Translation as Metaphor [1 ed.] 1138803561, 9781138803565

Table of contents :
Translation As Metaphor
Contents
Figures
Preface
Introduction
1 Metaphor and its Relationship to Translation
1 Transference and Analogy: Aristotle’s Definition of Metaphor
2 Substitution: Metaphor in Classical Rhetoric
3 Tenor and Vehicle: I. A. Richards’s Redefinition of Metaphor
4 Frame and Focus: Max Black’s Interaction Theory
5 Metaphors as Models
6 Metaphor in Scientific Discourse
7 Lakoff and Johnson on Conceptual Metaphors
8 Metaphor and Translation
9 Translation in Metaphor Theory
2 Metaphors for Translation
1 The Problem with Metaphor
2 The Relevance of Metaphors for Translation in Translation Studies
3 Metaphorical Levels and Metaphor Clusters
4 Source Domains for Translation Metaphors in the West
5 The Art/Craft and the Nature/Body Domains
6 The Gender and the Power Domains
7 Metaphors for Translation in India, Japan and China
3 From Spatial Metaphors Of Translation To Translation As A Spatial Metaphor
1 Spatial Metaphors in Translation Studies
2 The Transference Metaphor of Translation
3 In-Betweenness
4 Intercultures
5 The Metaphor Cluster: In-Betweenness-Third Space-Hybridity
6 Reversibility and Mutuality
7 A Possible Interdisciplinary Dialogue
8 Revisiting the Transference Metaphor of Translation
4 Translation As Metaphor In Psychoanalysis, Anthropology And Ethnography, Postcolonial Theory, History And Literature
1 The Metaphoricity of Translation
2 The Translation Turn
3 Psychoanalysis: Translating Dreams
4 Anthropology and Ethnography: Translating Cultures
5 Postcolonial Theory: The Difficult Politics of Translation
6 History and Literature: Translation as Remembrance and Mourning
5 Translation As Metaphor In Sociology, Media And Communication Theory, Medicine, Genetics And Interdisciplinary Exchanges
1 Sociology: Translation as Displacement and Negotiation
2 Media and Communication Theory: Translating Hardware into Software
3 Translational Medicine: From Bench to Bedside and Back
4 Molecular Genetics: Translating Nucleotide Sequences into Proteins
5 The Issue of Interdisciplinarity: Translating Physics into Art
Conclusion
References
Index

Citation preview

TRANSLATION AS METAPHOR

In today’s ever-changing climate of disintegration and recombination, translation has become one of the essential metaphors, if not the metaphor, of our globalized world. Translation as Metaphor is an attempt to draw a comprehensive map of these new overlapping theoretical territories and the many cross-disciplinary movements they imply. In five chapters, this book examines:      

the main metaphor theories developed in the West the way the notion of metaphor relates to the concept of translation different theoretical perspectives on metaphors of translation in translation studies the main metaphors developed to describe translation in the West and in the East spatial metaphors within translation studies, cultural studies and postcolonial theory the use of the metaphor of translation across psychoanalysis, anthropology and ethnography, postcolonial theory, history and literature, sociology, media and communication theory, medicine and genetics.

Comprehensive analysis of key metaphor theories, revealing examples from a wide range of sources and a look towards future directions make this is a must-have book for students, researchers and translators working in the areas of translation and translation theory. Rainer Guldin is Lecturer for German Language and Culture at the Faculty of Communication Sciences at the Università della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano (Switzerland). His publications include Political Landscapes: On the Relationship between Space and National Identity (2014) and The Language of the Sky: A History of the Clouds (2006).

TRANSLATION THEORIES EXPLORED Series Editor: Theo Hermans, UCL, UK Translation Theories Explored is a series designed to engage with the range and diversity of contemporary translation studies. Translation itself is as vital and as charged as ever. If anything, it has become more plural, more varied and more complex in today’s world. The study of translation has responded to these challenges with vigour. In recent decades the field has gained in depth, its scope continues to expand and it is increasingly interacting with other disciplines. The series sets out to reflect and foster these developments. It aims to keep track of theoretical developments, to explore new areas, approaches and issues, and generally to extend and enrich the intellectual horizon of translation studies. Special attention is paid to innovative ideas that may not as yet be widely known but deserve wider currency. Individual volumes explain and assess particular approaches. Each volume combines an overview of the relevant approach with case studies and critical reflection, placing its subject in a broad intellectual and historical context, illustrating the key ideas with examples, summarizing the main debates, accounting for specific methodologies, achievements and blind spots, and opening up new avenues for the future. Authors are selected not only on their close familiarity and personal affinity with a particular approach but also on their capacity for lucid exposition, critical assessment and imaginative thought. The series is aimed at researchers and graduate students who wish to learn about new approaches to translation in a comprehensive but accessible way. Translation and Language Education Sara Laviosa Translating as a Purposeful Activity Christiane Nord Translation and Gender Luise von Flotow Translation and Language Peter Fawcett Translation and Empire Douglas Robinson Translation and Literary Criticism Marilyn Gaddis Rose

Translation in Systems Theo Hermans Deconstruction and Translation Kathleen Davis Can Theory Help Translators? Andrew Chesterman and Emma Wagner Stylistic Approaches to Translation Jean Boase Beier Representing Others Kate Sturge

TRANSLATION AS METAPHOR

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Rainer Guldin

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First published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2016 Rainer Guldin The right of Rainer Guldin to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him 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. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Guldin, Rainer. Translation as metaphor / by Rainer Guldin. pages cm Includes bibliographical references. 1. Translating and interpreting. 2. Metaphor. I. Title. P306.G78 2015 418.02--dc23 2015017533 ISBN: 978-1-138-80356-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-75363-8 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Taylor & Francis Books

CONTENTS

List of figures Preface

vii viii

Introduction

1

1

3

Metaphor and its Relationship to Translation 1 Transference and Analogy: Aristotle’s Definition of Metaphor 4 2 Substitution: Metaphor in Classical Rhetoric 5 3 Tenor and Vehicle: I. A. Richards’s Redefinition of Metaphor 7 4 Frame and Focus: Max Black’s Interaction Theory 9 5 Metaphors as Models 11 6 Metaphor in Scientific Discourse 12 7 Lakoff and Johnson on Conceptual Metaphors 15 8 Metaphor and Translation 18 9 Translation in Metaphor Theory 21

2

Metaphors for Translation 1 The Problem with Metaphor 25 2 The Relevance of Metaphors for Translation in Translation Studies 28 3 Metaphorical Levels and Metaphor Clusters 33 4 Source Domains for Translation Metaphors in the West 35 5 The Art/Craft and the Nature/Body Domains 37 6 The Gender and the Power Domains 40 7 Metaphors for Translation in India, Japan and China 42

24

vi Contents

3

From Spatial Metaphors of Translation to Translation as a Spatial Metaphor 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

4

5

Spatial Metaphors in Translation Studies 48 The Transference Metaphor of Translation 51 In-Betweenness 53 Intercultures 55 The Metaphor Cluster: In-Betweenness-Third Space-Hybridity 56 Reversibility and Mutuality 58 A Possible Interdisciplinary Dialogue 61 Revisiting the Transference Metaphor of Translation 65

Translation as Metaphor in Psychoanalysis, Anthropology and Ethnography, Postcolonial Theory, History and Literature 1 2 3 4 5 6

47

69

The Metaphoricity of Translation 70 The Translation Turn 74 Psychoanalysis: Translating Dreams 78 Anthropology and Ethnography: Translating Cultures 82 Postcolonial Theory: The Difficult Politics of Translation 86 History and Literature: Translation as Remembrance and Mourning 90

Translation as Metaphor in Sociology, Media and Communication Theory, Medicine, Genetics and Interdisciplinary Exchanges

94

1 Sociology: Translation as Displacement and Negotiation 94 2 Media and Communication Theory: Translating Hardware into Software 100 3 Translational Medicine: From Bench to Bedside and Back 105 4 Molecular Genetics: Translating Nucleotide Sequences into Proteins 108 5 The Issue of Interdisciplinarity: Translating Physics into Art 110 Conclusion

115

References Index

120 128

FIGURES

2.1 Source domains for translation metaphors in the West 4.1 Translation as a source domain

36 71

PREFACE

This book is part of a larger research context and dates back several years. My interest in the close theoretical link between translation and metaphor began with the work of the Czech–Brazilian philosopher and media theorist Vilém Flusser. Flusser generated his multilingual work through a constant practice of self-translation and envisaged his whole oeuvre as an overarching theory of translation (Guldin 2005). In the following years, I participated in a series of international conferences exploring different aspects related to the central issue of this book: “Self & Identity in Translation” at the University of East Anglia (2006), a panel on sexual identity and translation at the second IATIS conference in Cape Town (2006), the conference “Translation and translation – des faux amis, tracing translation(s) across disciplines” at Bog˘ aziçi University in Istanbul (2007), as well as panels on self-translation and the relationship of translation and geography at the third IATIS conference in Melbourne (2009). The Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies at the University of Manchester played an important role in the conception and further development of this book. In 2011, I participated in a panel on the relationship between narrative and translation theory, and in February 2013, I presented a seminar on translation as metaphor within philosophy, media theory and cultural studies, which was the actual starting point of this book. Some parts of the present study are re-elaborations of previously published essays. Section 8 of Chapter 1 (Metaphor and Translation) is based on selected parts of the essay “Metaphor as a Metaphor for Translation” (in James St. André (ed.), Thinking through Translation with Metaphors. Manchester: St. Jerome, 2010: 161–91). Section 8 of Chapter 3 (Revisiting the Transference Metaphor of Translation) is based on the essay “Translating Space: On Rivers, Seas, Archipelagos and Straits” (Flusser Studies 14, 2012). Finally, Section 2 of Chapter 5 (Media and Communication Theory: Translating Hardware into Software) is a revised and expanded version of the essay “From Transportation to Transformation: On the Use of the

Preface ix

Metaphor of Translation within Media and Communication Theory” (Global Media Journal, Canadian edn, 5(1)). I thank the editors for their kind permission to republish parts of these essays in an amended form. I also want to thank the different editors for their kind permission to use short text passages as epigraphs for the single parts of the book. The epigraphs are from the following sources: Naoki Sakai “Translation as a Filter” (translated from the Japanese by Gavin Walker and Naoki Sakai). In Transeuropeennes. International Journal of Critical Thought, March 2010, http://www.transeuropeennes.eu/en/articles/200 (the epigraph for the book as a whole and the Conclusion); Mieke Bal, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002: 24 (Introduction); Michael Cronin, Translation and Identity. London: Routledge, 2006: 105 (Chapter 1); Maria Tymoczko, “Western Metaphorical Discourses Implicit in Translation Studies”. In James St. André (ed.), Thinking through Translation with Metaphors. Manchester: St. Jerome, 2010: 109 (Chapter 2); Anthony Pym, Method in Translation History. Manchester: St. Jerome, 1998: 185 (Chapter 3); Susan Bassnett, Translation Studies. London: Routledge, 2014: 6 (Chapter 4); Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, “Unscrewing the Big Leviathan: How Actors Macrostructure Reality and How Sociologists Help Them do so”. In K. Knorr Cetina and A. Cicourel (eds), Advances in Social Theory and Methodology: Toward an Integration of Micro- and Macro-Sociologies. London: Routledge, 1981: 270 (Chapter 5). I want to thank Paschalis Nikolaou, Christopher Larkosh, S¸ebnem Bahadır, Dilek Dizdar, Anthony Cordingley, Mona Baker, Maria Tymoczko, Martin J. Eppler, Siobhan Brownlie and James St. André for inspiring me along the way. I also want to thank Erick Piller for his careful reading and copyediting. Finally, I would like to thank Theo Hermans for his many suggestions and Mona Baker for her kind invitation to write this book. Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders. If any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity. Lugano, Switzerland, March 2015

When we seek an explanation of translation, we too often and too facilely speak of translation as if its central aim consisted in the transfer of a text written in one language to a text written in another language … It is difficult to draw narrow conceptual limits around the word ‘translation’, which is almost always used metaphorically. Naoki Sakai

INTRODUCTION

But concepts are not fixed. They travel – between disciplines, between individual scholars, between historical periods and between geographically dispersed academic communities. Between disciplines, their meaning, reach and operational value differ. These processes of differing need to be assessed before, during and after each ‘trip’. Mieke Bal

Throughout the centuries, translation has been described in metaphorical terms, leading to the absorption of foreign elements into the body of theoretical writings on translation and influencing the everyday practice of translators and the ways they have defined themselves. At the same time, the metaphor of translation has been deployed in other discursive domains. The many changes that have taken place in the last few decades have radically redefined the terms of these exchanges, their scope, their socio-political and cultural significance and their theoretical relevance. In the last third of the twentieth century, translation studies came to constitute a separate field of inquiry with a growing body of theoretical work. This has given the notion of translation more visibility in the academic field. The far-reaching reappraisal of translation initiated within translation studies and the neighbouring fields of cultural studies, postcolonial theory and gender studies has been slow to impact other disciplinary fields. Interest in translation, however, has probably never been greater. Globalization is not only about the dissolution and disappearance of clear-cut political, cultural and linguistic borders; it has also led to a merging and mixing of different disciplines across the globe, linking researchers from different cultures and creating new hybrid interdisciplinary fields on the frontier of the humanities and the natural sciences. In this all-encompassing climate of disintegration and recombination, translation has become a general metaphor for connection, exchange, transfer and transformation. One might say that translation has become one of the essential metaphors, if not the metaphor, of our globalized world. It is at this

2 Introduction

theoretical juncture that this study positions itself. The book is an attempt to draw a more comprehensive map of these new overlapping theoretical territories and the many cross-disciplinary movements they imply. The cultural turn in translation studies fundamentally redesigned the significance of translation, emancipating it from the straitjacket of a purely linguistic definition. Something comparable happened within metaphor theory, in which new theoretical approaches, above all cognitive linguistics, emphasized its fundamental significance in everyday life and its essential role in the formulation and transmission of new scientific theories. In the past few years, these parallel and complementary theoretical developments have led to a renewed interest within translation studies in metaphors in general as well as in metaphors for translation. An excellent example of this is the 2010 collection of essays Thinking through Translation with Metaphors edited by James St. André. In the present book, I want to take up this new line of inquiry by exploring some further aspects of the multidimensional relationship of metaphor and translation. Translation and metaphor are related in a number of ways. In the West, the two terms share a common etymological origin and a parallel history. Translation can be a metaphor for metaphor, and conversely, metaphor a metaphor for translation. Metaphors are used to describe the functioning of translation processes, the role of translators and the relationship of original and translation. Add to this the thorny question of the translatability of metaphors and the use of translation as a metaphor in a wide array of disciplines. Finally, metaphor has played an important role in the metalanguage of translation, as has translation in the metalanguage of metaphor theory. The overall narrative of the book leads from metaphor theory to the use of metaphors in the discourse on translation and from there to the use of metaphors of translation in other discursive areas of both the humanities and the natural sciences. Chapter 1 focuses on a reconstruction of the main metaphor theories developed in the West and the way the notion of metaphor relates to the concept of translation. Chapter 2 proposes a critical reading of the different theoretical perspectives on metaphors of translation in translation studies and considers some of the main metaphors for translation in the West and in the East. Chapter 3 shifts the focus from metaphors for translation to translation as metaphor, from translation as a target domain to translation as a source domain. The emphasis is on the use of spatial metaphors in translation studies and on spatial metaphors of translation in cultural studies and postcolonial theory. Chapters 4 and 5 deal with the use of the metaphor of translation across a series of different domains of scholarship and research: in Chapter 4, psychoanalysis, anthropology and ethnography, postcolonial theory, history and literature; in Chapter 5, sociology, media and communication theory, medicine and genetics.

1 METAPHOR AND ITS RELATIONSHIP TO TRANSLATION

If metaphor … is about the matching of the like and the unlike, the bringing together of the alien and the domestic, then it seems similarly true that translation is a primarily metaphorical operation in its bringing together of difference and that all metaphor is fundamentally a translational operation. Michael Cronin

This chapter deals with the notion of metaphor and the way it relates to the concept of translation within the Western tradition. The first seven sections of the chapter focus on a reconstruction of the main metaphor theories developed in the West. Given the scope and aim of this book, I will discuss only a few authors, mainly from the Anglophone world, in order to highlight the radical redefinition of the traditional understanding of metaphor. The development of Western metaphor theory begins with Aristotle and classical rhetoric, passes through semiotics and semantics, and reaches hermeneutics, philosophy, scientific discourse and cognitive linguistics. This progression through the disciplines leads from a restricted to an enlarged understanding of metaphor. According to Ricœur (2003: 1), who defined the development from the point of view of the linguistic unit taken into consideration, it is an itinerary conveying from word, to sentence, to discourse. At the one end, classical rhetoric defines metaphor as a singleword figure of speech, a trope of resemblance operating through displacement. At the other, cognitive linguistics claims that everyday speech, scientific discourse and the very way we think and act are fundamentally metaphorical in nature. These different conceptions will play an important role in the following chapters. They influenced the changing attitudes towards the notion of metaphor and the use of translation metaphors within the field of translation studies (Chapters 2 and 3), as well as the various metaphorical uses of translation within other disciplinary areas (Chapters 3, 4 and 5). Sections 8 and 9 consider the close relationship between metaphor and translation and the theoretical parallels in the development of metaphor theory and

4 Metaphor and its Relationship to Translation

translation theory in the West. This connection is pivotal for the present book. It highlights the fact that a sustained study of metaphors for translation and of translation metaphors can be profitable for the fields of both translation studies and metaphor studies.

1 Transference and Analogy: Aristotle’s Definition of Metaphor Aristotle formulated the first substantial discussion of metaphor in the Western tradition. Although he discussed metaphor in only a few short paragraphs of his Poetics (2007) and Rhetoric (2011), his comments proved extremely influential. In Section 3, Part XXI of his Poetics, Aristotle draws a distinction between current or ordinary words that are in general use and strange, alien words that are in use in other countries. He positions metaphorical words between strange and ornamental words, suggesting their common exceptional character. The enumeration (Ricœur 2003: 19) that follows – newly coined, lengthened, contracted and altered words – reinforces the closeness of metaphor to that which is uncommon and outlandish. If proper words are the general rule, metaphors represent an interesting deviation. Aristotle distinguishes between four different kinds of metaphor. One can create metaphors either by transference or analogy. There are three different forms of transference: from genus to species (from the general to the particular), from species to genus (from the particular to the general) and from species to species (by similarity). In Aristotle’s terminology, a species is a subgroup of a genus. Human beings (species) are rational animals (genus). In this sense, the first and second forms of metaphor are also subspecies of synecdoche. The fourth form of metaphor works by analogy or proportion. In this case, the second term is to the first as the fourth is to the third. Old age, for instance, is analogous to the evening because it is to life as the evening is to the day. In Book III, Part 10 of Rhetoric, Aristotle defines proportional metaphors that work by analogy and similarity as the most useful and effective kind. In Part 4 of the same book, he compares proportional metaphors to similes. Similes and metaphors can express the same idea. Metaphors, however, are shorter and because of this more effective and attractive. In Part XXII, Aristotle discusses the uses of metaphors. Stylistic perfection is achieved when diction is clear without being mean. If one uses only current and proper words, the result will be clarity, but also meanness. In order to rise above the commonplace, one has to add a proper amount of words differing from the normal idiom: “Now this cannot be done by any arrangement of ordinary words, but by the use of metaphor it can … A certain infusion … of these elements is necessary to style; for the strange (or rare) word, the metaphorical, the ornamental, and the other kinds above mentioned, will raise it above the commonplace and mean, while the use of proper words will make it perspicuous … By deviating in exceptional cases from the normal idiom, the language will gain distinction” (Poetics XXII). Metaphors are essential to creating a style that is both lucid and lofty. However, they have to be applied in moderation to avoid the obscurity of jargon and riddles. Aristotle also discusses the use of metaphors when no suitable words are available. When we give names

Metaphor and its Relationship to Translation 5

to nameless things, “we must draw them not from remote but from kindred and similar things, so that the kinship is clearly perceived as soon as the words are said” (Rhetoric III, 2). Appropriateness is an essential feature of good metaphors. Aristotle concludes his discussion of metaphor with a remark stressing its singularity: “But the greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances” (Poetics XXII). Metaphors not only deviate from everyday speech; their very use cannot be taught. Only exceptionally gifted individuals can devise apt metaphors. In Rhetoric, Aristotle introduces a few more important points with regard to the form of metaphor and the effects that can be achieved by its proper use. The idea of moderation that governs his idea of stylistic perfection resurfaces in the notion of a beautiful metaphor. Metaphors should not be too grand and theatrical, too far-fetched and obscure, because they will then be ridiculous or difficult to grasp. Metaphors must be fitting. They must be appropriate to the thing to which they are referring both from a perceptual and semantic point of view. “The materials of metaphor must be beautiful to the ear, the understanding, to the eye or some other physical sense” (Rhetoric III, 2). Good oratorical prose combines regular and metaphorical terms creating “a style that is distinguished without being obtrusive”. Metaphor “gives style clearness, charm and distinction as nothing else can” (Rhetoric III, 2). Metaphors are also particularly apt at drawing and sustaining the interest of the listener because they enable the listener to get hold of new ideas: “Now strange words simply puzzle us; ordinary words convey only what we know already; it is from metaphor that we can best get hold of something fresh” (Rhetoric III, 10). Good metaphors convey information as soon as they are perceived. They are startling, vivid and generally suggestive of activity and swiftness: “Liveliness is specially conveyed by metaphor, and by the further power of surprising the hearer; because the hearer expected something different, his acquisition of the new idea impresses him all the more” (Rhetoric III, 11). Before turning to the different stages of a critical redefinition of metaphor, I will briefly sum up Aristotle’s point of view and its influence on classical rhetoric.

2 Substitution: Metaphor in Classical Rhetoric Aristotle’s definition of metaphor originated at the crossroads of two disciplines, rhetoric and poetics, with distinct goals, namely persuasion and mimesis, respectively. For Aristotle, rhetoric covered three distinct areas: argumentation, style and composition. In the course of history, this broader understanding of rhetoric and its tasks shrank to a theory of style and subsequently to a theory of tropes and a taxonomy of figures of speech. Because of this, rhetoric lost its original connection to dialectics and through this to philosophy. The use of metaphors within other disciplines was no longer regarded as a viable theoretical option. For his definition of metaphor, Aristotle used the single word as the only unit of reference (Ricœur 2003: 8–48). This view carried over into classical rhetoric.

6 Metaphor and its Relationship to Translation

There was, however, a price to pay for such a limitative interpretation: one lost sight of the fact that metaphor operates at all levels of language, from word to sentence, text and discourse. Although Aristotle clearly focuses on the proportional metaphor that works by analogy, he defines four different kinds of metaphor in Poetics. The subsequent tradition of classical rhetoric restricts itself to the fourth kind, based on resemblance. The first three kinds of metaphors are categorical transgressions, that is, they violate order by jumbling classification. Ricœur (ibid.: 22–6) proposes to interpret these three traditionally neglected types of metaphor as a possible anticipation of a different theory less interested in simple deviation and closer to the modern understanding of metaphor. In fact, transgression is of interest only insofar as it opens up the possibility of redefinition. From this point of view, metaphors appear as a strategy that can be used to destroy in order to invent. To describe metaphor, Aristotle used the metaphor of displacement. The Greek phora means change with respect to location, movement from one place to another. Metaphor is a borrowed meaning as opposed to an ordinary meaning. It takes the place of the proper or absent word. Aristotle’s use of a metaphor to describe metaphor points to a particularly relevant aspect. If the word for metaphor is itself metaphorical, it becomes impossible to talk about metaphor non-metaphorically. I will come back to this point in this and the following chapters. Aristotle defines metaphor in terms of deviation. Metaphor is a transposition of an alien (allotrios) name and because of this is opposed to current (kurion) terms. This specific point of view resurfaces in the classification system of classical rhetoric, which focused on the way tropes distinguished themselves from everyday speech. This theoretical decision became relevant for the ensuing tradition in two respects. First, the opposition between metaphors and ordinary words led to that of the figurative and the proper – a distinction that cannot be found in Aristotle’s work. Second, to describe metaphor, Aristotle uses the term borrowing without explicitly linking it to the idea of substitution. In Poetics and Rhetoric, however, the two terms mostly appear together, especially in the examples. This connection had huge consequences for the ensuing tradition, which developed a substitution theory of metaphor. “If the metaphorical term … is really a substituted term,” writes Ricœur, “it carries no new information … and if there is no information, then metaphor has only an ornamental, decorative value” (ibid.: 21). An example of the view that will dominate Western thought for centuries to come is Quintilian’s (AD 35–100) definition of metaphor in his twelve-volume textbook on rhetoric Institutio Oratoria written around AD 90. Together with Cicero (106–43 BC), Quintilian was one of the most influential figures of classical rhetoric. Chapter VI of book VIII of the Institutio Oratoria deals with tropes, which he defines as an artistic alteration of a word or phrase from its proper meaning to another. Quintilian begins with metaphor, the most common of tropes. As he points out, taking up Aristotle’s notion of transference, the Latin translation of the Greek metaphorá, μεταφορά – from metaphérein, μεταϕέρω, to transfer – is translatio,

Metaphor and its Relationship to Translation 7

which means both translation and metaphor – a switch from language to language and a switch from proper to figurative (Hermans 2004: 118). I will return to this terminological convergence of metaphor and translation in Section 9, the last section of this chapter. Metaphor is a shorter form of simile, which has the power to make somebody’s style elegant and attractive. It can move the feelings, give special distinction to things and place them vividly before the eye. When correctly and appropriately used, metaphor will have a pleasing effect. Excessive use leads to obscurity and weariness in the audience. Metaphors should not be mean, harsh, gross or far-fetched. Above all, they must be appropriate to their subject, neither too big nor too small. Metaphors are used to produce a decorative effect or to clarify meaning. Metaphor is a borrowing that operates through the interchange of words. A noun or a verb is transferred from the place to which it belongs to another vacant place where there is no literal term available – a necessary metaphor – or because the transferred term is more impressive than that which it displaces. There are also purely ornamental metaphors. Quintilian defines four classes of metaphors, which all operate through substitution: one can substitute a living thing for another, an inanimate thing for another inanimate, an inanimate for an animate and finally an animate for an inanimate. Metaphors can produce an effect of sublimity by bringing inanimate things to life. These four kinds are subdivided into a number of species: for example, transference from rational to rational, irrational to irrational and the reverse, or from the whole to the parts and the parts to the whole. To sum up: in the wake of Aristotle’s Poetics and Rhetoric, classical rhetoric defined metaphor in spatial terms as a form of displacement and transportation. It classified metaphor as a word-focused figure of speech and described it in terms of deviation. This led to the formation of a substitution theory that ultimately relegated the role of metaphor to that of mere ornament. The basis of such a conception was the clear-cut opposition between literal and figurative, proper and improper. I will come back to this opposition at the end of this chapter.

3 Tenor and Vehicle: I. A. Richards’s Redefinition of Metaphor The traditional view of metaphor as a poetically and rhetorically creative but secondary ornamental form of representation was radically questioned in the course of the twentieth century. In The Philosophy of Rhetoric, first published in 1936, I. A. Richards developed a ground-breaking new theory of metaphor that initiated a paradigmatic shift within the field. Richards (1893–1979), who was an important English literary critic and rhetorician, studied philosophy at Cambridge University. His works Principles of Literary Criticism and Practical Criticism, published in the late 1920s, played a decisive role in the formation of New Criticism, a movement of literary criticism that dominated the Anglo-American field for several decades. New Criticism emphasized the self-contained and self-referential nature of literary works. Richards’s name is also associated

8 Metaphor and its Relationship to Translation

with the notion of “close reading”, an interpretative practice based on the careful and sustained interpretation of brief text-passages. The theoretical foundation of Richards’s redefinition of metaphor (Ricœur 2003: 88–96) is a wider and anti-taxonomical redefinition of rhetoric as a discourse with a philosophical character. It is no longer the word that carries the meaning but the context. In this sense, words do not possess a proper stable meaning of their own. This paves the way for a re-evaluation and a radically new conception of metaphor and its role. In Lecture V of The Philosophy of Rhetoric, Richards begins his discussion of the traditional view of metaphor with a direct reference to a key passage from Aristotle’s Poetics which I have already mentioned. Aristotle identifies the command of metaphor as the greatest thing by far, the mark of true genius. He adds, however, that to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances, which cannot be taught. This conception is based on three interconnected assumptions, which have ever since hampered the study of metaphor (Richards 1965: 89). The first assumption is that an eye for resemblances is a unique gift that only a few possess, and the second is that this exceptional ability cannot be imparted to others. “But we all live, and speak, only through our eye for resemblances … Though some may have better eyes than others, the differences between them are in degree only and may be remedied … in some measure … by the right kinds of teaching and study” (ibid.: 89–90). The third, and “worst”, assumption stresses the exceptional character of metaphorical use in language. Metaphors represent “a deviation from its normal mode of working” (ibid.: 90). Richards advocates a radically enlarged view of metaphor. Metaphors are not simply an ornament or addition to language, requiring a special kind of skill, but one of its constitutive forms. Rather than being limited to specific areas of language, metaphor is an omnipresent principle we cannot do without “even in the rigid language of the settled sciences” (ibid.: 92). One makes use of metaphors even when one openly professes not to be relying on them. Like Aristotle, Richards conceives of metaphors in terms of analogy, similarity and transference. Metaphor is a comparison accomplished by carrying over a word from its normal context into a different one, where it is put to a new use. Metaphors, however – and this is a radically new idea – consist of two halves, which interact with each other. When we use a metaphor, two different thoughts of two different things relying on a single word or phrase interact. The meaning of these co-present thoughts is the result of their interaction. There are many different modes of interaction dependent on the different contexts of the meaning of a word. Another important addition, anticipating cognitive metaphor theory, is Richards’s notion that metaphors are not only a displacement of words, but “an intercourse of thoughts, a transaction between contexts. Thought is metaphoric, and proceeds by comparison, and the metaphors of language derive therefrom” (ibid.: 94). In the traditional view, the word “metaphor” is generally used for the two cooperating halves of a metaphor and sometimes also for one of the two terms in separation from the other. To avoid confusion and allow for a study of the different relations the two parts of a metaphor hold to one another, Richards introduces two

Metaphor and its Relationship to Translation 9

new technical terms: the “tenor” and the “vehicle”. The tenor is the underlying idea, the principal subject. It refers to an object, person or idea. The vehicle is that to which the tenor is compared, the image that carries the weight of the comparison. In the metaphor “Old age is the evening of life”, old age is the tenor and evening the vehicle. The co-presence of tenor and vehicle and their interaction results in the meaning of the metaphor. The meaning of a metaphor is not to be found in the tenor alone, but can be reconstructed only from its interaction with the vehicle. The vehicle is not “a mere embellishment of a tenor which is otherwise unchanged by it but … vehicle and tenor in co-operation give a meaning of more varied powers than can be ascribed to either” (ibid.: 100). As a result, “the tenor does not remain unaltered, as if the vehicle were nothing but wrapping and decoration” (Ricœur 2003: 93). In this sense, it would be misleading to consider the tenor the central and the vehicle the peripheral element of a metaphor. But there is more to it. Different metaphors define different relationships between tenor and vehicle, resulting in different meanings: “At one extreme the vehicle may become almost a mere decoration or coloring of the tenor, at the other extreme, the tenor may become almost a mere excuse for the introduction of the vehicle, and so no longer be ‘the principal subject’” (Richards 1965: 100). Richards’s notion of the simultaneous presence of tenor and vehicle is fundamental as it also abolishes the clear-cut border between the literal and the figurative. These were traditionally assigned to the tenor and the vehicle respectively, circumscribing the metaphor to one word only. Metaphor is not a simple transfer of words, but a transaction of semantic contexts (Ricœur 2003: 92–3).

4 Frame and Focus: Max Black’s Interaction Theory Max Black (1909–88), a leading figure of analytic philosophy, studied mathematics at Cambridge. In 1940, he moved to the United States, working first at the University of Illinois and then at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Black took up Richards’s radical redefinition of metaphor in a first, seminal paper (Black 1954–1955). He returned to the subject in 1962, in connection with metaphors and models, and again in 1979, reflecting upon the heuristic and innovative potential of metaphors within scientific discourse. Richards was the pioneer who made the breakthrough, opening up the field. Black occupied and organized the terrain by developing a viable terminology (Ricœur 2003: 96–7). Richards was interested in a restoration of rhetoric, focusing mainly on the field of literature. He was aware of the importance of metaphor for scientific discourse and thought in general, but he did not follow through with this idea. As a mathematician and analytic philosopher, Black was, above all, interested in the logical grammar of metaphor, exploring its innovative, creative and epistemological potential. In Metaphor (1954–1955), Black starts out by reconstructing the two main positions of traditional metaphor theory: the “substitution” and the “comparison” view of metaphor. According to the substitution view, metaphors are used in place of an

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equivalent literal expression. Metaphors communicate a meaning that might also have been expressed literally. They are generally used because they are more concrete than their literal equivalent, give pleasure to the reader or create an agreeable surprise. Metaphors and all other rhetorical tropes of figurative language are a deviation from plain style and a purely decorative moment in language. Because of this they “can have no serious place in philosophical discussion” (Black 1954–1955: 282) but should be confined to literary criticism and books on rhetoric. The comparison view of metaphor is a special case of the substitution view. In this case, metaphor is a condensed or elliptical simile based on analogy or similarity and can be replaced by an equivalent literal comparison. In the fifth section of the essay, Black introduces the “interaction view of metaphor”, which is a development of and terminological elaboration on Richards’s definition of metaphor. Black introduces two visual metaphors, “focus” and “frame”. In the metaphorical expression “Man is a wolf”, wolf would be the focus of the metaphor and the remainder of the sentence the frame. Black also uses the notions of “principal subject” (man) and “subsidiary subject” (wolf ). The frame imposes an “extension of meaning upon the focal word”. This new meaning is neither the exact equivalent of its literal meaning “nor quite the meaning which any literal substitute would have” (ibid.: 286). The extension of meaning is brought about by a “system of associated or related commonplaces”, a set of standard beliefs and implied assertions about the focal word (wolf ). These have to be made to fit the principal subject (man) in order to “construct a corresponding system of implications about the principal subject” (ibid.: 288). The metaphor “suppresses” some elements and “emphasizes” others and by doing so “organizes” our view of man. Man will look fierce and treacherous as a wolf, and his more humane qualities, his meekness and forgiveness, will fade into the background. To explain this process, Black uses the visual metaphor of the filter. Suppose I look at the night sky through a piece of heavily smoked glass on which certain lines have been left clear. Then I shall see only the stars that can be made to lie on the lines previously prepared upon the screen, and the stars I do see will be seen as organised by the screen’s structure. We can think of a metaphor as such a screen, and the system of “associated commonplaces” of the focal word as the network of lines upon the screen. We can say that the principal subject is “seen through” the metaphorical expression – or, if we prefer, that the principal subject is “projected upon” the field of the subsidiary subject. (ibid.: 288) Metaphors filter and transform our vision not only by selecting but also by bringing forward some aspects that might otherwise not have been perceived. Black applies his radical redefinition only to a specific subsection of metaphors. Substitution and comparison metaphors can be completely replaced by literal equivalents. In doing this, some of their charm and vivacity will be sacrificed, but the cognitive content will not be impaired. Interaction metaphors, however, are

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not dispensable, and because of this, they are of the greatest importance in philosophy. Interaction metaphors use the subsidiary subject in order to foster insight into the principal subject. This use of metaphor is a “distinctive intellectual operation … demanding simultaneous awareness of both subjects but not reducible to any comparison between the two” (ibid.: 293). With respect to Richards, Black introduces three major innovations in metaphor theory (Ricœur 2003: 96–102). First, he describes the structure of metaphorical statements. These consist of one or more words that are considered metaphorical (focus), while the rest of the statement is non-metaphorical (frame). This makes it possible to isolate the metaphorical word from the rest and to focus on it, knowing well that the meaning is not to be found in single words, but arises from the interaction of frame and focus. Second, he draws a distinct boundary between the classical theory of metaphor and the new interaction view, creating a viable alternative. Third, he explains the functioning of interaction. The frame acts on the focus to produce new meaning, which is not reducible to simple paraphrase or literal use. This is made possible by a system of associated commonplaces related to the literal uses of the subsidiary subject, which organizes the perception of the principal subject.

5 Metaphors as Models In Models and Metaphors, published in 1962, Black extends metaphor theory to the theory of models exploring the epistemological dimension of scientific imagination. Ricœur (2003: 283–9) defined this text as the decisive stage in the progression from word to sentence and discourse. In fact, if Richards moved beyond word into sentence and context, Black moves beyond simple semantic analysis into sustained discourse by redefining metaphor as a heuristic instrument that can be used for a re-description of the world. As Ricœur observes, models belong not to the logic of proof but to the logic of discovery. In this sense, they are cognitive processes with a strong epistemological interest. As in the earlier essay, Black defines metaphor in visual and spatial terms. Metaphors reveal new connections. They are lenses for seeing a new subject matter in a new light. Metaphors are about the wedding of different domains by transfer “of the implications of relatively well-organized cognitive fields” (Black 1962: 237). In Chapter XIII, “Models and Archetypes”, Black distinguishes between three different kinds of models. Scale models operate through an enlargement of scale (e.g., the model of a sailing-boat) whereas analogous models work through change of medium and isomorphism (e.g., the hydraulic model of economic systems). Like analogous models, theoretical models are based on identity of structure, but they introduce a new language of description. In this respect, they are similar to “sustained and systematic” (ibid.: 236) metaphors. To pinpoint the theoretical link between model and metaphor and differentiate this kind of metaphor from others, Black introduces the notions of “root metaphor” and “conceptual archetype”. Implicit or submerged models are similar to root metaphors because they understand one area in terms of another. They use the

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better-known to explain the less-known and define the abstract and intangible in terms of the concrete and tangible. Conceptual archetypes are systematic repertoires of ideas comparable to a list of key words. Root metaphors, furthermore, organize subordinate metaphors into complex metaphoric networks. I will come back to this notion of metaphoric complexity in Section 7 on conceptual metaphors and in the following chapters. The theoretical detour through the theory of models (Ricœur 2003: 283) helps Black confirm the validity of his interaction theory – especially the principle of inexhaustibility through paraphrase (ibid.: 287) – and reveals a series of new traits. It also narrows the distance between the sciences and the humanities: both “are an affair of the imagination” (Black 1962: 243). Furthermore, by comparing the isomorphic structure of metaphors and models, a new extended definition of metaphor is called for. Metaphors are not simple sentences or statements but complex networks of statements (Ricœur 2003: 287). Finally, the comparison highlights the connection between the heuristic and descriptive function of metaphors. Max Black’s reading of metaphors in terms of models is a bridge between the earlier semantic accounts (Black 1954–1955; Richards 1936) and the coming radical extension of the meaning of metaphor in scientific theory and cognitive linguistics.

