Ethical Problems in Translation (2010)

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Ethical Problems in Translation

Phil Goodwina

aReligions and Theologies, University of ManchesterPublished online: 21 Feb 2014.

To cite this article:Phil Goodwin (2010) Ethical Problems in Translation, The Translator,

16:1, 19-42, DOI: 10.1080/13556509.2010.10799292

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ISSN 1355-6509 St Jerome Publishing Manchester

The Translator. Volume 16, Number 1 (2010), 19-42

Ethical Problems in TranslationWhy We Might Need Steiner After All

PHIL GOODWINReligions and Theologies, University of Manchester

Abstract. Translation represents the quintessential ethical situationof the encounter with the other. Beginning from Levinas, this paperargues that translation is intrinsically ethical. Making extensive use

of a case study from the theoretical literature (Jenin, Jenin, in Baker2006), the paper demonstrates that the issues raised by this transla-tion are profoundly ethical, rather than merely technical. Attempts toresolve these issues by importing an ethical theory (rights theory isthe example used here) are shown to be unsuccessful. However, thehermeneutical model of translation already contains within itself anethics of translation. This is exemplied by Steiners hermeneutic of

translation as described in After Babel(Steiner 1975/1998). Afterconsidering some objections to Steiners work, the paper argues thatit should be regarded as a bridge between Levinas philosophicalethics and the practical issues of translation.

Keywords: Levinas, ethics, George Steiner, hermeneutic motion, rightstheory.

If, with Levinas (1961:43ff), we believe that the beginning of ethics (in fact,for him, also the beginning of philosophy) is the encounter with the Other, then

translation must represent an extraordinarily fertile ground for the develop-ment of thinking about ethics. In lpiphanie du visage(ephiphany of the face,Levinas 1981:90) which a translation situation presents, we have the encounterof the individual with the Other in its starkest form: mutual incomprehensibil-ity. We must attempt to comprehend the Other, without absorbing that Others

profound difference into a sameness. Once a translator arrives on the scene,the event is thickened into a political occurrence: now we have three parties

le sujet, lautruiand le tiers(the subject, the other and the third; ibid.:188).This requires us to think about the complex relations between these three, to

consider what might be a just resolution of their respective claims, amongother things. Far from having to import an ethical framework from elsewhere,translation might itself then be part of the solution for how to create such aframework in the rst place.

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Ethical Problems in Translation20

And this in turn, of course, would be a tremendous relief. If an ethicalframework has to be imported from elsewhere, where is that elsewhere, andwhat is its claim on the specic activity of translation? An import can only

indicate an ideological source, itself in need of validation, and which hasbeen adapted, more or less successfully, for our purposes. The postmodernproject in ethics can be interpreted as the attempt to grow or nd an ethics

with no foundation. Translation, I would like to suggest, is a good place tolook for this.

In this paper, I consider a specic case from the literature of translation

theory a translation performed in the context of an ethically and politicallyhighly-charged situation. I seek to show, rst, that the issues raised by this

translation are profoundly ethical, and not merely technical. Next, I try to

show that attempts to resolve these issues by importing an ethical theory(rights theory is the example used) are unsuccessful. Thirdly, I suggest thatthe hermeneutical model of translation already contains within itself anethics of translation. Fourth, I commend Steiners hermeneutic of translationas described in After Babel(Steiner 1975/1998) as a highly developed andsubtle example of this approach. Finally, I address some of the more commonobjections raised to the hermeneutic approach.

1. Jenin, Jenin

In Translation and Conict, Baker (2006) applies narrative theory to the dis-course of war and shows that the stories people tell and how they tell themwork powerfully to dene their position in a conict. How one side translates

the other (and how neutral third parties translate both) thus becomes part ofthe struggle itself. Approaches to translation often focus on how a text func-tions at the progressively higher levels of morpheme, word, clause, sentenceor discourse (for example, Baker 1992:6, who also notes the limitations ofthis approach), but here Baker observes that a text can be seen as functioningat the level of narrative itself, and this raises the question of how translationshould reect this state of affairs. Adapting recently presented narrative theory

(including Bruner 1991), she notes that a narrative often consists of a canonicalscript, with a twist some sort of innovation or breach, but in the context of theold, familiar, story. A text may make reference to such a canonical narrative,evoking a whole story perhaps simply through a certain lexical or syntacticchoice, and then adding the twist which makes that text relevant.

How should a translation deal with this? There is a problem here which

presents itself in helpfully acute form, in that the extreme efciency of theoriginal communication is part of it. Suppose, for example, that a British news-paper article about the nancial crisis which as I write is sweeping through

its banking system says: What we need is a bit of the Dunkirk spirit. Acomplex and highly signicant narrative (the canonical script) is evoked in a

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Phil Goodwin 21

few words, and at the same time linked to a contemporary and perhaps, at theobvious level, unrelated event (the relevant twist). How could one translatesuch a reference for a culture which knew nothing of British history? Is it

possible to do so, or is this a case of untranslatability?In the course of Bakers discussion, a documentary on the Israeli raid onthe Jenin camp on the West Bank is cited. This documentary, titledJenin, Jeninand produced by Mohammed Bakri in 2002, includes a short interview withan old Palestinian man, speaking in Arabic, who expresses his shock at whathappened and the worlds apparent indifference and reluctance to intervene

(Baker 2006:99). His contribution is subtitled in English, as the documentaryis intended for European and American circulation. The last thing which theman says is, in a literal rendition:

What can I say, by God, by God, our home is no longer a home.

As he is speaking, the camera focuses on a picture of an all-but destroyedPalestinian home presumably the old mans. The subtitle provided by thetranslators, however, reads:

What can I say? Not even Vietnam was as bad as this.

