Engler/Bouquet) 72, 76, 77 Emergence 4, 25, 76, 79; of the CFBI 100, 101; of the EI construct 36; in heteroglossia (Bakhtin) 95; of language 44, 45 Emotional: brain 15; injury, and thick/ thin skin 53, 82; intelligence 11, 35–38, 111, 112; interpretant (Peirce) 74–76, 91, 94; interpretation, as RBI 32, 33, 102; novels 68, 69; nuances of speech, and aprosodia 58, 59; state, in MacDuff 85 Emotional intelligence (EI), trait 35–39, 111, 112; ability 36 “Emotional Intelligence and Translation Studies: A New Bridge” (Hubscher-­Davidson) 35 Energetic interpretant (Peirce) 73–76, 91, 94 Engler, Rudolf 72 Equivalence, formalized as constative structure 26 Estrangement and the Somatics of Literature (Robinson) 111 Eugene Onegin (Pushkin/Hofstadter) 65 Eugene Onegin (Pushkin/Nabokov) 79 Eye-­tracking 35 Feeling Extended (Robinson) 9, 75, 111, 112 Feeling 5, 28, 81–83, 87, 107; in audience response to story 34; in correctness anxiety 57, 108;

132 Index as the emotional interpretant (Peirce) 74, 75; in Herderian hermeneutics 5, 6, 111; of imposture in speaking a foreign language (Cronin) 53; of mind (FoM) 65; of movement (kinesthesis) 8; of prosody 62; as the RBI-­becoming-­CFBI 100, 110; as RBI interpretation 33, 105, 110; as RBI reward or warning 27, 58; of self-­ unification 20; simulated by the mirror neurons 103, 104; in teaching Plath 40; in trait EI 36 “Frame of Reference” (Invisibilia) 61 Fraser, Janet 38 García, Adolfo M. 2 Gardner, Howard 36 Garneau, Michel 11, 84–86 Gazzaniga, Michael S. 15; on Capgras syndrome 32, 101; on a CFBI 100–4; on dissipative systems 80, 93; on hypotheses, beliefs, and neural constraints as primed by the LBI 20–23; on the Interpreter Theory 3, 6, 7, 10, 15–17, 73, 74, 98, 104, 109, 110; on the LBI 20–24, 31–34, 64, 73, 74, 80, 98, 105, 109, 110, 112; on the mirror neurons 103; on the RBI 20, 31–34, 73, 74, 111; on a visual interpreter 31, 32; on Vygotsky 101, 102 Glass, Philip 71 Glass, Suzanne 53 Grice, H. Paul 25, 102 Habit 21, 50, 54, 82, 83, 102, 109, 113 Habitus (Bourdieu) 46, 47, 64 Haidt, Jonathan 57, 58 Halverson, Sandra 112 Hand gestures, and the emergence of language 45 Hatim, Basil 2 Heidegger, Martin 10, 11 Herder, Johann Gottfried 5, 6, 111 Hermans, Theo 82 Hermeneutics 5, 6 Heteroglossia (Bakhtin) 12, 91–95, 101 Hijacking: of the affective RBI 32, 33; of the verbal LBI 22–24

Hofstadter, Alfred 10 Hofstadter, Douglas 65, 66 Holmes, James 36 Holquist, Michael 91, 92 Howl’s Moving Castle (Jones, Miyazaki) 43 Hubscher-­Davidson, Séverine 11, 35–39, 43, 111, 112 Hujala, Maria 70 Hypotheses 20, 21, 24, 64 Icon (Peirce) 74 Icosis (Robinson) 2; theory of 82, 104, 111; see also plausibility; somatic theory Ideology 6, 21, 22, 110; as centripetal heteroglossia (Bakhtin) 94, 95; and the CFBI 10, 82, 83, 98–100, 105–8; as icosis 2; and the ideologeme 86, 87 Implicature (Grice) 82 Impola, Richard 66–70 Index (Peirce) 74 Intelligence: emotional (EI) 35–39, 111, 112; interpersonal and intrapersonal (Gardner) 36 Interpretant (Peirce) 73–76, 91, 94 Interpreter, The (Glass) 53 Interpreter: affective/conative/ kinesthetic (RBI as, Robinson) 4–8, 10–12, 20, 22, 31, 34, 64, 78, 91, 94, 107, 110; shared (CFBI as) 4, 6–10, 12, 22, 44, 91, 96, 105, 110; verbal (LBI as, Gazzaniga) 3–6, 8, 10–12, 20–28, 44–46, 49, 63–65, 77, 79–81, 83, 91, 98, 99, 109, 111, 112; visual (RBI as, Corballis) 4, 31, 32, 35, 64 Intersemiotic translation 79 Introducing Performative Pragmatics (Robinson) 2, 25, 102 Invisibilia (NPR) 61 Iterability (Derrida) 85 Jääskeläinen, Riitta 38 James, William 111 Jerome, Jerome K. 17 Jones, Diana Wynne 43 Kahneman, Daniel 12, 78, 106, 107 Kankimäki, Mia 4–10 Kant, Immanuel 23