6 Metaphor in Scientific Discourse In the late 1970s and early 1980s, one can detect a growing recognition of the innovative potential of metaphors outside the areas of rhetoric and literary studies (St. André 2010a: 5–7). At about the same time metaphors of translation and the question of the translatability of metaphors were attracting new interest within the field of translation studies. The paradigmatic change that was going to take place in the following decades was heralded by two nearly concurrent publications, which had a lasting impact across different fields of inquiry: the collection of essays Metaphor and Thought, edited by Andrew Ortony in 1979, and George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By, first published in 1980. Both books expanded the scope of metaphor in different directions, liberating it from its linguistic prison house and its ancillary function. Metaphors are no longer restricted to particular areas of language and reality but represent a fundamental part of everyday speech and thought. In this section, I will consider Ortony’s collection with regard to the epistemological potential of metaphors in scientific discourse. Section 7 will consider Lakoff and Johnson’s cognitive theory of metaphor. Metaphor and Thought consists of two parts. The first deals with metaphors within linguistic theory, pragmatics and psychology, and the second with its uses in social theory, science and education. The book focuses on the form and use of metaphor from a non-literary perspective. In the introductory chapter, Ortony formulates a criticism of the traditional view of the language of science as unambiguous, precise and objective, that is, as fundamentally literal. Within such a context, metaphors

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appear as a deviant and parasitic use of normal language, a problem, if not a threat. From a constructivist point of view, however, metaphors are an essential characteristic of the creativity of language and “play an important role in scientific discovery, and in the formulation and transmission of new theories” (Ortony 1979b: 14). For centuries, metaphors were assigned to rhetoric and literature and considered irrelevant to scientific discourse. This clear-cut division deepened and strengthened when each discipline started adopting its own domain, technique and metalanguage. Metaphor and tropological language ended up belonging to the restricted area of literary theory dealing with the figurative language of tropes. But “all language is tropological, the language of the scientist included” (ibid.: 3). In “Metaphor and Theory Change: What Is ‘Metaphor’ a Metaphor for?” Richard Boyd distinguishes between three different classes of metaphor in scientific discourse. Exegetical and pedagogical metaphors are operative in the realms of informal exegesis, heuristics and teaching. The class of theory-constitutive metaphors, however, plays a vital role in the articulation and development of new theories. These metaphors introduce theoretical terminology where none previously existed and possess some of the characteristics of Black’s interaction metaphors – they work by suggesting similarities and analogies between different domains and are fundamentally open-ended. Their main utility in theory change depends upon their being suggestive rather than explicit. Theory-constitutive metaphors are particularly visible within the theoretical framework of relatively young sciences engaged in the process of constituting a new field of enquiry, but they are also of importance within more mature sciences. Boyd distinguishes between the conceptual open-endedness of literary interaction metaphors and the inductive open-endedness of theoryconstitutive metaphors. The first kind of metaphor relies on the ability of the reader to interpret the principal subject in terms of the secondary subject. The function of theory-constitutive metaphors is much broader. Besides exploring similarities and analogies, the reader is invited to look for features that have not yet been discovered or completely understood. Another essential function consists in suggesting strategies for future research. “This programmatic research-oriented feature … explains … the ways in which such metaphors both resemble and differ from ordinary interaction metaphors” (Boyd 1979: 363). In “Metaphor and Science”, Thomas Kuhn assigns an extensive role to metaphors in science. They are not only theory-constitutive or heuristic and pedagogical devices but lie at the very heart of theory change and transmission. Kuhn questions Boyd’s distinction between interaction and theory-constitutive metaphors. Metaphors do not only presuppose or supply a possible list of similarities between the two subjects; they actively create and call forth new similarities. Paradigmatic shifts in scientific theory always imply a change in the metaphorical metalanguage. They do not supplant the use of metaphors with a more objective language. To prove this point, Kuhn cites an example from the history of science. Atoms were traditionally compared to the solar system. In 1913, this metaphor was supplanted by Bohr’s model, which described the atom as a positively charged nucleus surrounded by electrons. The new metaphorical model replaced the metaphor of the solar system, but

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did not end the process of metaphorization itself. Bohr’s new model, moreover, was never intended to be an objective description of reality. “I would hazard the guess that the same interactive, similarity-creating process which Black has isolated in the functioning of metaphor is vital also to the function of models in science” (Kuhn 1979: 415). Ortony’s collection also contains a new essay by Max Black exploring the ability of metaphors to generate new unexpected analogies. With regard to the connection between model and metaphor, Black comments self-critically: “I am now impressed, as I was insufficiently so … by the tight connections between the notions of models and metaphors … Every metaphor is the tip of a submerged model” (Black 1979: 31). To distinguish metaphors from each other, Black introduces two new criteria: “emphasis” and “resonance”. Metaphorical utterances are emphatic if they cannot be substituted by any literal expression or paraphrase without a significant loss of meaning. Furthermore, emphatic metaphors have to be systematically explored in order to unravel their unstated implications. This interpretative activity, which Black calls “implicative elaboration”, stimulates creativity and fosters insight into the existence of unexpected relationships. Metaphors with a high degree of implicative elaboration are resonant. Emphasis and resonance are related to each other. Highly emphatic metaphors tend also to be highly resonant. “Strong metaphors” are both highly emphatic and highly resonant. Strong metaphors do not just bring already existing connections into evidence but generate insight and new knowledge by creating analogies. They are indispensable cognitive instruments “for perceiving connections that, once perceived, are then truly present”. Strong metaphors “enable us to see aspects of reality that the metaphor’s production helps to constitute” (ibid.: 39). Metaphors show that conceptual boundaries are elastic and permeable and can be stretched and altered. This should not be surprising “if one believes that the world is necessarily a world under a certain description – or a world seen from a certain perspective. Some metaphors can create such a perspective” (ibid.: 39–40). To sum up: any approach that treats literal utterance as an unproblematic, objective standard of scientific discourse encourages reductionist theories. Metaphors can suggest strategies for future research and play an essential role in the construction of theoretical models. They introduce new terminology and highlight features that have not yet been discovered or fully explained. Metaphors are also of great importance in theory change. Paradigmatic shifts go hand in hand with a radical transformation of the metaphorical metalanguage of a specific scientific domain. Finally, metaphors are essential to the transmission of scientific theory. Traditional metaphors have a powerful influence on the ways in which a theoretical field is perceived. In the wake of a paradigmatic shift, new metaphors can be used to convince others to adopt the consequences resulting from the theoretical change. Textbooks written for pedagogical purposes generally adopt these metaphors after a new paradigm has been accepted (St. André 2010a: 5). Let me now turn to the definition of metaphor in cognitive linguistics.

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7 Lakoff and Johnson on Conceptual Metaphors George B. Lakoff, Professor of Linguistics at the University of California since 1972, and Marc Johnson, from the department of philosophy at the University of Oregon, radically redefined the field of metaphor theory in cognitive terms. Cognitive linguistics defines linguistic phenomena as fundamentally conceptual in nature. Language and cognition mutually influence each other. Language is, furthermore, embodied and always situated within a specific environment. In Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson define metaphors as the very basis of everyday action and thought. “Metaphor is for most people a device of the poetic imagination and rhetorical flourish – a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language. Moreover, metaphor is typically viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought and action … We have found, on the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature” (Lakoff and Johnson 2003: 3). Metaphors have the power “to create a reality rather than simply to give us a way of conceptualizing a preexisting reality” (ibid.: 144). In the second edition of Ortony’s book (Lakoff 2002: 203), Lakoff traces the origins of conceptual metaphor theory back to Michael J. Reddy’s classic essay (1979) on the conduit metaphor of communication included in the first edition of Ortony’s collection. The conceptual metaphor of the conduit defines communication as transportation of content across an intermediate space. Language is a conduit through which thoughts can flow freely. Communication transfers someone’s mental content to others. Words act as containers for thoughts. Thoughts are inserted into words at one end of the communication chain and extracted at the other. The conduit metaphor separates form and content, language and thought, the same way that the clothing metaphor does (language is the dress wrapped around thoughts). Thoughts can be stripped of their external linguistic form without major loss. I will come back to this notion, which is of great relevance to metaphor and translation alike, in Section 9 of this chapter. I will now sum up briefly the main points of Lakoff and Johnson’s conceptual redefinition of metaphor. To move away from a purely linguistic definition of metaphor, Lakoff and Johnson developed the notion of “conceptual” or “cognitive metaphor”. Conceptual metaphors are based on bodily experience. Lakoff and Johnson write them in capital letters to distinguish them from the related “metaphorical expressions” that can be found in language. The conceptual metaphor ARGUMENT IS WAR, for instance, is linked to the metaphorical expressions “Your claims are indefensible”, “He shot down all my arguments” and “His criticisms were right on target” (Lakoff and Johnson 2003: 4). With this distinction, Lakoff and Johnson create a dual system connecting language to thought while at the same time separating them. Thought is directly linked to everyday bodily experiences and to the way we experience ourselves in time and space. As the following will abundantly prove, Lakoff and Johnson follow in Richards and Black’s footsteps even if they do not explicitly acknowledge their influence.

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In Metaphors We Live By, metaphor is defined as understanding and experiencing one thing in terms of another. Understanding through conceptual metaphors does not take place in terms of isolated concepts but in terms of entire domains of experience. When we describe conversation as war, we “superimpose the multidimensional structure of part of the concept WAR upon the corresponding structure CONVERSATION” (ibid.: 81). Metaphorical concepts do not exist on their own but are “multidimensional structured wholes” (ibid.: 81). There are different forms of “systematicity”. Metaphorical concepts are coherent with each other by virtue of having a connecting structure – external systematicity – and form systems based on subcategorization – internal systematicity. TIME IS MONEY, TIME IS A VALUABLE COMMODITY and TIME IS A RESOURCE form a single system of related units linked by entailment relationships (ibid.: 9). This system in turn defines a coherent subsystem of metaphorical expressions: “You are wasting my time,” “Is that worth your while?” and “I have invested a lot of time in this project” (ibid.: 7–8). Furthermore, metaphorical concepts join with other concepts to build coherent clusters. Cross-metaphorical coherence is achieved by overlap and unity of purpose. Different metaphors organize and structure different aspects of a single concept by providing distinct perspectives on the same subject. The notion of systematicity – the logical structure of metaphors – is fundamental for a redefinition of metaphor as an everyday tool for interpreting and changing the world. Metaphors organize our everyday existence in a structured way by forming coherent systems in terms of which we conceptualize our experiences. Another aspect of metaphorical systematicity is the dialectics of highlighting and hiding (ibid.: 10–13). The very systematicity that allows us to comprehend one aspect of a concept in terms of another … will necessarily hide other aspects of the concept. In allowing us to focus on one aspect … a metaphorical concept can keep us from focusing on other aspects of the concept that are inconsistent with that metaphor. (ibid.: 10) Metaphorical structuring is always partial, never total. Lakoff and Johnson discuss this important dimension of metaphorical concepts with the aid of the conduit metaphor of communication. Metaphors not only block out certain aspects that contradict their basic presuppositions. They can also prevent us from realizing that they are actually metaphors. The conduit metaphor articulates such a widespread belief about language and communication that it is difficult to see that one is confronted with a metaphor at all. A closer look, however, reveals the aspects the metaphor is masking. It wrongly suggests, for instance, that words have a meaning of their own, independent from their linguistic context and the speakers involved. Furthermore, it defines translation as an unproblematic transfer of thought content from one linguistic container to another.

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Lakoff and Johnson define different kinds of conceptual metaphors. In the “structural metaphors” LINGUISTIC EXPRESSIONS ARE CONTAINERS FOR MEANINGS and ARGUMENT IS WAR, one concept is metaphorically structured in terms of another. “Ontological metaphors” structure our understanding of events, activities, ideas and emotions in terms of discrete entities and substances (THE MIND IS A MACHINE) or persons (INFLATION IS A PERSON). Ontological metaphors serve various purposes: they allow for quantification (“You need a lot of patience”), identification of causes (“He did it out of anger”) and definition of goals (“I can find true happiness”). “Orientational metaphors”, which are of fundamental importance for both metaphor theory and translation theory, operate on the basis of spatial dimensions – left/right, inside/out, up/down, back/ front, centre/periphery, deep/shallow. They “arise from the fact that we have bodies of the sort we have and that they function as they do in our physical environment” (ibid.: 14). Most fundamental concepts are organized in spatial terms through one or more interconnected spatialization metaphors. “So-called purely intellectual concepts, e.g., the concepts in a scientific theory, are often – perhaps always – based on metaphors that have a physical and/or cultural basis” (ibid.: 18–19). Most orientational metaphors favour the UP orientation (HAPPY IS UP, SAD IS DOWN). This generates an overall external systematicity within the field of spatial metaphors. To stress the importance of the physical and bodily dimension in metaphors, Lakoff and Johnson introduced the notion of grounding. We tend to “conceptualize the nonphysical in terms of the physical … the less clearly delineated in terms of the more clearly delineated” (ibid.: 59). This is true not only of highly abstract concepts like nation or justice, but also of key notions that carry an ambivalent charge of meaning, a promise and a threat, and have therefore been subject to repeated forms of metaphorization. Lakoff (1987, 2002) and Johnson subsequently extended their account of the functioning of metaphor, introducing new terminology. The central concepts are now the two conceptual domains – the source domain and the target domain – and the processes of mapping. Metaphors are cross-domain mappings. The source domain of a metaphor, from which one draws metaphorical expressions, is the domain one knows more about, because it is relatively more concrete and physical. This domain is mapped onto a target domain, the domain that one is trying to understand and about which one knows less, because it is more abstract and difficult to grasp. Mapping is a form of projection: “The main function of conceptual metaphor is to project inference patterns from one conceptual domain onto another. The result is that conceptual metaphor allows us to reason about the target domain in a way that we otherwise would not” (Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 82). Mappings represent systematic sets of correspondences that exist between constituent elements of the source and the target domain. They do not work according to a random list of attributes and relationships but have a narrative structure dictated by inference patterns that shape the relationship between the two domains. “The mapping is tightly structured”: the entities of one domain “correspond systematically” (Lakoff 2002:

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203) to the entities of the other. This notion is reminiscent of Black’s system of associated or related commonplaces. There are various modes of connection between source and target. Single source domains can be mapped onto single target domains. A single source domain may also be mapped onto different targets, and different source domains onto the same target. Multiple targets can be brought together by a single source domain in such a way that the source can shape the understanding of each of them by simultaneously highlighting and hiding some of their aspects. Furthermore, a single source can be mapped onto different target domains that are connected with or related to each other. Thanks to these different forms of cross-domain mapping, the target domains develop new relationships to each other. These considerations are of direct relevance to this book. In fact, translation can be viewed both as a target domain (Chapters 2 and 3) and as a source domain (Chapters 3, 4 and 5).

8 Metaphor and Translation In conclusion, I want to focus on structural similarities between the notions of metaphor and translation and on some possible intersections between metaphor and translation theory, examples of the intricate reciprocal theoretical exchanges and multiple borrowings across borders that have gone on between the two fields in the course of history. As already pointed out, in the West metaphor and translation are closely linked etymologically and have had a comparable terminological trajectory from the very beginning. Shifts in the appreciation of metaphor have very often found their echo in corresponding reappraisals in translation studies. This allows for a recapitulation of some stages of translation theory from the point of view of metaphor theory. In fact, the two interlinked histories could be interpreted in terms of a common emancipation of the two notions accompanied by an empowerment and enlarging of the two theoretical fields. As part of their redefinition, both the meaning of metaphor and of translation have been expanded from the purely linguistic to a much broader cultural definition. In the course of the twentieth century, a comparable paradigmatic shift occurred in translation studies and in metaphor theory. The concepts of both metaphor and translation were radically redefined in the process and in ways that suggest a subterranean, implicit convergence. Within metaphor theory, the traditionhallowed substitution theory stressing the secondary role of metaphors gave way to interaction theory and a cognitive redefinition of metaphor, highlighting the creative epistemological potential of metaphoric thinking. A similar change took place in translation theory. In translation studies, the subservient role of the translated text with regard to the original and the notion of equivalence were revised in favour of a transformative view reaffirming the relative autonomy of the translated text and the importance of the innovative changes occurring during the translation process. Metaphors are much more than simple ornaments, and translations do not merely echo the original, but recreate it. The philosophical tenets involved in this parallel reshuffling are fundamentally the same. Both express a

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passage from a dualistic vision to a new dynamic concept focusing on action, transformation and creativity. The relationship between metaphor and translation has to be considered in the broader context of linguistic ideologies and prevailing regimes of language. Well into the eighteenth century, the predominant view of language in the West was based on Plato’s assumption that ideas were located beyond language and Aristotle’s notion that thinking was possible without language. It is particularly telling that in the Western tradition one of the chief metaphors for the metaphoric process coincides with one of the central metaphors used to describe the functioning of translation. “The principal metaphor for metaphor (as for language generally) is that of the garment” (Cheyfitz 1991: 91). The corresponding translation metaphor is the exchange of clothes. Language is a garment for thought, a grammatical clothing lightly thrown over a semantic body, and can therefore be exchanged without any problem. Clothes change, the body underneath remains the same. Each thought can be stripped bare of its clothes and clad again in new garments without incurring any major changes. Translation is travesty. The metaphors of the garment and the changing of clothes are connected to the conduit metaphor. Content and form are separable from each other. The essential content of a sentence can be expressed in any language, like water being poured from a cup into a glass. When one compares translation and metaphor from a structural point of view, a series of essential similarities appear. Both are binary concepts (Teplova 2009: 247), possess a dual structure and imply a movement across a border or gap of some kind. One cannot deal with one side of the pair without having to consider the other as well. Attention oscillates continuously between the two, moving back and forth from one component to the other in a weaving motion similar to a loom. This simultaneous co-presence of the two sides is essential to both metaphor and translation. The relation of the two domains and the nature of the movement established between them depend on the way their respective status is defined. If one side is assigned priority, the two components and the movements between them are defined from a hierarchical point of view. If the left side of the pair (the source text, the primary subject) is given precedence, the movement towards the right side is associated with the idea of loss or inferiority. The figurative meaning which metaphor creates is subordinated to the literal, original meaning that it tries to explain. Translation always comes after the original and, as such, is wholly dependent upon it. However, if the two sides differ only in degree, a reversible two-way movement becomes possible. The two domains become part of a chain extending indefinitely to the left and to the right. Every original is already a translation of some sort. Translations can become new originals that need to be translated again. Literal meaning is based on the figurative power of language, and the primary and the secondary subject – or the source and the target domain – can exchange places, each becoming a metaphor for the other. Another essential aspect linked to the subordination or coordination of the two components is the relation of sameness and difference. Metaphor and translation both stress similarity and difference between the literal and figurative pole and the

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original and its translation. The prioritizing of the literal over the figurative and the original over the translation is generally associated with a predominance of similarity over difference. In the opposite view, which emphasizes the reversibility of the two poles, metaphor – and translation for that matter – tends to lead us to perceive sameness in difference and difference in sameness. As already briefly pointed out, the structural relationship of metaphor and translation described above is not only expressed but actually implicitly suggested by the etymology of the Greek metaphorá – from the verb metaphero, which literally means “to carry across” – and its Latin translation translatio, from transferre, translatus. Both words imply transportation across a middle space. The Greek metaphorá contains among its other meanings also the sense of translation from one language into another. In this respect, early Western definitions of metaphor already contain a theory of translation as passage across borders. The word “translation” is already a metaphor for the process of translation. Another common trait of the two notions, and an important reason for the many theoretical attempts to domesticate them, is their profound disruptive effect. Besides highlighting and explicating, translation and metaphor always also distort and hide. However, it is not because of this shared ambivalence that they represent a threat both to the stability and to the unity of proper meaning as well as to the relationship between word and thing. The metaphoric principle accomplishes within language that which translation does for the ensemble of languages: it represents and signals the presence of multiplicity opening up from inside the apparent unity of monolingualism. Metaphor and translation represent a rift, an internal and an external split, respectively, and, simultaneously, the very solution to overcome it. Metaphors open up a dangerous space between signifier and signified. Translations question the representational identity and unity of languages, disclosing the arbitrariness of the relationship between words, things and ideas: translational transactions show that words are finally only metaphors for things. The scandal of metaphor resides in its destabilizing effect within a single language and points to the fact that no language is at peace with itself. The scandal of translation has to do with the undeniable existence of a plurality of languages that cannot ultimately be reduced to a single universal one. According to Eric Cheyfitz (1991), the notions of translation and metaphor are etymologically and ideologically inseparable. The common ground for translation and metaphoric thinking is to be found in the relationship of the literal and the figurative. Figuration is, simultaneously, the movement of metaphorization and the process of translation. The existence of two languages within a single language – the figurative and the literal – and their relationship can, therefore, be used as a model to explain translational interactions and vice versa. In the Western tradition, the literal is associated with the proper, the idea of property and a notion of identity as a self-contained, fenced-in territory. In addition, the very connection between the literal and the figurative is severed in an attempt to objectify the notion of literalness. The literal, however, is no firm foundation for meaning, and there is no escaping the troublesome but unavoidable multiple processes of translation

Metaphor and its Relationship to Translation 21

within language and between languages. In Aristotle’s description, metaphor and translation are intimately linked: figurative language is made up of translated words of which the word “metaphor” itself is the prime example. Although Aristotle initially distinguished metaphors from unusual words, he finally subsumed them under the same species as the foreign. By blurring the frontier between the metaphorical and the foreign, a further link between metaphor and translation is introduced. Metaphor and translation are not only intimately linked to each other because of their structural analogy – that is, because of the existence of two separate entities between which a process of transference takes place. There is another more decisive similarity between that which is known and that which is unknown, the familiar and the unfamiliar. Metaphor is an alien element within everyday language, the same way a foreign language is alien to domestic speech. As a result, the difference between the proper and the foreign determines the way both metaphors and translations operate. The necessity of metaphors and translations to subordinate the foreign to the domestic, the figurative to the literal and difference to similarity “proves difficult, because metaphor” and translation are “duplicitous, playing the part of a double agent in a game of foreign intrigue”. Metaphors and translations work “simultaneously for two governments” (Cheyfitz 1991: 92–3). This ambiguity, which is one of the fundamental structural presuppositions for the functioning of metaphor and translation, is also one of the main reasons for the diffidence it has encountered within a tradition upholding unity, similarity and hierarchy between irreconcilable antithetical opponents. As the preceding considerations have shown, metaphor can be used as a metaphor for translation (Guldin 2010) and, conversely, translation as a metaphor for metaphor. This aspect, however, has received very little, if any, theoretical attention so far. Brian Lambkin (2012) reviews three basic types of conceptual metaphors for metaphor – “SEEING”, “TRAVELING” and “THINKING” – and proposes “MIGRATION” as a new metaphor for metaphor. In his analysis, which strives to combine migration and metaphor studies by looking for a common metaphorical terminology, Lambkin discusses a series of metaphors for metaphor that are also of great significance for a description of translation. Metaphors are bridges, windows, mirrors; move between the familiar and the unfamiliar; integrate and blend separate domains; carry from one domain to another and back and allow for a simultaneous awareness of both perspectives at once. While introducing the new MIGRATION metaphor, which could also be of interest for translation studies, he points to the fact that only one scholar in metaphor studies had made an explicit connection with migration studies by focusing on the IMMIGRATION metaphor. Significantly, Lambkin does not mention any connection to the notion of translation or any possible exchange between metaphor, migration and translation studies.

9 Translation in Metaphor Theory One can find traces of the profound connection between metaphor and translation both in Black’s interaction theory and in Lakoff and Johnson’s cognitive theory of metaphor.

22 Metaphor and its Relationship to Translation

Black explicitly links translation to paraphrase: “Can metaphors be translated into literal expressions?” (Black 1954–1955: 273). In two other passages, he connects the notions of substitution, literalness and equivalence. The traditional view of metaphor defines the metaphorical expression as a “substitute for some other literal expression” (ibid.: 278–9). The substitution theory of metaphor “holds that a metaphorical expression is used in place of some equivalent literal expression” (ibid.: 279). To understand a metaphor, the reader has to “retrace the author’s path and so reach the original literal meaning” (ibid.: 282). The non-translatability of metaphors (Ricœur 2003: 287) is one of the essential features that distinguishes Black’s interaction view from the traditional substitution view. This theory assumes that metaphors can be “replaced by literal translations … with no loss of cognitive content. But ‘interaction-metaphors’ are not expendable” (ibid.: 293). Lakoff and Johnson introduced the notions of source and target into metaphor theory. These concepts have been in use in translation theory since the 1960s. In Toward a Science of Translating, published in 1964, Eugene Nida spoke of source language and source text and defined the language of translation as the “receptor language”. The use of the source metaphor is heavily fraught with meaning, especially in view of the fact that Nida developed his translation theory with reference to biblical texts. By defining the role of translation as subordinate and receptive, Nida established a clear-cut hierarchy between source and receptor language. The source text has to be adequately translated into an equivalent form of the receptor language. In J. C. Catford’s A Linguistic Theory of Translation: An Essay in Applied Linguistics (1965), translation is defined as the search for a word in the target language that is equivalent to a word in the source language. Catford described translation as the substitution of target language meanings for source language meanings, spelling out the deepseated theoretical link between metaphor and translation put forward in this chapter. In the course of the 1970s, the assumption that translations were above all facts of the target domain and that a target orientation was essential in the shaping of translations was reaffirmed by Itamar Even-Zohar and Gideon Toury (Venuti 2004: 123–4). The use of terms like “source” and “target” to describe the original and its translation in contemporary translation theory is of course profoundly metaphorical. Despite its general acceptance, this specific choice suggests a one-way movement originating in one domain and ending in the other. Source implies origin, originality, intimacy, even purity. Target suggests the idea of an arrow flying towards its goal. To translate is to shoot at and to kill (Rabassa 1989: 5). To translate a text adequately means, accordingly, to hit the target without betraying the original purity of the message. The source–target pair in Lakoff and Johnson’s work articulates a different view of metaphor that can already be found in Black’s interaction theory. In traditional translation theories, the original comes first and takes precedence over the translation. The same holds true for classical metaphor theory: the literal precedes the figurative and represents the foundation of language. In Lakoff and Johnson’s reinterpretation, the active projecting domain is the vehicle, the secondary subject, whereas the

Metaphor and its Relationship to Translation 23

target, the tenor or primary subject, has become that onto which new sets of implications are mapped. The source domain provides the means for understanding the other subject. In terms of translation theory this would mean that the translation illuminates the original. It is important to stress that Lakoff and Johnson – like Black before them – overcome the unilaterality of traditional conceptions by radically redrawing the relationship between the two sides of a metaphor and emphasizing their reciprocity. This notion could be used to redefine the relationship of original and translation in interactive terms. To conclude: metaphors are active on all levels of language and across all spheres of knowledge, from literary theory to philosophy and science. They possess internal and external complexity. Because of this, it is appropriate to describe them in terms of interacting systems (Black), domains (Lakoff and Johnson) or networks of statements (Ricœur). Metaphors generally do not exist in isolation, but come in pairs and clusters, defining conditions of coordination and subordination. By highlighting some aspects and hiding others, metaphors organize our perception of the world. Like models, metaphors are cognitive processes with epistemological relevance. They play an essential role in the formulation and transmission of new scientific theories as well as in theory change. Metaphors are indispensable cognitive instruments that bring novel connections into view and help in the search for features that have not yet been discovered or completely understood. In this sense, metaphors generate new knowledge.

2 METAPHORS FOR TRANSLATION

Metaphor is a fundamental feature of human thought and language and as such metaphors are key to many dimensions of translation studies. Maria Tymoczko

This chapter takes a critical look at the way in which metaphors for translation used in the West and in the East have been discussed in translation studies in recent years. To this end, I have compiled a small corpus of modern scholarly essays that deal explicitly with translation metaphors. My starting point was an annotated bibliography of 28 essays on metaphors for translation compiled by James St. André (St. André 2010c: 295–302). St. André’s Thinking through Translation with Metaphors contains another ten papers, as well as an index. To this, I added two particularly telling German texts (Koller 1972; Resch 1998), two English papers (Foiera 2003; Rizzo 2003), as well as a series of essays considering metaphors for translation in India, Japan and China (Cheung 2005, 2006; Gopinathan 2006; Trivedi 2006; Uchiyama 2012; Wakabayashi 2009). The resulting corpus allows for methodological, thematic, diachronic and cross-cultural insights into the different perspectives on the use of metaphors for translation in the field of translation studies. Even if the final list is incomplete, it suits the main purposes of this chapter, which are not primarily historical or systematic. My first aim is to show that there are still doubts as to the necessity and efficacy of metaphors in the constitution of a metalanguage of translation. There is, however, a growing number of translation scholars emphasizing the fundamental importance of metaphors for translation studies. Distrust in the utility of translation metaphors as cognitive instruments is generally based on a more traditional view of metaphor. Scholars advocating the use of metaphors to gain new insight into the process of translation draw on interaction theory and cognitive linguistics. In many cases, these

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specific theoretical choices also have a direct bearing on the metaphors of translation chosen for analysis. The second aim is to demonstrate that the terminology developed in Chapter 1 can be profitably applied to the metaphors for translation reunited in the corpus. In the Western tradition, metaphors for translation form specific patterns whose study can provide new insights into the past, present and possibly the future metalanguage of translation studies. The main theoretical focus of the essays is either historical (Hermans 1985, 2004; Hermans and Stecconi 2002; Morini 2006), typological (Green 2001; Gross 1991; Hanne 2006; Koller 1972; Mason 2004; Martín de León 2010; Rabassa 1989; Round 2005; Roy 1993) or a combination of the two (D’hulst 1993; Hermans 2002; Teplova 2009). Some essays deal with metaphors of translation from a specifically analytical point of view (D’hulst 1992; Evans 2001; Halverson 1999; Guldin 2010; Tymoczko 2010), or concentrate on single domains (Arrojo 1994, 1999; Chamberlain 2000, 2001; Resch 1998 on gender; Benshalom 2010; Farrell 1996; Janis 1996 on translation and theatre) and specific metaphors (Hermans 2007; Johnston 2000 on transubstantiation; Hönig 1997 on bridge building; Johnston 1992 on simulacra; Roy 1993; Wadensjö 1993 on the conduit metaphor; St. André 2010b on cross-identity performance; Tyulenev 2010 on smuggling; Uchiyama 2012; Vieira 1994, 1999 on cannibalism; Foiera 2003 on the body-snatching metaphor; Rizzo 2003 on travel; van Wyke 2010 on changing clothes). Roesler (2010) deals with the different metaphors of translation used in the work of Yves Bonnefoy, and Monti (2010) with the predominant metaphors used to describe the translation of metaphors. Henitiuk (2010), Sayers Peden (1989) and Gross (1991) consider particularly original and less known metaphors or attempt to create new ones. In Section 1 of the current chapter, I will consider an example from the early 1970s to illustrate the profoundly ambivalent way in which metaphors of translation were dealt with in that period. I will use this theoretical position as a backdrop for the following sections. Section 2 proposes a critical reading of the different theoretical perspectives on metaphors of translation in the corpus, emphasizing the terminological and epistemological potential inherent in a sustained study of metaphors for translation. Section 3 takes up Lakoff and Johnson’s notion of internal and external systematicity of metaphors with regard to the metaphors of the corpus. Sections 4 to 6 consider some of the main metaphors for translation in the West discussed in the text-corpus and the way they relate to each other. Section 7, finally, addresses the use of metaphors for translation in the East, focusing on the main differences with respect to the West.

1 The Problem with Metaphor In view of the history of metaphor traced in Chapter 1, it should come as no surprise that metaphor, and metaphor theory for that matter, have not met with great interest in translation studies until fairly recently. In a mid-1970s essay about the

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translatability of metaphors, M. B. Dagut (1976) emphasized the fact that although metaphor is a central phenomenon of language it had not received the attention it deserved in translation studies. Dagut briefly examined the status of metaphor in some of the more authoritative works of his time. In Toward a Science of Translating (1964), Eugene Nida touches only very briefly on metaphor and figurative language, and in The Theory and Practice of Translation, written together with Charles A. Taber (1969), there is no mention of metaphor at all. “There is thus an almost grotesque disproportion between the importance and frequency of ‘metaphor’ in language use and the very minor role allotted to it in translation theory” (Dagut 1976: 21). Interest in metaphor theory in translation studies was slow to develop. In the 1990s Nili Mandelblit (1995) still complained about the striking asymmetry between the treatment of metaphors in translation studies and the new findings of the cognitive view of metaphor. In an essay written as recently as 2004, Christina Schäffner points to the persistent lack of interest in new theoretical developments in the field of metaphor studies and their possible applicability in the translation of metaphors. In many cases, the argumentation is still based on a traditional understanding of metaphor as a figure of speech, whose main function is the stylistic embellishment of the text. However, there are also exceptions to this general tendency. In the first paragraphs of his historical survey of metaphor in the discourse on translation, Theo Hermans (2004: 118) sums up all the major positions of metaphor theory from Black to Lakoff and Johnson. The following sections will show that, on the one hand, the situation has radically changed in the last few years, but that, on the other, in some cases a certain diffidence towards the use of metaphors of translation persists. This ambivalent stance becomes particularly apparent when other theoretical areas make use of translation as a metaphor. I will return to this specific point in the following chapters. I will now turn to the second chapter of Werner Koller’s Grundprobleme der Übersetzung (Basic Problems in Translation) (Koller 1972: 40–63). Koller is one of the first translation scholars to address extensively and systematically the use of metaphors in translation theory. His book was published a few years before the radical revision operated by cognitive linguistics and Andrew Ortony’s pioneering collection of essays on metaphors in scientific discourse. This could explain in part his more traditional view of metaphor. Significantly enough, his bibliography does not list either Richard’s or Black’s key texts on metaphor theory. Koller’s view of metaphor differs in many ways from the definition reached at the end of Chapter 1 of this book. He describes metaphor as a useful “pre-scientific tool” that can only “pave the way” for further, more systematic reflection, but not generate new knowledge. Metaphors can be “transformed” into scientific knowledge or they can reproduce vividly, in a “simplified and condensed way”, notions that have already been clearly formulated. They can help to illustrate that which is not yet clear, difficult to explain or just intuitively perceived. As “pre-scientific images”, metaphors can “initiate thinking”. This is also their main function in translation theory. A major problem with metaphors is that they can easily be taken as a

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conclusive result. Because of this, they can become an impediment for further reflection. In view of their “conceptual fuzziness”, metaphors can be used to describe different aspects of a specific subject matter. The music metaphor, for instance, can describe the role and requirements of a good translator, the process of translation, but also the impossibility of any satisfying reproduction of the original. As already pointed out in Chapter 1, Lakoff and Johnson described this specific dimension of metaphors as “internal systematicity”, that is, not as a conceptual shortcoming but as an epistemological advantage. I will return to this aspect in Section 3. Besides music, Koller lists three other main metaphors for translation: art, reproduction and the change of clothes. The art of translation is subsidiary. Translators are in the business of the reproductive arts. They are like pianists interpreting a Beethoven sonata or a Mozart piano concerto. Translators are actors interpreting a text, by transporting it into a different medium. Translations are similar to picture galleries containing only copies of the originals, deceptive and disappointing substitutes for the real thing like chicory coffee. Koller does actually point to the creative dimension of translation, but he does this only in connection with literary texts, above all poetry. Translational creativity is not a form of transformative recreation but an intuitive ability to choose the right substitute in the target language. Finally, translation is comparable to a change of clothes. Language is a dress that can be thrown over certain content. When a text is translated, it receives a new grammatical outfit. As in travesty, the dress has to be new, but the content must remain the same. Koller rightly suggests that content and form can never be clearly separated because thought and linguistic garb are inseparably interwoven. Unfortunately, he does not consider any metaphors for this specific view of translation. One whole section considers the fundamental impossibility of translation and the different metaphors used to express this. Three are particularly telling. The metaphor which casts translation as the underside of an embroidered Flemish tapestry, from Cervantes’s Don Quixote, illustrates “categorical impossibility”. The metaphor of the “belles infidèles” – the most beautiful women are generally the least faithful – illustrates the impossibility of being true to the content, while producing an aesthetically pleasing translation. Finally, translations are trees transplanted in foreign soil. They will inevitably lose their leaves and blossoms. Translation is incapable of truly rendering the context of the original. Koller disregards any metaphors describing the inevitable changes occurring in translation as part of the process of recreation. The final section of the chapter focuses on the utility of metaphors for the field of translation studies. As in his initial comments, Koller stresses the limited relevance of metaphors, criticizing, however, theoretical positions that stress their complete lack of importance. Metaphors are characteristic of earlier stages of translation theory and are generally dealt with in connection to literary texts. As midwives of thought, images can steer reflection in certain directions and trigger insights into aspects that have not yet been conceptually and systematically analysed. Furthermore, images have a synthetic function: they can help one to visualize the overall issue

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before it has been thoroughly explored in conceptual terms. Nonetheless, their function remains “strictly pre-scientific”, and must, therefore, be subordinated to scientific thinking. Examining Koller’s view of metaphor and the collection of metaphors for translation he brings together in his chapter, one cannot help noticing the fragility of both metaphor and translation. In fact, inadvertently perhaps, Koller emphasizes simultaneously the conceptual limitations of metaphor and the shortcomings of translation. As already pointed out in Chapter 1, such parallelisms are not accidental, but reveal a fundamental connection between the two terms. The very choice of a specific metaphor often articulates an implicit point of view much better than a more literal use of language would. Let me explain this with an example taken from Koller’s book. At the beginning of the chapter, Koller describes the use of metaphors as a characteristic of pre-scientific forms of inquiry. In these “early phases”, he argues, metaphors tend to be used excessively, especially in the humanities, but less so in the natural sciences. With growing scientificity, however, the use of metaphors “steadily declines”. To describe this early phase, he uses the German word üppig, “lush”, suggesting a plant-like character of metaphors and the dangerous possibility of rampant over-abundance. This implies a clear-cut difference between metaphoric and conceptual thinking, which is untenable in view of cognitive linguistics. Add to this the fact that metaphors narrow the distance between the sciences and the humanities and fundamentally question disciplinary boundaries. Limitative views of metaphor highlighting fuzziness, lack of rigour and an unchecked tendency towards proliferation can be traced back to a fundamental distrust of metaphor in the Western tradition, which has two main reasons. Metaphors are part of figurative language and as such belong to the world of images. Western society nurtured from its very inception a deep-seated sense of distrust of images. The refusal of imagery is central to the Bible and many philosophical works, like Plato’s Republic. Pictures, for Plato, suggest a similarity to the object they represent, but have no reality of their own. They are mere optical illusions. Pictures are like the fleeting visions in a dream, like ephemeral shadows or passing reflections on water. The second reason is metaphor’s early link to rhetoric. Plato condemned rhetoric as an art of illusion and deception. “Before becoming futile,” writes Paul Ricœur, “rhetoric was dangerous … Every condemnation of metaphor as sophism shares in the condemnation of sophistry itself” (Ricœur 2003: 10). I will now turn to a critical overview of the different theoretical perspectives on the function and form of metaphors for translation that can be found in the textcorpus. Section 2 documents both the predominantly positive assessment of translation metaphors and the persistence of sporadic doubts with regard to their scientificity.