Bakers explanation of this is worth quoting in full. She says:In order to communicate the gravity of the situation to a world publicwhose conception of gravity is conditioned by the political dominanceof the USA the subtitlers recontextualize the event by invoking anarrative which is assumed to have moral resonance for those view-ers. The indigenous storyline within which the original utterance isframed, and which is evoked by the use of home, is one of repeatedevictions from the lands of the narrators ancestors. . In 2002, thisstoryline had very little resonance in the USA in particular, and the

subtitlers seem to have judged it as unintelligible to Western audiences.It is replaced here with a historical episode which is intelligible. This example illustrates both breach and normativeness [in narrativestructures]. The tragedy of Jenin is compared to Vietnam, rather thanKashmir, for instance, in order to be made intelligible in the contextof American political dominance. At the same time a breach of thethen dominant narrative of Israel being a small defenceless countryunder threat and the USA playing the role of honest broker in the areais explicitly signalled. The subtitlers thus succeed in both ensuring

intelligibility andretaining the breach encoded in the very making ofthe lm. (Baker 2006:99-100; emphasis in original)

This subtitle, then, is cited as a successful case of translation at the level ofnarrative. One narrative, which is unintelligible to the target audience, is

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translated or recontextualized into another, which is intelligible. The trans-lation is particularly successful because it captures both the normativenessand the breach in the source narrative. The Palestinian man has been given

an effective voice in the target culture.Of course, at the naive level we could say that the semantics of the subtitleare quite different from those of the original statement. But then, this is veryoften so, and quite properly so, in translation. Different languages map theworld differently: we must not look for word-for-word or phrase-for-phrasecorrespondences. In this particular case (which I will discuss in more depthshortly), the literal translation provided above cannot be a very satisfactorysolution, because the man does indeed seem to be saying more than our homeis no longer a home. Moreover, the director of the documentary was clearly

not able to consider the option of treating the utterance as untranslatable: thehuman imperatives of the situation and the need for the West to hear this mandrive the process: where such wrongs occur, we cannot pass over in silencewithout becoming ourselves complicit. The translator has taken the viewthat what the Palestinian said in this case could not be conveyed by a literaltranslation; he or she thus moved up the levels of possible equivalence, orinterpretation, until a level was found at which some sort of correspondenceseemed to be operative in this case, the level of narrative. The very economyof the mans original expression, and the constraints of the subtitle genre,

forced the translators hand, and a solution was found by means of a narrativewhich would function in a similar way in the target audiences minds.1Now, this is a translation situation which tends to divide readers. Some peo-

ple nd the translation quite acceptable; others are left feeling slightly uneasy

perhaps even very uneasy. I want to focus for a moment on the latter group,which includes people who have a strong intuition that there is somethingwrong with this as translation: whilst they might recognize the translatorsgood intentions and ingenuity, they are concerned that the speaker may have

been misrepresented. The uneasy feeling is that queasy mixture, familiar to

all translators, of a part-ethical, part-technical problem. It is a feeling that insome way a wrong has been committed, but also that in a more technicalsense the translation itself is wrong (in translation these two cognate Englishusages seem to apply together). This feeling expresses itself all too easily inontological terms: we feel that this isnt really what this Palestinian manmeant as if there really was such a thing as this mans real meaning.Part of what I want to argue here is that when we talk in such terms, we areusing shorthand for a procedural shortcoming. When people encounter eachother and converse, they do in fact use a hermeneutical procedure to interpret

1I have tried to express this in theoretically uncommitted terms, because I am hoping atthis stage to examine this question at the intuitive level, and because Bakers exposition oftranslation at the level of narrative does not in the nal analysis depend on any particular

theoretical approach such as functional equivalence.

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Phil Goodwin 23

each other; and what is really wrong here is that this procedure has not beenfollowed.

1.1 A purely technical problem?

Suppose rst, then, that we attempted to tackle this purely as a technical prob-lem. One way of addressing the technical issues is to discuss the question ofthe level or relevant unit of translation. One might, for example (on tacticalgrounds), question whether the narrative of displacement in the Middle Eastcan be represented in any way by the narrative of the Vietnam war; or onemight (on strategic grounds) challenge the decision to translate at the levelof narrative at all, arguing that a lower level should have been sought. The

issue of the appropriate unit of translation is an example of a question whichis very difcult to answer on technical grounds from within a given transla-tion theory. Baker herself is fully conscious of this difculty: it is often easier

pragmatically (and certainly pedagogically) to begin at the level of word;yet as we all know, meaning tends to be operative at much higher levels thanthis even, perhaps, at the level of narrative (2006:6). Those who argue forliteral or essentially literal translation often proceed on the basis of thedemonstrably false assumption that individual words are the primary bear-ers of meaning. However, it is also true that those who argue for functional

equivalence at the level of phrase, sentence or higher textual level sometimesforget that individual words do have meaning as well (Halverson 1997:210).The movement between levels represents one of those matters (and there arecertainly others) which ultimately reside with translator choice. Whilst therewill be occasions where what I have called technical considerations will guideor even determine that choice, there will be others where the translator willneed to choose on other grounds. In many cases (and theJenin, Jeninsubtitleis one), that decision will reect not only technical considerations but the

overall moral contours of the situation.

Is this the end of the matter? Contemporary descriptive translation studieswould like to suggest that it is: all we can do is to observe how translators actu-ally translate, try to describe it, to devise appropriate taxonomies and (perhaps)to make predictions of how translation might proceed in given circumstances

based on our scientic observations. This is the accepted postmodern ortho-doxy: let a thousand owers bloom. There is no doubt that much progress

can be and is made within these constraints. There is also no doubt that ourpostmodern squeamishness about prescriptive approaches to translation isa necessary corrective to a long tradition of theoretical pronouncements on

how translations should be done. However, the purpose of quoting theJenin,Jeninexample is to remind us that translation always takes place within ahuman context. Here is a situation dripping with moral signicance: we have

a man speaking, a man who has been wronged; we have a group of people(the Director, the subtitler, and all those involved in producing the lm) who

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passionately, urgently wish to communicate this to the world; and we have anaudience who may or may not want to hear. If we translate the man literallyhe is very likely to be misunderstood or ignored; if we translate him freely,

as the translator chose to do in this case, we misrepresent him in another way.There are those (I am one of them) who would see it as almost wilfully absurdto view the translation question in these circumstances as a purely technicalone, as if it were essentially the same sort of question as the choice of cameraangle or grade of lm used.