Index  133 Kent, Stephanie Jo 8 Key-­logging 35 “Killing in the Name” (Rage Against the Machine) 71 “Kim,” 61–63, 66, 77 Kinesthetics: and the energetic interpretant (Peirce) 74, 75, 91; and the RBI 4, 8, 11, 24, 33–35, 49, 64, 98, 105–7, 110, 112 Kivi, Aleksis 19, 66–71 Kussmaul, Paul 19, 27 Language and Social Power (Bourdieu) 45, 46 Language: as an abstract sign system 48; mavens 56–58; nonverbal 34 Langue, la (Saussure) 47, 72 Leaves of Grass (Whitman) 22 LeDoux, Joseph 3, 7, 15 Left-­Brain Interpreter (LBI) 3–6, 8, 10–12, 20–28, 44–46, 49, 63–65, 77, 79–81, 83, 91, 98, 99, 109, 111, 112; and the CFBI 100–7; and correctness anxiety 57, 58; hijacking of 22–24, 32, 33; and literary translation 40–42; and overtranslation as confabulation 17–19; and Peircean interpretants 73–76; and the RBI 32–34 Legisign (Peirce) 74 Leino, Kaisa 70 Les 7 frères de finlande/Seitsemän veljestä Suomesta (Kivi/Perret/ Verrier) 70 Linguistics: aprosodic 63, 64; pragmatics 2; structuralist (“Saussure”) 47, 72, 91–96 Literalism 7, 91; and the “literal translation hypothesis” (Schaeffer/Carl) 112; “mindless” (Hofstadter) 65, 66; slavish 79; stylized (foreignized) 26 Logical interpretant (Peirce) 74–76, 91, 94 Lörscher, Wolfgang 38 Macbeth (Shakespeare/Garneau) 11, 84–86 Maier, Carol 40–42

Malmkjær, Kirsten 82 Maron, Marc 18, 19 Mason, Ian 2 Maxims (Grice) 25 Mehrabian, Albert 59, 77 Michima Yukio 5 Miller, Lulu 61 Mirror neurons 44, 45, 60, 101, 103 Miyazaki Hayao 43 “Modest Proposal, A” (Swift) 39, 40 Moll, Henrike 101 Mu suppression 60 Multimedia/multimodal translation 79 Multiple intelligences (Gardner) 36 Multisensory integration (MSI) systems 60, 61 Munday, Jeremy 38 Muñoz Martín, Ricardo 2 Music in Twelve Parts (Glass) 71 Nabokov, Vladimir 79 Naiset joita ajattelen öisin (Kankimäki) 4 Native Tongue trilogy (Elgin) 53 Neurons: mirror 4, 44, 45, 59–61, 101, 103, 105; motor 45 Neuroscience, affective 3, 111; cognitive 2, 10 Nida, Eugene A. 27 Nightingale, Andrea Wilson 40–42 Nord, Christiane 27 “Notes on Travel and Theory” (Clifford) 41 O’Brien, Sharon 112 Oberman, Lindsay 60–65 Object (Peirce) 73 “Old Dan Tucker” (Emmett) 69, 70 “On Wandering and Wondering: Theōria in Greek Philosophy and Culture” (Nightingale) 40–42; Plato 41, 42 Overtranslation 17; as LBI confabulation 11 Pandemonium model of consciousness (Dennett) 80 Parasomatics of language (Saussure) 73, 77, 78, 81, 82 Parasôme (Saussure) 77 Parole, la (Saussure) 47, 72 Peirce, Charles Sanders 11, 72–76, 94, 113