2 The Relevance of Metaphors for Translation in Translation Studies According to Natalia Teplova, any description of translation inevitably leads to the use of metaphors. The discipline of translation studies, whose very name constitutes

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a metaphor, cannot escape this epistemological specificity (Teplova 2009: 247). In his account of the use of figurative language in Tudor translation theory and practice, Massimiliano Morini also emphasizes the sheer necessity of metaphors when it comes to an appropriate description of translation. Attempts at defining and systematizing translation always call for figurative language, for the nature of the process seems too fleeting to be described through the naked syntax of denotation … If closely read, they reveal deep-seated notions on the nature and process of translation. (Morini 2006: 35) In her essay focusing on the main conceptual metaphors of translation in Western European culture, Maria Tymoczko defines metaphor as a fundamental feature of language and thought, an indispensable key to important aspects of translation, and as central to any consideration of the metalanguage of translation studies. This is of great consequence for the work of the single translator and the discipline of translation studies at large. Self-reflective attention to metaphors is … important in academic fields because metaphors often operate on multiple levels simultaneously in a discipline … Dominant metaphors formative of modern Western European views of translation, for example, have shaped governing norms for the practice of translation since the end of the Middle Ages. (Tymoczko 2010: 137) Jeffrey M. Green (2001), whose main interest as a professional translator is the work of the translator him/herself, argues for the necessity of metaphors in translations. Translators are often treated unfairly, and even sophisticated readers do not always know what their work is actually about. Metaphors can vividly explain the process of translation and show the difficulties, the failures and the successes of the artistic craft of translation. In a similar vein, Alex Gross (1991) criticizes writing on translation as too theoretical and complex. Metaphors can facilitate the understanding of the intricacies of translation, making it more accessible to a wider audience. Enrico Monti (2010) emphasizes that theoretical reflection cannot do without metaphors. In his description of the establishment of translation studies as a scientific domain, though, he suggests that the use of metaphors of translation belongs to earlier phases of the discipline. Interestingly enough, he uses a description echoing Koller’s earlier appraisal: translation has elicited “wild imagery” on the part of earlier practitioners and theoreticians. Metaphoric creativity, however, progressively diminished as the discourse on translation slowly began to acquire independent status. This decrease speeded up the moment translation studies began establishing itself as a full-grown scientific discipline. Metaphors, thus, seem to lack the conceptual capacities to create a scientific discourse. The problem with such a narrative is that it creates a false opposition between an early metaphoric and a late conceptual

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stage. Even if the choice, use and frequency of metaphors in a discursive field vary in accordance with its development, such a view is very problematic. Scientific disciplines do not develop by discarding metaphor altogether. Modifications in the use of predominant metaphors generally announce paradigmatic shifts in the theory itself. However, these shifts do not simply end metaphor-like processes, but lead to changes in the metaphorical metalanguage. A growing number of translation scholars have recently turned to the study of metaphors of translation precisely because a radical overall theoretical change has been taking place in the field of translation studies. Nicholas Round (2005) emphasizes the fact that something about the translating experience inevitably calls for metaphor. However, he remains sceptical of translation as a metaphor and metaphors of translation in general. Round also criticizes the use of spatial metaphors of translation in the fields of cultural and postcolonial studies, pointing out that single metaphors are not sufficient to explain complex phenomena. The existing assortment of traditional metaphors is unconvincing and leaves the picture as it is. So where does all this plethora of translation imagery get us? … We badly need ways of discriminating among all these metaphors, in terms … of their … broader or more specific applicability, their central or peripheral relevance, their cognitive force or lack of it. (Round 2005: 57–8; emphasis added) As Natalia Teplova also argued, one has to move beyond simple compilation (see Delisle 2006) and proceed to an analytic and synthetic study of the issue (Teplova 2009: 248). In the final part of his essay, Round attempts such a discriminating view by classifying metaphors for translation into two main groups: the source-oriented re-group and the target-oriented trans-group, which stand in a ratio of 2:1 to each other. Round’s starting point is not a catalogue of metaphors, as one would expect, but a list of words used in connection with translation in theoretical texts of the twentieth century. Two opposed ideas dominate the field of translation: imitation of something pre-existing, on the one hand, and appropriation and bringing across, on the other. These two groups do not imply simple polarization, but a view of translation poised between the two opposites. Interestingly enough, Theo Hermans (2002) interprets the same two metaphors not as opposites, but as the two sides of an integrated overall view of translation that has deep roots in Western society. In fact, imitation and bridge building form a metaphorical pair, in which the two metaphors interconnect on different levels. I will return to Hermans’s analysis in Section 3. According to Michael Hanne (2006), both metaphor and translation are characterized by imperfection and partiality because they attempt to link two completely different semantic domains. This, however, also has positive consequences: one never supposes that translations and metaphors are exhaustive or final. Metaphor is “pre-theoretical”, but it plays an important role in the development of philosophical and scientific thought. On the way to a fully developed theory, fresh metaphors

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allow for striking new insights into old problems. Innovative thinkers need to try out different metaphors, each one highlighting a different aspect. The use of diverse metaphors can, in fact, help one to gain a better understanding of a phenomenon. One single metaphor is generally not enough to explain the full complexity of a specific subject matter. When moving from one metaphorical formulation to another, the different facets of the phenomenon are successively illuminated. One should, furthermore, be wary of “grand metaphors” as they can lead to limiting and unproductive interpretations of reality. Hanne compares the business of doing translation with the business of making metaphors, pointing to the fact that both processes involve crucial choices. In choosing any one metaphor rather than another … we draw attention to just one thread of the translating process. Only with the assistance of the full range of metaphors available can we begin to describe the extraordinary complex and creative work of the translator as writer. (Hanne 2006: 221) Hanne’s plea for the use of different metaphors to explain the multidimensionality of translation is very much to the point, as Section 3 will show. However, it falls short of the interpretative potential of single metaphors, as Ben van Wyke’s critical redefinition of the clothing metaphor and Yotam Benshalom’s meticulous analysis of the acting metaphor cogently prove. In fact, even traditional metaphors emphasizing the secondary reproductive nature of translation can be revived when the focus shifts from failure and insufficiency to generative power and inner complexity, and when a dialogue with the discursive field from which the metaphor originates is engaged in. These considerations also apply to the spatial metaphor of translation, which I will consider in more detail in Chapter 3. Van Wyke situates the dressmaking metaphor in a broader philosophical frame, testing its relationship to Western concepts of truth, in particular to Plato’s theory of representation, which interprets language and the contingent world of objects as a mere manifestation of timeless ideas. In this context, translation operates at a “third remove”. It is the imitation of an imitation, a garment clothing a body, which in turn hosts an eternal soul. However, from a post-Nietzschean point of view emphasizing the constructedness of reality, the dressmaking metaphor assumes a completely different meaning. The clear-cut opposition between original and translation breaks down. Translation becomes just another veil, covering the many “veils that participate in naming the original” (van Wyke 2010: 38). Van Wyke’s analysis also explores the external systematicity of metaphors, showing that metaphors of translation do not operate on their own, but are always “intertwined with countless other metaphors” (ibid.: 21). The acting metaphor traditionally stressed the imitative subservient role of translation with regard to the original. Yet this is only one way of looking at it. In fact, as Benshalom argues, the general similarity between actors and translators can be developed into more specific insights.

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The area covered by the current uses of the performance metaphor is thus truly wide. The potential of the acting metaphor to benefit the field of translation, though, is still far from being fulfilled. It has yet to be discussed in an orderly, comparative and critical manner, and most importantly, with reference to existing acting theories … Applying acting theory to the practice of translation may hopefully give translators new, innovative tools … [The] potential for new terminology is perhaps the most interesting consequence of the deliberate application of [the] acting metaphor to the concept of translation. (Benshalom 2010: 51–2) To achieve this, Benshalom suggests an interpretative practice that is very close to Max Black’s exploration of the system of associated commonplaces between the primary and the secondary subject. “General concepts, such as ‘translation’ and ‘performance’, must be divided into minute, comparable sub-terms, creating a layer of compatibility, so they can be paralleled in a meaningful way” (ibid.: 52). In his analysis, which focuses on the internal systematicity of the acting metaphor, Benshalom discusses how different aspects of performance can be mapped onto the process of translation and the work of the translator. Acting can help one to understand the performative state of mind both from the point of view of continuity and spontaneity. Translation is often described as a repetitive, circular process of continuous refinement and retouching. A performance-oriented approach to translation, however, suggests “an ever-progressive line of translational attention, curving its way gradually and … intuitively between source and target texts” (ibid.: 54). Spontaneity depends on subconscious elements, which are the result of different parallel mental processes. Actors can rehearse sustained spontaneity by developing their skills. Similarly, translators can experiment with different working rhythms, rehearse first drafts of translation under less restrictive conditions or perform posttranslational rehearsals. In this specific case, the translator goes through his text several times in an attempt to relive its creation process. Finally, there are strategies of impersonation touching upon the translator’s emotional attitude and his/her relation to the text. As Hermans and Stecconi (2002) forcefully argued, figurative language and the use of metaphors should be a key subject of inquiry in translation studies. A systematic analysis of metaphors of translation would increase theoretical and cross-cultural selfconsciousness, reveal implicit values and help in understanding past and present conceptualizations of translation. It would help one to cultivate the awareness of one’s own historicity and promote an exploration of different figurations and possible alternatives, highlighting the complexity and diversity of translation through the ages and the contingency of present modes of thinking about translation. It would also encourage rethinking the metalanguage of translation in order to initiate a shift in terminology. A change of metaphors can open up new ways of thinking and allow for insights into the construction of translation as a cultural category. This would also draw

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attention to the strength and persistence of traditional thinking on translation, which owes a lot of its influence to the fact that founding metaphors still do not receive the critical attention they deserve. In this sense, the predominant metaphors used to conceptualize translation should be critically re-examined, showing their limitations and questioning their authority. Instead of metaphorically defining translation in terms of a reproductive activity, translation theory should argue for an understanding of translation as creative text production (Resch 1998: 335). Raising the issue and “asking questions of this kind does not immediately help the day to day practice of professional translating. Its use lies elsewhere … It demonstrates that the current way of thinking and speaking about translation is never the only possible way” (Hermans and Stecconi 2002: 14). To sum up: in the field of translation studies, metaphor is presently viewed as an indispensable means of reflection and a common device of scientific analysis. Some authors, however, still question its role in the formation of a full-blown scientific discourse on translation. Clear evidence of the shift that has occurred in translation studies in the last few years with regard to metaphor theory is St. André’s collection of essays Thinking through Translation with Metaphors (2010c). In their analysis of the importance of metaphors for translation, practically all contributors make use of the most recent theoretical insights of metaphor theory. Metaphors of translation do not generally operate on their own, but in pairs or interconnected clusters (Tymoczko 2007). This explains their tenacity and effectiveness in structuring specific views of translation over longer periods. Instead of simple compilations of metaphors, one should aim for an overall picture, looking for implicit links between the different metaphors of translation. A survey map of the main metaphors of translation in the West should explicitly call attention to these connections. Finally, traditional metaphors of translation can be revitalized, activating their hidden interpretative potential. In Section 3 I will consider the inner and outer complexity of metaphors and the ways in which these two aspects interact in order to create an overall coherent picture of translation.

3 Metaphorical Levels and Metaphor Clusters As Lakoff and Johnson suggested, metaphors possess both internal and external systematicity and coherence. They are internally organized as multilayered systems of interrelated levels and externally as clusters that are coherent by virtue of having a connecting structure. These two aspects interact in many ways, projecting vertical (internal systematicity) and horizontal (external systematicity) networks of meaning that are connected to each other. I will illustrate these theoretical considerations in Sections 4 to 6 by means of concrete examples. Metaphors of translation are highly functional, articulating different levels of interpretation and their relationship to each other. The main aspects to be considered are the translation process, the figure and role of the translator, his/her relationship to the author, the relationship of source and target text, the possibility and impossibility

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of translation, the relationship to audience and target culture, the different stages of the translation process and the difficulties encountered (Morini 2006: 35). Hermans (2004: 119) distinguishes between the processual and the social aspect of translation, that is, the act of translation and its public recognition. The processual aspect is primarily discussed in mimetic (imitation, likeness, copy), transformative (recoding) and spatial metaphors (transportation, transference). Metaphors highlighting the social aspect of translation focus on translational rules, the role of the translator and the way translation is viewed in a certain historical and cultural context. Even if metaphors of translation generally focus on only one or a few of these aspects, the other related levels can be generally inferred. Thus, each metaphor organizes a coherent inner field of relationships between the different aspects. The same complexity and systematicity can be detected in metaphorical pairs and clusters, which are organized according to complementarity and similarity. The inner and outer systematicity of metaphors corroborate each other, by highlighting and hiding different aspects of the same phenomenon. Although metaphors of translation were traditionally used to promote a specific view of translation, some metaphors can be used for differing translation practices without deviating from their general meaning. The metaphor of following in someone else’s footsteps, for instance, allows for a differential reading. One can adhere as closely as possible to the heels of the author, follow at a certain distance or stray too far (Hermans 1985: 108–9). Hermans’s (2002) criticism of the mirror metaphor of equivalence as the traditional way of looking at translation is an excellent example of how different sets of metaphors and different levels of metaphoricity are connected to each other in order to create inner and outer coherence by pointing to different but complementary aspects of the same target domain. Hermans distinguishes between two main functions of the representational view of translation: usefulness and reliability. We cannot do without translation and have to make sure that it works properly. By highlighting these characteristics, the metaphor forcefully hides others – imaginative transformation or recreation, for instance. These aspects are not only hidden from view, but recast as a problem to be avoided: a threat of potential failure and a fundamental lack of faithfulness to the original. These initial choices have a direct impact on the different metaphorical levels. Proper translation must be reliable and the translator a trustworthy intermediary transmitting the original message essentially intact. The translation must resemble the original in all its relevant aspects. This double complementary function calls for two interrelated sets of metaphors, which are part of the arsenal of Western translation metaphors. The “enabling function”, as Hermans calls it, removes obstacles, provides access and makes communication possible. The related metaphors as far as the act itself is concerned are bridge building, opening doors and ferrying across. The translator is seen as a relay station and a conduit, and in minor part also as a transformer. The second set of metaphors comments upon the ways in which the enabling function is achieved. The associated metaphors are reflection, replica, reproduction, duplicate portrait,

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perfect imitation, faithful copy, mirror image and transparent pane of glass. Even if these metaphors seem to focus on the level of the text alone, they are actually touching upon all levels of metaphoricity at the same time. Furthermore, equivalence and transparency are intimately connected to each other. The translation and the translator should not stand in the way of the reader and the original, but become totally unobtrusive and invisible. The reader is expected to trust the accuracy of the translator and the perfect likeness of the translation she/he is supposed to bring about. The translator is defined as a painter reproducing through mimesis the original work as well as he can. Ideally, he is supposed to produce a mirror image of the original. He is carrying the original over the intermediate space between the different languages in order to deliver it directly into the hands of the reader. The idea of faithfulness also introduces a gender aspect. In submitting to the original, the translator assumes a secondary feminine role. The purely reproductive role of the translation process recasts the translator as a humble servant. The trust placed in the translator depends on the likeness of his translation. The easier the transfer is achieved, the smoother the passage, the more truthful will be the translation. Hermans’s analysis shows the double systematicity of translation metaphors: the inner layering of process, actor, text and audience and the outer coherence created through a dense associative web linking the inner levels of metaphoricity of the single metaphors to each other. The invisible translator producing a perfect copy of the original is directly connected to the smooth self-abetting trustworthy translator who carries the translation safely across the divide between the two languages. Careful crafting and cautious transportation need each other for the translation to be truly successful. This example fittingly demonstrates that specific views of translation are not based on single isolated metaphors but on whole clusters of interrelated multilayered metaphor sets. This self-sustaining web-like structure of metaphor clusters makes it very difficult to eradicate tradition-hallowed views and to open up the field to new innovative sets of metaphors. The traditional conception of translation as a subservient secondary activity has “struck deep roots in our thinking”, papering “over the cracks” that threaten it from inside and outside. It is necessary to make these gaps larger and more visible “so that the complex and unsettling nature of translation can come into view” (Hermans 2002: 5). I will now consider some of the important source domains of the metaphor of translation in the West, focusing on their complex interrelatedness.

4 Source Domains for Translation Metaphors in the West In this and Sections 5 and 6 I will concentrate on the source domains that have received the most attention in the text-corpus presented at the outset of this chapter. I have opted for five distinct domains: art/craft, nature/body, space, gender and power. Because of its particular importance in the metaphorical metalanguage of Western translation theory, I will consider the space domain separately (see Chapter 3, Sections 1 and 2). Given the scope and aim of this book, some source domains

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could not be taken into consideration. Among them are the monetary metaphor (Morini 2006: 46ff.) and the visual metaphor of light and shadow (Hermans 1985: 116; Morini 2006: 42–7), which can be related to the imitation metaphor and the inside/outside opposition. The typology elaborated in the next sections will serve as a backdrop for translation metaphors used in the East. Figure 2.1 is an attempt at visualizing some of the cross-domain relationships in the Western field of metaphors for translation. It takes up the suggestion to move beyond simple lists and compilations of metaphors discussed in Section 2, and complements Hermans’s analysis of the equivalence/bridge building pair in Section 3. For each domain, I have added a short list of keywords, some of which are discussed in the following sections in view of their interrelatedness. I have italicized some others to point to possible cross-domain connections. In some cases, it becomes difficult to assign single keywords to one domain only. The inside/outside imagery, for instance, has been generally discussed in the context of the art/craft domain, but it could also be interpreted in a spatial sense. This goes to prove that one has to think of metaphors for translation not in terms of single domains but always in terms of cross-domain interaction.

Art / Craft

Space

imitation / equivalence following in someone’s footsteps copy / mirror / reverse side of tapestry painter / composer / musician / improvisor actor / performing artist / editor / adapter dressmaker / changing clothes body and clothing / inside and outside translator as writer / creativity magician / translation as illusion

transference / transport / relocation / carrying across intermediary / go-between / double agent bridge building / border crossing smuggling contraband goods journey / gateway / threshold target / source river / strait / windows / doors conduit / container pouring liquid from a vessel into another

Translation

Nature / Body

Gender

organic / physiological seeds / growing / transplanting flowering in another language / surviving / afterlife blood transfusion / transplanting organs impregnate the translator or the translation cannibalism / feeding / digesting body and soul / metempsychosis / transubstantiation bastard / mongrel / blendling

masculinity / femininity husband and wife fidelity / infidelity / chastity / paternity beautiful or faithful: ‘Les belles infidèles’ male authority / feminine submissiveness mother / midwife / father / foster-father seduction / abuse / rape illegitimate offspring

Power appropriation / submission / the captive original humble servant / slave / rival / master colonial perspective / subordination / bondage passive subservient translator / cannibal / parricide struggle / competition / contest advocate / spokesman / honest broker / friend ethical fidelity to author and source text

FIGURE 2.1

Source domains for translation metaphors in the West

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The arrows pointing towards the centre represent the relationship between source and target domain. The other arrows illustrate part of the multiple possible links between the different source domains. Ideally, not only the domains next to each other but also those facing each other are connected. There is a second diagram (Figure 4.1) illustrating the use of the metaphor of translation across the disciplines at the beginning of Chapter 4. In most cases, cross-domain connections strengthen the argumentative effectiveness of a certain view of translation. Two examples will illustrate this point. The idea of moving across a middle space connects the nature/body domain to the space domain by joining transplanting to transport and transference. Translations are uprooted trees replanted in foreign soil, organs transplanted into foreign bodies. This cross-domain connection enhances the idea of a fundamental spatial rift between original and translation by establishing a physiological connection between the original and its environment. The idea of submission connects the gender to the power domain, stressing the femininity and the servile character of translations and translators with regard to the original. In some other cases, however, cross-domain connections can open up the possibility of a fundamental reinterpretation of the metaphor. For instance, if we interpret the metaphor of imitation as digestion, the transformative dimension of translation comes into view, recasting the role of the translator in terms of self-sufficiency and creativity.

5 The Art/Craft and the Nature/Body Domains The art/craft source domain has received a lot of attention from translation scholars (D’hulst 1993; Green 2001; Gross 1991; Hermans 1985, 2004; Hermans and Stecconi 2002; Morini 2006). The two main interconnected levels of interpretation associated with this domain are the relationship between original and translation and the role of the translator. Translators are like painters, musicians, composers, actors and other performing artists (Green 2001). As a musician, the translator keeps the rhythm, improvises or recomposes a piece from scratch. Sometimes, s/he plays all these roles at the same time. With this comes also a moment of illusion and deceit. The translator is a magician producing a mirror that enables him/her to deceive his/her audience. Green draws a line between the faithful self-effacing and the inventive interventive translator and at the same time points to possible intersections between translation and art. Drawing a connection to the gender domain, he distinguishes between mothers and midwives. Authors generate their own offspring while translators help bring somebody else’s child into the world. The original artist is more creative, because s/he possesses a greater degree of freedom. The translator is a lesser artist comparable to an editor or a musical arranger and adapter. His/her work requires knowledge, the application of skill, as well as a measure of intuition and the ability to reach an empathic understanding of the material. The understanding of a translator is closer to that of the artist than of the scholar. This, however, holds true only for literary translation. Translators have to identify closely with the

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author of the original and need an affinity for the material they translate (Hermans 1985: 125). In his historical overview of metaphors of translation in the Western European tradition from antiquity to modern times, Hermans (1985) focuses on the relationship between imitation and translation as it was developed in classical Rome in connection with the appropriation of Greek culture. Imitation (Morini 2006: 55–8) is an ambivalent notion as it implies both submission and transformative recreation. In classical Rome, however, translation was considered a lesser, debased form of imitation. The translator had to submit wilfully to the restrictions imposed on his liberties. This clearly set him apart from the artist. In the course of history, the metaphor served a variety of purposes, but interpretations suggesting inferiority were much more frequent (Hermans 2004: 122). Hermans (1985: 105) distinguishes between three different forms of imitation: dissimulative (concealing the traces of the original), agonistic (competition, racing, wrestling, surpassing the opponent) and transformative (bees transmuting pollen into honey, the likeness of parent to child) (Hermans 2004: 119). The metaphor of imitation can be linked to the space and to the nature/body domain. These connections articulate two completely different visions of the mimetic process. Imitation was compared to the act of following in someone’s footsteps. This articulates a dependence in the chronological, logical and hierarchical sense: the translation comes after the original, is derived from it and articulates a power relation of stronger to weaker, of master to servant (Hermans 1985: 104–5). Imitation, however, was also viewed as a form of appropriation. In 1549 the French poet Joachim du Bellay (1522–60) suggested that French poets should imitate the Romans who had enriched their language by devouring the Greek authors, digesting them and converting them into nourishment and blood (Hermans 2004: 119). In 1946, the French ethnographer Roger Bastide signalled a cross-cultural connection between the nationalist agenda of the French literary group La Pléiade, to which du Bellay belonged, and Oswald de Andrade’s Manifesto Antropófago (Cannibal Manifesto) published in 1928. The digestive analogy, also used in German romanticism (Casanova 2008: 87), represents a different understanding of the metaphor of imitation. Another aspect of the imitation metaphor of translation is inside/outside imagery, which operates in the context of the conduit metaphor, suggesting that linguistic form is the outward cover of an inner, transportable meaning and that translatability is the possibility of conveying an invariant meaning across a middle space (Hermans 1985: 120–1). This metaphor establishes a whole series of cross-domain links. Translations are windows and doors. They are like precious gems in cheap wooden boxes, like treasures to be extracted from the bowels of the earth or liquid poured from one vessel into another. The inside/outside aspect is also linked to the dressmaking metaphor, which articulates a dualistic agenda opposing the essential to the superfluous, sense and meaning to sound and words, soul to body and the body to clothes (Morini 2006: 36). In this sense, the change of dress is often associated with cheapening and degradation, pointing to that which is irremediably lost in the process of translation.

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Morini discusses the dressmaking metaphor from an historical point of view. He shows that a fundamental shift occurred in English culture in the late sixteenth century. A new patriotic feeling of superiority superseded the earlier subjection to other continental languages, above all French. In earlier accounts, translators were forced to substitute the rich and sumptuous clothes of the original with the poor and base wardrobe of the English idiom. This situation was radically reversed. The English garment was still considered plain and simple, but this was now interpreted as an advantage rather than a shortcoming. This reinterpretation of the metaphor was strengthened by a connection to the gender domain. Plainness had become a sign of great value, “not to be lightly swapped with the fickle, effeminate elegance of foreigners” (Morini 2006: 41). Around 1766 Johann Gottfried von Herder used the dressmaking metaphor in terms of appropriation and power. Foreign texts must enter France dressed up in French clothing, like prisoners who are forced to acquire French fashion and custom (Hermans 2004: 123). In 1603 John Florio – interweaving the art/craft with the gender domain – compared his translation of Montaigne’s Essays to a child born from the head of the author, adopted and raised by the translator, a loving foster-father who put him into English clothes and taught him to speak English (van Wyke 2010: 24). I will now turn to the nature/body domain. The nature/body domain emphasizes the organic quality of translation, the living nature of texts and their rootedness in a specific cultural and historical soil. As with the metaphors of the art/craft domain, nature and body metaphors can argue for both the secondary nature of translation and the subservience of the translator, as well as for emancipation and creativity. Translations are plants that cannot survive for long in a different soil and climate. From the point of view of the target culture, however, transplanting is an enrichment. Translations are also compared to blood transfusions or the transplanting of organs, highlighting their ambivalent vivifying character (Hanne 2006). Walter Benjamin (2000) described translation in terms of a “hidden seed” that would “ripen” to elucidate his notion of the life and “afterlife” (Überleben) of works of art. The notion of afterlife presupposes that both the original and the translation have to be considered something living and that in the process of translation the original undergoes a renewal and a transformation. Thanks to the workings of translation, the original attains its ever renewed plentiful flowering and a potentially everlasting afterlife in succeeding generations. This notion can be linked to the metaphors of transubstantiation and metempsychosis (Hermans 2007, Johnston 2000). A metaphor linking the nature/body domain to the gender domain sees the translator as someone who is impregnated with the essence of the original or who actively impregnates the translation by breathing his vital spirit into it. The translator experiences labour pains until he gives birth to a new creature (Morini 2006: 48–9). Metaphors of fecundation are interwoven with metaphors of absorption and digestion (Martín de León 2010: 97–101). Chamberlain emphasized the gender dimension of this metaphor and its reliance on a patriarchal model of authority

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(2001: 95). The feeding and digesting metaphor, however, positions itself outside the gender opposition by relying on the oral rather than the genital principle. Much has been written on Brazilian cannibalism (Guldin 2008; Vieira 1994, 1999), a metaphor combining three different domains – nature/body, art/craft and power. The polyvalent cannibalistic image has been a major cultural metaphor, as well as an exemplary mode of symbolic struggle against neocolonial dependency in Brazilian culture. The cannibal does not deny otherness outright, but devours it in order to transform and absorb it. Through cannibalistic translation, the new text becomes an original of its own. The translator is a creator in his/her own right, negating any debt s/he might have contracted towards the first act of creation. Another metaphor of this domain is that of the bastard or mongrel. In his lecture On the Different Methods of Translating, delivered to the Royal Academy of Science in Berlin on 24 June 1813, the German philosopher and theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher describes translations as hybrid bodies resulting from the blending of languages foreign to each other and compares the work of the translator to the unnatural movements of a sideshow performer. In 1680, in his criticism of literalism, Dryden had already described translation in bodily terms as a “dancing on ropes with fettered legs”, warning of the danger of falling and breaking one’s neck. Schleiermacher uses a similar analogy. A translator trying to stay as close to the foreign language as to his own and bending his mother tongue to the foreign idiom must appear stiff and unnatural. He should aim at generating offspring that are the “pure effigy” of their paternal lineage instead of bastards (Blendlinge). Anthony Pym (1995) pointed to the polysemy and ambivalence of the German word, which can also be associated with vagrants and travelling acrobats, suggesting a blurring of clear-cut borders.

6 The Gender and the Power Domains The gender domain of translation metaphors has been part of the field from the very beginning. However, it has only lately received the critical attention it deserves thanks to a feminist perspective bent on exposing its sexist dimension. The gender duality reproduces and naturalizes other dualities that are active in the field of translation. In this sense, it acts with the same ideological force as the nature/ body metaphor, supplying natural evidence for power differentials that look at first sight unquestionable and self-sustaining. The male side is associated with the unique, primary, creative, active, dominant position of the author, the female side, on the other hand, with the repeatable, secondary, passive, subservient position of the translator. The gender metaphor describes the process of translation as a sexual act. George Steiner’s (1998: 313f.) translator aggressively invades and penetrates the text to extract and incorporate its meaning and re-establishes the balance between the two sides in an enactment of reciprocity. Gayatri Spivak pleads for love and feminine surrender to the source text (2000: 400). The metaphor of the “belles infidèles” originated in France and dominated the field of translation from the mid-seventeenth to the late eighteenth century. It was

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based on the idea that translations were either plain and faithful wives or beautiful and treacherous women, but never both at the same time (Hermans 1985, 2004; Resch 1998). Hanne (2006: 216) ironically commenting on this simple sexist duality, points out that only a beautiful translation can be truly faithful to the original. In her seminal paper about the gender metaphoric of translation, Lori Chamberlain (2000) distinguishes between two irreconcilable forms of fidelity: the source-oriented fidelity of a male author–translator to the original female text and the targetoriented fidelity to his own feminine mother tongue. In the first case, the translator must avoid making the new text too beautiful, lest he betray the original. In the second, as the substitute father of the new text to be born through translation, he must be true to his mother tongue in order to avoid producing illegitimate offspring, thus protecting the target language from any vilification. These two coexisting roles can in some cases enter into open antagonism with each other: the call for fidelity to the mother tongue, for instance, can justify abuse, rape or pillage of the other language and the translated text. In the imaginary triangle of author, text and translator the latter must either usurp the author’s role or appear as a dangerous seducer. In both cases, issues of paternity and the importance of the reputation of a feminized original text are absolutely essential. Another, perhaps even more important aim of this discourse is to assign the danger of infidelity and the questionable role of the seducer to the translational side alone, so as to make it practically impossible for the original and its author to be in any way guilty of infidelity. As Rosemary Arrojo (1999) pointed out, the asymmetrical gender relation implied here is closely related to the power divide at work in colonial situations. In this view the translator is not only equated with a woman because of the allegedly reproductive side of his/her activity, but also with the slave and the subject of colonization, both forced to live a secondary, imitative existence dominated by the values of the motherland. In sexual terms: the inaugural narratives of colonial settings tend to stress the vulnerability of the weak feminine exploited nature of the subaltern culture and the complementary maleness and invulnerability of the dominant one. The relation between the two is conceived in terms of rape and violence. The gender metaphor is based on a sexualization of text and language, with imitative equivalence and fidelity complementing each other. It expresses anxiety about paternity and the legitimacy of the progeny in terms of authorship and authority. This directly links the metaphor to the power domain. Power metaphors signalling hierarchic differentials are all-pervasive in the field of translation (Morini 2006: 51–5). Gavronsky (1977) divides translators into two groups: on the one hand, the submissive servile translator, and on the other, the aggressive conqueror and parricide whom he equates with the figure of the cannibal, creating a link between the nature/body and the power domain. The cannibalistic translator capturing and raping the original is opposed to a translator considering himself as child and rival of a father creator. Gender and power metaphors are connected in many ways (Hanne 2006). Joseph Farrell, combining the power and space domain, describes the translator as a servant of many masters who is unsure of his allegiances. He operates in border areas

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(Farrell 1996: 45), smuggling contraband goods, which will inevitably be damaged in the crossing (Tyulenev 2010). The tug of war between author and translator can lead to conflicting readings: the translator is a slave and hired labourer on another man’s plantation (Hermans 1985: 111); or he can take the original as a prisoner and lead its meaning away as a captive. Power metaphors encourage “us to think about translation in terms of power struggle: it is not a simple technical process for achieving equivalence but a conflict or contest, a question of ‘bind or be bound,’ ‘chain or be chained,’ capture or be taken captive” (Robinson 1997: 56). The very policy of translating is traditionally viewed in hierarchical and dualistic terms. The source/target opposition entails the master/servant pair of author and translator spawning all other images of subordination in the different source domains. In this sense, the power domain, along with the space domain, is perhaps the most fundamental and pervasive of the domains discussed here. In Section 7, the last section, I will discuss the cross-cultural dimension of metaphors for translation by focusing on a series of essays written by scholars from India, Japan and China. Their contribution will round off the picture drawn in the previous sections, pointing to blind spots in the metaphorization of translation in the West.

7 Metaphors for Translation in India, Japan and China In their programmatic introduction to Decentering Translation Studies: India and Beyond, Rita Kothari and Judy Wakabayashi mention three major differences between Western and non-Western attitudes towards translation, which have important consequences for the choice of specific metaphors. In non-Western cultures, oral texts were often deemed more important than written ones. Furthermore, due to different epistemological bases, religious texts did not possess the same sacrality as in the West, where the biblical paradigm helped enforce the duality of original and translation. These two factors were responsible for the alleged fixity and superiority of the original. The prevalence of sub-national units, finally, prevented the creation of a direct connection between language, nation and national territory, which in the West strengthened the uniqueness and insularity of the single national languages. The view of translation as transportation and transference across a border or middle space has also to do with the notion of languages as discrete countable systems separated from each other by clear-cut borders. This specifically Western conception is absent in India, where languages belong to a continuum: The movement between them was so effortless that it was no movement at all. Perhaps that is why Indian words for translation generally do not have a suggestion of “carrying across” or “migration” … Largely monolingual cultures are more likely to be aware of translation as a distinct act and more active in theorising it. (Kothari and Wakabayashi 2009: 13)

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G. Gopinathan (2006) points out that in ancient India no theory of translation was developed because a clear distinction between writing and translating never existed. Translational practice, furthermore, occurred only between Indian languages. These two facts worked against dualistic conceptions of translation. The same holds true for the metaphor of the shadow, which was used to describe translations of ancient Sanskrit spiritual texts into modern Indian languages. In the West, the metaphor of the shadow belongs to the wider conceptual metaphor TRUTH IS LIGHT, signalling the fundamental metaphysical subsidiarity of any translation with respect to the original. In the Indian tradition, however, the metaphor was interpreted in more ambivalent terms. The idea of translation as “shadow” means not only that a translation should follow its original but also that, like a shadow, depending on the intensity and angle of the light falling in, a translation may assume a form different from that of the original in accordance with changing circumstances and the translator’s interpretation. (Gopinathan 2006: 236) Harish Trivedi extends the significance of the metaphor by suggesting that it could also be interpreted as if one language were the shadow of the other (2006: 104). Contrary to the Western view, these interpretations emphasize the complementarity of languages and the importance of the point of view of the translator. Trivedi adds two more reasons for the absence of the Western notion of translation in Indian literary theory up to the nineteenth century, when the pervasive colonial presence started to make itself felt in all cultural domains. Literary production, to which translation also belonged, was conceived as a collaborative and collective activity in which little value was placed on individuality and originality. In the West, the originality and authority of an isolated creative individual are closely linked to each other, vouching for the unique value of the original. For long stretches of time, furthermore, in the elite literary circles all major Indian languages were mutually understandable. There was therefore no reason for a sustained practice of translation. “This history of non-translation is in its own way remarkable … It presents a starkly different historical model for translation studies to contemplate” (ibid.: 106). To highlight the differences between Western and Indian conceptions of “translation” Trivedi discusses a series of metaphors from contemporary translation activity, emphasizing the fact that, contrary to the English “translation”, most Indian languages possess many different terms that can be used interchangeably. Rupantar (change in form) articulates a translation that changes the form, but retains the aesthetic effect of the original text. Vivartana, which originally meant whirlpool, suggests the idea of a passage through different stages of existence. It is also a piece of rope that looks like a serpent. Translations are deceptive because they make the original look like something it is not. The difference from the Western view of illusion, however, is that not only the translation but the original itself is also an artifice.