1.2 Can translation ethics be built from human rights theory?

Once we admit this, though, it becomes legitimate to ask what, if anything,

should guide that individual translators exercise of judgement? This is in es-sence the ethical question: what set of obligations are in play when we makesuch a decision? Is, for example, the relevant set of obligations only that which

relates to the commissioner, the provider of the bersetzungsauftrag(Nord1997:30) of the translation, as Skopostheoriemight perhaps suggest? If so,we would only need to consider the originators commercial or ideologicalobjectives, and then make the choice which best served those objectives. Or,do the relevant obligations also embrace the original speaker, the audience,and even others? If we thought that they did, we might seek to locate the

issues within a larger ethical framework let us suppose, for example, thatof human rights.2We could, then, import a specic understanding of humanrights, for example that embodied in the Universal Declaration of HumanRights promulgated by the United Nations in 1948. We would then have touse this information to decide:

Whose rightsare we worried about here? In theJenin, Jenin case, is itthe Palestinian man who has putatively been wronged, or the audience

for the translation? What responsibility does the translator have towardsthese two parties?3

Are these parties rights in harmony, or are they in conict?

How can the rights of these parties be weighed against each other? Would

it make any difference if the original communicator, instead of being a

2I use the case of Rights Theory mainly because this was the response to the question,when I posed it to the Manchester seminar for which this paper was originally prepared.A different audience may have reached for some version of Utilitarianism; I do not think

this would have led to any different conclusions. The point I wish to make here is thatoverarching theories of ethics are not very effective in dealing with the complicated andsubtle issues involved in translation.3And, to the extent that we widen the group of actors in a translation situation to includeChristiane Nords initiator, transmitter and so on, we will need to consider their rights

too (Nord 1997:19 ff).

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Phil Goodwin 25

contemporary Palestinian, was a long dead author? (Do dead authorshave rights?)4

Supposing that one or more of these rights could be substantiated, howare such rights to be weighed against other human rights involved inthe overall situation? In other words, in what circumstances could these

rights be trumped by more pressing issues? If the translator is trying

to save lives, for example, does this exonerate him or her?5

How relevant is it that no one is actually harmed by this translation,whatever their rights? (Rights, certainly as legally dened, are usually

linked to the question of damage.) We do not think any the worse of thePalestinian man here he has not been slandered, for example. Nor hasany obvious harm been done to the audience.

What rights exactly have been violated? Does the speaker have a right

to be heard accurately? Does the audience have a right to be informedaccurately?

Is this a question of misappropriation, as our intuition suggested earlier?

Can a person be said to own his or her own voice in the sense required

here? If so, what exactly is the object of ownership is it the words

themselves, or the meaning or the intention behind the meaning?6

Supposing we accepted the existence of such rights, how would they bedened? What does the right to be heard accurately or to be informed

actually mean? Does it, for example, mean that a speaker may only be

quoted verbatim, and how then would we deal with interlingual quota-tion, wherethis is impossible?

When we begin to consider these questions, we can appreciate threethings. First, like the technical question, the ethical question does not admitof an easy answer. The last two points above, for example, raise the wholeissue of what translation actually is, returning us to the very question we areseeking to answer. Second, a broad ethical framework such as rights theory israther a blunt instrument for tackling the question. Third, and importantly, by

importing a theory of rights wholesale, we have simply displaced the ethical4As Derrida (1967, 1972) and others would, of course, observe, all authors are in somesense dead. Morgan comments: Texts, like dead men and women, have no rights, noaims, no interests. They can be used in whatever way readers or interpreters choose. Ifinterpreters choose to respect an authors intentions, that is because it is in their interestto do so (in Bardon 1988: 7).5Naomi Seidman (2006:1-2) provides an excellent example. Her father told a story of howhe mistranslated between a group of Jewish refugees and the French police, upon theformers arrival in Paris. The mistranslation was intended to achieve (and did achieve) a

peaceful encounter between the two groups.6Each of these terms is itself contested. Speakers cannot be said to own words, because itis their very iterability which makes them words; Derrida (1972) provides a good demon-stration of the issues involved. Meaning and intention are both matters of interpretation in other words, a hearer or a reader is complicit in their construction; so how, then, isownership to be described?

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problem to another level. The question of foundation remains unanswered:how are these supposed rights to be established? And what makes us think

they are applicable in this instance? The purpose of discussing rights theory

here is not to suggest that it can or should provide the answer, but to illustratethe difculty of attempting to resolve the complicated issues raised in transla-tion with a general ethical theory: the translator in theJenin Jeninsituation isvery likely to merely confuse herself, rather than nd an answer, if she starts

thinking about rights.

2. The renement and care of the hermeneutic question

Fortunately there is a long line of translation theorists who have recognized

that their subject has as strong an ethical content as it has a technical one, andwho have thought deeply about the interaction of the two. As we are begin-ning to appreciate, there are two ways of regarding this interaction. For onegroup, ethics may be regarded as important but extrinsicto translation itself,so that the latter should be ethically governed (as all human activities are) but,once it is set within an overall moral framework, can proceed without it. Ananalogy might be mining exploration: there is such a thing as the ethics ofmining exploration, but mining itself is a technical activity quite separate fromthe ethical framework within which it is conducted. Thus, we might send a

geological mission to a foreign country to explore the potential for mining itsnatural resources: on one piece of paper we could write technical instructionsfor mining, and on another, quite separately, we could write an ethical code ofconduct we wished the mission to observe. In sympathy with such an approachwould be any translator who regards the activity itself as a technical procedure,in principle susceptible to remainderless scientic description.7

The other way of thinking about translation, which tends to be associatedwith the hermeneutical approach, is that it is intrinsicallyethical: that theactivity itself cannot proceed without an account (explicit or implicit) of how

the encounter with the other human being should be conducted. An anal-ogy might be trade: suppose that instead of a mining mission, we sent a trademission to our imagined foreign country. In this case, the activity involves theother human beings which the mission will encounter, and the activity must beconsensual (non-consensual trade is not trade, but pillage), such that the activ-ity itself cannot take place other than in the context of an ethical framework8

7An example might be the early Nida, who in the rst ush of excitement about the Chom-skyan science of linguistics felt that translation was a technology whereby in principle

any sentence in any language may be reproduced in any other, without a remainder (Nida1964:66 ff).8I am not, of course, here suggesting that all trade is by denition ethical only that

ethics are intrinsic to trade in a way that they are not to mining. Trade may, as history andcurrent observation amply demonstrate, be conducted according to a bad ethic as well asto a good one. What it may not be is ethically neutral.