134 Index Performance (Chomsky) 78 Performative 2, 11; and body language 35; and the periperformative (Sedgwick) 11, 84–87; pragmatics (Robinson) 22, 26; utterance (Austin) 84–86 Performative Linguistics (Robinson) 2, 82–84, 102 Perret, Jean-­Louis 70 Pete Seeger Sessions (Springsteen) 69 Pickwick Papers, The (Dickens) 17 Pinker, Steven 56 “pity this busy monster, manunkind” (cummings) 75, 76 Plath, Sylvia 40 Plausibility 3; and deniability (secret code) 46; and humor 18; and the LBI 22, 25; primed by the RBI 26; see also icosis; somatic theory Pragmatics, constative 26; linguistic 2; performative 22, 26 “Pragmatism” (Peirce) 74 Primes: chronotopic (Kent) 8; and creation of long-­lasting memories through repetition 2; high-­love, associated with enhanced prosodies 12, 108; high-­money 12, 108; of ideological orthodoxies by socioaffective normativities 2; in think-­aloud protocols 19 Proprioception 8 Prosody 34, 58, 61, 69, 80, 108; as body language 82; and primes 59; and the prosodics of language 78, 82; see also aprosodia; parasomatics of language Pryor, Richard 19 “Psychological Consequences of Money, The” (Vohs et al.) 105 Pushkin, Aleksander 65 Pym, Anthony 84 Qualisign (Peirce) 74 Rage Against the Machine 71 Ramachandran, Vilayanur S. 44, 45, 60 Reilly, Cassandra (Wilson) 48, 49, 53, 112 Repetitive trans-­cranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) 61–63 Representamen (Peirce) 73

Rhetoric (Aristotle) 32 Richard Pryor Live in Concert 19 Right-­Brain Interpreter (RBI) 4–8, 10–12, 20, 22, 31, 34, 64, 78, 91, 94, 107, 110; and affect/ conation/kinethetics 24; and aprosodic linguistics 63–65; and body language 50, 64; and correctness anxiety 57, 58, 109; and the double-­binds of translation 54, 55; and first-­language acquisition 53; and flat-­affect translation 11, 65–70; and Inside Out 79; in the literature classroom 39, 40; and musical primes 71; and Peircean interpretants 74–76; priming nationalism 86, 87; priming the LBI as primed by the CFBI 25–28, 44, 98–101, 104–6; regulating the LBI 79–83; and Saussurean parasomatics 73, 78, 81, 82; and the “secret code” (Bourdieu) 45–49; theorized by Paul Corballis 31–35, 102; and trait EI 35–39, 111, 112; and wonder 40–43 Risku, Hanna 2 Rite of Spring (Stravinsky) 71 Rizzolatti, Giacomo 44, 45, 103 Rosin, Hannah 61 Sagan, Françoise 65 Saldanha, Gabriela 38 Saussure, Ferdinand de 11, 72, 73, 76–78, 94; and structuralist linguistics, created posthumously 47, 91–96 Schaad, Eric 66–68 Schaeffer, Moritz 1, 2, 25, 112 Schiavi, Giuliana 82 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 5, 26, 111; on translation troped as travel 41, 42 Schleiermacher’s Icoses (Robinson) 27, 111 Sechehaye, Albert 72, 76 “Secret code” (Bourdieu) 36, 45–49, 53, 80, 83 Sedgwick, Eve 11, 84–87 Segmentation: the anchoring effect of 78; formalized as constative structure 26