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The Sanskrit word anuvad was used to describe the new practice of translation imported by the colonial powers. Originally, it meant repeating a word after someone, but without carrying any spatial connotation. In the late nineteenth century, the word acquired the new Western meaning of “translation” as a transfer between languages. The modern meaning of anuvad is a neologism “invented to cope with the English word ‘translation,’ it is, so to say, a translation of ‘translation’” (ibid.: 112–113). A fundamental difference, however, persists. “Translation” is based on a spatial metaphor, whereas anuvad, in the sense of repetition, is fundamentally a temporal metaphor. The Western obsession with the spatial dimension of translation and the irreducible duality of original and translation has blinded translation theory to the simple fact that translations also take place in time. Translation processes have been conceived as a jump over the abyss between the languages, but they could also have been viewed as a journey of a certain duration that can be divided into a series of interlocking and overlapping stages (Benshalom 2010; Morini 2006). I will return to this point in Chapter 3. In an attempt to explain the difference between the two readings of anuvad, Trivedi points to the dissimilar language regimes predominant in India and the West. In Europe, the “chauvinistic tradition of linguistic nationalism” originating around 1800 dominated the field of translation theory up the second half of the twentieth century. In India, with its Sanskrit hegemony uniting the huge subcontinent, “all that was required was for everyone to say the same thing in the same language, though not necessarily at the same time” (Trivedi 2006: 113). In her etymological exploration of the semantic domain of translation in Japanese culture, Wakabayashi (2009) stresses the importance of a theoretical approach, looking for the internal logic – the ontological architecture of a cultural system – and the terminological discontinuities and differences with respect to the Western tradition. Wakabayashi discusses three interrelated metaphorical layers focusing on their potential for inner discrepancies. Indigenous words describe translation as a softening and breaking down of the text in order to make it plain and understandable. It is literally a crushing with the teeth, which Wakabayashi links to the digestive metaphor of Brazilian anthropophagy. Another term focuses on sudden change and a flipping over of the original, comparable to the Old English wendan (Halverson 1999). The emphasis, however, is on “turning into”, rather than on “turning over”. This is a significant difference, because “turning into” implies that the original is not simply reproduced but changed into something different. The standard Japanese word for translation, hon΄yaku, originated in China. One specific reading of the term compares translation to the turning over of brocade, showing that the pattern on the reverse side is different. Contrary to the use of the same metaphor in Don Quixote, however, where the underside of an embroidered Flemish tapestry is used to prove the irreconcilable difference between original and translation, the Chinese metaphor stresses the importance of difference. Martha Cheung (2005, 2006, 2009) dealt extensively with metaphors of translation used in China and their relevance to the Western notion of translation. From

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ancient China to the diffusion of Buddhism, sutra translations were described in a variety of terms. Translations were compared to wine or milk diluted with water, chewed and regurgitated rice, cream losing its flavour before it is watered down or a dish that cannot be appreciated because the flavours are not mixed well enough. Translations are also like oranges transformed into tangerines, trees transplanted in new soil or fields full of weeds. They were described as the two mutually locking halves of a tally, water poured from vessel to vessel or a pearl losing its lustre before it is locked away. Even if most of these metaphors stress simplification and abridgement, translation is not considered inferior in itself as in the West. To translate means to (ex)change. Oranges are different from tangerines, yet bear essential similarities. Their taste, smell and leaves are pretty much the same. Even if a plant is growing in foreign soil, it will bear fruit. The different metaphors, most of which belong to the nature/body source domain were not used singularly, but in pairs and sets of three. These clusters either cumulate favourable or unfavourable points of view or oppose them to one another. Most metaphors are related to the process of translation and the relationship of source and target but not to the translator, possibly because translation, as in the Indian tradition, was not an individual affair but the work of a team. Translation is seen as a relational act, protean in form and nomadic in character. Because of their oral origins, sources were unstable and ephemeral and often did not exist as a material object in the early phases of sutra translation. Later texts were often fragmentary or heavily abridged. Reinterpreting the traditional Chinese notion of fanyi as a collective name, Cheung remaps in an exemplary way the meaning of translation, moving away from the fixity of a single term by stressing plurality and complexity. Like other Western scholars quoted in this chapter, Cheung conceives of translation in terms of a multilayered contradictory cluster of related images. We can start with a redrawing of the map of theoretical discourse on translation through a reconsideration of the terms “ji,” “xiang,” “Didi” and “yi.” These four terms, I would argue, form a network of inter-related meanings. Together, they represent the various early Chinese attempts to describe … to wrap around with metaphors … the activity now called “fanyi”. (Cheung 2005: 36) Translation is seen as transmission, as representation, as an act of knowing each other, as change and exchange, communication and a manifestation of truth. “As for the purpose and function of translation, they are plural and multiple, and they change with time and respond to different needs … I find the picture of an empty space circumscribed by four terms haunting to the imagination” (ibid.: 36–7). To conclude, metaphors for translation possess both internal and external systematicity. They project a series of interconnected metaphorical levels for the different aspects of the translation process (e.g., the role of the translator, the relationship of source and target text, the possibility or impossibility of translation). Metaphors for

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translation tend to form pairs or clusters. These are linked to each other either by complementarity or by cross-domain connections. In the first case, the metaphors differ from each other but cooperate towards the same end (e.g., the equivalence/ bridge-building pair). In the second case, cross-domain connections based on similarity enhance the overall effect of one aspect of translation (e.g., the feminine servile translator) or question the meaning of a metaphor (e.g., imitation as digestion). The traditional understanding of translation in the West relies on a dualistic agenda of clear-cut oppositions and stable borders. In the East, translation is based on a fluid continuum of interwoven similarities and differences. The predominance of the spatial metaphor of translation in Western culture endorsed the irreconcilable difference between original and translation. This restricted view of translation could be counteracted by focusing on Eastern metaphors for translation stressing change and the multiplicity of points of view (e.g., the expanded metaphor of the shadow and the metaphor of time).

3 FROM SPATIAL METAPHORS OF TRANSLATION TO TRANSLATION AS A SPATIAL METAPHOR

The intersection itself need not have fixed boundaries. Anthony Pym

This chapter represents a theoretical juncture in the metanarrative of this book because of its middle position and double perspective. It shifts the focus from metaphors for translation (Chapter 2) to translation as metaphor (Chapters 4 and 5), from translation as a target domain to translation as a source domain. I will illustrate this passage by comparing the use of spatial metaphors in translation studies with the use of spatial metaphors of translation in cultural studies and postcolonial theory. As the following chapters will show, the notion of translation has already been used in other discourses in past years – for instance, in psychoanalysis (Chapter 4) and media theory (Chapter 5). However, the success the metaphor of translation has experienced in recent years is a new phenomenon that has not yet been systematically studied. The metaphor of translation used in other theoretical domains highlights aspects that are not predominant in the traditional view of translation, which still holds on to images of subordination. In these other theoretical domains, the metaphor of translation generally stresses connectivity and change rather than fidelity and equivalence. In this sense, there is a theoretical convergence between this specific metaphorical understanding of translation and some recent redefinitions of translation in translation studies itself, enlarging the notion of translation and empowering translators (Tymoczko 2007). Studying how and why the metaphor of translation has made its appearance in cultural studies and postcolonial theory (this chapter and Chapter 4), psychoanalysis, anthropology and ethnography, history and literature (Chapter 4), sociology, media and communication theory, medicine and molecular genetics (Chapter 5) can help to shape a new understanding of translation. The widespread use of the notion of

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translation outside translation studies, however, also carries a risk. The endless propagation of the notion could lead to its demise as a critical concept. Universalist claims, which discover “translation” everywhere, tend to reduce the notion to its lowest common denominator and, in the long run, drain it of its meaning. Even so, the diffusion of the notion of translation should be taken for what it is: a signal of a radical change of the status of translation and a chance for translation studies to reframe its theoretical options. Furthermore, as with metaphors for translation, the use of the translation metaphor is not governed by randomness but entails a series of theoretical insights that could profitably be reimported into translation studies. Finally, the metaphor of translation does not generate a cluster of images universally applicable among the disciplines. As this and the following chapters will show, there is a wide variety of ways in which the metaphor of translation has been interpreted and integrated into the terminological net of other disciplines. Sections 1 and 2 of this chapter sum up the role spatial metaphors have played in translation theory and the way they have been critically reassessed in recent years. The subsequent sections focus on the use of spatial metaphors of translation across the disciplines and the discussions this has provoked in translation studies. Section 3 considers the notion of in-betweenness, Section 4 Anthony Pym’s concept of interculture, Section 5 the metaphor cluster connecting in-betweenness, third space and hybridity and Section 6 the notions of reversibility and mutuality. Section 7 will consider Harish Trivedi’s (2007) criticism and Karen Bennett’s (2012) defence of the metaphor of translation in cultural studies. In Section 8, the last section, I will propose a redefinition of the transfer metaphor of translation by focusing on some aspects that have been neglected so far.

1 Spatial Metaphors in Translation Studies Spatial metaphors have played a central role in Western translation theory. There is a wide variety of spatial metaphors from conduits and containers, to windows, doors and bridges. The translation process has been described as following in someone’s footsteps or pouring liquid from one vessel into another, as transport, transference, carrying across, fording of a shallow riverbed, bridge building, border crossing and the smuggling of contraband goods. Translation is a unidirectional movement from a source to a target language. The translator is an intermediary, a go-between and, because of his/her allegiance to different cultures, a double agent. Spatial metaphors of translation generally define translatability as transportability of some unchanged content. They affirm the possibility of risk-free successful crossing, focusing on the relationship between the point of departure and the point of arrival. One of the essential elements of the traditional spatial metaphor of translation is the notion of a transportable context-free meaning. In their discussion of Michael Reddy’s conduit metaphor, Lakoff and Johnson (2003: 10–11) pointed to the way in which each aspect of the metaphor tends to generate the same notion of object-like stability by consistently denying the existence of context. Words and sentences have meanings in themselves, which are independent of the speaker and the context.

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The speaker can therefore put his/her ideas into words and send them across a middle space. This entails that the meanings also have an existence of their own. The idea of a container, moreover, suggests that the meaning can be separated from the words, the same way the body can be stripped of its clothing. The receiver extracts the words from the container and has thus direct access to the meaning of the speaker. This problematic vision of communication has been questioned by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson (1995), who developed what has been termed a “pragmatic relevance theory”. Instead of envisaging interpersonal communication as a simple form of coding and decoding, Sperber and Wilson have stressed the fact that context generally plays a vital role in communication, as do other factors such as the speaker’s intentions, the expectations of the receiver and the relationship between sender and receiver. Mostly thoughts are communicated conveying only as much information as is needed in a certain context. The receiver can recover the intended meaning not only from what has been said, but also from the context and from the different communicative implications. S/he will fill in the details that were not explicitly communicated thanks to the context and the shared intentions of the sender and receiver. Meaning in communication, and in translation for that matter, is therefore not an invariable, but always the result of a selective and reconstructive process determined by context. There is a series of reasons for the success of spatial metaphors in translation theory. Spatial metaphors of translation can be traced back to the etymology of the Greek metaphorá and its Latin translation translatio. Both words imply transportation across a middle space. The word “translation” is thus already a spatial metaphor. This has led to a long-lasting fascination with the etymology of the word and has become a problem translation studies still has to grapple with (Hermans 2004). The etymological argument, however, is far from compelling. Sandra Halverson (1999) pointed out that in the English language a spatial conceptualization of translation processes existed well before the term to translate was imported from Latin, in the verb wendan, to turn, to change in position or state, and the related awendan. Furthermore, the Latin-based translate originally had different meanings, one of which was to change in form, appearance or substance, to transmute, to transform and to alter. Another more recent origin of spatial metaphors of translation can be found in German Romanticism. In On the Different Methods of Translating, Friedrich Schleiermacher defined translation as a double, contrary, self-exclusive movement: translators either bring the original to the reader or take the reader to it. In Schleiermacher’s view, there is no other, third way of translating. Translation, however, always involves both, bringing the reader to the text and the text to the reader (van Wyke 2010). The reduction of different modes of translating to a spatial movement in opposite directions has been taken up in the twentieth century. The widely used terminology of “source” and “target” is based on a spatial and teleological conception of translation. Hermans (2004) also suggests the possible influence of Roman Jakobson’s notion of communication, conceiving of the message as travelling from a sender to a receiver, without being changed in the process.

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One of the main reasons for the historical success and the unabated relevance of spatial metaphors of translation, however, is their link with the metaphor of equivalence, discussed in Chapter 2. Add to this their crucial role in a linguistic ideology based on a dualistic agenda, which still exerts a great influence in the field of translation studies. The spatial opposition between source and target fits a whole series of related dichotomies (proper/improper, domestic/foreign, invisibility/visibility, sense for sense/word for word, content/form). Because of the decisive role they have played in the formation, implementation and maintenance of a fundamentally limitative view of translation, spatial metaphors are a thorny issue, from which the field of translation studies is presently trying to emancipate itself. Let me illustrate this with the aid of a few significant examples. The first example illustrates the traditional way of interpreting the spatial metaphor of translation. In The Theory and Practice of Translation, published in 1969, Eugene A. Nida and Charles R. Taber describe the translation process in terms of someone walking up and down the bank of a broad river in order to find the right place to cross it (D’hulst 1992: 34; St. André 2010a: 4). Nida and Taber map a precise geographical setting and the necessity for crossing onto the work of the translator. The firm, reassuring territory of the two riverbanks corresponds to the source and the target language. The river flowing in between is powerful and dangerous. I will return to the metaphoric dualism of solidity and fluidity in Section 8, the last section of this chapter. The shallow ford, which the translator is looking for, stands for the ideal solution of a translation problem, but also for the possibility of successful transportation. The act of translating is compared to the safe crossing of a river. Nida and Taber’s translator does not want to take any chances; s/he neither swims nor uses a boat to cross the river. S/he spends his/her time looking for an adequate place to cross without incurring undue risk. In the worst case, he will only wet his feet when carrying his package safe and dry to other side. The journey across the river is inessential. The time spent walking along the side of the river, however, is crucial to the crossing. Nida and Taber’s spatial metaphor of the crossing of a river fits neatly into the general outline of the conduit metaphor. I will return to further implications of the river crossing metaphor in Section 8, the last section. The following two examples I am going to discuss are attempts at overcoming the traditional view of the spatial metaphor of translation. Cynthia B. Roy (1993) and Cecilia Wadensjö (1993) have criticized the restrictive role of the conduit metaphor in interpreting studies, arguing for a broader approach taking in all relevant aspects and highlighting possible conflicts. Their account of interpreting studies may be dated from a present point of view but it points to an understanding of translation that is still very much alive. According to the two authors, interpreting is generally subsumed under translation, the main difference being that in interpreting the focus is on spoken messages. Because of this, the role of the interpreter, and not the relationship between source and target text, takes centre stage. As Roy points out, metaphorical descriptions, above all the unexamined notion of the interpreter as a conduit, have generally compressed the complexity of the role into a single analogy. The conduit metaphor pays attention

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to the transfer of meaning, but ignores the transfer of form and the relationship between form and content. It focuses on the message of a single speaker, received and reproduced by a passive audience. The interpreter is a person in the middle, a mediator, a channel, a transparent windowpane, a telephone, a bridge, a facilitator or a simple conveyer. Wadensjö also lists the metaphor of the photocopier. Accuracy and impartiality are the interpreter’s essential characteristics. At his best, he operates as an instrument conveying information, a machine rendering messages without changing them. There are, however, theoretical inconsistencies and a series of aspects that the metaphor systematically hides from view. In the discourse on the role of the interpreter a profound ambivalence persists, which is generally not taken into consideration by theory. On the one hand, the interpreter is asked to be detached and neutral; on the other s/he is exhorted to be flexible enough to adapt to the constantly shifting conditions of his/her job. The machine-like quality of the interpreter can also be seen as a problem. The professionalism of his/her service could be viewed as cold and self-serving. S/he could deny any responsibility. Yet interpreters are involved in a variety of ways. Besides purely technical ability, the interpreter’s task always involves a knowledge of language systems, a familiarity with the speaker, the topic and the overall context within which s/he is operating, as well as an understanding of the purposes of the message. Interpreting is an interaction based on relaying and coordinating, servicing and controlling. The interpreter has to listen carefully, constantly assessing how the interlocutors intend their utterances to be understood. S/he has to understand the set-up of the participation framework and how the parties relate to each other, evaluating the interlocutor’s speakership and listenership. The last example I want to discuss is Sergey Tyulenev’s discussion of the metaphor of smuggling, which allows for a critical redefinition of spatial metaphors of translation. Tyulenev emphasizes the importance of using metaphors as cognitive tools. To achieve this, one has to focus on the complexity of translation and provide a detailed analysis of the different components that make translation comparable to smuggling (Tyulenev 2010: 244). Contrary to Nida’s metaphor of the safe crossing of a shallow river, the metaphor of smuggling involves a series of risks. It recasts the translator as a border crosser with a subversive mission, halfway between the visible and the invisible and it describes the translation process as an illegal activity, full of freedom, excitement and adventure. The smuggler hides illicit content and attempts to introduce forbidden knowledge into the target culture. His contraband goods contain the translator’s personal feelings and convictions, which cannot be found in the source text. Furthermore, to avoid being caught, the smuggler must constantly keep a close eye on the crossing itself. The following section considers the fundamental ambivalence of spatial metaphors of translation.

2 The Transference Metaphor of Translation In her essay “Metaphorical Models of Translation. Transfer vs. Imitation and Action”, Celia Martín de León (2010) systematically and critically discusses spatial metaphors of translation from the point of view of cognitive linguistics. Martín de

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León follows Round’s (2005) basic distinction between a trans- and a re- group of translation metaphors discussed in Chapter 2. She considers examples from both groups: the transfer metaphor (transportation and preservation) as well as the footstep and the target metaphor (imitation and action). The best example of a metaphor from the trans-group is the conduit metaphor that has also found its way into translation theory. The conduit metaphor originally mapped the physical transfer of objects (source domain) onto the target domains of communication and language. The “transference metaphor” of translation, as Martín de León calls it, is an elaboration of the conduit metaphor. It defines translation as a directional movement from source to target. Texts and languages are containers of meaning. The translator extracts meaning from a source text and transfers it into a target text. Meaning can be determined objectively and completely and is transportable because of this. Ideas, words and texts are defined as transferable and recast as fundamentally stable entities. The two containers – the fixed landmarks – are linked by a “trajectory”, moving along a path, from the first to the second container, mapping the movement domain onto the translation domain. The transference metaphor highlights the starting point and the point of arrival, but hides the in-between journey. This allows for three points of view: the opening of the first container and the extracting of the meaning, the placing of the source meaning into the target container and the safe transference of the contents. As Martín de León points out, the footsteps and the target metaphor are also spatial metaphors, but contrary to the transference metaphor, they emphasize imitation and action and are therefore part of the re-group. The footsteps metaphor stresses the secondariness of translation: the translator moves forward, along a path, following the footmarks of the author. The “trajectory” of author and translator, however, can never be truly the same. They are parallel movements from source to goal. Despite its spatial orientation, the footsteps metaphor describes translation as an action that is fundamentally different from the production of the source text. From the point of view of imitation, nothing is transferred. Martín de León’s analysis of the footstep metaphor postulates a clear-cut difference between the two metaphorical groups and deals with the single metaphors on their own. As already pointed out in Chapter 2, the imitation and the transference metaphor have to be studied as part of an integrated system of metaphors collaborating towards the same ideological end. The target metaphor describes translation as a goal-oriented activity. The imitation of a source text is a necessary but not sufficient condition for defining a text as a translation. In the target metaphor, the path is of secondary importance. The most important aspect is the destination. The goal determines the direction of movement, the path, the relevance of the source text and the strategies of the translator. In the target metaphor, the source is of secondary importance and meanings are not stable. In the footsteps metaphor, there is only one possibility of translation dictated by the author. In the target metaphor, different goals call for different translations. To sum up: spatial metaphors have had a great influence on Western translation theory for a series of reasons: the etymology of “translation”, the dualistic agenda of the prevailing linguistic ideology and the pervasive influence of the conduit

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metaphor. Spatial metaphors are not a problem per se, as the use of the footsteps and the target metaphor prove. The core of the problem is the transference metaphor, which postulates translatability thanks to the transportability of an extractable, stable meaning. This metaphor owes part of its argumentative efficacy to the metaphor of equivalence. The transference metaphor hides many relevant aspects of translation. It describes the translator as an instrument and does not take the process of translation, the intermediate journey, into consideration. In the following sections, I will discuss spatial metaphors of translation that have elicited a critical reaction from within translation studies. Let me begin with the metaphor of in-betweenness.

3 In-Betweenness Spatial metaphors have spread widely into post-structuralism, feminism, cultural studies and postcolonial theory. Hybridity, third space and in-betweenness are spatial metaphors of translation that have travelled widely back and forth between the disciplines, changing form and content in the process. At present, they circumscribe an interdisciplinary area where translation studies, cultural studies and postcolonial theory meet, intersect and clash. One of the problems with spatial metaphors of translation from the point of view of translation scholars is the fact that they emphasize the transformative power of translation and its overall usefulness for cultural and social integration without considering the political, social and cultural power differentials translation processes always imply. Spatial metaphors highlight reconciliation but hide conflict and oppression, two important aspects of any translation process that have been reintroduced through the “cultural turn”. The enlarging of the notion of translation has revealed its transformative and innovative power but also its darker sides, the deliberate will to misunderstand, as Mona Baker put it. In translation studies today, we have a master narrative of the translator as an honest intermediary, with translation … as a force for good, a means of enabling dialogue to take place between different cultures … No one questions whether bridges are always built for the (morally) “right” reasons, nor the fact that just as they might allow us to cross over and make positive contact with a different culture, they also allow invading troops to cross over and kill, maim and destroy entire populations. (Baker 2005: 9) The success of the spatial metaphor of translation in cultural studies, feminism and postcolonial theory has also had its effects in translation studies, prompting a renewed interest in notions of spatiality. This trend obviously clashes with the critical treatment spatial metaphors have received in translation theory. Maria Tymoczko’s essay “Ideology and the Position of the Translator: In What Sense Is a Translator ‘In Between’?” aptly illustrates this theoretical quandary.

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The notion of in-betweenness is one of the most popular means of figuring an elsewhere different from the source and the target culture. Tymoczko calls it the very heart of the “ideology of translation” (2003: 185). If one suggests that the translator is positioned in-between, one is, however, also suggesting that s/he is somehow elsewhere, neither in one language nor in the other, that s/he does not have any political or cultural allegiances. The translator is separated from the actual physical and cultural space and ideological position s/he is bound to occupy. To prove how influential the notion has become, even in translation studies, Tymoczko mentions three examples. In her book on gender in translation, Sherry Simon defines the in-between space as a meeting point of two languages, a powerful but challenging place for the translator to occupy. The translational is a “liminary terrain”, a “hybrid space”, which stands between the “certainties of national cultures” without participating in them (Simon 1996: 153). Tymoczko also mentions Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s notion of “spacey emptiness”, a territory between two historical languages, into which “meaning hops” during translation (Spivak 2000: 398) and Samira Mehrez’s description of hybrid postcolonial texts by bilingual writers creating a new “language in between” (Mehrez 1992: 121). Tymoczko lists six different reasons for the success of the term in translation studies, arguing on two separate levels: from within the tradition of translation theory itself (reasons two, three and five) and from without, situating the notion of in-betweenness in a broader theoretical context (reasons one, four and six). First, like hybridity, to which it is directly linked, in-betweenness is a trendy term. Second, the notion is connected to the actual physical location a translator occupies, when s/he is operating as an interpreter between cultures. The simultaneous interpreter is literally standing in between two speakers. Third, the strongest argument in favour of conceptualizing translation in spatial terms is the metaphoric load the term “translation” carries in several Western languages. Fourth, there is the theoretical importance of the metaphor of in-betweenness in post-structuralist thinking and the strong influence exerted by this theoretical approach on translation studies itself. Fifth, in-betweenness has been absorbed into translation studies because of its theoretical congruence with other aspects of translation. In fact, spatial metaphors make gaps in time and space relevant to the activity and process of translation. Finally, in-betweenness makes it possible to break free from a dualistic agenda. Tymoczko emphasizes the problematic aspects (trendiness, the impact of post-structuralism) and points to one specific aspect, to which I will return in Section 6: the theoretical emancipation from dualistic agendas. The main point of Tymoczko’s critical reading of the metaphor of in-betweenness is its applicability to system theory. In fact, if translation is conceived in terms of transfer between language systems, the metaphor starts to break down. When one is leaving a system, one does not fall into an abyss between the two systems or escape systems altogether, as the notion of in-betweenness seems to suggest. There is no in-between, no free space outside systems. One cannot escape into an absolute outside. Furthermore, languages are not self-contained or closed in on themselves, islands floating in the sea, but are open systems that overlap and constantly interact

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with each other. In this sense, languages are not countable. During the translation process, the translator enters a third system encompassing or including the two other transcended systems. Translators are thus not operating between languages, in a neutral or free space, but in a system including both languages. This can be graphically described by two small circles enclosed within a larger one (Tymoczko 2003: 196–7).

4 Intercultures In her essay Tymoczko also discusses Anthony Pym’s notion of “interculture”, which projects a completely different view of in-betweenness. Pym defines intercultures as an intersection or overlap of different cultures. Graphically this is rendered by two overlapping circles (Pym 1998: 177). The translator is situated in the overlap at the junction of two linguistic and cultural systems. In this sense, s/he combines creatively the knowledge and expertise of both cultures. Translators do not belong exclusively to the target or to the source culture, but always possess a certain degree of interculturality. In translation studies, there is a tendency to attribute an unambiguous position to translators. They are supposed to be situated either on one or on the other side of the divide between the languages they are translating from and translating into. The double allegiance of translators has always been looked upon with suspicion. Even in contemporary translation studies, this is still seen as a problem. Pym lists three significant examples. André Lefevere situates translators within the boundaries of the culture they were born into, and Lawrence Venuti assigns them to the target culture. Gideon Toury denies the existence of cultural overlaps and admits the existence of a series of different intercultures only in the sense that they all belong to a particular target culture (ibid.: 178–9). Pym’s criticism also holds true for Tymoczko’s contention that the metaphor of in-betweenness describes translators as individuals existing above history and ideology, occupying a neutral territory. From this specific point of view, in-betweenness is not the intersection of two or more cultural allegiances, but the banishment from all cultures into an empty and neutral space without any identity of its own. Tymoczko conceives of the translator in between cultures as an alienated figure, cut loose from all affiliations. This very alienation, she argues, can also be passed off as the objectivity of the professional. The in-betweenness of the translator leads to an effacement of the ideological position and undermines the self-reflexivity and empowerment of translators, because it portrays them as isolated individuals and independent interpreters. Translation, however, requires affiliation and implies collective action (Tymoczko 2003: 201). Pym’s notion of interculture could help us to reconsider the metaphor of in-betweenness by focusing on its interpretative potential. The interculture is neither an empty space nor an exterritorial dimension beyond culture, but a layered space where cultures meet and mix, interact and clash. Intercultures recast the translator as someone who lives in a cultural overlap, cumulating the knowledge and expertise of the source and the target culture. Because of this ambiguous position, the

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translator is constantly forced to make decisions and take sides. Intercultures are the very place where people meet, interact and possibly engage in collective action. The notions of interculture and of in-betweenness do not automatically locate translators in a static idealized no-man’s-land, which they transcend. Instead, these notions acknowledge translators’ embeddedness in a variety of different narratives.

5 The Metaphor Cluster: In-Betweenness-Third Space-Hybridity Before discussing the metaphors of reversibility and mutuality, I will briefly consider the metaphorical cluster of in-betweenness-third space-hybridity in the work of Homi Bhabha. My main intent is to point out possible misunderstandings in the interdisciplinary dialogue and to look for ways in which this metaphor cluster can be made useful for translation studies. I will discuss further metaphorical uses of translation within postcolonial theory in Section 5 of Chapter 4. In Homi Bhabha’s very influential The Location of Culture (2006), the notions of in-betweenness, third space and hybridity articulate different aspects of the same phenomenon by intersecting and overlapping in many ways. The three aspects refer to each other by constant combination and recombination in endless terminological circles. The main problem with Bhabha’s terminology is its fuzziness and high degree of abstraction. One may get the feeling that one is still trying to catch Bhabha’s shadow while already living in it … To evoke an irresistibly alliterative and beguiling, mantra-like phrase that Bhabha … uses more than once, … is the “translational transnational” … i.e., the condition of Western multiculturalism brought about by Third World migrancy … In this version, cultural translation is not so much the need of the migrant, as Bhabha makes it out to be, but rather more a requirement of the society and culture to which the migrant has travelled; it is the hegemonic Western demand and necessity. (Trivedi 2007: 5–6) Harish Trivedi calls attention to a problematic aspect of the notion of cultural translation. In fact, most of the time, present-day global migration is a forced condition full of hardships and despair. The suffering of postcolonial subjects radically questions any idealistic notion of hybridity or in-betweenness. Bhabha defines in-betweenness as a ruptured place of tensions and subversive acts, real and imaginary at the same time. The third space is not an empty but an overdetermined space, not a vacuum between two positions but a constructive area in which the unsaid and untranslatable can be articulated. It is a contact zone between different incommensurable and asynchronous cultures, a passage where different identities, different spaces and moments in time meet and overlap; a place of negotiation but not reconciliation. The British cultural anthropologist Victor Turner (1920–83) developed the concept of “liminality”, from the Latin limen, threshold. This notion is based on

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Arnold van Gennep’s description of rites of passage. These consist of three distinct phases: separation from everyday reality, liminality and reincorporation. During the middle stage, social hierarchies can be playfully reversed or dissolved. Liminality is more than a space. It is a way of existing and experiencing the world. Contrary to Turner, who conceived of liminality as a fundamentally disruptive and creative but only temporary state, Bhabha’s third space of exile and migration represents a permanent conflictual condition of insecurity, which does not lead to any reintegration into stable social conditions. Migrants and exiles remain homeless, caught in the third condition of liminal passage. In this sense, the third space is both a consequence of globalization and the many cultural disruptions it causes and a place of possibility where cultures meet and clash and where they can be recombined in new creative and surprising ways. It is a counter-project making other positions possible. Hybridity, the third term of the cluster, is not a spatial metaphor, but shares some spatial attributes through contamination with the other two terms. Hybridity is ideologically a highly charged term, originally used to describe forms of biological miscegenation. Before turning up in Bhabha’s The Location of Culture, the term was positively reinterpreted in Bakhtin’s work as the double voice of narrators in novels (Bhabha 2006: 205–6). Bhabha transformed it into a sign of subversion and resistance against cultural repression. Hybridity generates a third space that is situated in between. It is not a mixing or the result of a synthesis, but a rebellion against the system by transforming power relations in counter-culture. As such, it always already carries traces of the oppression from which it is trying to break free. Hybridity challenges the purity of cultures by opening up a metaphorical space in between that goes against binary categorizations. Traditionally, the third was conceived as a passage or a connection to a higher unity, but never as something existing independently. In Bhabha’s view, the third creates a relationship between the other two elements, connecting and separating them at the same time. For me the importance of hybridity is not to be able to trace two original moments from which the third emerges, rather hybridity to me is the “third space” which enables other positions to emerge. This third space displaces the histories that constitute it, and sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives. (Bhabha 1990: 212) The common trait of the three terms of the metaphorical cluster and their intimate link to cultural translation is the radical negation of self-contained identities and dichotomies, the dismissal of fixity and unity and the refusal of any kind of harmonizing, final synthesis. Bhabha uses translation not so much for texts, but for cultural inter-articulation. He “borrows from the structure of metaphor the notion of a ‘displacement or liminality’ which ‘opens up the possibility of articulating different, even incommensurable, cultural practices and priorities’” (Evans 2001: 152). The third space

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resulting from these processes of displacement and transformation operating within and across cultures is “an identification rather than an identity”. There “can never be a full translation of subjects or of forms of culture” (ibid). These are always hybrid and bear, like translation itself, “traces of former meaning that give rise to new areas of negotiation” (ibid). The difference between original and translation can never be substantial but only a matter of degree. To exemplify this idea, Bhabha quotes a passage from a performance artist living between Mexico City and New York City that could be read as a metaphor of translation, even if Bhabha explicitly links it to the hybrid identities of those living in between. The bankrupt notion of the melting pot has been replaced by a model that is more germane to the times, that of the menudo chowder. According to this model, most of the ingredients do melt, but some stubborn chunks are condemned merely to float. (Bhabha 2006: 313) This culinary metaphor, reminiscent of Brazilian anthropophagy, suggests that the apparent seamless unity of the translated text is ultimately a questionable notion. Bhabha’s notion of cultural translation contains some elements of interest for translation studies. In his view, the third space has no stable borders. It is the hybrid place of translation and as such is a space to move through, not to settle in. Translation is a passage, operates in between and carries the main burden of meaning of a specific culture. Bhabha invokes a passage from Walter Benjamin that refers to this essential moment of cultural translation: “Translation passes through continua of transformation, not abstract ideas of identity and similarity” (ibid.: 303). Again alluding to Benjamin, Bhabha speaks of a “borderline moment of translation” and “the nucleus of the untranslatable that goes beyond transferal of subject matter between cultural texts or practices. The transfer of meaning can never be total between systems of meaning” (ibid.: 234). The suggestion is that translation is not so much the linear relationship of a point of departure to a point of arrival but an open-ended process that is never final and never total. I will now turn to Vilém Flusser’s notion of reversibility and Wolfgang Iser’s concept of “mutuality”, two spatial metaphors that question the linear, hierarchical relationship of source and target as it is implied in traditional views of translation.

6 Reversibility and Mutuality The Czech-Brazilian philosopher and media theorist Vilém Flusser (1920–91) uses translation to describe cross-linguistic forms of communication and the conceptual pair translation/retranslation to develop a historical model of media and code evolution which I will discuss in Chapter 5. The German literary scholar Wolfgang Iser (1926–2007) proposes “mutuality” as an operational mode for translating cultures into each other.