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Phil Goodwin 27

which provides a basis for concepts such as volition, consent and exchange.It would perhaps be possible in such a case to divide our instructions into thetechnical and the ethical, but only with difculty, and the latter would play

a much more important and integral role in the activity itself.The hermeneutical approach implies a dialogue: it presupposes a will-ingness to submit, at least temporarily, to the claims of another. Submissionhere should not be taken to imply blind acceptance, rather it is a matter ofmaintaining discursive openness by not insisting on the pre-eminence of onesown ways of presenting the subject at issue. Maintaining this openness of vo-cabulary, this tentativeness of phrase and of rephrasing, is from a hermeneutic

perspective a guiding norm of any genuine dialogue. The reason is that onlyin such openness are new truths able to emerge, truths that are not simply a

yielding of one position to another, but a genuine preservation of the insightcontained in either (Ramberg and Gjesdal 2009:274). This approach whathas been described as the renement and care of the hermeneutic question

(Cohen 1985:7) has great attraction. However it is not in itself obvious how

it could lead to a practical ethics of translation: how does this general approachtranslate to translation as aphronsis?

This is the question, I believe, which George Steiner sets out to answer. HisAfter Babelis often described as hugely inuential for modern translationstudies (e.g. Munday 2001:163); yet as Steiner himself notes (1998:xi), in some

ways it seems to have fallen upon stony ground. His Four-Fold Hermeneuticwas offered in the context of literary translation, in the argot of German ro-manticism, which perhaps made it unlikely to be applied to the hurly-burlyof contemporary journalism. It also seems not to t the programmatic nature

of present-day translation studies: it is neither systematically descriptive, nor(as it has been interpreted) obviously reproducible in translator training. Thisis unfortunate, because it represents one of the most sustained pieces of think-ing about translation ethics in the eld. It provides a bridge from hermeneutic

philosophy to actual translation practice, by way of a clear ethic or poeticsof translation, to use his preferred term. This is in contradistinction to eithera set of prescriptive technical rules (a eld which has no interest for Steiner)

ora description of translation practice, whether synchronic or diachronic (inwhich role it is insufciently systematic).

Why might we be interested in Steiners ethics of translation? The answer

lies in Steiners acute sensitivity to ethical issues, a sensitivity which arisesfrom a certain view of language. For him, translation always involves a certainviolence, and this makes the ethical issues inescapable. I will return later to

the question of the extent to which the validity of his ethics is dependent onthe validity of his metaphysics; for the moment, I will focus on his sensitivity,and what follows from it. In the same way, when putting out to sea, we mightlisten carefully to the advice of a seasoned mariner, without troubling too muchabout whether he believes that storms are sent by the gods.

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2.1 Language and identity

For Steiner, languages dene boundaries, and the exclusion of others is their

primary function. Each language is a gnosis a secret code which denes agroup by including some (those who have the secret knowledge) and excludingothers (those who dont). This is the main reason why, for him, translation isalways in some sense a betrayal. This last point is, of course, a commonplaceof translation theory, but it is usually expressed in terms of the translatedtext somehow not doing justice to the original of what is lost in transla-tion. It is important to note that for Steiner the issue goes deeper than this:any translation, especiallya wholly successful translation, is a betrayal of agnosis which was quite clearly expressed in such a way as to be understood

by a certain group (or even a certain individual) and to exclude everyone else(Steiner 1998:55).

This is also the explanation for why there are so many human languages.If language was a function of bio-type or of a broad way of life if in otherwords it represented a Darwinian adaptation to certain ways of being human

one would expect there to be only a small percentage of the actual numberof languages attested. The reality is that peoples living in adjacent valleyswith almost identical physiology and way of life nevertheless speak mutuallyincomprehensible languages. The reason they do so, for Steiner, is to dene

themselves as against the other, and to exclude the other. It is the same forindividuals: a human individuals self-identity is intimately bound up withhow he or she uses words, how he or she articulates or fails to articulate hisor her self-understanding. Words provide a kind of psychological shell thatdenes and protects the individual from being overwhelmed by the group.

For Steiner, then, the basic unit of consideration is the idiolect(ibid.:47); alanguageis a statistically based ction (ibid.), formed by compromise andapproximation between idiolects.

This view of language is key to Steiners thought. It has many implica-tions one of them being that human speech matured principally throughits hermetic and creative functions (ibid.:242). In the beginning, saysSteiner, was the password (ibid.), meaning that language begins as aninward, introspective movement, and only later, and with considerable lossof energy, moves outwards. Language is used rst by an individual, and then

cautiously moves outwards to share a gnosis with close kin or those we love.Only under pressure of contact does it share with a wider group, and then itdoes so guardedly. Associated with this inner-to-outward movement are what,

for Steiner, are the primary functions of language, which revolve around theexpression of alternity in various forms: the articulation of what is not ornot yet, ranging from the hortatory Let us build a tower in the biblical mythof Babel through the many and varied ways in which language can be usedto conceal or exclude, to the outright lie. Thus the ability of words to convey

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Phil Goodwin 29

truth to give others information is a happy but accidental consequence oftheir ability to withhold.

2.2 A poetics of translation

Any account of communication, and therefore especially of translation, saysSteiner, must begin from this point. The encounter with another human be-ing is always an ethical question, and when we encounter another throughthe mediation of language, the ethical question becomes acute. Penetratinganothers gnosis is always in a sense an act of aggression, and potentiallyabusive. Moreover, if we wish to understand that other, nothing about his orher life is formally irrelevant (ibid.:7): the level of penetration required is

considerable.Returning for a moment to the Palestinian man quoted in Jenin, Jenin,Steiner would, I think, want to say that we have here an ethical encounterinvolving three parties what, for Levinas, would be a political situation.A human being from Jenin is trying to say something; a viewer in Europe orthe USA is hoping to understand what he is saying; and a translator/subtitleris standing between them trying to help them both. Translation represents theattempt to nd the just solution between the three. Although the translator will

be assisted by knowing what the technical options are, and by having a good

grasp of the theory and practice if you like, the technology of translation,this will not make the decisions for her. It will also be of some assistance toher to have a good grasp of the overall ethical contours of the situation, butas we saw earlier in our brief discussion of a rights based approach, this willnot in itself answer the translation question. This is what Steiner is arguingfor when he describes translation as an exact art. His hermeneutic approach,which he calls a poetics of translation, is intended to provide such a model,one that operates in the (quite extensive) decision-space which lies betweentechnical feasibility and moral prescription. It is not therefore in competition

with other theories of translation Steiner tendentiously describes the latteras impossible (ibid.:309). For him, theory is only possible in science, andtrue science is impossible here because there is no neutral point or laboratorywithin which language can be tested and observed we know no exit fromthe skin of our skin (ibid.:299). In many ways this part of Steiners argumentis unfortunate and unnecessary. It gives the impression that his thought isanti-scientic, which it is not at all: the issue is that Steiner has a very high

view of science, and he does not believe that the study of translation can meetthat standard of objectivity. His position on the question of theory is closest

to Wittgenstein, whom he quotes at the crux of his argument:

Translating from one language into another is a mathematical task, andthe translation of a lyrical poem, for example, into a foreign languageis quite analogous to a mathematicalproblem. For one may well frame

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What would initiative trust look like in ourJenin, Jeninexample? First,then, is this question: has the translator approached the task with an attitude ofradical generosity towards the source text? Does the translator really believe

that there is something there something which this Palestinian man wants tosay and which is worth our hearing? Do we really long to know exactly what hemeans? Do we really want to understand his life and to experience something

of the terrible thing which has happened to him and his community? Do we

want to encounter the real presencein his statement? Are we prepared to readand re-read (perhaps to mis-read) his writing until we nd the aporia, the

perplexity at its heart? (Remember that nothing is formally inadmissible in

the quest to understand him.) The question is not, we should note, whether wefeel sorry for the man, or angry about what has happened to him, whether we

want to plead his cause or do anything else for him the question is whetherthere is a real presencehere, with something to say, or whether we just havea character who is going to play a part, however important, in what wewantto say? The question is also not whether we agreewith our source. We shouldapproach a translation of one of Hitlers speeches with precisely the sameinitiative trust as we do Bonhoeffers prison letters; George Bush should begranted the same lancement as Mother Theresa, and so on.9

3.2 Aggression

The next step, by way of contrast, is an act of appropriative aggression, orpenetration. Steiner uses the image rst conjured by Jerome, of military con-quest and bringing home the meaning, captive (Steiner 1998:314). This is thestage which all practising translators recognize the hard work of researchinglanguage and social context, of lexica and grammar and history. It is penetra-tive because it is inevitably intrusive, and there is a certain violence involved.The idea is that the text must be completely opened up and laid bare. Steinermade heavy-handed use of images of rape here, talking of the cognate acts

of intellectual and erotic possession (ibid.). This imagery offended somereaders; a more acceptable analogy might be the operating table. The patientis opened up and his or her inner workings are open to the translators gazein a way that is quite unnatural but essential for the process of understanding.For example, a poem is dissected, and its syntax and imagery examined indetail, so that the translator receives not only the impression which a generalreader would receive, but understands how that impression is achieved. Wewill recall from earlier in the argument that for Steiner a language is a skin

like the surgeons knife, this second stage of translation will always feel like

a violation, and this is why it has to be an ethically-governed procedure.

9Steiner (2008) refers in another context to the supreme oratory of Hitler. As a Jewwhose family was severely affected by the holocaust he practices what he preaches in thegranting of initiative trust.

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The second question to ask about ourJenin, Jenintranslation is, therefore,this to what extent has the translator, having approached his or her sourcein the spirit of trust, then put in the necessary work to make sure that he or

she has completely understood him?

10

In order to understand this Palestinianman, one would have to examine the context in which he speaks both theco-text, and the real situation. Above all, one would seek to understand hiscognitive environment.11One would want to look carefully at the words hechooses to express his grief and his outrage, perhaps noting the repetitionseven within this short sentence God...God . . . home. . . home. One wouldwant to investigate carefully whether the my God, my God clause should beinterpreted simply as an exclamation, or whether an invocation of God is infact involved noting as we do so one of the variables which Steiner dwells

upon; that is, the very relationship between thought and speech. The invoca-tion of God here could modulate all the way from the merely exclamatory tothe prayerful, with many variations in between. In the United Kingdom, sucha phrase would generally either be blasphemous (probably in a thoughtlessway rather than an aggressive one), or a genuine invocation of God; howeverEnglish users in other parts of the world employ a wide range of uses of thedivine name which do not fall neatly into either category.12The invocation ofhome would be equally important what morphological relationship doesthis word have with homeland does it indeed evoke the history of a whole

people, and so on. I am not personally equipped to perform the work in thiscase. To me, the mans invocation of the powerful combination of religionand homeland seems clear enough, but it would take considerably more pen-etrative work than we have space for to conrm this or otherwise. The point

is, however, that this work must be done. It must be pursued, aggressivelyand even ruthlessly, until (in Derridaean terms) deconstruction is complete,and aporiahas been reached. God, God...home, home...: a whole world iscontained in those words, a world which even whilst representing a conicted,

contradictory puzzle is nevertheless a homeland. Steiner has sympathy for theunderpaid and overworked commercial translator who must rush this stage,as this is an inherently slow process, and, as we have seen, by no means a

purely linguistic task.

3.3 Incarnation

The third step is what is variously described as incorporation, incarnation

10Of course one never completely understands an Other, but the attemptto do so is whatdrives the hermeneutic approach.11

This is a term from relevance theory, not Steiner. However, I believe it captures ratherwell Steiners idea of the unique assemblage of experiences and thought which constitutesan individual (Sperber and Wilson 1995:38ff).12I have a friend in Kenya, a deeply religious person, who when faced with somethingshocking will say Jesus! in a way which is neither the easy swearing of modern UKEnglish nor a prayer.