Index  135 Seitsemän veljestä (Kivi) 66 Seme 77, 82 Semiology (Saussure) 11, 72, 76–79 Semiotics (Peirce) 72–76 Semiotranslating Peirce (Robinson) 111 Sense-­for-­sense translation 66, 78; formalized as constative structure 26 Seven Brothers (Kivi/Impola) 66–71 “Shared Representations and the Translation Process” (Schaeffer/ Carl) 1 “Signature Event Context” (Derrida) 85 Sinsign (Peirce) 74 Skin, thick/thin 53, 82 Skopos 27 Social moral emotions (Haidt) 57, 58 Somatic theory (Robinson) 2, 10, 35, 51, 78, 111; see also icosis; parasomatics of language Sôme (Saussure) 77, 78, 82, 91, 94 Speech 40, 102, 103; acts (Austin/ Bourdieu) 11, 46, 47, 49, 64, 80, 81, 93, 112; affective charge of, and aprosodia 58–65; center in the brain (Broca) 45; correctness anxiety in 57, 58; diversity 93, 94; excluded from aprosodic linguistics 78; indirect, and translation 83–87, 112; as parasitic 85; primed by the LBI 3, 10, 20, 25; prosody in 34 Sperry, Roger 3, 15 Spiegel, Alix 61, 63 Split-­brain patients 3, 5, 7, 8, 16–18, 20, 31–33, 98, 109 Springsteen, Bruce 69 Strange Loops of Translation, The (Robinson) 65 Stravinsky, Igor 71 Swift, Jonathan 39, 40 Symbol (Peirce) 74 “That Categorical and Hypothetical Propositions are one in essence, with some connected matters” (Peirce) 73 That Mad Ache (Sagan/Hofstadter) 65 “The Double Agent: Aspects of Literary Translator Affect as

Revealed in Fictional Work by Translators” (Anderson) 36, 53 Theory of Mind (ToM) 60; see also feeling Think-­aloud protocols 19, 35 Thompson, Michael and Lynda 59 Three Men in a Boat (Jerome) 17 Tirkkonen-­Condit, Sonja 38 Tomasello, Michael 101 Ton Beau de Marot, Le (Hofstadter) 65 Touching Feeling (Sedgwick) 84 Toury, Gideon 25 Training the Translator (Kussmaul) 19 Transgender, Translation, Translingual Address (Robinson) 111 Translation: creativity in 19, 38; domesticating (Schleiermacher/ Venuti) 42; flat-­affect 11, 65–70; free recreation 79; as indirect/ periperformative 11; multimodal/multimedia/intersemiotic 11, 79; over-­and under-­17; process research (TPR) 35; sense-­for-­sense 17, 26, 78; as traveling 40–42; Umdichtung 79; vertical vs. horizontal 1; word-­for-­word 65, 66, 78 Translation and Emotion (Hubscher-­ Davidson) 35 “Translation and Social Discourse” (Brisset) 84 Translation Studies: the fictional turn in 47, 48; “pure” (Holmes) 36 Translationality (Robinson) 31, 111 Translator 1, 10, 11, 85, 86, 96, 110; and affective priming 7, 8; and the anchoring effect of segmentation theories 78; and body language 50; of comedy 19; and the double-­bind 54–56; in fiction 41, 42, 47–49, 53; LBI primes for 27; and “mindless” literalism (Hofstadter) 65; as (non) performers of speech acts 83, 84; partially merges with author in CFBI 6, 9; primed by the CFBI 97; primed by the RBI 68, 71; as theôros 40–42; trait EI of 35–39, 111, 112 Translator’s Turn, The (Robinson) 2, 111 Triads (Peirce) 72–77 Tversky, Amos 78

136 Index Umdichtung 79 Venuti, Lawrence 26, 42 Verrier, France 70 Virtual reality (VR) 23, 24 Visual 15, 44; effects in multimodal translating 79; inputs for RBI priming 4, 7, 8, 58, 61, 63, 91, 102; interpreter (RBI as, Corballis) 31, 32, 35, 64; and virtual reality 24 Vohs, Kathleen 105–8 Vygotsky, Lev 101, 102

Wheel of Experience (Robinson) 27 Whitman, Walt 22 Who Translates? (Robinson) 54 Wilson, Barbara 48, 49, 53 Women I Think About at Night (Kankimäki/Robinson) 4 Wonder, in translation 40–42 Word-­for-­word translation 78; as “mindless” (Hofstadter) 65, 66 Writings on General Linguistics (Saussure/Sanders et al.) 72, 77 Yopit 51–53