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Flusser was born in Prague in 1920 into a wealthy assimilated Jewish family and forced into exile in the spring of 1939 by the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia. He fled to Brazil in 1941. His whole family was wiped out in the Nazi concentration camps. In 1972, Flusser returned to Europe and spent the last years of his life in the village of Robion, in southern France, though his life was cut short by a car accident in 1991 as he was travelling back from a conference in Prague. Flusser became famous in the early 1990s as a “digital thinker” and author of visionary texts on photography, video art and media theory. In a text written in the late 1970s, Flusser (1996: 337–44) conceives of translation as a fundamentally reversible operation, in which source and target can exchange places in an endless game of nested Russian dolls. Flusser describes the relationship between original and translation in terms of an “object-language” and a “metalanguage”, implying that the source language is always subordinate to the target language. The language of arrival dictates a new point of view on the original, just as a source domain does with regard to a target domain. In this view, translation processes are always the result of a specific power relationship. For this reason, Flusser calls the target language an “imperialistic meta-code”. In retranslation, however, this linear and fundamentally hierarchical relationship between the two languages is inverted. Retranslation means both to translate a text again and to translate it back into one of the languages that have already been used, generally the language of the first version. Even if translation is described as a reversible game, the fundamental structural inequality between the two languages engaged in translation persists. The translator has to decide which specific imperialistic meta-code s/he wants to employ. This theoretical insight is based on Flusser’s own writing practice. Flusser wrote his texts in four different languages – German, Portuguese, English and French – and constantly translated and retranslated them, creating in some cases up to ten or more different versions of the same text (Guldin 2013). In accordance with the subject matter and the point of view the choice of the first language and the ensuing translational sequence varied. Flusser conceives of these multiple processes of translation and retranslation in spatial terms. He defines the outcome of his own monolingual texts as palimpsests where the hidden languages of the previous versions linger between the lines. Tymoczko (2003: 185) suggests a similar spatial metaphor: the notion of layering. Translation is a form of meta-statement, a text about a text, an amalgam layered together. Flusser used the technique of self-translation to distance himself from his texts in order to check their inner coherence and formal qualities. This specific understanding of translation as criticism is akin to Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of the concept of criticism among the German Romantics (St. André 2011). Writing through translation is, moreover, a strategy that allows for the accumulation of as many points of view as possible. Each time a text is translated into another language, a new vantage point is reached from which the original thought can be viewed from a different angle. One of the decisive theoretical consequences of the inversion of hierarchical settings through translation is the disappearance of a single overarching all-embracing

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meta-position from which to survey and judge all other positions. The duality of original and translation is done away with. Any original can become a translation, and any translation a new original. A similar notion has been suggested by Wolfgang Iser (1995). Contrary to Flusser, however, who emphasizes the agonistic and antagonistic dimension of translation, Iser conceives of translation as a cybernetic self-regulating recursive looping. The precondition of mutuality is translatability. In a global world, cultures meet and clash, calling for mutual understanding. Notions of cultural superiority have to be given up. In this context, translatability emerges as a counter-concept to cultural hegemony and the idea of cultural hierarchy. Translatability calls attention to the space between cultures, which opens up the experience of otherness. Since this in-between space does not belong to any of the single cultures involved in the exchange, it allows for comparison and highlights self-awareness. The identities of cultures constitute themselves out of continuous processes of mutual assimilation, interpenetration and superimposition. Iser speaks of a self-regulative form of crosscultural exchange that has finally liberated itself from any pre-given frames of reference in order to generate its own control by constantly shifting modes of reference. This cybernetic structure relies on recursive looping, that is, on positive and negative feedback loops. Negative feedback loops screen off foreign elements and make them manageable. Positive feedback loops take up otherness and make it understandable. Whatever the direction, recursive looping as the mechanics of a cross-cultural discourse allows for mutual translatability of cultures, which far outstrips crosscultural interchange in terms of assimilation, appropriation and incorporation. [It] is an appropriate operational mode for translating cultures into one another. (Iser 1995: 33) In the end, this autopoietic cultural model will automatically bring about mutual comprehension through a principle of hierarchical reversibility. Furthermore, thanks to mutuality, any kind of overarching third dimension can be critically exposed for what it is: an interest-governed stance. There is, thus, no privileged meta-point-of-view from which to evaluate all other points of view, as any position can be fed into the recursive loops of mutuality mentioned above. As Iser puts it himself no “grandstand view” is available anymore. Arguing along the lines of Baker and Tymoczko, Annie Brisset (1997) criticized Iser’s notions of translatability and reversibility together with the specific metaphorization of translation they imply. Brisset points out that translation has been represented in postmodernism and postcolonialism as an “egalitarian operation” occurring in the supposedly “neutral space between cultures”. Translation is presented as an exemplary model for understanding the fundamental alterity of other cultures. Brisset also highlights an important aspect of translational processes that is in tune with Flusser and Iser’s theoretical approach. By moving away from a Eurocentric point of view, translation studies is forced to revisit the parameters of a purely

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linear unidirectional understanding of translation. Unfortunately, in the course of the essay, she does not pursue this idea any further. In her critical account of the principle of translatability, Brisset rightly points to the problematic automaticity of its basic mechanism, reversibility. The reversibility of translation does not automatically guarantee its egalitarian character. Such an approach to intercultural communication forgets that the translator is always immersed in a specific cultural setting with its own translational norms. As for the inbetween space that Iser posits in his text, Brisset suggests that its apparent neutrality is only possible if one talks about translatability and not translation. If translatability is a potentiality, translation is an effectuation. When translation leaves the neutral terrain of potentiality in order to become practice, it has to anchor itself in a specific space. Brisset’s second objection has to do with the cybernetic metaphor and its self-reflective mechanism. Iser suggests that translation processes can be reduced to the dialectical relationship of interpreting subject and interpreted object. Far from being only this, translations are strongly affected by the cultural representations both of the source and the target culture. As Brisset rightly points out, Iser’s representation of translating is “utopian”, not in the pejorative sense of the word, but rather as an ideal towards which one should reach.

7 A Possible Interdisciplinary Dialogue The use of spatial metaphors of translation can be discussed both from the point of view of translation studies and from the point of view of the different disciplines that have adopted translation as a metaphor. The questions asked vary accordingly. In the first case, the main questions are: In which ways has the notion of translation been altered by its use within other theoretical domains and how does this new use measure up to existing notions of translation and everyday translation processes? In the second case the main questions are: Does the metaphor of translation play a helpful role within the new domain, and in which ways is it related to other relevant theoretical notions of the field? In this section, I want to bring these two opposed understandings together in view of a possible theoretical dialogue. Such a double point of view necessitates new questions: What can the two domains learn from each other? In which ways can definitions of translation in translation studies help us to critically assess and possibly redefine the uses of translation in other theoretical domains? Conversely, in which ways can the use of the metaphor of translation help translation studies to better understand its own definitions and uses of the term? Throughout this double process of questioning, definitions of what metaphor is and what it can do play a vital role. I will return to these questions in Chapters 4 and 5. One of the theoretical hazards involved in such an interdisciplinary dialogue is the creation of an opposition between an original proper and a secondary metaphorical use of translation, which is then ascribed to translation studies and the other disciplines respectively. This view does not entail a denial of fundamental differences in the uses of “translation” in translation studies and other theoretical fields. Professional translators work with a notion of translation that must be forcibly

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different from that used by sociologists or anthropologists interpreting social and cross-cultural processes. My aim is to avoid clear-cut theoretical oppositions by pointing to inner complexity and contradiction in order to facilitate a productive interdisciplinary dialogue. In order to elucidate some aspects of this possible but still pending dialogue, I will discuss two essays dealing with the metaphor of cultural translation from opposing sides. In “Translating Culture vs Cultural Translation”, Harish Trivedi argues from within the field of translation studies criticizing the misuse of the notion of translation. In “At the Selvedges of Discourse: Negotiating the ‘In-Between’ in Translation Studies”, Karen Bennett (2012) tries to reconstruct the use of spatial metaphors of translation from within the area in which they are used. As the provocative title already suggests, Trivedi opposes the notion of “cultural translation” to the actual translation processes going on between different cultures. In the essay, however, he does not discuss the fact that the notion of “cultural translation” is a metaphor and that its use can be properly understood only if considered in these terms. This theoretical negligence inevitably leads to a series of misunderstandings. Trivedi criticizes the enlargement of the notion of translation in the wake of the “cultural turn” in translation studies and its use in other domains. The paper wants to show the “new riches” available in the field and “the tendency to push the range of the discipline as wide and retrospectively as far back as possible”. This is “reminiscent of the ways in which Postcolonial Studies emerged as an area of study just a few years before Translation Studies and, in fact, the resemblance here is not only incidental but interactive” (Trivedi 2007: 2). Trivedi questions the impact of the translation turn across the disciplines. I will return to this notion in Section 2 of Chapter 4. The “cultural turn” has profoundly transformed and redefined translation studies; the “translation turn” in cultural studies, however, remains an unfulfilled desideratum, a consummation yet only wished for. Meanwhile instead of a cultural turn in Translation Studies, we have on our hands a beast of similar name but very different fur and fibre – something called Cultural Translation … While wishing for the practitioners of Cultural Studies to come and join hands with them, those engaged in Translation Studies have not even noticed that something called Cultural Translation has already come into existence, especially in the domain of postcolonial and postmodernist discourse, and represents something that could not be further from their heart’s desire. For, if there is one thing that Cultural Translation is not, it is the translation of culture. In fact, it spells … the very extinction and erasure of translation as we have always known and practiced it. (ibid.: 4) In his analysis, Trivedi focuses mainly on Bhabha’s The Location of Culture and the spatial dimension of his translation metaphor. Trivedi also quotes Salman Rushdie’s famous formula of the “translated man”, which, as he points out, can be traced

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back to the etymology of the word. The tone of the following quotation is deliberately polemic: what he meant, therefore, was that because he had been borne across, presumably by an aeroplane, from India and Pakistan to the United Kingdom, he was therefore a translated man. He neglected to tell us as to whether, before he became a translated man, he was at any stage also an original man. (ibid.: 4–5) Trivedi’s sarcastic remark, however, misses the point when it comes to the use of translation as a possible metaphor for cross-cultural processes. “If this is cultural translation,” concludes Trivedi, we perhaps need to worry about the very meaning of the word “translation.” One wonders why “translation” should be a word of choice in a collocation such as “cultural translation” in this new sense when perfectly good and theoretically sanctioned words for this new phenomenon, such as migrancy, exile or diaspora, are already available and current. But given the usurpation that has taken place, it may be time … to unite and take out a patent on the word “translation,” if it is not already too late to do so … In conclusion, one may suggest that there is an urgent need perhaps to protect and preserve some little space in this postcolonial-postmodernist world, where newness constantly enters through cultural translation, for some old and old-fashioned literary translation. (ibid.: 6–7; emphasis added) Even though Trivedi’s analysis points to some of the theoretical weaknesses of postcolonial and cultural studies, expressing at the same time justified concern for a problematic use of the notion of translation, it suffers from a one-sided defensive approach. Instead of rejecting metaphorical uses of the notion of translation altogether, reclaiming a purely linguistic, “proper” use of translation – thus sacrificing the theoretical advances made possible by the cultural turn – the use of the translation metaphor should be studied more in depth and, above all, within the theoretical context in which it appears. The epistemological potentialities of the notion of translation for other discursive fields and the ways in which these can be made fruitful for translation studies should take centre stage. I will return in more detail to these questions in Chapters 4 and 5. Let me now turn to the Bennett essay. Karen Bennett focuses on some of the objections put forward by translation scholars that I have already discussed in this chapter and at the same time attempts to recontextualize the spatial metaphor of translation used in postcolonial theory. Instead of retreating to solid disciplinary ground, as Trivedi suggests, a reactivation of interdisciplinary dialogue is called for. As Bennett rightly points out, postcolonial writers like Spivak and Bhabha were not only the first to make use of the metaphor of the in-between but also “influential in alerting the translation studies community to its heuristic potential for translation” (Bennett 2012: 45).

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The idea of an in-between space has attracted a lot of attention in translation studies over the last few decades, and has become a common trope in the work of many scholars operating in the field … However, at first sight, it is not entirely clear just what this between-space is. The trope has become so familiar that few … have bothered to define it. (ibid.: 43) One of the problems with the notion of in-betweenness is its “conceptual fuzziness” and its association with other spatial concepts such as the “third space” and “contact zone” (Pratt 1991; Simon 1999) which also lack clear definition. To the problematic conceptual vagueness of the metaphorical cluster “in-betweenness-third spacehybridity”, as it is used in postcolonial studies, Bennett thus adds the vagueness of spatial metaphors in translation studies. This terminological indeterminacy, however, is not simply a weakness of metaphorical thinking. The conceptual openness of metaphors can be considered one of its main terminological assets. Metaphors differ from conceptual definitions by their flexible and pliable nature, which makes them particularly suitable for a description of complex abstract phenomena. Bennett also discusses Tymoczko’s influential essay on the position of the translator that I have already dealt with in Section 3. According to her, Tymoczko’s argumentation is based on a misreading of the philosophical context in which the concept of the “in-between” arose. The concept does not refer to any concrete geographic space, but operates on the symbolic level of discourse. This charge seems unjustified in view of Section 3, where I have shown that Tymoczko describes translators as being neither between languages nor between political/cultural allegiances, i.e. as not occupying any concrete space at all. Bennett defines discourse in Michel Foucault’s sense, as that through which institutions shape subjects and define what can be said about them. By doing this, she shifts the argument from an empiricist conception of language to a symbolic perspective, dissociating herself from a dualistic point of view opposing proper meaning to figurative meaning. This dispenses with Trivedi’s call for a return to a limited proper reading of the notion of translation. Regrettably, Bennett, who uses the term “trope” twice in her essay, does not show any interest at all in the metaphorical dimension of spatial imagery. I will illustrate this with an example. Commenting upon Spivak’s metaphor of “spacey emptiness” quoted by Tymoczko (see Section 3), Bennett points out that Spivak’s “in-between” space does not refer to some concrete location, “but to the spaces that are revealed when an authoritative discourse … is deliberately disrupted by the interposition of another” (Bennett 2012: 47–48). She fails, however, to provide a detailed analysis of the metaphorical implications of such a formulation. If we assume that Spivak is using a trope to capture the difficult relationship of languages during processes of translation – and this is the very function of metaphors – the in-between space could be interpreted as something that comes about in the act of translation itself. It is not the position of the translator during translation, but an imaginary extraterritorial

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dimension in between and beyond languages. Its emptiness points to its disruptive potential for change. To “hop into” could be contrasted with “to jump over”, which is traditionally used in spatial metaphors of translation to suggest complete separation of the single languages from each other. Instead of carrying us safely from one riverbank to another, translation carries us right into the unstructuredness of the river flowing in between. Spivak redefines translation as an operation at the very borders of meaning. The spatial metaphor is used here to redefine translation in critical terms: not to emphasize peaceful contact and harmonious cross-cultural exchange (as the bridge-building metaphor suggests) or the transference of an unchanged meaning across a middle space (as the conduit metaphor suggests) but to highlight the hazardous transformative dimension of translation processes. Bennett (2012) concludes: Tymoczko, Baker and Trivedi clearly subscribe to the “commonsense” AngloSaxon notion that words are signs for things in the real world, that “translation” is an act that invariably involves “two texts from two different languages and cultures” … Spivak and Bhabha, on the other hand … are operating in the symbolic domain. (ibid. 53) Personally, I would not subscribe to such a simple opposition, as Tymoczko (2007: 68–77) and Trivedi (2006) have systematically studied the metaphorical dimension of translation processes with a keen eye for the symbolic dimension of discourses and their cross-cultural significance. In her essay, Bennett points to a few aspects that are significant in the context of this book. The redefinition of the notion of translation proposed by postcolonial writers opens “the door onto a whole different conceptualization in which the notion of the ‘in-between’ is far from redundant … Rather than preventing ideological engagement, as Tymoczko suggests, the trope of the ‘in-between’ actively encourages it” (Bennett 2012: 56–7). Conceptions of unquestioned boundedness which define texts, national languages and cultures as well-circumscribed spaces are increasingly inadequate for dealing with the complexity of translation processes in the contemporary world. Borders have become porous, and the different dichotomies still operative in the field of translation studies have broken down. “Descriptive translation studies is inherently ill-prepared to deal with any form of hybridity for this involves ‘the mixing of codes’: linguistic codes … and cultural codes” (ibid.: 58). In Section 8, the last section of this chapter, I want to propose a redefinition of the transfer metaphor of translation, exploring an aspect that, in my opinion, has not so far received enough attention.

8 Revisiting the Transference Metaphor of Translation The great success of spatial metaphors outside translation studies has led to a defensive and excessively critical stance on the part of some translation scholars.

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Instead of rejecting the transfer metaphor outright and replacing it with metaphors of action and transformation, one could reactivate the remaining critical potential and descriptive energy of these older metaphors, redefining and reinterpreting them in the process. Yotam Benshalom (2010) and Ben van Wyke (2010) have done something similar with regard to the acting and the dressmaking metaphors (see Chapter 2). The conceptual weakness of the traditional spatial metaphor of carrying across lies in the fact that the actual process of transference is reduced to a short journey across a shallow ford or a simple jump over an intermediary chasm. The related metaphor of the bridge reinforces the idea of steadiness and stability by doing away with the hazardous fluidity of the river. The specific topographical setting also plays a role. By mapping the physical crossing of a river onto the process of translation, three distinct stages come into view: the two riverbanks and the river between them. Translation is recast in dualistic terms of solidity and liquidity, stability and instability. The metaphor itself, however, highlights only the point of departure, the point of arrival and their relationship to each other. The middle passage is hidden from view. The transference metaphor is an elaboration of the conduit metaphor, and operates in conjunction with the metaphor of equivalence. For both metaphors, transportability and translatability take centre stage. The close metaphoric relationship between translation and river crossing is expressed in the German word übersetzen. The difference between the two meanings is a matter only of pronunciation: übersetzen means to translate and übersetzen to ferry somebody or something over or to cross over a river by boat. Another point of view, however, is possible by introducing the notion of time, which is absent from the spectrum of metaphors for translation of the West but plays a prominent part in Eastern conceptions of translation. Instead of conceiving of the spatial dimension of translation in dualistic terms, one could focus on intermediary phases in between. The in-between space would lose some of its abstraction, and the actual work of the translator would come into view. In order to do this, I will explore the spatial metaphor of the strait and its possible relevance to processes of translation. Straits are narrow navigable passages of water that connect two larger also navigable bodies of water. They share some attributes with rivers but articulate a very different point of view, especially if seen as possible metaphors for translation. Contrary to the steady and quiet one-way flow of rivers, straits articulate an idea of risk, challenge, danger and even fear. They are tangible metaphors for tension, dynamism and the permanence of passages. Straits are complex geographical and meteorological settings where sudden changes necessitate different methods of crossing. Winds, violent currents, whirlpools and eddies ruffle their surface, especially in the middle. They are like rivers, but generally much larger. They are fluid borders at once joining two bodies of water and two landmasses, thus articulating two separate pairs of spaces: from sea to sea and coast to coast. Straits can be viewed as interpretative models for the possibilities created when two bodies are separated by a margin of transition. Straits are porous membranes, regulating the passage from

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one world to another. Straits allow for circulation between antagonistic spaces that cannot completely fuse into each other because they are of different natures. The essential aspect of straits is their fluctuating, composite waters, meeting between two shores and two seas, linking and separating them simultaneously. Straits are liminal areas in Victor Turner’s sense and thresholds in Walter Benjamin’s sense. According to Benjamin, thresholds introduce the possibility of a change of state. “The threshold must be carefully distinguished from the boundary. A Schwelle (threshold) is a zone. Transformation, passage, wave action” (Benjamin 1982: 494). A boundary is a line that separates, a threshold is a zone of transition. A threshold is not a straight line (Pym 2003) but a field of possibilities. Anthony Pym used the notion of interculture to criticize the idea of borders as straight lines separating one culture from the other. Boundaries have only two sides but no middle ground. Intercultures involve intersection and overlapping between cultures and languages (Pym 1998: 178). The German word for threshold, Schwelle, implies a swelling, a change, a passage and a flood tide. Straits articulate duality and at the same time move beyond it. Straits are above all sites where currents meet and mix. The waters bump back and forth, from shore to shore. The strait is a channel where waters mingle and overlap in a very complex way. Because these waters, continuously exchanging places, are not similar. In this alternative view, translation is more than simply crossing a river, moving from shore to shore, from solid land to solid land. Languages are different but overlap continually. Because of this, they seep into each other without losing their proper identities. The priority of the liquid over the solid abolishes the idea of the border as a straight line. The border itself liquefies and all the attention goes to that which takes place in an indistinct zone in between. The strait presents us with a more complex metaphor for translation processes. The metaphor of the strait, in fact, implies a shift from the carrying over of specific content to the process itself. The traditional spatial metaphors for translation ignore the in-between area, which is mostly viewed as an obstacle to be overcome. The strait implies a mixing of contradictory forces, of currents and winds. What happens in between is essential. Furthermore, the languages are no longer static riverbanks joined by a body of water, but contradictory overlapping currents at different heights and with differing temperatures. The time of translation is not a steady linear flow, but a series of vortices and turbulences. The new metaphor supplies a description of the process of translation, the role of the translator and the translation. In the traditional metaphor of carrying across, the essential element is the meaning of the original and the dreadful possibilities of loss and failure. The metaphor of the strait, on the other hand, recasts translation as a difficult middle passage with possible setbacks, a risky practice characterized by a series of successive stages that unfold in time. The translator is on a trip between departure and arrival, focusing on the manifold challenges of the crossing. The intermixing of different currents, finally, points to the ambivalent nature of the outcome. Another spatial metaphor moving beyond the simple dualism of departure and arrival, which is directly related to the notions of threshold and strait, is the gateway. A gate is not an entrance, a border or a divide, but marks an opening and a

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perspective, “a passage of light … It suggests transitory movement, rather than indexing a stationary location. It symbolizes an optic, a system of refraction through which light traverses” (Sakai 2011). Susan Bassnett suggested a similar metaphorical link between space and vision. According to André Lefevere, texts are related to each other through processes of refraction, “as distinct from reflection, using the scientific metaphor of the diffusion of light from multiple angles” (Bassnett 2011: 6). Translation and travelling enable us to look at the world with different eyes. The process of textual journeying also involves crossing a threshold from one world into another … Benjamin talks about translation opening up the gates of language, and the liminal has often been represented as a gateway. Gates of course, serve a dual purpose: they admit and they exclude, hence they can be symbols of great power. (ibid.: 6–7) To conclude: not all spatial metaphors of translation are problematic, as the metaphor of following in someone’s footsteps and the target metaphor, which both stress action and transformation, prove. The traditional transference metaphor, furthermore, can be reactivated by focusing on aspects that have traditionally been hidden from view. The spatial metaphors of translation used in postcolonial theory, feminism, cultural studies and post-structuralism are part of a larger terminological network, which carries a series of political implications. The notion of in-betweenness does not necessarily indicate political abstention, and the third space is not an empty, neutral territory. The notion of reversibility, moreover, implies a commitment on the side of the translator. On an abstract terminological level, these spatial metaphors question any form of duality, linearity and hierarchy. There is, however, another aspect that could be relevant for the practice of translation itself. The spatial metaphors of translation used outside the field of translation studies draw attention to in-between space, focusing on time and stages of translation and thus highlighting aspects largely absent from traditional metaphorizations of translation.

4 TRANSLATION AS METAPHOR IN PSYCHOANALYSIS, ANTHROPOLOGY AND ETHNOGRAPHY, POSTCOLONIAL THEORY, HISTORY AND LITERATURE

Today the movement of peoples around the globe can be seen to mirror the very process of translation itself, for translation is not just the transfer of texts from one language into another, it is now rightly seen as a process of negotiation between texts and between cultures, a process during which all kinds of transactions take place mediated by the figure of the translator. Susan Bassnett

In this chapter and Chapter 5, I will consider the use of the metaphor of translation in a range of different theoretical domains in both the humanities and the natural sciences. This chapter deals with psychoanalysis (Section 3), anthropology and ethnography (Section 4), postcolonial theory (Section 5) and history and literature (Section 6). In the Conclusion, I will discuss the significance of these four examples – along with those of Chapter 5 – in view of a critical reframing of the notion of translation in translation studies. Given the scope and aim of this book, some disciplinary areas could not be considered. Among them are cybernetics, semiotics, comparative literature, feminism and gender studies. Before considering the single disciplines, I want to address two major theoretical issues. The metaphoricity of “translation” is not stable but evolves over time in keeping with its pragmatic definition and everyday usage. The wider definition of translation in the Middle Ages was narrowed down in the course of the following centuries to a primarily linguistic definition (Section 1). This has radically changed in recent years. The metaphor of translation has spread across different disciplines. The main reason for the success of the metaphor of translation is the growing interdisciplinarity of the single theoretical domains and the general globalization of knowledge that we have witnessed over the past decades. Both developments have led to an increased visibility of the notion of translation, which has become the metaphor for all kinds of processes of transformation, rewriting, encoding and decoding as well as for cross-disciplinary exchanges within humanities and between the humanities and the

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natural sciences. A second reason for the use of a new enlarged notion of translation could possibly be traced back to changing attitudes in translation studies. The “cultural turn” in translation studies, focusing on extra-linguistic and extra-literary factors, is undoubtedly one of the preconditions for what some translation scholars have called the “translation turn” (Section 2). These theoretical shifts have had a bearing on postcolonial theory (Section 5) and some recent considerations in historical and literary studies focusing on processes of remembrance and intergenerational transmission (Section 6). Besides these two aspects, there is a formal dimension to be considered, which plays a central role in all the instances of metaphorical uses of translation discussed in this chapter and Chapter 5: the utility and efficacy of the metaphor of translation in the theoretical framework of the relevant discipline. The metaphor of translation was used by different disciplines well before the theoretical changes initiated by the translation turn and independently from translation theory. Two instances of such early metaphorical uses of translation discussed in this chapter are psychoanalysis (Section 3) and anthropology (Section 4). Two more examples will be considered in Chapter 5: sociology (Chapter 5, Section 1) and media and communication theory (Chapter 5, Section 2). Translation studies has recently become a source discipline. The notion of translation has been mapped onto a growing number of processes and practices. Through the common source domain, the different target domains have become comparable. This means that the widespread use of the metaphor of translation might also reveal theoretical links or convergences between disciplines that are generally not considered to be related to each other. The use of the spatial metaphor of in-betweenness in postcolonial theory, cultural studies and gender studies is an example of this development. Figure 4.1 shows the paradigmatic shift involved in the passage from translation as a target domain (see Figure 2.1) to translation as a source domain and documents most of the different uses of the metaphor of translation discussed in Chapters 3, 4 and 5.

1 The Metaphoricity of Translation The notion of metaphor (Chapter 1), the use of specific metaphors for translation (Chapters 2 and 3) and the use of translation as a metaphor (Chapters 3, 4 and 5) can be regarded from a historical point of view. The last of these three aspects is directly linked to the metaphoricity of the English word “translation” itself. The metaphoricity of a word depends on definitions of its predominant literal meaning, that is, its pragmatic use. However, this literal meaning is not a stable entity, but varies in time and space. In this sense, there is no fixed, literal meaning of “translation”, from which to define all other improper or metaphorical uses. The relationship between the literal and the metaphoric meaning of a word constantly shifts under cultural and socio-political pressures. This has a direct bearing on the metaphorical uses of a term at a specific historical and socio-political juncture. The metaphoric field of meaning of a word can widen or narrow according to its literal

FIGURE 4.1

Translation as a source domain

Sociology (ANT) translate all wills into one negotiation and displacement unilateral and reciprocal translation isotropy and asymmetry

Semiotics total translation culture as translation

Cultural Studies culture as translation cultural identity / living “in translation” mutuality / reciprocity / feedback loops

Gender studies / Feminism subjectivity / women’s identity creativity / writing representation in media gender role formation

Anthropology and Ethnography cross-cultural contact culture as translation translating experience into text

Medicine translational medicine from bench to bedside from animal to human generating feedback loops

Translation

Media and Communication Theory media as translators / translating from medium to medium history of code evolution / transcoding translating hardware into software

Biology / Genetics bio-translation communication between species encoding and recoding generating proteins

Translation Studies translation and culture translation and power

Literature / History transmission of tradition remembrance / memory trauma / mourning

Postcolonial Theory in-betweenness, hybridity, third space technology of colonial domination conquest and conversion transfer of knowledge and power retranslation / mistranslation

Psychoanalysis interpreting dreams generative principle psychic mechanism

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meaning. The literal and the metaphoric entertain a fundamentally dialogic relationship, which can however be denied and severed in such a way that they congeal into fixed and opposed poles within a hierarchy of signification (Cheyfitz 1991: 61). Any paradigmatic shift in a specific discursive domain not only calls for new metaphors but also radically redefines the very metaphoricity of its key terms. Ruth Evans (2001: 149–53) criticizes reductionist readings of “translation”, which define non-linguistic, that is, metaphorical uses of the term as not touching upon the methodological concerns and the proper focus of translation studies. Such a narrow view defines translation as a practical activity turning one language into another and translation studies as a subunit of comparative literary studies and linguistics, solely interested in structures of equivalence. As the following considerations will show, in the Middle Ages “translation” possessed a much wider semantic range, from which later, linguistically oriented theories of translation had to wrest their proper meaning, developing a specific technical vocabulary. This translation of the broad concept into a much narrower linguistic term not only effaced the earlier socio-political meaning but also the political relationship between translation and figurative language (ibid.: 151). In medieval Latin, translatio meant linguistic translation, as well as symbolic, physical displacement of persons, ideas, practices and objects. Despite this semantic multiplicity, the central idea was that of movement or transfer. The medieval notion of translatio imperii et studii implied the transfer or translation of culture, knowledge and political power or legitimacy (Cheyfitz 1991: 111–12). This transfer was seen as a movement in space, beginning in the East and ending in the West, from Athens and Rome to Paris (Robinson 1997: 52–60; Stierle 1996). In ecclesiastical usage, the physical transfer of a saint’s remains or relics from one place to another, the relocation of a cleric from one office to another and the transfer of a festivity from one date to another were all forms of translatio. The narratives related to such events were called translationes. “Translation is thus (like history) at once a sequence of human acts and a narrative recounting it, both being and representation” (Asad 1995: 325). Besides translatio, there was a multiplicity of other words for the process of translation, because the act itself was not yet clearly differentiated from other forms of writing like imitation, recreation, adaptation or commentary. There was no clear difference between the original text and its translation and no clear-cut, stable linguistic borders associated with specific nations and national languages. Furthermore, textual delimitations were flexible, many texts plurilingual, and there existed different forms of translation according to the texts translated. Translating from Latin into a vernacular language was different from translating into Latin. In the course of the sixteenth century, a new word for translation appeared in France (Berman 1988). The older translation, and all other related terms, were replaced by the new term traduction, which was now circumscribed to the activity of translating from one language to another. The term spread to all other Romance languages, but not to English. The earlier semantic ambivalences of the medieval term, which had migrated into the domain of the metaphorical, persisted in the English “translation”, but were lost in Romance languages. The French translation now referred

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only to the displacement of material objects or symbols incorporated in objects. The appearance of the new word marks a major event in the history of the West. The notion of traduction not only dispensed with the semantic complexities of the older translatio, reducing its original field of meaning; it also allowed the isolation of the act of translation from all other forms of writing, creating a modern concept of translation based on unity and specificity. At about the same time the notion of the translated text and the translator, a figure with its own profile and psychic constitution, appeared. Ideally, the translator lived in a world of languages separated from each other and had the task of transferring a clearly defined text from one language into another (his/her own) without endangering these natural delimitations between the single languages. The appearance of a new regime of translation in early sixteenth-century France is linked to a parallel historical development that Pascale Casanova described as the consecration and original accumulation of literary capital (2008). The nationalist agenda of the French literary group La Pléiade around Pierre de Ronsard and Joachim du Bellay was bent on the construction of a new proto-national identity, in which translation processes played a decisive role. They developed a model of cultural appropriation that would be relevant for all subsequent attempts. While these two interlinked processes – the constitution of a single literary field and the creation of a new linguistic definition of translation – originated in France, they spread to the rest of Europe in the following centuries. A second step in this evolution, around 1800, was the redefinition of the cultural and political role of languages by Romantic thinkers who stressed the fundamental importance of language in the constitution of national identities (Bassnett 2011: 4). National territories and national languages were analogically conceived as self-contained entities separated by distinct borders. An essential element of the nationalistically inspired monolingual paradigm was the ideological construct of the mother tongue invoking an organic link between nation, language and motherhood (Yildiz 2012: 10–12). The internal homogeneity of the single national language and the resulting radical heterogeneity of all other languages called for interlingual translation processes reaching across the imaginary divide. This ideological configuration hides the fact that languages overlap and intersect in many ways and that single languages are already plural, the site of constant intralingual translation processes. In an essay on the genealogy of translation in the West, André Lefevere points out that from 500 BCE to around 1800 European culture at large had been consistently bilingual and in some cases even multilingual. The period of monolingual nation states reaching from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century ended with the radical changes brought about by globalization. Consequently, the fundamental multilingualism of any culture, of culture as such, is “beginning to re-establish itself in the general consciousness of the West” (Lefevere 1990: 16). However, the new visibility of multilingualism “continues to be refracted through the monolingual paradigm” (Yildiz 2012: 3). Yildiz aptly describes the persistence of the monolingual framework inherited from Romanticism and nationalism as the “postmonolingual condition” (ibid.: 4–5). This profound ambivalence with respect

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to the epistemological, cultural and political status of language and languages is reflected in a view of translation that still oscillates between a purely linguistic definition based on the notion of equivalence and a culturally enlarged definition emphasizing transformation, displacement, change and creativity. The paradigmatic shift from a monolingual to a multilingual perspective questioning the self-contained organic nature of languages goes hand in hand with a radical redefinition of the meaning of translation, which impinges directly on the metaphoricity of the term. The narrow linguistic definition, which came into being at the end of the Middle Ages, has been slowly superseded by a much wider metaphorical understanding of the term (Bassnett 2011: 4). This process that reactivates meanings from the history of translation and introduces new aspects is linked to the cultural turn and what has been called the “translation turn”.

2 The Translation Turn Before discussing the theoretical implications of the notion of the translation turn for the present study, I will briefly sketch the genealogy of the notion and its impact in translation theory (see also Bachmann-Medick 2009, 2013). In their co-authored introduction to Translation, History and Culture published in 1990, André Lefevere and Susan Bassnett register a cultural turn in translation studies based on a culturally and politically enlarged understanding of translation beyond the positivistic notion of linguistic equivalence. This new concept of translation is not about words and texts but about culture and power. It focuses on the functional side of translation, the importance of standards of acceptability and predominant forms of discourse. Finally, it questions clear-cut borders with other textual activities like rewriting. Lefevere and Bassnett’s collection of essays marked a radical shift in the field of translation studies. In her essay “The Translation Turn in Cultural Studies” published eight years later, Susan Bassnett (1998) pointed to a fundamental theoretical convergence between translation studies and cultural studies. The growing interest in cultural issues in translation studies corresponded to a growing interest in translation in the work of cultural theorists. The parallel evolution had come about in three separate steps from the 1970s to the 1990s, conveying both translation theory and cultural studies from a culturalist criticism of elitist definitions of culture to a post-structuralist recognition of cultural pluralism via a structuralist inquiry into the relationship of textuality and hegemony. This development was also possible because the two disciplines shared a common agenda from the start. Both were actively calling disciplinary borders into question and moving towards the creation of a new space for dialogue. Bassnett draws a connection to her earlier essay, suggesting a structural complementarity between the cultural turn and the translation turn as far as their fundamental intentions are concerned. The previous text was intended as a manifesto signalling a major change of emphasis in the field of translation studies, which was moving from its “formalist phase” to “broader issues of context, history and

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convention” (ibid.: 123). The translation turn in cultural studies seems to follow the same kind of logic. If Even-Zohar’s literary polysystem redefined translation as a potential force for renewal at the core of social transformation processes, Homi Bhabha recasts it as “a sign of fragmentation, of cultural destabilisation and negotiation” (ibid.: 137). In Bassnett’s view, however, the translation turn is much more than the simple use of a common culturally and politically expanded notion of translation in translation studies and cultural studies. It is a change that affects a discipline to its very roots. In the last part of her essay, Bassnett focuses on a problem that still makes an interdisciplinary dialogue difficult: the slowness in recognizing the value of the research done in other disciplines. In this respect, cultural studies was even slower than translation studies in picking up the suggestions of the other field. There is still much to be done, but the significant overlap between the two domains and their joint evolution towards a collaborative approach are very promising. “The cultural turn in translation studies happened more than a decade ago; the translation turn in cultural studies is now well underway” (ibid.: 136). Bassnett’s early optimism has been subsequently questioned. In Chapter 3, I have already considered Harish Trivedi’s harsh criticism with regard to the fundamental asymmetry between the cultural turn in translation studies and the translation turn in cultural studies. Other translation scholars have echoed Trivedi’s sceptical comments. As Mary Snell-Hornby observed in a recent essay, apart from the developments sketched by Bassnett in 1998, no translation turn has actually taken place. The anticipated interdisciplinary activity is still mostly a one-sided affair. Translation studies has actively imported methods and impulses from other disciplinary areas but exported very little in the process (Snell-Hornby 2009: 48). The idea of the translation turn was taken up, reinterpreted and critically assessed by different translation scholars. In November 2003, a symposium, bearing the same title as Bassnett’s 1998 essay and setting up the same theoretical lines, was held at the Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Warwick. The conference planned to consider issues raised by the recent move towards translation studies in the field of cultural studies. However, as Snell-Hornby points out (ibid.: 47), hardly any of the speakers addressed the topic. In Cultural Turns, a book on the history and role of cultural turns in the humanities in the second half of the twentieth century, Doris Bachmann-Medick dedicates a whole chapter to the translation turn (2006a: 238–83). She emphasizes that the notion of the translation turn has become of fundamental importance in social and cultural studies and attributes to translation studies a pioneering role. Bachmann-Medick argues that the culturally enlarged notion of translation was exported into other disciplines. The translation turn would not have been possible without the previous cultural turn in translation studies. Contrary to the cultural turn, however, the translation turn has not yet taken place. Both Bachmann-Medick and Snell-Hornby question the decisive role of metaphors in theory change and the formulation of new scientific concepts. According to Bachmann-Medick, all turns display a triadic structure. The first stage is characterized

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by a cross-disciplinary exploration of new common fields of inquiry and an expansion of the object or thematic field. The second phase consists in a metaphorization of the new object of inquiry. In the final stage, the object of inquiry is transformed into an analytical category. Presently, cultural studies has only entered the second stage. The decisive qualitative conceptual leap is still to come. To reach a higher level, one would have to elaborate more sophisticated perspectives that do not “stubbornly stick to the path of purely metaphorical uses” (Bachmann-Medick 2012: 25). Processes of metaphorization supply turns with the necessary “fuel”. However, to ensure a safe passage to the third level, the metaphorical tendency will have to be “duly contained”. Any “inflationary use” of translation would ultimately “submerge” the notion of culture (ibid.: 27). However, if the metaphorization process is successfully curbed, a concrete category of analysis can be generated. Metaphors possess imagistic power that can generate new insight as long as they are kept in check by a more balanced point of view. Bachmann-Medick’s theoretical model makes use of a whole series of highly problematic metaphors that would require closer inspection, and echoes the ambivalent appraisal of metaphor by other translation scholars discussed in Chapter 2 of this book. She points to the utility of metaphors, but is sceptical about their scientificity. Metaphors can be of great help, creating possibilities for new insights. However, the middle metaphorical stage is only a transitory phase, which the travelling concept has to leave in order to acquire the necessary conceptual clarity. Metaphors are “symptoms” of the growing porosity of disciplinary boundaries, and of genre blurring in the social sciences. Their transfer and acquisition in the target disciplines, however, is beset by considerable theoretical problems. The terminological weakness and vagueness of metaphors becomes particularly conspicuous when they are used to interpret the emergence and the succession of cultural turns, that is, when they are used on a meta-theoretical level. The imagistic evidence of metaphors tends to make further explanation superfluous. To prove her point, Bachmann-Medick discusses a metaphor used by the German historian Karl Schlögel, who describes the “spatial turn” in terms of a disappearing and re-emerging river: turns are like bodies of water slowly seeping away, continuing their journey underground, only to resurface sooner or later, if at all. Such “rampant organicist imagery [my translation]”, continues Bachmann-Medick (2006a: 24), cannot really explain how turns come about, develop or change direction. The river metaphor, however, does not simply obscure the object under discussion, or dispense with any further analysis. It opens up a specific perspective highlighting certain aspects and hiding others. In this case, it is the notion of a subterranean connection between discourses, whose appearance and disappearance is difficult to predict. Furthermore, by using this specific metaphor Schlögel is not necessarily reinterpreting history in terms of a simple natural determinism, but pointing to the specific socio-political and cultural conditions of emergence of scientific discourse. Ultimately, Bachmann-Medick’s criticism is not aimed at the use of wrong metaphors, but at the use of metaphors as such. Her choice of Schlögel’s organic image is significant in that it suggests a fundamental connection between the use of

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metaphors in scientific discourse and a deterministic vision of history. Tellingly enough, in her criticism of the river metaphor, Bachmann-Medick herself makes use of an organicist image. The German participle wuchernd, “proliferating, sprawling” used in the text with regard to the workings of metaphors (ibid.: 24) is generally employed for the unrestrained flourishing of weeds, but it is also linked to Wucher “usury, profiteering”. Both meanings of the word are fraught with negative connotations. The term is reminiscent of Werner Koller’s less problematic üppig, “lush”, we came across in Chapter 2. The two translation scholars compare the functioning of metaphors to the exuberant growth of plants in order to underscore their pre-scientific character and their problematic tendency towards a unilateral vision of reality. At the beginning of her essay “What’s in a Turn? On Fits, Starts and Writhings in Recent Translation Studies”, published in a special issue of the journal Translation Studies addressing the topic of the translation turn, Mary Snell-Hornby (2009) explores the different meanings of the word “to turn”. She discerns three main meanings: change of direction, bend in a road and development or new tendency. A turn implies that change can be fully apprehended only in retrospect and from a distance. Before getting there, contradictions and hesitations hold sway, “fits” and “starts”, as Snell-Hornby calls them. After the cultural turn some twenty years ago, tortuous debates – writhings – as to the true nature of translation still pervade the field. Despite her detailed and suggestive analysis of the implications of the word “turn” and her own use of metaphors, Snell-Hornby emphasizes the dangers of figurative language, because of its reliance “on associations based on common consensus” (ibid.: 41). Metaphors “due to their ‘slippery’ and ‘fuzzy’ nature … though they may provide extremely evocative images for book titles and slogans” are “unsuitable as technical terms in academic discourse” (ibid.: 43). I will now turn to the theoretical implications of the translation turn for this book. Three main aspects have to be considered. First, the translation turn was developed and discussed in translation studies. These discussions focus primarily on disciplinary domains from the humanities, which are more or less directly linked to the field of translation studies (cultural and social studies, anthropology, ethnography and postcolonial theory) and cover a period from the 1970s to the present – overall a very limited area, both in terms of time and disciplinary domains. The second important aspect is the absence of a valid metaphor theory. Because of this, processes of metaphorization have been looked upon as suspect or simply ignored. This precludes a historically oriented, systematic and comparative study of the different uses of the metaphor and its role in the adopting disciplines. Consequently, the diffusion of the metaphor of translation into domains that are not directly related to translation studies, as well as its previous use, is not taken into consideration. Add to this the spatial metaphor of the “turn” itself, which maps a specific physical movement onto the development and relationship of scientific disciplines. It suggests a moment in time when things start following a completely different track focusing on the breaking point and the time that immediately precedes and follows it. Like any metaphor, it highlights some aspects and hides others. From such a point of view, emphasizing

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thorough, radical change, subtler moments tend to disappear. As this chapter and Chapter 5 will show, the influence of the notion of translation has been much more pervasive than might appear at first sight. For the adopting disciplines, the first and foremost criterion for choosing the metaphor was not dictated by an active interdisciplinary interest but by the theoretical effectiveness of the metaphor and its capacity to create inner coherence by reuniting disparate contexts. This is definitely the case with Freudian psychoanalysis.