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Phil Goodwin 33

or infection. In Steiners imagery, the warrior returns home having capturedthe beautiful slave girl. He now has to make a place for her in his own world,where she will be a blessing and also a problem. Is the captive going to be

dressed in the manner of her new home, or left in her own costume? To whatextent is she to be taught the customs of her new home? Although Steiner does

not mention her, one thinks of Medea and Jason: once Jason has brought herhome, to what extent will Medea become Greek and to what extent will sheremain the other which attracted him in the rst place?13

Once the translator has conquered the meaning in the text, he or she has toincarnate it in his or her own language. The problem is that the semantic spaceis already fully occupied. The translator must decide to what extent he willdomesticate the new word he has brought home, and to what extent he will

leave it strange and foreign. The implication of Steiners thought here is that thepurpose of translation can be described as that of achieving a benign infection.He is thinking in Hegelian dialectic terms: being comprehends itself in theencounter with the other. The translators task is to facilitate the infection ofhis or her domestic world by something recognizably other. If he or she merelydomesticates the other, what has been the point of the exercise? By forcing a

language to consider imagery and manners of expression which are alien toit, its powers of expression and thought are increased (Louth 1998:29).

The third motion, then, involves trying to incorporate what the Palestinianman has said into the target language. Having approached him with lance-ment, and having had the courage and persistence and sheer bloody-mindedcuriosity to try to nd out as much as possible about his words and his context,

one then seeks to bring his words home. The translator is seeking to infecthis or her target language/culture with the mans words, to nd a way under

the skin of the target culture to unsettle it somehow. We should note thatin this third stage, the discomfort but also the benet is all with the target

language. In terms of the discourse of human rights we discussed earlier, therelevant group to consider here is the receptor audience, which in some sensemight be seen as having the right to incorporate our Palestinians thoughtinto its own language and culture. Putting the matter this way throws it intosharp focus: what we are talking about is the right to appropriate, and thisis why this part of Steiners thinking is (or should be) of great interest to

postcolonial translation theory.It is in this third stage which the translator would consider the questions as-

sociated with incorporation for example the question of the correct level or

unit of translation: should it be word for word (what is usually called literal)or narrative for narrative, or some other level? Steiner, whilst acknowledging

13This aspect of Euripides drama is particularly well-lit in Passolinis lm version,Medea,1978.

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the seductive power of the literal for the translator,14is no fan of it. Thereis no presumption in favour of literal translation in his thought, and one ofthe purposes of his hermeneutic approach was to try to break what he saw as

the sterile triad of literal/free/just-right which had particularly dominated theEnglish translation tradition at least since Dryden.In ourJenin, Jeninexample, I believe that a translator following Steiner

would (like Bakri) reject a literal translation as his or her incarnation strategy.If it has been established in the second movement that this Palestinian mandoes indeed make reference to the repeated historical violations of homeland,then this must be reected in the translation, and this cannot be achieved word

for word. The repetition of home perhaps provides the necessary clue (likeWittgenstein, we suddenly see the solution), so that the nal version would

refer to the home being destroyed once again.The second and third movements are, then, all about the benet to the

receptor culture, a benet which can only be achieved by an act of aggressive

opening up of the secrets of the source culture, followed by an appropriationof what that receptor culture can use for its own enrichment. Steiners frankrecognition of the brutality of these processes is one of his most importantcontributions. It is also the reason for the existence of the other two motions(the rst and fourth). Without the rst movement of radical generosity, and

the nal movement of restitution translation would quite simply be robberywith violence.

3.4 Restitution

The nal step is restitution the crux of the metier and morals of transla-tion but rather frustratingly difcult to dene in abstract terms (Steiner

1998:316). The rst three steps have left the system dangerously out of

balance (ibid.) the source language has in some sense been despoiled,and the target language has been unbalanced or infected. Balance needs to

be restored somehow. Steiner suggests several ways in which this might beachieved. The translation should enhance the prestige of the source text, butwithout eclipsing it. If possible, the translation should somehow point backtowards the original. In this sense the perfect translation is one which leavesus wondering how the original text expresses the thought which the transla-tion has given us. In such a case, the arrows of psychological and cultural

benefaction point both ways (ibid.:317). The suggestion is that great trans-

lation can benet the source culture just as it benets the receptor culture

14In doing so he acknowledges another strand of the German tradition, perhaps exempli-ed by Benjamin, which valorises the literal precisely because of its unsettling, enriching

effect on the development of the language (Steiner 1998:327ff).

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Phil Goodwin 35

as, for example, German interpretations of Shakespeare enhanced Englishunderstanding of him during the Enlightenment period (ibid.:400). This is ahard test to pass, of course, and is perhaps why Steiner declares that 90% of

translation since Babel has been bad (ibid.). It can also be acceptable for atranslation to fall short in some way even to make a mistake if that is theonly way to achieve this end. A translation is also always diachronic, and hasthe opportunity to incorporate what has been learnt in the intervening periodabout the source text, such that it can detail, illumine and generally bodyforth what that text conveys (ibid.:316).

Steiner would say that the best translation points back to its source in somevital way. InJenin, Jenin, we would seek in whatever way we could to directthe audiences attention back to this man and his grief: to how this particular,

real text interprets and expresses it in language. Our translation should be suchthat we can imagine the Palestinian man nding out how the subtitler had

translated his phrase, acquiring the necessary knowledge to interpret it, nd-ing that the translation illuminated part of his thought which he had not fullyappreciated, and going back to his village with a new thought and perhaps anew saying to enrich his culture: Do you know, when they translated what Isaid, they talked about a brutal war fought by the Americans themselves, andthere were terrible civilian casualties and maybe they were right.15

In the course of the discussion, Steiner makes particular use of the ideas ofelective afnity (Wahlverwandschaft) and resistant difference. The former

is important for Goethe, whose novel, Wahlverwandschaften, tellingly, dealswith the complex interplay between three characters in a love-triangle: Steinersometimes sees translation as a similar three-way erotic encounter. There must

be a feeling of afnity, of at homeness in the source language and culture

for translation to occur. However, as well as this elective afnity, there

must also be a feeling of strangeness the translator must be able to see whatis strange and utterly different about this culture. The very best translationsare those where these two forces are in balance, and it is for this reason that,for Steiner, bilinguals do not make good translators: they cannot see whatis strange about the source text.16The best subtitler/translator for ourJenin,

Jenincase, then, is someone who can hear both the common humanity in themans statement, and its oddness to our Western ears. Part of the oddness ofBritish-English culture, for example, is our inexperience with what it feelslike to be invaded or displaced: an English translator can have afnity for this

mans love for his homeland, but he or she also appreciates (if approaching the

15It is important to understand that this is can only ever be a thought experiment. Todo it in actuality would be as impossible as asking Shakespeare to appreciate Hlderlinstranslations.16Steiner himself is functionally quadrilingual and does not consider himself qualied to

translate even himself within this language group.