3 Psychoanalysis: Translating Dreams Sigmund Freud is a major theoretician of translation and a great innovator in the field of translation studies. He described his early successes as triumphs of translation and explicitly compared the work of the psychoanalyst to that of the French philologist and Egyptologist Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832), who deciphered the Rosetta Stone hieroglyphs. As one of the first scholars who systematically discussed the relationship of translation to psychoanalysis pointed out, Freud gives the concept of translation “a scope, extension and depth in his work that appeared nowhere previously in history” (Mahony 1982: 65). This dimension of Freud’s theoretical legacy, however, has been largely ignored until fairly recently both in the field of psychoanalysis and translation studies. Freudian psychoanalysis contains a general theory of reading and interpretation grounded in the profound ambivalence of words. Every act of a person is a compromise between opposing and conflicting forces. There is no direct form of expression. Communication is not based on a stable and transportable meaning. The object of interpretation – a dream or a psychic symptom – is not static and not an end in itself. Interpretation is never linear or teleological, but an open-ended, endless process of becoming that constantly moves back and forth, always discovering new associations. Because of this, Freud’s understanding of translation moves clearly beyond the dialectics of loss and recovery and is not committed to faithfulness to the original, equivalence of meaning or representational mimesis. In fact, as Andrew Benjamin points out, translation by the analyst involves a refusal of mimesis, disrupting the link between translation, interpretation and representation (1989: 129–46). In this sense, Freud was “the logical precursor to deconstruction” (Quinney 2004: 116). According to Freud, to define the work of the analyst, one must critically discuss two popular modes of dream interpretation. Dreams have often been considered prophetic statements about a future still to come. In psychoanalysis, the actual latent meaning of the dream must be translated into the future to help the patient take conscious control of his or her life. The second popular means of interpreting dreams is the cipher method. Dreams are a kind of secret code, in which every sign is translated into another sign of known meaning according to an established key. Dreams, however, cannot be translated into the open by a system of simple equivalences, because of their origin and functioning. Dreams are not originals, but are already translations of deeper feelings. They are forms of unconscious wish fulfilment that operate with distortion, disguise and dissemblance. They deny, suppress and

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hide that which contradicts or threatens the deepest needs and feelings of the subject. In The Interpretation of Dreams, first published in 1900, Freud used the notion of translation to describe both the relationship of dreams to their conditions of emergence and the task of analytic reinterpretation by the psychiatrist. In the sixth chapter of his book, Freud considers the notion of dreamwork (Traumarbeit). During a dream, latent dream-thoughts are translated by a psychic mechanism into manifest dream-content. The dream-content is a translation of the dream-thoughts into another mode of expression. The relation of the latent dream-thought to its manifest expression can be compared, Freud argues, to the differences between two descriptions of the same content in two different languages. To understand the meaning of the manifest dream-content the psychiatrist must learn its symbols and laws of composition. The manifest dream is the result of two forms of translation, which are almost independent of each other: it represents the latent content as a present situation and transcribes it into a visual frame. The dream-content is presented in hieroglyphics, that is, in a visual code (Bilderschrift), whose symbols must be translated by the analyst in order to reach back to the original dream-thought. The constitutive elements of the manifest dream-content lack logical relation or connection and spell out a contradictory report. In the interpretation of the analyst, the initial connections severed by the dream have to be duly restored. To explain the work of the analyst, Freud uses the example of a rebus. A rebus combines words and single letters with pictures representing words or parts of words. The analyst replaces each image of the picture puzzle by a syllable or a word. Manifest dream-content might look confusing and meaningless at first. The reconstituted string of words, however, generally results in a meaningful statement. This interpretation involves the establishment of a sequential logical narrative, which betrays the patient’s dream. In the first chapter of his book Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), Freud quotes a witticism that aptly sums up the ambivalent work of the analyst. It is the Italian saying “Traduttore Traditore”, the translator is a deceiver (Benjamin 1989: 142). A slight alteration – in this case, the change of a single letter – can produce a shift from one context to another. In the course of analysis, the hidden meaning of the dream has to be translated into a clear statement. This can only be done by transformation, by discarding its surface meaning and substituting it with a new one. Translation in Freudian psychoanalysis does not work according to the classical definition of equivalence. The dream remembered by the patient cannot correspond directly to the new narrative created by the analyst. The translation expresses something different if not the very opposite of the original. If the manifest content is a feeling of hate and refusal, the latent content has to be interpreted as a feeling of love and acceptance. Translation, thus, not only possesses a transformative and revelatory power; it actually supersedes and eliminates the original. In this way, the relationship between the two poles is radically reversed. The original is a site of plurality, a lie, whose truth can only be revealed through translation (Benjamin 1989).

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The work of the analyst and the dreamwork of the patient are two different but complementary forms of translation. The psychoanalyst pursues meaning in its distortion. S/he translates hysterical symptoms and dreams into a language that both analysand and analyst can understand. His/her aim is to effect a translation and transposition of what is unconscious into what is verbally conscious, because thinking in pictures is an incomplete form of becoming conscious. The translation of dream-thoughts into dream-content is characterized by inhibition and resistance. All dreamwork implies distortion, omission and condensation. The forbidden and repressed desires of a person appear in dreams in disguised form. Only a few of the elements of the dream-thoughts make their way into the dream-content. Dreams are never faithful translations, but only very incomplete and defective reproductions of the original dream-thought. Freud exploits the semantic relationship between translation, metaphor and transference (Quinney 2004). He uses two different German words for translation that span a wide interconnected semantic field: übersetzen (translate, interpret, cross over) and übertragen (translate, transmit, convey, transfer without changing, transform, adapt, transfuse, entrust). Übertragen is directly linked to metaphor. Im übertragenen Sinne means “in a metaphoric sense”. Übertragung is also used for the process of analytical transference, the unconscious redirection of energy and feelings from one person to another and the reproduction of emotions relating to repressed experiences. This wide understanding of translation as both Übersetzung and Übertragung allows Freud to use the metaphor of translation for the most disparate forms of interaction. Translation is an all-pervading metaphor used throughout the work, which changes in meaning according to the context. It denotes direct transposition by substituting one item with another according to a preconceived system, but also transference and transformation. Besides dreamwork and the interpretative task of the analyst, a series of other related aspects are described in terms of translation. The unconscious strives for translation into the preconscious in order to penetrate through to consciousness. Retranslation is the effort to reproduce a dream from memory. Dreams are often untranslatable for the waking consciousness. The very movement of material in the psychic apparatus is a form of translation. Neuroses and symptoms are translations of unconscious material. Hysterical fantasies are translated into the motor sphere and into pantomime. The word becomes flesh. Mahony mentions a few telling examples from the area of hysterical and obsessional phobic symptomatology. Ideas are translated into sensations: the sentence “He gave me a piercing look” can cause actual physical pain between the eyes. Conversely, sensations can become ideas: leg pain can lead to the notion of being “on the wrong footing” (Mahony 1982: 66). Organic stimuli occurring during sleep can sometimes be translated into dream-representations. An urge to seek out a toilet can be based on the actual bodily need of urination. We can ideally translate ourselves from the past to the present. In some dreams, the transposition into childhood is expressed by the translation of time into space. One sees persons and scenes far away as if one were looking through the wrong end of a pair of opera glasses. Even the relationship between the different layers of identity is described in terms of

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translation. Freud conceives of the individual as a series of consecutive transcripts of successive periods of life. A patient can be psychically represented as a “vicissitude of translations” (ibid.: 65). At the frontiers between existential periods, a translation of psychic material must take place in order to guarantee a developmental continuity. This view echoes the notion of a life “in-translation” as it has been used in postcolonial theory. According to Mahony, Freud’s endopsychic semiotics of the rebus used by the manifest dream to translate verbal material of the latent dream and his intersemiotic symptomatology are the most outstanding contribution to translation theory (ibid.: 66). In this sense, Freud anticipates Jakobson’s (2000) third category of intersemiotic translation. Finally, translation also plays an important role in the mechanism of psychological repression. In a letter to Wilhelm Fließ from 6 December 1896, Freud defines repression as the denial of translation (Versagung der Übersetzung). Repression seems to generate a release of displeasure eliciting a mental disturbance that does not allow for translation. The German Versagung could also mean that the original itself refuses to surrender to translation, that is, to be made visible through the act of translation. The responsibility for the failure of translation would therefore be shifted from the translator to the original itself. To sum up: in Freud’s work, the metaphor of translation has multi-levelled and widespread meanings. It operates as a nodal word linking apparently unrelated occurrences and imposing coherence to seemingly disparate phenomena. The metaphor is mapped onto a series of inter-systemic, intra-systemic and intersemiotic interactions. It is a central generative principle in the functioning of the psyche, the mechanism of psychological repression, as well as in the emergence and interpretation of dreams. The interpreting work of the psychoanalyst is also a form of translation. Words are translated into bodily sensations and feelings into physical perceptions. The course of a lifetime can be described as a chain of successive processes of translation. Translation is conceived as an open-ended and fundamentally endless process of interpretation and reinterpretation. There is no readily accessible, stable original to fall back upon. There are only translations calling for further translations. The manifest dream-content is a translation of the latent dream-thought and its interpretation by the analyst therefore a translation of a translation. Freud’s use of the metaphor of translation contradicts the prevailing view of translation of his times and anticipates the new expanded notion that has come into being in the wake of the cultural turn in translation studies. It questions the superiority of the original, the notion of a stable transportable meaning and the importance of equivalence. Point by point translation through direct substitution of equivalent notions is a form of theoretical oversimplification. The original can be illusory and deceptive, calling for flexible translation strategies. The notions of objectivity and neutrality are given up. The translator (psychoanalyst) is always involved in what s/he translates. In some respects, Freud moved beyond the culturally expanded notion of translation by positing intersemiotic forms of translation, which dispense with original and translator. Freud postulates translation as an unconscious psychic process without any original to get back to and without the intervention of a translator.

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This echoes the technical definition of translation in media and communication theory (Chapter 5, Section 2) and the use of the metaphor in genetics (Chapter 5, Section 4). I will now turn to the use of the metaphor of translation in anthropology and ethnography.

4 Anthropology and Ethnography: Translating Cultures As Theo Hermans (2002: 16–18) has pointed out, the way other disciplines have conceived of translation can help translation studies to become more self-reflective and self-critical by questioning its own methodological and theoretical implications. When trying to interpret and translate other cultures, ethnographers and cultural anthropologists face problems similar to those of translation scholars and professional translators. The example of ethnography can therefore help translation scholars to guard against their own ethnocentricity and to reconceptualize their modes of representation through translation. The theoretical convergence of translation studies and cultural anthropology suggested by Hermans points to a more pervasive interdisciplinary connection between the two domains that can be traced back to a common history and a shared concern for similar theoretical issues. In fact, the debates in cultural anthropology and ethnography had a significant bearing on the development of translation studies and the formation of a new understanding of translation processes. This goes to show that the enlarged definition of translation that animates both the cultural turn in translation studies and the translation turn in the other disciplines is also a strongly interdisciplinary phenomenon. Let me now turn to the notion of “cultural translation” as it was discussed by three different ethnographers in the seminal collection of essays Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited in 1986 by James Clifford and George E. Marcus. In “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology”, one of the most influential early postcolonial studies on the notion of cultural translation, Talal Asad (1986) retraces the history of cultural translation in British social anthropology, showing how power structures shape this discipline. It is one of the first attempts to draw attention to the importance of cultural inequalities in translation processes (Robinson 1997: 42–5). From the 1950s to the 1970s, the translation of cultures became increasingly the distinctive task of the social anthropologist. In 1954, Godfrey Lienhardt, a pupil and collaborator of Edward Evans-Pritchard (1902–73), one of the central figures of British social anthropology, made explicit use of the notion of translation. He used the term to refer to negotiating different “modes of thought”, shifting the focus from a purely linguistic definition of translation to a much wider cultural understanding. According to Lienhardt, any description to other people of how members of a distant community think about the world can be considered an act of translation. This germinal idea was the seed that would eventually grow into postcolonial studies. As Asad points out, the notion of cultural translation emphasizes the relevance of the social, cultural and political context in which translations are always embedded:

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“the process of ‘cultural translation’ is inevitably enmeshed in conditions of power – professional, national, international” (Asad 1986: 163). Cultural translation is an institutionalized and historically situated practice, not an abstracted understanding. The ethnographer’s translation of a particular culture is inevitably a textual construct. He or she has the power to create new meanings. The privileged position of the anthropologist can be maintained only if one supposes that translating other cultures is a matter of matching written sentences in two languages. Translating cultures, however, is not about a text communicating itself, but about meeting people, learning to live another form of life and to speak another language. Furthermore, cultural translation always takes place within relations of stronger and weaker languages that govern the flow of knowledge. It seeks to reproduce the coherence of an alien discourse and a way of life in the translator’s own language. This reproduction depends on the resources of the translator’s language, the interest of the translator in his/her readership as well as on specific narrative genres of ethnographic analysis. The use of a specific style is not so much determined by the interests of a single ethnographer but by institutionalized power relations. In the long run, the social and institutional authority of anthropology prevails over the personal authority of a single ethnographer. Add to this the fact that very often the stiffness of ethnographic conventions impinges upon the description of a foreign culture. The ethnographer may be writing about an illiterate population for an academic English-speaking audience. Writing also implies an unavoidable change of medium. Ethnographers not only translate the spoken into the written word; they recast rituals, dramatic dance performances, pieces of music, but also eating habits and ways of dressing into a written text. The notion of culture as text has reinforced the notion that translation is essentially a matter of verbal representation. Ethnographers bring coherence to the practices of the foreign culture they are studying. Because of this, it is often assumed that the meaning they discover in a native culture is unavailable to the self-understanding of the population concerned. The analogy with psychoanalysis that such an understanding implies has been explicitly discussed in a text published in 1961 by David Pocock, another pupil of Evans-Pritchard’s. Pocock defines the work of the social anthropologist as a highly complex act of translation (Asad 1986: 161–2). To understand how this translation comes about, especially when it comes to identifying unconscious and implicit meanings, it is better to compare the ethnographer to a psychoanalyst than to a linguist. In Pocock’s view, the psychoanalyst is a scientist dealing with natural phenomena. Psychoanalysis generates a scientific representation of a private language that is translated into a public language without any major distortion. In this sense, it is similar to Evans-Pritchard’s ethnographic description of the society of the Nuer, a group primarily inhabiting the Nile Valley. Evans-Pritchard’s account is a scientific model that is both meaningful to the rest of the anthropological community and effective in that it can be deemed acceptable to the Nuer in an ideal situation, in which they would be interested in themselves as living in a coherent social setting. Pocock’s positivist reinterpretation of the relationship of psychoanalysis and translation contradicts Freud’s much more sophisticated vision. Asad radically

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questions the theoretical assumptions of Pocock’s comparison, using it to focalize some of the main aspects of his critical notion of cultural translation. The anthropological translator has the same final authority as the analyst to uncover implicit meanings in the subordinate society. He actually becomes the author of the subject’s meaning. Pocock’s analogy constructs the native as passive and completely unaware of his/ her own culture and therefore in need of an ethnographer, someone capable of translating it into visibility. In the ideal situation envisaged by Pocock, Asad adds ironically, the subject would no longer be him/herself but resemble the anthropologist. Thanks to the notion of the unconscious, the anthropologist possesses the power to create and authorize meanings for a specific subject This extremely problematic aspect of the relationship between analyst and patient is completely absent from Pocock’s comparison and has received little attention from cultural anthropologists. As Asad points out, cultural anthropology differs from psychoanalysis in that it is not bent on imposing its translation on the members of the culture it studies. In this sense, ethnography is not authoritative. In a psychoanalytical relationship, the analysand looks for help in an authoritative figure. In fieldwork the ethnographer is a learner looking for information, not a guide as is the analyst. Despite this, however, the representation of the ethnographer remains a textual construct that cannot be contested by the people it concerns. Besides exploring the importance of the academic and social context of cultural translation, Asad points to a fundamental difference between the ethnographic and the linguistic translator that Vincent Crapanzano uses in his essay “Hermes’ Dilemma: The Masking of Subversion in Ethnographic Description” as a starting point. “Like translation, ethnography is also a somewhat provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness … of cultures and societies. The ethnographer does not, however, translate texts the way the translator does. He must first produce them” (Crapanzano 1986: 51). The ethnographer has no primary, independent text as a starting point. In this specific sense, cultural translation is translation without a pre-existing original. As Bachmann-Medick points out, the final account of the ethnographer is a multiple translation (2004: 155–6). The ethnographer translates his/ her experience, the oral discourses and the actions s/he witnesses, into a textual form. In an essay on postmodern ethnography, Stephen A. Tyler pushes this critical notion even further, questioning the very possibility of representation through translation. He takes up a spatial metaphor echoing Nida’s description discussed in Chapter 3. Translation? Not if we think of it as fording a stream that separates one text from another and changing languages in mid-stream. This is mimesis of language, one language copying another, which never makes a copy anyway, but a more or less contorted original. (Tyler 1986: 137) Tyler underscores the poetical aspects of culture, suggesting that the ethnographer cannot describe but only evoke the alien cultural setting.

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The writing culture debate of the 1980s had a significant impact on both ethnography at large and the emerging domain of postcolonial theory, to which I will turn in Section 5. The linguistic and rhetorical turn in ethnography redefined translation as a medium through which representational conventions and cultural authority were established. The ethnographic practice itself was reframed as a creative process of translation involving invention and synthesis. As Bachmann-Medick (2006b) argues, cultural translation goes beyond simple cultural understanding, which generally suggests a harmonious relationship between different cultures. If cultural understanding is no longer the central issue of translation, the successes of cross-cultural exchanges seem less important. Conflict and failures come into view because of their more challenging character. Translation becomes a concept of relationship and movement, a metaphor for travel, transit and migration, generating relations rather than closing off cultures from each other. This specific understanding of translation closely resembles James Clifford’s metaphorical use of the term in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Concepts like diaspora, borderland, immigration, tourism, pilgrimage, exile and migrancy are “comparative concepts” or “translation terms” (Clifford 1997: 11). They are not equivalent to each other but suggest displacement, interaction and historical contingency. A similar view is put forward by Nikos Papastergiadis, who discusses the use of the trope of translation to describe migratory processes of transculturation and hybridization (2007: 127–45). To highlight the novelty of cultural translation developed by ethnography, Bachmann-Medick differentiates the theoretical position it implies from the traditional hermeneutic position, which is generally a single-sited, unilateral form of translation with a clearly Western bias. Cultural translation is a multi-sited, transnational globalized form of translation based on reciprocity, on translations followed by back-translations. The metaphor of cultural translation also led to a radical re-evaluation of the notion of culture. Instead of translation of and between cultures, culture itself was reconceptualized in translational terms. Cultures are not self-contained unified entities but hybrid fields for multiple translation processes. Cultures are not just translatable, but are themselves constituted in and as translations. They are the result of translation processes and at the same time continuously feed into cross-cultural translation processes. In this sense, cultural translation can act as a metaphor that questions essentialist and holistic views. To sum up: the metaphor of cultural translation in ethnography highlights above all the importance of the context in which any translator operates. Institutional, social, political, cultural, national and international conditions of power profoundly affect the ethnographer’s work. These conditions are ultimately much more significant than one’s individual attitude. Like all translation, cultural translation takes place in a power setting separating weaker from stronger languages. This notion resurfaces in the writings of postcolonial theorists who define translation as a colonial device producing a hierarchy of languages. Anthropological translation, furthermore, is not based on representational mimesis and does not aim for equivalence. There is no originating text that precedes and constrains the work of the ethnographer, who creates

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his/her own objects and controls their unfolding. Finally, ethnographic translation shows that there is no metalanguage available to carry out a comparison between cultures (Needham 1972). This echoes Wolfgang Iser’s and Vilém Flusser’s view of translation discussed in Section 6 of Chapter 3. Many aspects highlighted here have been carried over into postcolonial theory, which I will discuss in Section 5.

5 Postcolonial Theory: The Difficult Politics of Translation In Section 5 of Chapter 3, I discussed the use of spatial metaphors of translation in the work of Homi Bhabha. In this section, I will turn to the metaphor of translation in the work of three other major postcolonial theorists: Eric Cheyfitz, Tejaswini Niranjana and Vicente L. Rafael. In The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from The Tempest to Tarzan (1991), Cheyfitz explores Anglo-American politics from the sixteenth century to the present. His main focus is the analysis of literary texts. Niranjana’s Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism and the Colonial Context (1992) considers Anglo-Indian relations by examining translations of Indian legal and literary texts from the eighteenth century to the present. Finally, in Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule (1993) Rafael discusses the relationship between Christian conversion and translation in the early Spanish colonization of the Philippines. The three authors redefine the process of translation in terms of power relations and expand its meaning by drawing on different metaphorical uses, ranging from figuration to transportation, the transfer of power and knowledge, the construction of cultural identities and processes of Christian conversion (Evans 2001: 152–3). By doing this, they reactivate earlier, much wider definitions of translation, calling attention to the historicity of the term and challenging the underlying hierarchy of signification. Cheyfitz, Niranjana and Rafael conceive of translation as a technology of colonial domination: the colonial authorities translated the language, culture and identity of their subjects into the terms of the dominant colonial power. At the same time, even if in differing ways, they call attention to the potential for subversion, resistance and transformation inherent in processes of translation. In Cheyfitz’s view, the political complexities of translation have been systematically ignored (Robinson 1997: 63–79). Restrictive definitions of translation in terms of linguistic equivalence have led to its idealization and depoliticization. Cheyfitz develops a comprehensive postcolonial theory of translation by reactivating some of its etymological meanings: translation as metaphor, as the transportation of proper meanings into foreign displaced territories, as the historical movement of learning and empire from Europe to the New World and as the transfer or alienation of property. He creates a dense lexical web of interrelated concepts around the central notion of imperial translation (translatio). As already pointed out in Chapter 1, an essential aspect of Cheyfitz’s political reinterpretation of translation is its etymological link to the concept of metaphor. Both terms are grounded in the division between the domestic and the foreign, creating a dualistic hierarchy of signification, which opposes the proper to the

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figurative and the normal to the strange. This binary vision has both social and cultural relevance. The foreign is linked to the lower classes and the American natives, and the domestic to the upper classes and the English colonizers (Cheyfitz 1991: 95). Cheyfitz’s starting point is a primal scene of instruction based on a passage from Cicero’s De Inventione, which describes how an eloquent leader persuades a group of naked savages to submit to culture and law. Even if Cicero is not explicitly discussing the problem of translation, the multiple transformation processes in the passage under discussion can be reinterpreted in translational terms. The hierarchical relationship between the educated orator and the uneducated savages is expressed in two different languages, one of which is superior to the other. The speaker must translate his/her thoughts into the language of his/her audience. Conversely, the savages must be transformed in body and soul in order to be relocated within the perimeter of civilization. They dress up in civilized clothes and their uncouth passions are transformed into refined rationality. A temporal aspect complements the linguistic and spatial dimension of translation. By being translated from wilderness to civilization, the savages move up along the evolutionary ladder, from childhood to adulthood, from earlier to later stages of history, from past to present. Translation is a complex violent act of power moving across time and space, which recasts the lower classes in terms of the cultural supremacy of the upper classes. Cheyfitz applies this narrative to the colonial history of the New World. The colonizer projects political conflicts and social inequalities inherent in his/her own culture and language onto the Indians. The native Indians look similar to the people from the lower classes back home and speak a language comparable to theirs. By translating the social inequalities of the motherland into the context of the colonies, the colonizing powers recreate the original hierarchical relationship on foreign ground, hiding the social contradictions inherent in the colonial project itself and justifying the right to seize the territory of the colonized. The land of the Indians was wild unowned land, because the Indians lacked any sense of property. In order to alienate the land from the Indians it had to be transformed into the English legal understanding of property first. The Indians had to be thought of as owning the land for it to be taken away from them. In Cheyfitz’s reading, both the transformation of the wild land into legal property and its subsequent alienation from the Indians are processes of translation. In the English common law of the time, “translate” referred to the transfer of real estate. Finally, the colonial project recasts the identity of the natives through a dual movement of incorporation and rejection. The savages are translated into new beings comparable to the colonists. However, the very necessity of this translation stipulates their fundamental inferiority as second-class citizens. In Cheyfitz’s interpretation, the negative critique of imperial violence through multiple forms of translation clearly prevails. The imperial translation ultimately projects the “vision of a universal empire with a universal language, the translatio envisions the translation of all languages into one language … the end of translation in the obliteration or complete marginalization of difference” (ibid.: 122).

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However, translation is not only a technology of domination but also a liberating form of dialogue. Cheyfitz defines this utopian dimension of translation in abstract terms, as the possibility of free interplay between the literal and the figurative, which opens up a playful dialogue between all other related conceptual pairs. The hope of dialogue does away with the fixity and rigidity of binary contraries and the smothering weight of imperial dominance. In this form, translation would not be a mode of repression of languages (within a language) by a master language. There would be no master language. There would be no native speakers. Rather, all speakers would exist in translation between languages, which is where we all exist. (ibid.: 134) Let me now turn briefly to metaphorical readings of translation in the work of Tejaswini Niranjana. Niranjana (Robinson 1997: 79–82), who draws heavily on the work of Talal Asad, questions the traditional view of interlingual translation as a useful accommodating bridge, redefining it as a device that subordinates the native population to the colonial power. Translation not only imprints a new character on the colonized; it radically transforms their identity in the image of cultural hegemony. Niranjana, however, questions Asad’s concept of “cultural translation”, pointing out that it “leaves too little room for the use of translation as an act of resistance” (Niranjana 1992: 85). She also criticizes the notion of a stable transportable meaning from a source to a target text and the apparent transparency of translated knowledge that goes with it. In her view, translation plays an ambivalent role in colonial contexts. On the one hand, it is an instrument of colonial domination, which inserts the colonial subject into a history and culture from which he is ultimately debarred, hiding the violence done in the process. On the other hand, translational practices inscribe subversion into colonial culture. If translation is fundamentally a channel for empire and a tool of colonial dominance, retranslation is a form of resistance to colonial power. A retranslation of the Indian classics would have to work towards decolonization by breaking the colonizer’s translation rules. Retranslation, however, is not simply an attempt at eradicating the cultural traces of oppression but a way to transform and reframe them. The dialogic translation Niranjana envisages in her notion of retranslation works by introducing heterogeneity into the English language, subverting and disrupting the colonialist discourse and highlighting possible differences. The unity imposed by colonialism through Westernized translation and the stable relationships and unified meaning this entails are questioned from within. This specific reading of translation is remindful of Bhabha’s ambivalent notion of the third space. Niranjana’s understanding of the relationship of metaphor and translation is based on Walter Benjamin’s The Task of the Translator (2000) and Paul de Man’s deconstructive interpretation of this text (2012). Translation, like metaphor, with

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which it shares some structural traits, is a form of displacement and disturbance. It is, however, the activity of translation and not the translated text itself that can be compared to metaphor. Paul de Man suggests that the “totalizing movement” (Niranjana 1992: 90), which is always at work in metaphor can be undermined by the disruptive and fragmentary forces of allegory. In her own reading of Benjamin’s notion of translation, Niranjana highlights its political and historical dimension (ibid.: 129), as well as the critique of representation (ibid.: 128), the destruction of continuity (ibid.: 111) and the privileging of heterogeneity and contamination over homogeneity and purity (ibid.: 120) translation processes always imply. Her discussion of the metaphor of translation focuses on its meta-theoretical dimension and is less interested in its use as a trope as Cheyfitz or Rafael, who is the last author I would like to discuss in this section. A multiple metaphoric reading of translation allows Rafael to link disparate domains and to draw a tightly knit picture of the functioning of Spanish colonial rule (Robinson 1997: 82–7). In this sense, his interpretation can be compared to Cheyfitz’s description of Anglo-American colonial politics. There are, however, some fundamental differences in their overall approach, which I will consider at the end. The Spanish words conquest (conquista), conversion (conversión) and translation (traducción) are semantically related. Conquista refers to the armed occupation of a foreign territory and to the achievement of someone’s submission or the winning over of someone’s love and affection. The literal meaning of conversión is to change something into something else. Its most common meaning, however, refers to the practice of bringing someone over to a specific religion. “Conversion, like conquest, can thus be a process of crossing over into the domain – territorial, emotional, religious, or cultural – of someone else and claiming it as one’s own” (Rafael 1993: xvii). Conversión, furthermore, means substituting one word for another of equal meaning, and is thus directly related to translation. In the colonial project, military and political power, religion and language are intimately related. The Castilian words invade the vernacular Tagalog in the same way that the Spanish troops invaded Tagalog culture. The essential middle term between conquest and conversion is translation. The conqueror and the conquered speak different languages. This calls for continuous multiple processes of translation. In a colonial context, however, translation cannot be a reciprocal act of mutual understanding. It helps conquering the natives by converting them into subjects of the colonizing culture. The colonial device of translation works on different interrelated levels at the same time. Since the conqueror’s religion did not allow for simple economic exploitation, the natives had to be translated into Spanish subjects and converted into Christians first. This notion echoes Cheyfitz’s description of the alienation of the land from the Indians. The natives had to be colonized in both senses, that is, conquered in their bodies and converted in their souls. To achieve this, the Christian texts had to be translated into Tagalog. For this reason, the missionaries studied the native vernacular and wrote grammars and dictionaries. Tagalog was transcribed into the Roman alphabet, displacing the native syllabic script, which was considered by the Spanish colonizers

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to be irrational and unusable. The subjugation of bodies and souls was thus complemented by a subjugation of language. Translation is a colonial technology leading to the emergence of a hierarchy of languages – a notion that also plays a central role in anthropology and ethnography. At the top there is Latin, followed by Castilian, with Tagalog at the bottom, a language steeped in paganism. This interpretation corresponded to “sixteenth-century Spanish notions of translation, whereby vernaculars were decoded in terms of master language and placed in a hierarchical relationship to one another” (ibid.: 27). Translation into Tagalog was conceived as a downward movement of progressive inadequacy and increasing geographical and historical distance from God. Because of this, some key words were not translated into Tagalog but deliberately left in their Spanish form, for instance, Dios and Jesucristo (ibid.: 20–1). This moment of untranslatability alerted the Tagalog to the demands of Spanish authority, but it also preserved an outside space where the Tagalog could elude the meaning and intent of Christian religion. Another form of translation can be found in the Catholic practice of confession. The converts had to reformulate their past life in a narrative of sin and repentance, translating the clash between colonizers and colonized from the interpersonal to the intrapersonal. This forceful transformation, converting texts and translating people at the same time, never worked perfectly, as the colonized resisted colonial power in many ways. They did not simply internalize colonial conventions but evaded the totalizing grip of Spanish–Christian conventions, marking differences and working against the production of hierarchy through mistranslation (Robinson 1997: 93–100). The double translational movement from Latin and Castilian into Tagalog and from Tagalog into Spanish created multiple forms of hybridity. From the postcolonial perspective advocated by Cheyfitz, this represents a huge loss because it destroys the native culture existing before colonial conquest (ibid.: 95). For Rafael, however, who attempts to describe the complexity of the colonial encounter, hybridity creates cultural diversity and generates a whole variety of playful forms of insubordination. To sum up: the use of the metaphor of translation in postcolonial theory has led to a reintroduction of aspects that had disappeared from the spectrum of meaning of translation. The metaphor allows for the combining of disparate levels, creating a more complex picture, which integrates language, culture, identity, religion, politics and power. Postcolonial theory highlights the profound ambivalence of translation poised between coercion and liberation. In Section 6, the last section, I will turn to the diachronic field of the metaphor of translation. This specific aspect will also be discussed in connection with media and communication theory (Chapter 5, Section 2).

6 History and Literature: Translation as Remembrance and Mourning As already pointed out in Chapter 2, the understanding of translation in the West has been widely dominated by spatial concerns. Translation, however, also plays an

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essential role in the passage from one period of time to another, in the preservation of different forms of cultural expression for future generations, in processes of mourning and remembrance and in the overcoming of traumatic experiences. Some of these aspects have been discussed in two recent studies. In Can These Bones Live? Translation, Survival and Cultural Memory (2007), Bella Brodzki focuses on processes of mourning and intergenerational transmission, and in Tradition, Translation, Trauma: The Classic and the Modern (2011) Jan Parker and Timothy Mathews consider translation as an active force creating continuity and discontinuity over time. The two works convincingly show how a sustained study of the metaphor of translation could become the very basis for a new form of interdisciplinary research. As Jan Parker writes in the introduction, “it is time to release ‘translation’ from its disciplinary home into an interdisciplinary questioning … For the metaphorical power of translation embraces travel between cultures and between times; embraces personal experience and active transformation of self by text” (Parker 2011: 17). Walter Benjamin was probably the first theorist to explicitly consider the temporal dimension of translation along with its long-term effects. In his seminal essay on the task of the translator, he suggests that in the process of translation the original undergoes a radical modification. “For in its afterlife – which could not be called that if it were not a transformation and a renewal of something living – the original undergoes a change” (Benjamin 2000: 17). Translation ensures the survival and the living on of an individual text or cultural narrative, even if only in a changed and revised form. Starting with Walter Benjamin’s notion, Brodzki describes translation as a “redemptive mode”, a form of transfusion and transfiguration, a critical organizing principle that can be found at the core of all forms of cultural transaction (Brodzki 2007: 1). Translation is seen as an expanding and enriching mode, ensuring the afterlife of texts across time and space. Translation is an “act of identification that is not imitation”; it “hearkens back to the original … and elicits what might otherwise remain recessed or unarticulated, enabling the source text to live beyond itself, to exceed its own limitations” (ibid.: 2). Brodzki points to metaphorical aspects of translation that were part of its medieval field of meaning. To cross the threshold of life and death and from there into the afterlife is a form of translation. Translation is also about “excavating or unearthing burial sites or ruins” in order to reconstruct the past, about “resurrecting a memory or interpreting a dream” (ibid.: 4). The bones metaphor of the title of her book does not suggest the possibility of an irrefutable form of physical evidence. Even if it were possible to excavate them intact – to reach the hard incorruptible meaning of the original – “the necessarily delayed, translated context of such an excavation would be transformed in the interval between the moment of production and the moment of its translation” (ibid.: 4–5). Time dissolves and changes what seems to possess stability and durability in space. Conversely, what is dead and forgotten, hidden, buried or suppressed can overcome its dire destiny by being translated across time and space into another context where it is born anew. Memory’s redemptive work of translation is achieved by collecting the fragments and remnants of the past, reconstituting a narrative that can then be recollected collectively.

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Translation is about “the power and persistence of cultural memory as a challenge to the degradation of both matter and discourse” (ibid.: 6). Brodzki focuses on significant intersections of literature, culture and history, highlighting the performance of translation metaphors as viable categories of analysis. Her first chapter considers translators as “elusive, estranged, erotic and enigmatic” characters of fictional texts (ibid.: 12). Chap. 2 charts the trajectory of American slave narratives and the way translation processes revise, challenge and enrich them. Chaps 3 and 4 turn to translation as an act of cultural memory enabling the survival of “intergenerational, interlingual, transcultural transmission of endangered knowledge” (ibid.: 13). Brodzki considers a text from a French Holocaust survivor, a postcolonial Nigerian novel and Jorge Semprun’s memories of the Spanish Civil War. “Ultimately, this book endorses a view of translation as transfigurative in every aspect of human production”, a “pervasive and expansive model” that belongs “not at the margins of our cultural consciousness, but at the forefront” (ibid.: 14–15). The collection of essays edited by Parker and Mathews arose from a collaboration between different research groups joining comparative literature, literary theory and translation studies. It is an attempt to create a dialogue reaching across boundaries of time, space and discipline. In a programmatic prologue, Susan Bassnett explores some of the metaphorical dimensions of translation. The stories we tell and retell each other and ourselves in our daily lives and the ways we rework and reshape the past are forms of translation. Translation also encompasses the notions of metamorphosis and death. It can recover the past and bring the dead back to life. Translation is a form of resurrection. In the sixteenth century, it also meant the translation of the body into the celestial realm. The field of meaning of the word “translation” diachronically is far wider than the restricted sense of translation as the transfer of a text written in one language into another … Through translation we are enabled to peep beyond the curtain that holds back the distant past. (Bassnett 2011: 1–2) The book, whose title alliteratively and metaphorically links translation to tradition and trauma, but also to transmission, consists of three parts. The first part considers the way in which the classical tradition was handed down through history, made new or openly refused. The second part discusses forms of tension between modernity and tradition and the third the way traumatic experiences are carried over into the present. The predominant notion of translation emerging from the book revolves around highly ambivalent moments of violence, dislocation, destruction and renewal, echoing an understanding of translation that can also be found in cultural studies and postcolonial theory. The pre-cultural turn notion of transference is replaced with the more ambivalent notions of transmission and displacement. Tradition is also described in terms of silencing, and translation is recast in tense metaphors: decapitation – severing the text from authority – mutilation and

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cannibalistic reception (Parker 2011: 12). The metaphors associated with trauma confirm this specific vision. Trauma is an “untreated, subsuperficial wound: that which is not dealt with, cauterized, anaestheticized” (ibid.: 22). Translating lament can convey rather than exorcise pain. The underlying historical narrative is inspired by Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History rushing into the future with his face turned towards the ruins of the past. This vision precludes a rewriting of history into simplifying triumphant linear trajectories. The model of cultural transmission discussed in the book suggests the very disruption of the idea of unproblematic linear transmission. “For by disruptive, dismembering translation, Classical material can be wrenched from its original historical world and used to animate or express political discourses in cultures alien to it” (ibid.: 19). This, however, does not imply a simple rejection of a possible historical continuity. The metaphor of translation expresses a contradictory ambivalent understanding of history poised between continuity and discontinuity. Translation is both a product and a process, and tradition both challenged and perpetuated. Translation processes are both “foundational and destabilizing, both locating and disturbing temporal awareness” (ibid.: 20). In this sense, the translator can both support and subvert the expectations of the target culture with regard to the so-called deeper truths of classical texts. The main question, writes Parker, was not so much how great cultural achievements were handed down and reinvented, but what was “found – new wrought – as well as lost – new wrenched, damaged and damaging – in translation” (ibid.: 21). To sum up: contrary to the traditional metaphor of transference, which stressed the notion of a stable transportable meaning smoothly moving across a middle space, the temporal metaphors of translation explored in these two texts emphasize multiple aspects of discontinuity and dislocation, without, however, eclipsing the moment of continuity. Translation implies both renovation and retention across time and space, but transformation and change are also looked at from their destructive and disruptive side. This implies a refusal of a theory of translation based on imitation and mimetic representation, as well as a refusal of the idea of an original per se. Brodzki, Parker and Mathews emphasize the epistemological relevance of the metaphor of translation and its fundamental role in an interdisciplinary dialogue locating differences and commonalities between various disciplines.

5 TRANSLATION AS METAPHOR IN SOCIOLOGY, MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION THEORY, MEDICINE, GENETICS AND INTERDISCIPLINARY EXCHANGES

By translation we understand all the negotiations, intrigues, calculations, acts of persuasion and violence, thanks to which an actor or force takes, or causes to be conferred on itself authority to speak or act on behalf of another actor or force. Michel Callon and Bruno Latour

This chapter considers four further theoretical domains that have made use of the metaphor of translation, shifting the accent from the humanities to the natural sciences. Section 1 discusses the “sociology of translation” and its relevance to actor–network theory (ANT). Section 2 focuses on the media and communication theory of Marshall McLuhan, Lev Manovich and Vilém Flusser. Sections 3 and 4 discuss uses of the metaphor of translation in the natural sciences: translational medicine (Section 3) and molecular genetics (Section 4). The last section addresses the issue of interdisciplinarity. The metaphor of translation has not only been used in single scientific domains, but also to describe cross-disciplinary forms of exchange.

1 Sociology: Translation as Displacement and Negotiation In 1982, Bruno Latour became professor of sociology at the École Nationale Supérieure des Mines in Paris. Together with Madeleine Akrich and Michel Callon from the Centre de sociologie de l’innovation, as well as with the help of the British sociologist John Law, he developed an interdisciplinary approach that would later be called actor–network theory, abbreviated to ANT and sometimes referred to as “sociology of translation” (not to be confused with the sociology of translation as normally understood in translation studies). ANT operates in an interdisciplinary field made up of the most heterogeneous array of elements. The list of possible social actors and agencies is radically extended, and the artificial divide between the social and the technical, between humans and non-humans, abandoned. The objects of science and technology become social–compatible. Also essential is the

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role granted to animals, like the microbes in Latour’s study on the pasteurization of France or the scallops in Callon’s essay on the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay. This combination of heterogeneity and the simultaneous need for connection across dividing lines turned the notion of translation into an ideal principle that both acknowledged difference and attempted to overcome it. ANT does not “designate a domain of reality or some particular item, but rather is the name of a movement, a displacement, a transformation, a translation, an enrollment” (Latour 2005: 64). One of the founding texts of ANT was an essay by Michel Callon on the operation of translation as a symbolic relationship, written in 1975 and deeply influenced by Michel Serres’s La traduction, published a year earlier. I will discuss Serres’s text in Section 5, the last section of this chapter. In a footnote, Callon and Latour explicitly referred to this important theoretical debt (1981: 301). Callon (1975: 120–41) defines the form and functioning of translation from a structural point of view. Translation is delivered from its linguistic straitjacket and reinterpreted as a general organizing principle of society. Processes of translation are political acts of interchange within a symbolic universe. They create and define a complex and continuous network that connects different utterances with each other. Thanks to translation, a problematic utterance can be transformed into another utterance, that is, a specific problem can be redefined in terms of another. Successive translation operations link different utterances to each other. A network is a system of relationships of supply and demand between different utterances. These relationships can be described in terms of translation. Within a network, the dichotomies of inside and outside, centre and periphery, cause and effect are abolished. Furthermore, translations define different forms of exchange and subordination. “Unilateral translation” is a one-way exchange based on the subordination of one element to the other. “Reciprocal translation” is a two-way exchange based on a mutual dependency of the two elements on each other. A group of problems constitutes a body of interlinked utterances if each element entertains at least one translational relationship of reciprocity with at least one other element of the network. One can speak of “organic links of solidarity” when each element of the body is dependent on at least one element and when there is at least one element that depends on it. There are two main organizational forms, asymmetry and isotropy and a series of intermediate states. In the first case, one element prevails; in the second, there is perfect symbolic equilibrium. Finally, the “valence” of a single element depends on the number of links with other elements. The more an element is translated, the higher its domination factor. The more it translates other elements, the weaker its position in the overall network. Translation is not a natural spontaneous operation. It always projects a specific power structure. Callon defines translation as an ambivalent political process poised between equality and subordination. In the following years, the members of ANT reinterpreted Callon’s notion, emphasizing new aspects and applying it to concrete examples. In Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory, Latour discusses the difference between translation and transportation, shifting the theoretical focus from the kind of relationship that translation establishes to the role of individual

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actors (2005: 106–9). Callon differentiated between unilateral and reciprocal forms of translation. Latour discusses this fundamental difference from the point of view of the “intermediary” and the “mediator”, introducing a series of new considerations. Even though it is not always completely clear how the different actors of a network are connected to each other, they are all associated in such a way as to make others do things. Actors have to do things. They are not simple placeholders. This is done not by transporting a force that would remain the same throughout as some sort of faithful intermediary, but by generating transformations manifested by the many unexpected events triggered in the other mediators that follow them along the line … a concatenation of mediators does not trace the same connections and does not require the same type of explanations as a retinue of intermediaries transporting a cause. (ibid.: 107) The difference between intermediaries and mediators expresses two different and opposing notions of translation. On the one hand, we have a concatenation of transforming mediators actively influencing each other through a message that keeps changing from actor to actor, and on the other a string of faithful intermediaries transporting the same causal message down the line. Translations are connections that transport transformations. Intermediaries are single black boxes that count only for one even if they consist of many parts: an intermediary transports meaning or force without transformation. To define its inputs is sufficient to define its output. In the case of mediators, however, the input is never a good predictor of the output. “Mediators transform, translate, distort and modify the meaning of the elements they are supposed to carry” (ibid.: 39). Mediators can become complex and lead in multiple directions. They affect each other, triggering unexpected events. A network consists of an irreducible plurality of interconnected mediators that cannot be reduced to a single common denominator. Mediators, furthermore, may become bifurcations or events, originating new translations. Translations are never conclusive or exhaustive; they always prompt further processes of translation. Both the single actors and the connections they create are dynamic entities whose effects are unpredictable and open to change. Because of these radical differences, intermediaries and mediators can never be transformed into each other. The second relevant aspect, which is directly connected to the opposition between intermediary and mediator and the metaphor of translation, is the supposed unilaterality of the relationship of cause and effect that Callon had already briefly criticized in his early text. “The direction of causality between what is to be explained and what provides an explanation is not simply reversed, but thoroughly subverted” (ibid.: 107–8). An example from Latour’s work can illustrate this notion: the development of Louis Pasteur’s (1822–95) bacteriology. From the point of view of classical sociology, the social relationships of late nineteenth-century France would determine the development of Pasteur’s bacteriology, explaining its coming into being and effects on society. Within ANT, however, this unilateral causal relation

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is fundamentally questioned. Latour’s presupposition is that each actor in the network – the scientists, the microbes and the bureaucrats – is playing a unique role depending on the set of power relations. In this sense, Pasteurism is not only the product of social relations, but also the result of an intervention of nature – in this case the microbes – within a specific social setting. A study of patterns of contagion, furthermore, completely redraws the social maps, explaining what it really meant to be socially connected during the Second Empire in France. The word “translation” “takes on a somewhat specialized meaning: a relation that does not transport causality but induces two mediators into coexisting” (ibid.: 108). Latour uses the metaphor of translation to redefine the concept of society. Society is not an integrated self-contained unit but a transitory association. The social becomes a circulating entity, a fluid and flexible network of actors connected by a set of relations, which are each in their own way a translation. ANT studies “the social fluid through its ever changing and provisional shapes” (ibid.: 87). Translation processes generate traceable associations, making the movement of the social visible. Networks “designate flows of translation”; they are the traces “left behind by some agent” (ibid.: 132). In “Unscrewing the Big Leviathan: How Actors Macro-structure Reality and How Sociologists Help Them to Do So”, published in 1981, Callon and Latour use the model of translation to describe the constitution of power structures, focusing on its synthesizing unifying force. Translation postulates the existence of a single unified field of signification, a common site, which expresses a shared desire to arrive at the same result. It involves creating convergences and homologies by connecting completely different spheres of reality with each other: people, ideas, things, resources and processes. The general law of translation helps to abolish pre-defined distinctions between scientific disciplines or single domains of society. Individuals, institutions, economy, history, psychology, technical and social elements, machines, bodies and markets are all actors within an isomorphic network. All actors are translated into a single will. Macro-actors are not necessarily stronger than micro-actors. Differences in size and influence are brought about by power struggles and the construction of networks through translation processes. “Translations are seen as integrations.” Each system is added to the others, producing the big Leviathan of society, a “hybrid monster with a thousand heads and a thousand systems” (Callon and Latour 1981: 297). In ANT, however, translation is not only about convergence but also about dispersion. In Traduction/Trahison: Notes on ANT, John Law recasts the old problem of the questionable faithfulness of translation in new epistemological terms. From this point of view, the failures of translation become a fundamental theoretical asset. Law explores a few specific case studies from ANT to exemplify the “rigour of translation theory by revealing its character as dispersion and diaspora … by stressing that traduction is also trahison” (Law 1997). The first story chosen by Law is by Madeleine Akrich. She studied a possible technology transfer from Sweden to Nicaragua: the exportation of a machine for compacting forest waste into briquettes which may be used as combustible fuel. The machine could have assisted Nicaragua in the manufacture of briquettes from tropical waste products. Technology,

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however, is not simply transferred in one go, but passed on from hand to hand, each time redefined in new terms. During this process, it becomes less and less recognizable. The machine starts to change as soon as it leaves Sweden for Nicaragua. Not only does the machine itself start to change, but so do the social and technical relationships surrounding it. The idea that progress can be exported anywhere without any radical change for the exported technology and the context of arrival recalls the notion of a stable transferable text suggested by the conduit metaphor. The briquette machine starts projecting new roles for itself and all other actors that relate to it. These transformations in turn have an impact on already existing Nicaraguan networks, calling for the creation of new networks. Akrich’s story shows that translation implies both similarity and difference and that “it is going to be much more interesting to explore differences than similarities. Much more interesting to trace betrayals in the practice of translation” (ibid). The idea that translation is also always betrayal is built into “the charter” of ANT (ibid). I will now turn to an example to show how ANT used the metaphor of translation to describe the fundamental fragility and ambivalence of complex social processes. In “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay” (1986), Michel Callon discusses a complex process of negotiation involving four heterogeneous actors with diverging interests but connected by a translational chain: three researchers, their scientific colleagues, the scallops (pecten maximus) and the fishermen. The three researchers had discovered during a trip to Japan that scallop production could be improved drastically by anchoring the larvae in environments sheltered from predators. When the shellfish reached the required size, they could be moved into the ocean, where they would grow until they were ready for harvest. This new technique, still unknown in Europe, would have made it possible to increase the level of existing stocks in France and to stop the steady and continuous decrease of production in the area of St Brieuc Bay due to intensive overfishing. This was their initial hypothesis. There was a general lack of information about scallops among the scientific community in France. Furthermore, the fishermen had always fished adult scallops and had therefore never seen any larvae. And, finally, there was the unpredictable natural environment and the scallops themselves. The experiment described by Callon was set up by the three researchers (marine biologists) who were the “primum movens” of the whole story (Callon 1986: 203). They tried “to impose themselves and their definition of the situation on others” (ibid.: 196). The main aim of their attempt at domestication of the scallops and the fishermen, which Callon describes in terms of translation, was to create connections between the four actors in order to find a common solution to the problem. In the course of the process, the identity of the single actors, the possibilities of interaction and the margins of manoeuvre were constantly renegotiated. Callon distinguishes four separate but overlapping moments of translation: problematization, interessement (a French–English word, synonymous with interposition), enrolment and mobilization. The phase of problematization is characterized by a definition of the identity of the different actors

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of the network and their relations to each other and by a choice of a specific course of action. The researchers sought to become indispensable to other actors in the drama by defining the nature and the problems of the latter … suggesting that these would be resolved if the actors negotiated the “obligatory passage point” of the researchers’ programme of investigation. (ibid.: 196) During problematization a passage similar to the narrow end of a funnel is created, in which the single actors are made to converge, forming an interdependent network. In the case under discussion, it was the question of whether pecten maximus would attach itself in the sheltered environment selected for the purpose. During the second phase, interessement, the researchers tried “to lock the other actors into the roles that had been proposed for them in [the] programme” (ibid.: 196). This was achieved by translating the initial hypothesis of the three researchers into a material device. A series of netted bags containing a support for the anchorage of the larvae was immersed in the sea. These devices assured the free flow of water and protected the larvae from predators and fishermen alike. Each group of actors had a direct interest in the success of this endeavour. The pecten maximus would manage to perpetuate themselves, the fishermen could look forward to a long-term profit, the scientific colleagues would increase their knowledge about the scallops and the three marine biologists would advance knowledge and repopulate the bay to the profit of the fishermen. During the third phase, enrolment, the different roles attributed by the three researchers to the other actors were tightened. Callon defines it as a set of strategies in which the researchers tried to define and coordinate the various roles they had allocated to others. This phase is indispensable, as the stage of interessement does not automatically lead to the necessary alliances. Enrolment has many faces. The scallops must be willing to anchor in the netted bags. This would require active negotiation with turbulences, currents and possible parasites. But enrolment also affects the human actors: the fishermen and their representatives would need to consent to the experiment, watching and patiently waiting for the final result. In the last phase, the mobilization of allies, representative spokesmen for the different collectivities are chosen. Mobilization is a set of methods used to ensure that these spokesmen are “properly able to represent those collectivities and not [be] betrayed by the latter” (ibid.: 196). The four phases tend to concentrate and constrain; their aim is to bind the actors to the common goal by creating a dense network of multilayered interrelations, a consensus that can, however, be contested at any moment and ultimately fail, transforming translation into treason. The first experiment carried out with about a hundred scallop larvae was successful. However, in the following attempts, the larvae failed to anchor, detaching themselves from the project. They became dissidents. The fishermen defected as well. On Christmas Eve, they penetrated the barriers and started fishing the scallops that had hatched from the larvae in the protected areas.

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Callon discusses the methodological relevance of the metaphor of translation for an adequate description of the processes that he analyses in his essay (ibid.: 222–4). Translation is an open-ended process with uncertain results. It emphasizes the continuity of transformations and displacements that occur at every stage: displacements of goals, interests, human beings, devices and larvae. To translate, however, “is also to express in one’s own language what others say and want”; that is, to negotiate and to adjust. In the beginning, the three different universes were separate, without a common language to communicate with each other. The researchers managed to translate the fishermen, the scallops and the scientific community into a unified network with a common goal. “At the end of the process, if it is successful, only voices speaking in unison will be heard. The three researchers talk in the name of the scallops, the fishermen, and the scientific community” (ibid.: 223). Translation is a process before it is a result. This process is always threatened by possible failure. “As the aphorism says, traduttore-traditore, from translation to treason there is only a short step” (ibid.: 224). The danger of dissidence and defection, which is particularly acute during the last stage, is directly linked to the asymmetrical dimensions of power. “Translation is the mechanism by which the social and natural worlds progressively take form. The result is a situation in which certain entities control others.” Understanding power relationships means describing the way in which actors are defined, associated and simultaneously obliged to remain faithful to their alliances. The repertoire of translation is not only designed to give a symmetrical and tolerant description of a complex process which constantly mixes together a variety of social and natural entities. It also permits an explanation of how a few obtain the right to express and to represent the many silent actors of the social and natural worlds they have mobilized. (ibid.: 224) To sum up: ANT uses the metaphor of translation to describe the contradictory character of the social and the processes that generate it. Translation is either a unilateral or a reciprocal process of exchange and transformation projecting different forms of dependence and subordination poised between isotropy and asymmetry. Translation operates within a network of heterogeneous elements. It can create coherence or provoke displacement, translate the wills of the single actors into one or provoke dissidence and defection. In Section 2, I want to consider the use of the metaphor of translation in media and communication theory, focusing on three different authors: Marshall McLuhan, Lev Manovich and Vilém Flusser.

2 Media and Communication Theory: Translating Hardware into Software Chapter 6 of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, first published in 1964, bears the title “Media as Translators”. McLuhan uses the concept of translation for a whole

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series of transformative processes, combining it on the conceptual level with the terms “metaphor” and “media”. The three terms are, in fact, used synonymously, enabling McLuhan to shift quickly back and forth through layers of time and space. Translation and media operate as a sort of time machine. The thematic shifts and sudden stylistic accelerations reproduce on a formal level the functioning of media themselves as McLuhan describes them. Media translate their users from one historical stage on an evolutionary line to another and back. The city has translated the nomadic and rural man into a new human being. Movies translate “us beyond mechanism into the world of growth and organic interrelation” (McLuhan 1999: 12), whereas “electric technology … begins to translate the visual or eye man back into the tribal and oral pattern” (ibid.: 50). Technologies “are ways of translating one kind of knowledge into another mode,” and translation itself is “a ‘spelling-out’ of forms of knowing.” Mechanization is “a translation of nature, and of our own natures, into amplified and specialized forms” (ibid.: 56). Today “we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information … we can translate more and more of ourselves into other forms of expression that exceed ourselves” (ibid.: 57). In the course of history, nature is translated into art. This, in McLuhan’s formulation, is called applied knowledge. The term “applied” “means translated or carried across from one kind of material form into another” (ibid.: 58). Finally, “all media are active metaphors in their power to translate experience into new forms” (ibid.: 57). The spoken word is the first technology to possess this translational power and is, at the same time, the model of all following media throughout history. All media translate as words do. “Words are complex systems of metaphors and symbols that translate experience into our uttered or outered senses. They are a technology of explicitness” (ibid.: 57). Words translate immediate sense experience into vocal symbols. Not only do media translate us from one world into another, but they are the result of a translation process themselves. The wheel is an extension of the foot and the camera an extension of the eye. All these bodily extensions are for McLuhan forms of translation. Thus, translation not only carries across from one state to another; in doing so, it reinterprets, reinvents and transforms; it spells out, makes explicit and amplifies. Translation as an active innovative force never implies loss but always gain and expansion. McLuhan even uses it to convey a utopian, fable-like dimension of endless possibilities of transformation. In the age of automation, everything can be translated into everything else. New technology therefore represents an “image of the golden age as one of complete metamorphoses or translations of nature into human art, that stand ready of access to our electric age” (ibid.: 59). About halfway through the chapter, McLuhan suddenly shifts gears, focusing on the relationship of media and metaphor. Both media and metaphor transform and transmit experience. As extensions of the human body, media store and amplify experience, providing new awareness and new insights. They get at one thing through another, just as metaphors do, and, one would like to add, translational processes as well. The same way that words translate experience, media take care of the interplay

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of senses: “sight [is] translated into sound and sound into movement, and taste and smell” (ibid.: 60). In the present electric age, finally, we witness the last stage of this universal ongoing translation process, which is history itself: the translation of “our central nervous systems into electromagnetic technology” (ibid.: 60), leading to a complete conversion of our lives into the spiritual form of information and a transfer of our consciousness to the world of the computer. McLuhan uses the metaphor of translation as a dynamic generative principle that is active on all levels of human experience, in a way that recalls Freud’s use of the notion in psychoanalysis. Another example of the metaphorical use of the concept of translation in media theory can be found in Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media, published in 2001. Contrary to the two other examples discussed in this section, Manovich uses the metaphor of translation in a strictly non-evolutionary way. He introduces five basic principles of new media: numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability and transcoding. New media objects (e.g., images, sounds or shapes) can be directly created on computers or converted from analogue sources. All new media objects are numerical representations. They are composed of digital code and thus subject to algorithmic manipulation. Media elements possess a modular structure. They are made up of discrete samples (e.g., pixels or scripts), which can be assembled into larger unities. These can be combined into even larger units. New media objects are not static but can exist in potentially infinite versions. “Variability would also not be possible without modularity. Stored digitally, rather than in a fixed medium, media elements maintain their separate identities and can be assembled into numerous sequences under program control” (Manovich 2001: 36). Cultural transcoding is the most important consequence of the computerization of media. Thanks to this principle, all cultural categories and concepts are gradually translated into the new format of computerized society: “Computerization turns media into computer data” (ibid.: 45). This explains the enormous importance of programming languages, that is, of software. In fact, Manovich claims that media studies should be renamed software studies. The process of translation that he is talking about takes place between the cultural layer and the computer layer, the two essential dimensions of new media. Examples of categories belonging to the cultural layer are story, plot, composition and point of view. Examples of the computer layer, on the other hand, are computer language, process and data structure. “In new media lingo, to ‘transcode’ something is to translate it into another format. The computerization of culture gradually accomplishes similar transcoding in relation to all cultural categories and concepts” (ibid.: 47). For Manovich, this translation process is a substitution of all cultural categories and concepts “on the level of meaning and/or language, by new ones that derive from the computer’s ontology, epistemology, and pragmatics. New media thus acts as a forerunner of this more general process of cultural reconceptualization” (ibid.: 47). Manovich uses the notions of transcoding and translating mainly as synonyms without specifying whether this passage implies simple substitution or also a transformative moment. Manovich also uses the metaphor of translation in his latest book, Software Takes Command (2013), to explain the epochal passage from the physical dimension of media

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to a world generated through software applications. The softwarization of media in the 1980s and 1990s consists of a “systematic translation of numerous techniques for media creation and editing from physical, mechanical, and electronic technologies into software tools. Translated into software, media techniques start acting like species within a common ecology … a shared software environment” (Manovich 2013: 164). The “representational formats of older media types” (e.g., books, films and audio records) are “unbundled from their physical bases and translated into software” (ibid.: 171–6). Media-independent techniques (e.g., the search, cut and paste functions) are translated into algorithms and data into visual forms (ibid.: 113–14, 118). “Software simulation liberates media creation and interaction techniques from their respective hardware. The techniques are translated into software, i.e. each becomes a separate algorithm” (ibid.: 200). Even if Manovich does not point to this explicitly, his understanding of translation in this new book clearly privileges the transformative generative aspect. The third example I would like to consider here is Vilém Flusser, whose notion of translational reversibility has already been discussed (Chapter 3, Section 6). Vilém Flusser used the conceptual pair of translation/retranslation and the structural reversibility that it implies to describe the transformation of one medium into another and to develop a comprehensive history of code evolution leading from prehistory to the present moment. In his work, codes and media operate in McLuhan’s sense as translators and transcoders. With McLuhan Flusser not only shares a decidedly ambivalent but creative use of terminology but also a belief in a kind of technological determinism. Both authors describe history in terms of a series of technical revolutions affecting all layers of society. Flusser used his writing practice (see Chapter 3, Section 6), which was based on constant translation and retranslation, as a metaphorical basis for his history of code evolution. According to Flusser, essential changes in human history come about through changes of the predominant code. Codes are systems of symbols whose main purpose is to make communication between humans possible. The two essential codes are images and texts. Images are defined as two-dimensional signifying surfaces and texts as linear strings of symbols. Codes were invented to make reality accessible to human understanding. As with all media, however, they are subject to the dialectical tension of revealing and hiding: new codes start out by representing reality and end up by taking up its place. This inherent dialectics calls for the invention of new codes whose main aim is to open up reality to human beings by making the world understandable again. In Towards a Philosophy of Photography, published in 1984, Flusser develops a history of code evolution based on a series of processes of translation and retranslation. The different phases are conceived as translational passages from one universe to another. In the “Lexicon of Basic Concepts” at the end of the book, translating is defined as a move from code to code, a jump from one universe into another (Flusser 1984: 61). The spatial notion of jump stresses the radical rift separating one universe from another. In Flusser’s view, each symbolic universe is dominated by a specific code. In the course of history, previous codes are not simply overcome and forgotten. They are contained within the predominant

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one, in the same way the different multilingual versions of a text are contained within the last one. The first step in the evolutionary process is the creation of significant surfaces whose function is to make the world imaginable by abstracting it. These surfaces (e.g., cave paintings) were meant to be mediations between man and world, but they slowly started to hide the world by absorbing and substituting for it. The world became image-like. Flusser calls this reversal of the function of images idolatry. To counteract this tendency, texts were invented. Their aim was to break up the hallucinatory relationship of man to image and to criticize imagination by recalling its original intention. Some men … attempted to destroy the screen in order to open the way to the world again. Their method was to tear the image elements out from the surface and to align them. They invented linear writing. In doing so, they transcoded the circular time of magic into the linear time of history. (ibid.: 7) History, therefore, can be defined as the progressive translation of ideas into concepts, of images into texts. The dialectics of mediation at work in the passage from the first to the second step of evolution, however, leads to a second impasse. The purpose of writing is to mediate between man and his images. In doing so, however, texts interpose themselves between man and image and end up hiding the world from man instead of making it transparent for him. “Texts grow unimaginable, and man lives as a function of his texts. A ‘textolatry’ occurs, which is just as hallucinatory as idolatry” (ibid.: 9). Just as the prehistoric phase of images was overtaken by a historical phase of texts, post-history takes over from history and, by inventing technical images, attempts to make texts imaginable again. By doing this, post-history bends the progressive linear development of translation from images into texts back to its origins and beyond. Flusser describes this process as a retranslation of concepts into ideas, of texts into technical images. Technical images differ from traditional images in that the two are the results of dissimilar processes of translation. Traditional images have existential situations as their source; technical images, on the other hand, start out from texts, which in turn have been written in order to break up images through translation. The fundamental difference between traditional images and technical images becomes clear when one thinks of calculated digital images surfacing on computer screens. These images have been generated by software and transcend any purely representational interpretation. Translating, or transcoding, as Flusser calls it at times, is seen as a form of radical criticism and transformation that finally leads to a falsification of the original intention, calling for a further liberating phase of translation. The same conception of an open-ended, always renewable form of translation, bending back on itself in a final recoding move, can be found in Flusser’s own daily practice of translation and retranslation, as well as in the different attempts at creating a unified theory of translation he developed in the 1960s and

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1970s. And this is also where the metaphor of translation that Flusser uses in his media theory originally comes from. In Flusser’s interpretation of the practice of self-translation, the notion of fidelity to the original is of little importance. What really matters is the creative transformative power of the translation process. Any translation process can, furthermore, be subverted by a subsequent process of retranslation, abolishing any simple hierarchical and linear conception of the practice of translation. To sum up: McLuhan uses the terms “metaphor”, “media” and “translation” synonymously. Media translate us from one historical stage into another. McLuhan uses the metaphor of translation to convey a utopian dimension of endless possibilities of transformation, very much in tune with some current visions of universal translation and hybridization. Manovich introduces the idea of a general transcoding principle, by which all categories are gradually translated into the new format of computerized society, and uses the metaphor of translation to describe the passage from hardware to software. Flusser, finally, uses the terms “translation” and “retranslation” to explain phenomena of intermediality and to develop a history of media evolution. Both McLuhan and Flusser use the metaphor in a diachronic sense, focusing on radical change rather than conservation of meaning through time. I will now turn to the use of the notion of translation in medicine.

3 Translational Medicine: From Bench to Bedside and Back Translational medicine is a multidisciplinary field that was created to bridge the widening gap between experimental science and everyday practice in hospitals and medical offices. As with other forms of translational science – for instance, physics and chemistry – its main aim is to translate theoretical knowledge into practical application. Translational medicine started in the United States and was rarely used in the 1990s. In Europe, it is still not very well known. Some American universities such as Duke and the University of Pennsylvania have lately created centres of research addressing the theoretical challenges of translational medicine. In Europe, translational medicine is used above all in cancer research. The creation of translational medicine at the institutional and academic level can be traced back to 2002. In this year, the American National Institute of Health (NIH) initiated a series of consultations in the research community to define prevailing scientific trends and to identify interdisciplinary areas that could not be tackled by single institutes but only by the NIH itself. This led to the formulation of a roadmap for medical research. In “Translational and Clinical Science – Time for a New Vision” (2005), Elias A. Zerhouni, director of the NIH, summed up the main themes of the roadmap and formulated some of the theoretical challenges for the future of translational medicine. In the years prior to publication, interactions between basic and clinical researchers had grown more difficult, and clinical research had become less attractive to new investigators. Because of this, clinical scientists had increasingly moved away from patient-oriented research. This situation called for the creation of the new interdisciplinary field of translational medicine to stimulate the

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development of novel approaches. Since scientific progress is often made at the interface of pre-existing disciplines, it was necessary to reduce administrative and cultural barriers that obstructed such research. Translational medicine hopes to help to establish a bidirectional flow of information between the involved partners and ensure that new knowledge about health and disease prevention and treatment as well as methodological research will be applied to both bedside and benchside alike. There are different but complementary definitions of translational medicine focusing on different aspects. One can distinguish between a product-driven understanding that concentrates on the development of new drugs, devices and treatment options for real patients and a more community- and policy-focused understanding that is mainly interested in the translation of research into practice. The “bench to beside” approach emphasizes the concrete and direct linkage between laboratory and patient. From the point of view of the actors and the financial interests involved, the definitions are more controversial. In academia, it represents a desire to test new ideas generated in basic research with the hope of turning them into clinical applications. In the commercial sector, the main interest lies in identifying ways to make the right decisions early in the process, when costs are still relatively limited, and in accelerating development, especially in the initial phases. For the physicians, the professionals in clinical laboratories and the patients, translational medicine responds to a real need. It should accelerate the application of the benefits of research and ensure that new theoretical knowledge actually reaches the patient. The functioning of translational medicine implies a series of successive translational steps or blocks arranged in a continuum with an overlap of sites of research and translational steps. The real power of translational research resides in its iterative character. At each step, a return to previous stages of translation is possible, creating a series of translational loops. Translational research keeps moving back and forth along the different stages until results have been maximized and the transfer from the initial stages to the last step has been successfully accomplished. “Translational medicine describes the transition of in vitro and experimental animal research to human applications” (Wehling 2010a: 1). In their essay, Plebani, Zaninotto and Lippi describe the “research pipeline” as a series of subsequent translational roadblocks, each of which is grounded in a reciprocal translation loop (2010: 31). The first block ensures the transfer of new understandings of disease mechanisms acquired through systematic testing in animals into the development of new methods of prevention diagnosis and therapy for humans. It translates basic scientific research with animals into an understanding of human biochemistry and physiology. The second block translates basic human medical knowledge into better diagnostic tests that will eventually improve patient management. The third crucial step – translation to practice – ensures the delivery of recommended care to the right patient at the right time. Spatial metaphors of translation take centre stage in translational medicine. According to Martin Wehling’s introduction to translational medicine, the new discipline is a reaction to the “cleft that has been brought about by the separation of

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medical teaching and pharmaceutical research into preclinical and clinical categories” (Wehling 2010a: 1; emphasis added). A successful translation from one stage to the other will have to answer questions such as “If a specific drug works on monkeys, rabbits and rats, does it also work on human beings?” Overcoming this gap is crucial for a successful cure of diseases in humans. The bridging of the divide can be achieved by facilitating the passage and eliminating attrition in order to improve interface performance. Wehling distinguishes between primary and secondary translation. Primary developmental translation bridges the gap between the discovery of a specific therapeutic target and its clinical evaluation. However, “innovations that have successfully passed all translational hurdles in the developmental process … still may not reach the patients at large, as there is a second barrier between guideline recommendation and real-life-medicine” (ibid.: 3; emphasis added). The second gap between market authorization and real-life patient care can be successfully bridged by secondary translation. Wehling describes the relationship of the single stages of translation in terms of reversible feedback loops. The first aim of translational medicine is target investigation and validation. This can be achieved by early testing of human evidence at the preclinical stage of the drug development and its reverse, the use of side effects of drugs used in humans to discover new and better drugs. Thanks to translational medicine, the linear models of drug development have been substituted by a more complex model based on “forward-signaling loops and reverse-signaling loops” linking the different stages to each other (ibid.: 10). The first stage of target identification, for instance, is linked through a feedback loop to the stage of concept testing, while the second stage of hit identification is linked to the launch stage, which precedes the final stage, product maintenance. These loops can effectively speed up processes, allow for parallel processing and generate knowledge for other projects. This specific vision echoes Wolfgang Iser’s and Vilém Flusser’s model of translation based on reversibility and mutuality (Chapter 3, Section 6). The metaphor of translation is also used for target profiling, that is, for the development of a potential drug action site (Wehling 2010b). An essential moment in this process is the possible translatability of a specific drug from animal to human. This gap can be bridged with the help of biomarkers, measurable indicators of some specific biological state or condition. Eighty per cent of all translational efforts are devoted to finding and developing the most adequate biomarker. This impinges directly on the early phases of translational planning. The translational relevance and feasibility of a specific drug action site has to be ascertained as early as possible. Translational assessment of targets must be carried through from the very first day. Target validation implies the chemical accessibility of a specific target to intervention with pharmaceutical agents (for instance, with enzymes). Strong translational validation is a key to success. Targets can gain translational power in the course of an investigation. To sum up: translational medicine uses the metaphor of translation to describe difficult passages between developmental stages from early preclinical research on animals to the commercial launch of a new drug and its use in hospitals. Translation

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processes help to overcome divisions between preclinical and clinical, theory and practice, animal and human, bench and bedside. These processes are reversible. Translational medicine relies on spatial metaphors: research pipeline, roadblock, cleft, gap, hurdle, bridging and feedback loop. I will now discuss the use of the metaphor of translation in molecular genetics.