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task in compliance with the Steinerian hermeneutic) that, certainly for Britishviewers, there is no association or, at the verbal level, collocation betweenhome and displacement. The translator must therefore do something special

to create this association in the target text.

4. The hermeneutic motion as phronsis (practical wisdom)

This fourth movement completes Steiners hermeneutic approach. Howshould we take this approach? A common way of (mis)reading Steiner is as

one attempting a schematic description or history of translation practice; anunderstandable misunderstanding, in view of the scores of pages he devotesto adducing examples. Douglas Robinsons unsympathetic interpretation

(Robinson 1998:97) presents Steiner (and by the by giving a near-perfectdemonstration of the intentional fallacy) as intending to re-write GoethesWest-stlicher Divan but failing in his intention. Similarly, Paul Bandia

and Niranjana, whom he quotes interpret the Fourth Motion (restitution)as descriptive of what actually happens in translation (as such it is of coursedemonstrably false) rather than as the highest requirement of what shouldhappen (Bandia 2008:147ff).

But if Steiner is not descriptive, nor is he theoretical in the narrow sense.

He repeatedly asserts that his approach is not a theory of translation. This isthe point in his argument, as we noted earlier, where he is unduly antagonisticto those attempting the latter; all that is required by the logic of his argumentis to show that theories, whatever progress they make, are always non-deterministic that there will always be a substantial decision-space left fortranslator choice. Once this is acknowledged, there is ample space for theoperation of an ethics or poetics of the exact art of translation. The modelis aesthetics: just as, for example, William Morris might be taken as providingan ethics of craft-based manufacturing, without attempting to specify thetechnical procedures which any given craftsman needs for his work, or JohnRuskin might specify a certain way of approaching great art, so the translatorneeds to approach the act with a certain frame of mind. This may be seenas part of procedural ethics: phronsis (practical wisdom), in Aristotelianterms. The sharing of a cake between two people is essentially an ethicallyloaded decision. However, there are better and worse ways of going about it:the classic one cuts, the other chooses rule, for example, is a demonstrably

better way of proceeding than the blindfold cut method. This rule is, we

should note, neither a general moral precept nor a point about the technologyof knives and cake-cutting. Steiners model is self-consciously ethical, ratherthan descriptive. It tells us how we oughtto approach the act of translation.In the matter of cake-sharing, fairness is not dened in terms of the portion

sizes for example, by saying each slice should be equal because there

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Phil Goodwin 37

will always be cases where that outcome violates some strong intuition offairness; rather, it is dened in terms of an agreed procedure for cutting and

choosing.17Similarly, Steiners hermeneutic does not specify in advance what

delity in any given translation should look like; it only gives guidance onhow the translator should approach the task.

The word should needs to be emphasized. Although Steiners approachin a sense elevates the standing of the translator, this is not necessarily goodnews for him or her. For Steiner, a translator performs a sacred function: whatis at stake is nothing less than the interaction of a self with an Other. Althoughas a matter of simple observation it is clear that translators mayperform asthe venal slaves of nancial or ideological masters, if they do so, they breach

their ethical duty. In Levinasian terms, it is the selfs encounter with the Other

which forms the self in the rst place (ethics precedes ontology): to the extentthat the self does not deal authentically with the Other, it divides and destroysitself (Critchley 2007:40). Presented with a case such as theJenin, Jeninex-ample, then, the application of the four-fold hermeneutic poses the question:howhas this translator approached her or his task? One can imagine the benignscenario in which the subtitler/translator has carefully made his or her waythrough the various movements which Steiner species. Unfortunately, one

can also imagine the scenario in which the imperatives of time, money and avery strong ideological agenda have driven the whole process without regardfor Steiners hermeneutic or anything like it in other words, the scenario inwhich the translator has acted unethically. The problem begins with initiativetrust it appears that the translator (either on his or her own initiative, orunder direction) may not really be very interested in discovering the real hu-man voice behind the mans distraught statement. If he or she was interested,they would notice that the man talked about his god and his home not aboutVietnam, not about the wicked hegemony of the USA, but about the terriblething which had happened to him and his community while the world stood

by and watched. The mans tragic story has actually been subsumed into theanti-American, anti-Israeli polemic which is presumably the main thing onthe translators or directors mind.

We should also note that, at the incarnationstage, the translator has chosena story which, to be sure, has resonance in the USA but it is a story withwhich this audience is already very familiar, perhaps to the extent that it isimmune to it already.Infectionwill not be achieved where the body is alreadyimmune. Moving to the fourth stage, of restitution, we would have to observethat the effect of the translation is not to focus attention onto this text, but to

17The theory of justice suggested by Rawls operates on a similar basis. The just societyis that which all parties would have chosen from behind the veil of ignorance, that is,without knowing in advance what precise position they were going to hold in that society(Rawls 1972).

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blur that attention by a deection onto another major source of sadness and

grievance Americas behaviour in Vietnam.

4.1 The importance of Steiner

I have tried to show that Steiners hermeneutic can provide a powerful toolin clarifying ethical issues in the translation of political material. It is a toolwhich need not be seen as competing with any particular translation theory,

but as a guiding light to the application of that theory. My own theoreticalcommitments, such as they are, are to a Relevance Theory-based approach. Inthe relevance-theoretical model of translation (Gutt 2000), a translation is anutterance or text which achieves its relevance by virtue of its resemblance to a

source, and the translators task is seen in terms of interpreting an original andthen nding an expression which resembles it in relevant respects. This theory

provides a satisfactory technology of translation, and a mechanism to workwith, but it cannot specify the mind with which I approach the task. I havefound that Steiners hermeneutic does meet this need, and in a way which issurprisingly sympathetic to a pragmatic communicative agenda.