4 Molecular Genetics: Translating Nucleotide Sequences into Proteins The metaphor of translation plays a central role in molecular genetics, which studies the structure and function of genes at a molecular level. To understand the specific functioning of translation in genetics, two other processes of conversion have to be considered first: replication and transcription (Jacobs 2012). The two main elements involved in replication and transcription are DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) and RNA (ribonucleic acid). Double-stranded DNA is a molecule that encodes the genetic instructions used in the development and functioning of living organisms. DNA is comparable to a blueprint of biological guidelines that an organism must follow in order to exist and remain functional. The sequence of nucleotides (i.e., the building blocks of nucleic acids) in genes represents the genotype, the genetic makeup of the organism, that is, the instructions for producing a specific trait. The proteins formed by genes control the phenotype of an organism, its observable physical characteristics or traits. The passage from the genotype to the phenotype is ensured by the flow of genetic information. I will return to this point shortly. RNA is a single-stranded molecule that helps carry out this blueprint’s guidelines. RNA is more versatile than DNA and capable of performing numerous tasks. DNA is like a database. It is more stable than RNA and holds more complex information, for longer periods. DNA and RNA can be considered cousins. Both DNA and RNA are encoded in specific nucleic acid sequences. A sequence is a succession of letters that indicate the order of nucleotides within a DNA or RNA molecule. During replication, the first type of conversion, a single strand of DNA is used as a template to build new DNA. This process occurs when stem cells are about to divide to generate new daughter cells. The results are two complete DNA strands that are identical copies of one another. The two DNA strands possess exactly the same sequence. The other two conversions, transcription and translation, are the two essential stages of the multistage process of genetic information flow. The English molecular biologist Francis Crick (1916–2004), the co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953 with James Watson, called this process, which describes the primary method by which a living organism can interpret its genetic information into proteins, the central dogma of biology. The flow of genetic information is the very basis of all life on earth. It is a unidirectional stream. Information cannot be translated from protein back into nucleic acid. In the first stage of transcription, the database of DNA is accessed and the enzyme RNA polymerase transcribes a particular segment of DNA into RNA to

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produce an intermediate RNA molecule. The information of the coding sequences is then synthesized in sequences that are precisely complementary to those of the coding strand of the DNA. Jamie Jacobs compares this process to the rewriting of an old English text into modern English, suggesting a fundamental continuity between the two codes with the possibility of minor changes (2012). Transcription is the first stage of gene expression (Passarge 2001: 52–3). The second stage is protein synthesis. The genetic information is interpreted into a string of amino acids to create a polypeptide chain; that is, the sequence of information in the intermediary RNA molecule is translated into corresponding sequences of amino acids. This stage is known as translation because there is no direct correspondence between the nucleotide sequence in DNA (and RNA) and the sequence of amino acids in the protein. Protein biosynthesis is responsible for the generation of new proteins by biological cells to balance the loss of cellular proteins through export or degradation. It is organized into multiple steps and involves error-checking mechanisms. During the process of genetic translation, the four-letter DNA code is turned into flesh and blood. Genetic translation can be compared to a transposition of one language into another because it involves both faithfulness to an original code and the creation of something essentially different. Jacobs compares protein biosynthesis to the translation of a modern English book into Japanese (2012). In the complex functioning of protein synthesis, two important forms of biologically active RNA play a decisive role: messenger RNA (mRNA), which conveys genetic information encoded as a ribonucleotide sequence from the chromosomes to the ribosomes, and transfer RNA (tRNA), which carries amino acids to the protein synthetic machinery of a cell. The mRNA carries the gene’s message from the DNA out of the nucleus to a ribosome for the production of a particular protein. Transfer RNA is an adapter molecule that serves as a physical link and as a translator between the sequence of nucleic acids and the amino acid sequence of proteins. The interaction between tRNA and mRNA leads to protein synthesis. Transfer RNA possesses two sites: one for amino acid attachment and an anticodon or RNA triplet. To ensure a faultless translation of each new amino acid to be added to the growing polypeptide chain, each tRNA anticodon is matched to a complementary mRNA codon. Both the codon and the anticodon sequences are made up of three nucleotides. Genetic translation is a single coordinated process in which mRNA is decoded by a ribosome to produce a specific amino acid chain. Ribosome molecules are the primary site of biological protein synthesis. They are large and complex molecular machines that function like translational apparatuses. Ribosomes are multi-subunit structures containing rRNA and protein. They are composed of two subunits. The small subunit positions the mRNA so that it can be read, and the large subunit removes each amino acid and joins it to the growing protein chain. The single amino acids are read one by one in an order specified by mRNA and joined together to form a complete polypeptide chain. The amino acid is carried to the ribosome by tRNA as directed by the codon sequence in the mRNA. As the mRNA is

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ratcheted through the ribosome, the mRNA sequence is translated into an amino acid sequence. The mRNA passes through the ribosome and is read by it in a fashion reminiscent of that of a ticker tape or computer tape. Genetic translation consists of three phases: initiation, elongation and termination. During initiation, the ribosome assembles around the target mRNA, and the first tRNA is attached to the start codon. During elongation, the tRNA transfers one amino acid at a time to the growing protein chain, and the ribosome moves on to the next mRNA codon to continue the process. When the stop codon is reached, the ribosome releases the finished polypeptide chain. The process is terminated. The addition of each amino acid is a three-step cycle taking place at three distinct sites of the ribosome. The tRNA enters the ribosome at the A site and is tested for codon/ anticodon match with mRNA. If there is a correct match, the tRNA is shifted to the P site, and the amino acid it carries is added to the growing chain. The tRNA is then moved to the E site, where it is ejected from the ribosome to be recycled. In the course of this process the finished chain emerges from the ribosome. To sum up: molecular genetics makes a very specific use of the metaphor of translation, differentiating it clearly from other forms of transformation, like transcription. The notion of sequence is central to an understanding of the flow of genetic information and the main reason for using the metaphor of translation. In genetic translation, specific nucleotide sequences in DNA (and RNA) are translated into sequences of amino acids to generate proteins. These two sequences are different from each other because they are composed of different elements arranged according to a different logic, like the syntax and semantics of two different languages. Translation in genetics is a target-oriented rigorous unidirectional process monitored by an error-checking mechanism (the codon/anticodon match). It is an automatic process functioning without a conscious translator, like Freud’s psychic mechanism active in the emergence of dreams, and it is the very basis of all living organisms on earth. In Section 5, the last section, I will consider the use of the metaphor of translation in the description of interdisciplinary exchanges.

5 The Issue of Interdisciplinarity: Translating Physics into Art As this chapter and Chapter 4 have shown, the metaphor of translation has been used in a wide range of disciplines from both the humanities and the natural sciences. Doris Bachmann-Medick has suggested that in addition to its intra-disciplinary use, the metaphor of translation could also become a model for interdisciplinary contact and exchange (2002: 286–90). This idea is not completely new. As I want to show in this section, there are a few examples of such use that could be relevant for the more comprehensive and systematic approach that Bachmann-Medick is calling for. In Wolfgang von Goethe’s notion of Weltliteratur (world literature) and in German Romanticism, translation played a central role in many respects. Romantic poetry was defined as a progressive universal poetry, based on a principle of universal

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translatability. Its aim was to fuse prose and poetry, to reunite all literary genres and to put poetry in touch with rhetoric and philosophy. This endless variability through continuous processes of translation was also applied to other disciplines. According to the German poet Novalis (1772–1801), single sciences can best be understood if they are explained in terms of each other. As a result, one would not only have a poetry and grammar of mathematics, but also a history and physics of mathematics (Berman 1992). Moreover, these processes of translation can be reversed at will. Vilém Flusser, who conceived of his transdisciplinary work as an attempt to generate a general theory of translation, can be placed within this tradition. His game of translation and retranslation, which applies both to his multilingual practice of writing (Chapter 3, Section 6) and to his history of media evolution (Section 2 of this chapter), is a form of criticism and self-criticism. In his view, the experience of the general translatability of individual scientific disciplines into each other shatters the positivistic notion of scientific objectivity and opens up the possibility of a sustained interdisciplinary exchange (Guldin 2005). I will now turn to a very telling example of how the metaphor of translation could be used to describe cross-disciplinary relationships and exchanges. The early work of the French philosopher Michel Serres, who, as already shown, had a direct influence on Michel Callon’s and Bruno Latour’s ANT, revolves around the notion of translation and its relationship to communication. In his five volumes dedicated to Hermes, translator and messenger of the gods, Serres developed an interdisciplinary reading of the relationship between the humanities and the natural sciences. Serres’s notion of translation is based on information theory (Brown 2002: 5–8). Translation is an act of invention that works by combining different elements into a congruent whole. It is a process of communication making connections and forging passages between different domains. These passages have the power to distort and transform. For Serres, interdisciplinary exchange is not about generating direct links and creating transparent noise-free forms of communication. The spaces in between disciplines are complicated. This calls for a specific view of translation focusing on differences rather than similarities, on difficult passages and not on easy successful crossings. In the spaces in between, messages are transformed. The history of science is not linear but a complex network of paths criss-crossing each other. A scientist should occupy the spaces of transformation in between, giving up the comforts of disciplinary specialism. In a conversation with Bruno Latour, Serres comments critically on the notion of interface, which presupposes that the junction between two sciences or two concepts is perfectly under control, or seamless … I believe that these spaces between are more complicated than one thinks. This is why I have compared them to the Northwest Passage … with shores, islands and fractal ice floes. Between the hard sciences and the so-called human sciences the passage resembles a jagged shore, sprinkled with ice, and variable. (Serres and Latour 1990: 70)

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In an essay discussing the differences between “translation” and the French traduction, Antoine Berman refers directly to Serres’s work (Berman 1988: 31). According to Berman, the French traduction, which derives from the Latin trans-ducere, “to lead across”, and ductio, “conduit”, “line”, stresses the active energy deployed before the actual transference takes place. Contrary to the word “translation”, from the past participle of the Latin transferre, which emphasizes an anonymous movement across a divide, and a notion of passive transference and transportation, traduction points to the agent implicated in the process of translation. This interpretation fits both Bruno Latour’s and Michel Serres’s understanding of the active transformative role of translation. In the introduction to La Traduction, Serres points to the close relationship between different “systems of transformation”. All we get to know about the world and ourselves is through systems of transformation, of which there are at least four: deduction in the area of mathematics and logic; induction in the experimental domain; production in the domain of practice; and finally traduction in the field of texts. Possibly all philosophy is based on duction, that is, on active transformation (Serres 1997a: 9). Not only thought but also the relationships between the four different areas of knowledge are grounded in translation. In fact, the different composites of ductio can be explained by each other. Traduction is a production and reproduction. Furthermore, production, reproduction, induction and deduction can be explained in terms of traduction, an idea that echoes Flusser’s notion of translational interchangeability (Berman 1988: 31). All four systems presuppose an agent, an activity and a transforming energy. Serres defines translation as a textual operation but uses it also in a metaphorical sense. He clearly differentiates the four systems of transformation from each other, but at the same time allows for multiple reciprocal cross-disciplinary exchanges and transformations, suggesting a fundamental unity of all forms of knowledge. In the concluding part of the introduction to La Traduction, Serres addresses a further distinction, which, however, is only one of degree. He tentatively defines science as the sum of all messages optimally invariant with regard to any translation strategy. If this hypothetical maximum is not attained, we are still within the other cultural areas. This means that the deductive and inductive systems show more stability when transported from one field of knowledge to the other. Below this hypothetical threshold operate the productive and reproductive systems, which are characterized by difference and variation. Instead of aiming for an abstract definition of translation, Serres opts for a study of its functioning in concrete situations. His interest is in the application of translation and not in its explication. This allows for a fluid understanding of the term and implies the study of the transformation that messages incur when moving from one system to another. In this sense, a law of history tells us something about the state of matter, and the specific use of form and colour can explain the Industrial Revolution. For Serres, the transformative power of translation always presupposes the possibility of betrayal (Serres, 1997a: 11). Serres explores different forms of translation, which occur across disciplinary boundaries. The German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), for

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instance, is retranslated into mathematics, and the French Baroque painter Georges de La Tour (1593–1652) translates the French mathematician, physicist and writer Blaise Pascal (1623–62). I will focus on the example Serres discusses in the chapter “Turner traduit Carnot” (Serres 1997a: 233–42). In this example, the translation of physics into art is illustrated by William Turner’s (1775–1851) paintings and their relationship to the notion of thermodynamics developed by the French physicist and engineer Nicolas Carnot (1796–1832). At the outset of the chapter, Serres draws a connection between George Garrard’s (1760–1826) painting of Samuel Whitbread’s brewery in London and the rational mechanics of the eighteenth century based on the work of the Italian mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange (1736–1813). Garrard’s painting, executed in 1784, shows a wooden hangar where tools are kept, along with a world in which work is still done by the bodies of men and horses. The main sources of energy are wind and water, putting ships, windmills and water mills in motion. The painting recapitulates a world dominated by objects and implements, a world made of points, lines and circles that will soon disappear. Garrard illustrates the main principles of Lagrange’s treatise on analytical mechanics published in 1788, four years after the painting. He shows us the same world that Lagrange deduced from his mathematical principles. Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire (1838) symbolizes the passage from the old static geometrical world of Garrard and Lagrange to a completely new world dominated by fire and steam. It depicts an old sailing ship, which played an important role in the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, being towed by a tugboat equipped with a combustion engine towards its final mooring place in southeast London, where it will be broken up for scrap. The real battle, writes Serres, did not happen at Trafalgar, but elsewhere (ibid.: 236). The painting is a “scale model of what is happening in society; the latter vessel kills the former. The sail is dead. Turner navigates under steam” (Serres 1997b: 8). Turner’s painting shows the very soul of the new world order. His canvases spit flames like steamboats. They stage Carnot’s reflections on heat and temperature and their relation to energy and work. As Garrard before him, Turner anticipates the future theoretical developments of physics without having any direct knowledge of Carnot’s thermodynamic circle and what was still to come – Maxwell’s demon, Boltzman’s statistical mechanics and the random Brownian motion of particles suspended in a liquid or a gas (Serres 1997a: 238). Turner contributes to the development of a model that is both theoretical and practical, artistic and scientific, cultural and social. He acts as a relay point around which different homologies coalesce, creating a network, combining different elements from different domains. Garrard’s and Turner’s translations are without an original, insofar as the theoretical assumptions expressed in their paintings have not yet been explicitly formulated. This form of translation does not work according to a representational logic, but generates an overall picture combining disparate elements with each other. Serres does not use the word “translation” itself very often. In the chapter from La Traduction discussed in this section, he uses it only in the title. Instead, he resorts to analogous notions: staging, illustrating, telling and showing.

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Between the two pairs – which belong to the same period of time, the “same world”, as Serres puts it – lies a revolutionary shift that affects society as a whole and brings about a complete scientific, social, cultural and technological renewal (ibid.: 235). Serres describes this passage as a fundamental disruption that affects all levels of society in the same way. The road that leads from Garrard to Turner is the same that leads from Lagrange to Carnot (ibid.: 235–6). The changes in art correspond to the changes in physics. The stochastic vision of the world replaces the drawing of forms. “The two works translate the two different dynamics – the old one of ‘cold’ power” and the fiery hot one of thermodynamics. “The change of draughtsmanship and of color palette points to the evolution between two systems of tools, two sets of machines, two conceptions of work. In short, two worlds conceived by – if not born of – these two sciences” (Serres 1997b: 9). The historical upheaval is described in violent terms. Heat disrupts and destroys the older stable cool agrarian and aristocratic society. Fire strikes Garrard’s wooden hangar like a lightning bolt burning it to the ground. The steam of the tugboat “kills” the old sail ship, and the “dead horses” of Whitbread’s brewery are transubstantiated into steam clouds, into “chevaux-vapeur”, horsepower (Serres 1997a: 235). This violent vision of the forces of history recalls the tense metaphors of decapitation and mutilation discussed in connection with translation and the workings of time (Chapter 4, Section 6). To sum up: in his essay on Turner and Carnot, Serres uses the metaphor of translation in two different, complementary ways. The first form operates on the synchronic level, creating overall coherence, “a continuity running from the history of science and social science to the fine arts” (Serres 1997b: 9). Turner’s art shares the same arrangement and style of Carnot’s thermodynamics. His paintings map the emergence of thermodynamics; they do not represent a scientific concept, but are themselves thermodynamic in both form and content. Translation operates as a morphic mechanism that organizes a particular epoch by blurring the distinctions between art and science, the social and the discursive. This specific understanding of translation has also been adopted by ANT. The first form of translation is used to describe the functioning of a society at a specific historical moment. It defines culture as the result of multiple translation processes. The second form works on a diachronical level. History is as a process of translation and metamorphosis. The passage from the static world of the late eighteenth century to the energy- and heat-driven world of the early nineteenth century discussed in La Traduction can be understood in terms of translation. Serres does not deal explicitly with this question. Here again, he uses notions that are metaphorically linked to translation: to disrupt and destroy, to strike and burn down, to kill and to dissolve solid matter into ephemeral clouds. Each discipline is linked with other areas of knowledge of the same period of time and with previous and subsequent stages of itself through multiple processes of translation that operate without an original and beyond the logic of representation.

CONCLUSION

Translation operates by exceeding the narrow meaning of language. A novel is translated into a film, just as a political idea can be translated into action. A human being’s creative capacity can be translated into capital, their desires translated into dreams, their aspirations translated into seats in parliament. Translation passes through and circulates in the intervals of different instances of meaning, threading together discontinuous contexts. Naoki Sakai

Before discussing the different uses of the metaphor of translation and their relevance for translation studies, I want to consider Zrinka Stahuljak’s essay “An Epistemology of Tension: Translation and Multiculturalism” (2004), which sums up in an exemplary way some of the theoretical ambivalences with regard to the metaphor of translation that have emerged in this book. Stahuljak discusses the difference between medieval uses of the metaphor of translation and its use in present globalized times. She argues that the medieval understanding of the notion of translation might help us to interpret and critically reassess some central aspects of contemporary metaphors of translation that have gone unnoticed. The medieval topos of translatio articulates a theory of transmission and an epistemology of tension poised between fragmentation and completion. Transmission is twofold: besides the transferred objects (power, reliquaries, bodies of saints), the specific knowledge gathered around the transmission of these objects is also transmitted. Translation is described in terms of betrayal, rupture and corruption, leading to a dangerous decomposition of the original. It is the site of conflict between power and knowledge. Translatability is thus also untranslatability. Translation always calls for resistance to translation. The division and fragmentation surrounding any act of translation have to be overcome in a final act of completion and reconciliation. Even though contemporary uses of the metaphor of translation occupy a central position within the disciplines at large, they

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do address the issue quite differently. The dominant global language of translation presents itself as neutral and all-inclusive and could become, because of this, a hegemonic discourse. Instead of focusing on inner tensions, it connotes translatability and transparency, obscuring relations of power and conveying the illusion of harmony. Reading parts of Stahuljak’s description of medieval translatio, one cannot help but think of similar descriptions of cultural translation by other translation scholars. In her account of the notion of translation that emerged in the wake of the cultural turn and spread to the fields of cultural studies, postcolonial theory, feminism and gender studies, Doris Bachmann-Medick emphasizes moments of disruption (2006b, 2012). Translation processes, she argues, do not construct safe bridges that allow for smooth passage; they reveal rifts and gaps, hindrances and obstacles. The notion of translation mapped onto key terms of social studies – culture, for instance – questions binary conceptions and holistic structures. It projects a non-dichotomous model of exchange based on reciprocity. I do not want to question Stahuljak’s careful and illuminating interpretation of the medieval notion of translation, but rather her sweeping verdict on the role of contemporary metaphors of translation. Her bibliography features a long list of titles considering medieval uses of the metaphor of translation, but not a single item on the relevance of the phenomenon within modernity. This makes a comparison very difficult, if not impossible. Stahuljak’s view is indicative of a prevalent feeling of distrust with regard to metaphorical uses of translation, and it echoes other voices from within the field of translations studies. As Stahuljak’s own account shows, this feeling is very often based on a theoretical prejudice rather than on a close acquaintance with the issue. In some cases, the metaphor of translation undeniably obscures relations of power. However, as most of the cases discussed in this book suggest, the metaphor generally expresses tension, transformation and conflict and is conceived as a device enmeshed in a dense social, political and cultural web. In postcolonial theory, anthropology and actor–network theory (ANT), translation is the very site of power. Instead of pitting the medieval use of the notion of translation against its use in our globalized world, it would be more challenging to try to understand what links the two periods and what separates them from the intermediate era of nation states and national languages. This, however, would need a study of its own. I will now briefly sum up the main points of Chapters 3, 4 and 5, focusing on the relevant aspects for a critical reframing of the notion of translation. The metaphor of translation is used within other disciplines to describe complex abstract transformation processes (such as the constitution of identity, the functioning of colonial power or the transmission of culture) and/or to connect heterogeneous contexts by creating inner theoretical coherence (for instance, in psychoanalysis, postcolonial theory or ANT). In some cases, it is also employed to explain interdisciplinary exchanges (as is the case in the work of Michel Serres and Vilém Flusser). There are different degrees in the use of the metaphor. It can be employed occasionally (as in molecular genetics) or become a systemic notion organizing the

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conceptual architecture of a specific discipline (for instance, in Freudian psychoanalysis, McLuhan’s media theory or in translational medicine). Generally, the metaphor is used according to the theoretical necessities of the relevant discipline without any explicit reference to prevailing theories of translation. The changes that the notion undergoes within the new theoretical domain are not considered. The emphasis clearly lies on functionality, not on meta-theoretical relevance. The fact that many different disciplines have opted for translation as a metaphor makes these different scientific domains comparable. Translation is also a metaphor for a possible theoretical convergence between the different disciplines and for the growing interdisciplinarity of the humanities and the natural sciences in times of globalization. This is one of the reasons for its sweeping success. Add to this its fundamentally connective and transformative nature. From a structural point of view, translation implies connection, exchange, conversion and displacement occurring between heterogeneous instances separated in time and/or space. These processes always involve difficult and contradictory negotiations and are subject to the risks of any kind of transformation. For this reason, the metaphor has mostly been used for processes involving human actors (for example, the work of the ethnographer and the analyst) or taking place independently of any conscious will (as with protein biosynthesis or dreamwork). The main focus is on dynamic connectivity and fluidity rather than on the existence of pre-given, static and independent entities. The metaphor operates on its own but also in association with other metaphors (for instance, as the middle term between conquest and conversion in Rafael’s description of colonial power settings). Nearly all the instances discussed in this book define translation in terms very similar to those predominant in translation studies in the wake of the cultural turn. Rather than simply being a retaining and preserving force, translation is a generative principle based on instability and open-endedness, a site of displacement characterized by multiplication and dissemination of meaning. Translation is seen as a force of disruption, but also as a unifying force creating synthesis, connecting and disconnecting, generating continuity and discontinuity at the same time. There are, however, also some instances where translation is employed in a more traditional sense. Molecular genetics, for instance, defines translation as the exact transmission of stable messages across an intermediate gap. A study of metaphors of translation allows us to test the limits of the concept. Linguistic and even cultural translation presuppose the existence of a conscious translator. Freudian psychoanalysis, molecular genetics and media theory, however, show that there can be translation without the active intervention of a translator. Here translation becomes a process governed by its own inner logic. Some uses of the metaphor of translation, moreover, show that translation does not really need an original. In psychoanalysis, the original is already a translation. The ethnographer does not translate texts the way the translator does, as he or she must first produce them. Finally, there can be translation without languages and without texts, for instance in protein generation, or in the view suggested by postcolonial theory and Freudian psychoanalysis that identity can be described in terms of translation.

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The wide use of the metaphor of translation in recent years has led to a radical expansion of its scope. Translation is not only the governing principle for culture at large, but also the very basis of life on earth. In this sense, contemporary uses of the metaphor clearly transcend its application in the Middle Ages. The metaphor of translation has been employed in different historical contexts and different disciplines that were not directly related to each other (for instance, psychoanalysis, media and communication theory and ANT). This goes to show that its use is not simply dictated by notions of trendiness, as some translation scholars have suggested, but grounded in its usability and structural adaptability. The predominant understanding of translation that emerges from the different metaphorical uses considered in this book recasts the concept as an interactive, non-representational principle. The translation metaphor questions notions of duality, unilaterality, hierarchy and linearity by focusing on plurality, and in some cases also on reciprocity and reversibility (for example, Wolfgang Iser’s notion of mutuality and Vilém Flusser’s conceptual pair translation/retranslation). The translation metaphor posits a theory of meaning based on instability and transformation. It criticizes the mimetic character of traditional notions of translation. Translation is incomplete, always in motion, never reaching a final point, a reminder of the absurdity of the assumption that there is such a thing as a selfcontained stable original, a transportable meaning or an ultimate translation. An exception to this understanding is molecular genetics. Translation has the power to explain and to highlight, as well as to hide and distort. Contrary to linguistic definitions of translation, which focus on relationships between two texts, the metaphor of translation operates within a socially, culturally and politically enlarged context. Instead of single circumscribed processes of translation that have a clear beginning and a clear end, the metaphor suggests a chain of successive, interlinked, overlapping and in some cases also reversible processes that lack a clear origin and a final point of arrival. This change in perspective corresponds to the historical enlarging of the notion of translation from a purely linguistic to a cultural, social and political understanding. The different dimensions are closely interrelated. What, then, can translation studies learn from a systematic study of the metaphor of translation? Perhaps the answer lies in the overall narrative of this book. It starts with metaphor theory and its links to translation theory, moves on to translation metaphors and their relevance for a metalanguage of translation theory and ends with a survey of metaphorical uses of translation across the different disciplines. To understand and fully appreciate the presence of the metaphor of translation in other disciplinary domains, one has to consider the essential role metaphors play in the formulation and transmission of scientific theories. Moreover, a study of the paradigmatic shift within translation studies in the wake of the cultural turn from the point of view of metaphor would facilitate a better understanding of the role of the metaphor of translation in the constitution of the metalanguage of other scientific domains. Despite the changes that translation studies have witnessed in this respect

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in the past few years, some researchers still harbour doubts regarding the value of metaphors in scholarly and scientific thought. This cautious attitude is often grounded in a theoretical stance that concedes the inventive power of metaphor but dismisses its capacity to operate as a proper scientific concept. Clearly, the work of Max Black, Paul Ricœur, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson has not yet received the attention it deserves. Perhaps the study of translation is in need of a metaphorical turn.

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INDEX

Note: Page numbers in italic refer to figures. acting metaphor, 31 actor–network theory (ANT), 97 Akrich, Madeleine, 97–8 analogy, 4 Andrade, Oswald de, 38 anthropology, 82–6 anuvad, 44 Aristotle, 4–5 Arrojo, Rosemary, 41 art/craft domain, 37–40 Asad, Talal, 82–4 “At the Selvedges of Discourse: Negotiating the ‘In-Between’ in Translation Studies” (Bennett 2012), 63–5 Bachmann-Medick, Doris, 75, 85, 110 Baker, Mona, 53 Bassnett, Susan, 68, 74–5 Bastide, Roger, 38 “belles infidèles” metaphor, 40–1 Benjamin, Andrew 78 Benjamin, Walter, 39, 58, 67, 91 Bennett, Karen, 48, 62 Benshalom, Yotam, 31–2, 66 Berman, Antoine, 112 Bhabha, Homi, 56–8 Black, Max, 9–11, 12, 14 body domain, 37–40 Boyd, Richard, 13 Brazilian cannibalism, 40 bridge building metaphor, 34, 36, 46

Brisset, Annie, 60–1 Brodzki, Bella, 91–2 Callon, Michel, 97 Can These Bones Live? Translation, Survival and Cultural Memory (Brodzki 2007), 91–2 Carnot, Nicolas, 113 Casanova, Pascale, 73 Catford, J. C., 22 Chamberlain, Lori, 41 Cheung, Martha, 44–5 Cheyfitz, Eric, 20–1, 86–8 China, 42–6 classical rhetoric, 5–7 Clifford, James, 85 close reading, 8 cognitive linguistics, 15–8 communication theory, 100–5 “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology” (Asad 1986), 82–4 conceptual metaphors, 15–6 conduit metaphor, 48–9 Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule (Rafael 1993), 89–90 craft domain, 37–40 Crapanzano, Vincent 84 Crick, Francis, 108–10 cross-domain mappings, 17–8

Index

cultural translation, 82–6 cultural turn, 62–3 Cultural Turns (Bachmann-Medick 2006a), 75 Dagut, M. B., 26 Decentering Translation Studies: India and Beyond (Kothari and Wakabayashi 2009), 42 digesting metaphor, 40 displacement metaphor, 6 dreams, 78–82 dressmaking metaphor, 31 Du Bellay, Joachim, 38, 73 Eastern field of metaphors, 42–6 emphasis, 14 “An Epistemology of Tension: Translation and Multiculturalism” (Stahuljak 2004), 115–6 equivalence, notion of, 18 ethnography, 82–6 Evans, Ruth, 72 Evans-Pritchard, Edward, 82–3 exile, 57 fanyi, notion of, 45 Farrell, Joseph, 41 feeding and digesting metaphor, 40 figuration, 20–1 filter metaphor, 10–1 Florio, John, 39 Flusser, Vilém, 59–60, 103–5, 111 focus metaphor, 10–1 frame metaphor, 10–1 Freud, Sigmund, 78–82 Garrard, George, 113–4 gateway metaphor, 67–8 gender domain, 39–42 genetics, 108–10 globalization, effects of, 1 Goethe, Wolfgang von, 110 Gopinathan, G., 43 Green, Jeffrey M., 29 Gross, Alex, 29 grounding, 17 Grundprobleme der Übersetzung (Basic Problems in Translation) (Koller 1972), 26–8 Hanne, Michael, 30–1 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 39 Hermans, Theo, 26, 30, 32–3, 34–5, 82–6 history, 90–3 hon ’yaku, origin of term, 44 hybridity, 57

129

“Ideology and the Position of the Translator: In What Sense Is a Translator ‘In Between’?” (Tymoczko 2003), 53–5 imitation metaphor, 38 immigration metaphor, 21 in-betweenness, 53–5 in-betweenness-third space-hybridity, 56–8 India, 42–6 inference patterns, 17–8 Institutio Oratoria, 6–7 interaction theory, 9–11 intercultures, 55–6 interdisciplinary dialogue, facilitation of, 61 interdisciplinary exchanges, 110–4 The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud 1900), 79 Iser, Wolfgang, 60–1 Jakobson, Roman, 49 Japan, 42–6 Johnson, Mark, 15–8, 48–9 Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (Freud 1905), 79 Koller, Werner, 26–8 Kothari, Rita, 42 Kuhn, Thomas, 13–4 Lagrange, Joseph-Louis, 113 La Tour, Georges de, 113 Lakoff, George B., 15–8, 48–9 Lambkin, Brian, 21 The Language of New Media (Manovich 2001), 102–3 Latour, Bruno, 95–7, 111 Law, John, 97 Lefevere, André, 55, 68, 73, 74–5 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 112–3 Lienhardt, Godfrey, 82–4 liminality, 56–7 A Linguistic Theory of Translation: An Essay in Applied Linguistics (Catford 1965), 22 linguistics, cognitive, 15–8 literature, 90–3 The Location of Culture (Bhabha 2006), 56–8 Mahony, Patrick, 80, 81 Mandelblit, Nili, 26 Manifesto Antropófago (Cannibal Manifesto) (Andrade 1928), 38 Manovich, Lev, 102–3 mapping, 17–8 Martín de León, Celia, 51–2 Mathews, Timothy, 92–3 McLuhan, Marshall, 100–2 media and communication theory, 100–5

130 Index

medicine, 105–8 Mehrez, Samira, 54 metaphor: Aristotle’s definition of, 4–5; classes of, 7; defined, 6–7; and translation, 18–21; use of term, 2 Metaphor (Black 1954–1955), 9–10 “Metaphor and Science” (Kuhn 1979), 13–4 “Metaphor and Theory Change: What Is ‘Metaphor’ a Metaphor for?” (Boyd 1979), 13 Metaphor and Thought (Ortony 1979), 12–4 metaphor theory, translation in, 21–3 “Metaphorical Models of Translation. Transfer vs. Imitation and Action” (Martín de León 2010), 51–2 Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff and Johnson 1980), 15–8 migration, 57 migration metaphor, 21 Models and Metaphors (Black 1962), 11–2 molecular genetics, 108–10 Monti, Enrico, 29 Morini, Massimiliano, 29 mourning, 90–3 mutuality, 60–1 national identities, language in the constitution of, 73 nature/body domain, 37–40 New Criticism, 7 Nida, Eugene Albert, 22, 50 Niranjana, Tejaswini, 88–9 Novalis, 111 On the Different Methods of Translating (Schleiermacher 1813), 40, 49 Ortony, Andrew, 12–4 Papastergiadis, Nikos, 85 Parker, Jan, 92–3 Pascal, Blaise, 113 Pasteur, Louis, 96–7 The Philosophy of Rhetoric (Richards 1936), 7–8 La Pléiade, 73 Pocock, David, 83–4 Poetics (Aristotle), 4–5, 6 The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from The Tempest to Tarzan (Cheyfitz 1991), 86–8 postcolonial theory, 86–90 power domain, 40–2 pragmatic relevance theory, 49 proportional metaphors, 4

psychoanalysis, 78–82 Pym, Anthony, 40, 67 Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 6–7 Rafael, Vicente L., 89–90 Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Latour 2005), 95 Reddy, Michael J., 15 remembrance, 90–3 replication, in molecular genetics, 108–10 Resch, Renate, 33 resonance, 14 reversibility, 59–60 rhetoric, 5–7 Rhetoric (Aristotle), 4–5 Richards, I. A., 7–8 Ricoeur, Paul, 3–6, 8–9, 11–2, 22–3, 28 Ronsard, Pierre de, 73 Round, Nicholas, 30 Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Clifford 1997), 85 Roy, Cynthia B., 50–1 rupantar, 43 Schäffner, Christina, 26 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 40, 49 Schlögel, Karl, 76–7 scientific discourse, 12–4 Serres, Michel, 95, 111–2 Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism and the Colonial Context (Niranjana 1992), 88–9 shadow metaphor, 28, 36, 43, 46 smuggling metaphor, 25, 48, 51 Snell-Hornby, Mary, 75–6, 77 sociology, 94–100 Software Takes Command (Manovich 2013), 102–3 “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay” (Callon 1986), 98–100 source domain, 17–8, 35–42, 36, 71 space domain, 48–53 spatial metaphors, 48–51 spatial turn, 76–7 Sperber, Dan, 49 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 40, 54, 64–5 St. André, James, 33 Stahuljak, Zrinka, 115–6 Stecconi, Ubaldo, 32–3 Steiner, George, 40 strait metaphor, 66–7

Index

strong metaphors, 14 structural metaphors, 17 Taber, Charles Russell, 26, 50 target domain, 17–8 The Task of the Translator (Benjamin 2000), 88–9 tenor, use of term, 9 Teplova, Natalia, 28–9, 30 The Theory and Practice of Translation (Nida and Taber 1969), 26, 50 Thinking through Translation with Metaphors (St. André 2010c), 33 Toury, Gideon, 55 Toward a Science of Translating (Nida 1964), 22, 26 Towards a Philosophy of Photography (Flusser 1984), 103 Tradition, Translation, Trauma: The Classic and the Modern (Parker and Mathews 2011), 92–3 La Traduction (Serres 1974), 95, 112 Traduction/Trahison: Notes on ANT (Law 1997), 97 transcription, in molecular genetics, 108–10 transference, forms of, 4 transgression, 6 “Translating Culture vs Cultural Translation” (Trivedi 2007), 62–3 translation: and metaphor, 18–21; metaphor of, 70–4, 71; in metaphor theory, 21–3; use of term, 2 Translation, History and Culture (Lefevere and Bassnett 1990), 74–5 translation turn, 62–3, 74–8 “The Translation Turn in Cultural Studies” (Bassnet 1998), 74–5 “Translational and Clinical Science – Time for a New Vision” (Zerhouni 2005), 105

131

translational medicine, 105–8 Trivedi, Harish, 43–4, 62–3 tropes, 6–7 Turner, Victor, 56–7, 67 Turner, William, 113–4 Tyler, Stephen A., 84, 85 Tymoczko, Maria, 29, 33, 53–5 Tyulenev, Sergey, 51 übersetzen, 66, 80 Understanding Media (McLuhan 1964), 100–2 “Unscrewing the Big Leviathan: How Actors Macro-structure Reality and How Sociologists Help Them to Do So” (Callon and Latour 1981), 97 usage, 7, 69, 72 Van Wyke, Ben, 31, 66 vehicle, use of term, 9 Venuti, Lawrence, 55 visual metaphors, 10–1 vivartana, 43 Wadensjö, Cecilia, 50–1 Wakabayashi, Judy, 42 Watson, James, 108–10 Wehling, Martin, 106–7 Weltliteratur (world literature), 110 wendan, 44 Western field of metaphors, 35–42, 49 “What’s in a Turn? On Fits, Starts and Writhings in Recent Translation Studies” (Snell-Hornby 2009), 77 Wilson, Deirdre, 49 Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Clifford and Marcus 1986), 82–6 Zerhouni, Elias A., 105

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