One of the virtues of Steiners hermeneutic is that it does not over-simplify.Thinkers on translation who reect on its ethical dimension are sometimes prey

to the temptation to simplify what is, after all, a very complicated situation,

involving multiple interests. One tendency is to adopt an either/or approach totranslator responsibility. For example, when faced with the question To whomis a translator responsible?, one resolves it thus: I put myself psychologically

in the position of authors, not readers. This is a shared experience of almostall translators. They unconsciously identify themselves as a mouthpiece of theauthors. . [T]ranslators are responsible to authors, not readers (Whang1999:59). This is an unambiguously text-oriented solution: it is the authors ororiginal communicators who have the right to be heard, and the translatorsobligation is to them. This sounds a straightforward resolution until one con-siders that the receptors of the translation are also human beings and they alsotherefore have ethical standing. Moreover, this position also degrades the roleof the translator herself, delegating her to a mouthpiece.

Conversely (and perhaps more commonly), the translator might have a

simplistic view that his or her responsibility is to the reader. This is an insidiousproblem in translation, mainly because of the inescapable fact that translationstend to be commissioned by people or institutions whose overriding com-mercial or ideological objectives will be determined by the acceptability of

the product to a target language audience. It is not accidental that when theputative right to be heard accurately is violated, the victims are usually faraway in space or time, so that they are not in a position to make any protest.This Palestinian man is separated by many miles, but more importantly by aworld of cultural barriers, from the receptor audience. He will probably never

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Phil Goodwin 39

even see the documentary in which he appears; if he did see it, he would not,perhaps, be able to read the English subtitle; if he could read it, he wouldnot know how to register his objection, and so on. Time can work just as

well as distance. We touched earlier, for example, on the case of a long-deadauthor: in what sense, if at all, can she or he be said to have the right not tobe misinterpreted?18Steiners hermeneutic avoids these over-simplications

by recognizing the claims of different parties through the four movements.In the rst and fourth movements, the claims of original authors are given

full weight, whereas in the second and third movements the appropriativerights of the target language culture are explicitly acknowledged. Steiner iscontinually at pains to stress that the four movements must be kept in balance.He also acknowledges the at times delicate natureof these obligations and

relationships: for example, whatever level of obligation we have towards anauthor, we are certainly not (as Whang suggests above) his or her mouthpiece,

because the translator herself is also a moral agent.A further over-simplication in thinking about translation manifests itself in

what we might term single issue ethics. For example, much recent discussionof translation ethics revolves around Antoine Bermans critique of a transla-tion practice which amounts to a systematic negation of the strangeness ofthe foreign work (Berman 1984/1992:5). Venuti enthusiastically promotesan ethics of difference in which a foreignizing strategy resists the natural

temptation to domesticate a text to the needs of the translating culture (Venuti1998:125-27). As we saw earlier, this celebration of difference is also presentin Steiners hermeneutic; however, he avoids it becoming the sum of his ethi-cal practice, because the need of the receptor culture to incarnate the text(the third movement) is fully recognized. There is also no danger in Steinersthought of equatinga non-domesticating strategy with a non-appropriativeone. Tarek Shamma has shown, for example, in his compelling study of thehistory of translation of the Arabian Nights into English that colonialistcontainment of the text could just as readily be achieved by a foreignizingstrategy as by a domesticating one. He makes telling use of Tony Bennettsnotion of the exhibitionary complex whereby the foreign is put on display inorder (as Shamma puts it) to underline the difference of those non-civilized

peoples (2009:43). Lanes 1840 English translation is a case in point: it wasneither uent nor domesticating ... [but] the conscious effort to reproduce

the linguistic and cultural features of the foreign text as meticulously andauthentically as possible. Yet Lanes work neither disrupted the norms of thetranslating society, nor created a reading public more open to cultural differ-

ence (ibid.:47).18Plato famously introduced this question to Western thought. In the myth of Theuth,recounted inPhaedrus, the written text is thought of as a child, dependent on its father-author for protection from mis-interpretation. If the father is dead, the child is a defencelessorphan. See Derrida (1982).

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Publishing.Bardon, John (1988)Biblical Interpretation, Oxford: Oxford University Press.Berman, Antoine (1984/1992) The Experience of the Foreign; Culture and Trans-

lation in Romantic Germany, trans. S. Heyvaret, Albany: State University ofNew York Press.

Bruner, Jerome (1991) The Narrative Construction of Reality, Critical Enquiry18(1): 1-21.

Cohen, Richard (1985) Introduction to Emmanuel Levinas,Ethics and Innity:

Conversations with Philippe Nemo, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press,1-17.

Critchley, Simon (2007)Innitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of

Resistance, London: Verso.Derrida, Jacques (1967)Lcriture et la difference, Paris: ditions de seuil.------ (1972) Signature, vnemment, contexte, in Marges: de la philosophie,

Paris: Minuit.Grass, Gnter (2006)Beim Huten der Zwiebel, Gttingen: Steidl Verlag.Gutt, Ernst-August (2000) Translation and Relevance, Manchester: St. Jerome

Publishing.Halverson, Sandra (1997) The Concept of Equivalence in Translation: Much Ado

about Something, Target9(2): 207-20.Levinas, Emmanuel (1961) Totalit et Inni, La Haye: Nijhoff.------ (1981) Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis,

The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.Louth, Charles (1998) Hlderlin and the Dynamics of Translation, Oxford:

LEGENDA.Munday, Jeremy (2001)Introducing Translation Studies, London & New York:

Routledge.Nida, Eugene (1964) Toward a Science of Translating: With Special Reference to

Principles and Procedures Involved in Bible Translating, Leiden: E. J. Brill.Nord, Christiane (1997) Translating as a Purposeful Activity, Manchester: St.

Jerome Publishing.

Ramberg, Bjrn and Kristin Gjesdal (2009) Hermeneutics, in Edward N.Zalta (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Chicago: StanfordUniversity Press.

Rawls, John (1972)A Theory of Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press.Robinson, Douglas (1998) Hermeneutic Motion, in Mona Baker (ed.)Routledge

Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, London & New York: Routledge, 97-99.Shamma, Shamma (2009) Translation and the Manipulation of Difference:

Arabic Literature in Nineteenth-Century England, Manchester: St. JeromePublishing.

Seidman, Naomi (2006) Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference andthe Politics of Translation, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson(1995)Relevance: Communication and Cogni-

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------ (1989) Real Presences,London: Faber & Faber.------ (1998)After Babel, Third Edition, Oxford:Oxford University Press.------ (2008) Interview, The Guardian, 19 April.Venuti, Lawrence (1998) The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Dif-

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Documents

Ethical Problems in Translation (2010)