Reading Report On Contemporary Translation Theories

Reading Report On Contemporary Translation TheoriesI am so happy that I have finished reading a wonderful and useful book—Contemporary Translation Theories (Edwin Gentzler). The following is my reading report.Since the mid-19th century, translation theory has made great progress. Gentzler digs what is useful and rejects what is useless on the translation of today's complex theories, and describes in detail several major schools of translation –The North American Translation Workshop, the “science”of Translation, Early Translation Studies, polysystem Translation and Deconstruction. These theories originated in the mid 60s of the 20th century until today have had a broad impact. The author discusses the book's strengths and weaknesses of various schools to study all the internal relations among different schools of thought, described the translation of theory on the importance of today's cultural studies, and Translation of today's major assumptions made questioned. The second edition of this book updated the view of each school, added to the latest findings. In the conclusion part, the author predicted the future direction of translation studies.The translation theories examined thus far all depend upon some notion of equivalence: the same aesthetic experience (Chapter 2), linguistic structural/dynamic equivalence (Chapter 3), corresponding literary function (Chapter 4), or similar formal correlation governed by social acceptability in the target culture (Chapter 5). Despite differing approaches, each theory is unified by a conceptual framework that assumes original presence and a representation of it in the receiving society. Even-Zohar and Touty tried to escape the epistemological strait-jacket that the power of the original text retains over the translation by reviewing the problem of translation in terms of the actual product rather than the ideal of a “faithful”version, but in the end they found it difficult to escape limitations imposed by their Formalist roots, scientific approach, and dualistic epistemological assumptions. The question remains whether it is possible to think about translational phenomena in other than traditionalterms. To date, all translation theories have made rigid distinctions between original texts and their translations, distinctions that determine subsequent claims about the nature of translation.Deconstruction challenges limits of language, writing, and reading by pointing out how the definitions of the very terms used to discuss concepts set boundaries for the specific theories they describe. While not offering a specific “translation theory”of its own, deconstruction, however does “use”translation often both to raise questions regarding the nature of language and “being-in-language”as well as to suggest that in the process of translating texts, one can come as close as is possible to that elusive notion or experience of difference, which “underlies”their approach. Such thinking about the nature of translation and the nature of language, thus, becomes important to translation theorists, not because it necessarily defines another approach, but because it deepens and broadens the conceptual framework by which we define the very field itself.In “What is an Author?”Foucault quotes Samuel Beckett as posing the Nietzschean question “What matter who’s speaking?”man as well as God has disappeared into the evolution of language writing itself. The fundamental question of the Modern Age, according to Foucault, is no longer how one accumulates knowledge to become an authority and pass judgment on the world, but one of how we can think that which we cannot think. Although Foucault makes no predictions as to what the answers to his own questions are, he does point us in a direction: toward a reflection on that which is silent, an illumination of that which is dark, and a restoration to language of that which has been mute. This “Other”has not been, nor can it be, illuminated in the sense of a positive knowledge, but rather as a blind spot or dark region which accompanies conscious thought. He conceives of the “Other”as man’s double because it has, “like a shadow,”accompanied man “mutely and uninterruptedly”since the nineteenth century (Foucault, 1973: 326-7). Deconstruction thus shifts the nature of the questions being asked about a literary work and its meaning from the audible to the mute. The author’s creative role is reduced and new questions are raised about where the discourse of any particular text comes from, ifnot the author. Most importantly, the “meaning”of a text is reconsidered, and silent elements are returned to the language of a text, visible in contradictions, gaps, and omissions. In addition (im)possible meanings are returned to words, meanings that always accompanied them, but were covered up by the nature of the evolution of the discourse in Western culture in general, and the eighteenth century in particular. Thus, in practice, deconstructionists tend to exhibit a great indifference to authors and explicit meanings and instead tune into the language speaking itself, listening for the unheard, the ungraspable-that which is there and yet is not there, lost in that space between and the signifier.Heidegger’s translation theory is not all unlike early translation studies. He does assume that translations are conditioned by the conceptual categories governing any given epoch, despite attempts to circumvent them. He also believes that with study and historical recontextualizing, one can come to some sort of conclusion as to what the author’s intent was and thus uncover layers of obfuscation in order to arrive at some sort of originary intent or presence before its distortion. He then chooses words that defamiliarize, which function differently in today’s society, to try to achieve the same effect or response that the original version evoked, in the process breaking down the conceptual categories of his reader.Derrida’s main theoretical point seems to be that there is no pure meaning, no thing to be presented behind language, nothing to be represented. Therein lies the radicality of the deconstructionist project. Similar to the formalist position, what does exist, according to deconstructionists, is a continuous chain of signification comprised of languages in a constant state of interplay, mutually supplementing each other. Yet in addition to such a continuous chain, the Formalists tend to posit unified works of art as a goal within the system, a very fragile assumption, according to Derrida.Andrew Benjamin does not agree with Derrida, nor with de Man, and instead finds a way out of the labyrinth via Donald Davidson. In a very discussion of Davidson’s paper “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme”(1984), which studies translation as a way of focusing on criteria of identity for conceptual schemes,Andrew Benjamin argues that mutual understanding is “almost inescapable.”A complex series of interconnected preconditions precedes the process of expressing equivalent “things”in another language. Davidson’s approach thus mediates between the untouchable original and a movement of language that is intelligible, or at least indicates those “objects”that stand in relation to the source and target text and make communication possible. At this point, Andrew Benjamin discusses Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator.”he agrees with de Man’s reading that the fragment of a broken vessel do not presuppose an initial vessel, i.e., that original language is always already displaced language, and that therefore no original language exists. He then asks, however, how are we to understand the futural vessel and what are the conditions that implicitly causes us to think in terms of the “belonging together”of the fragments and thereby the “belonging together”of languages. Andrew Benjamin and other post-Enlightenment philosophers think not about the abyss, not about the pre-ontological conditions, but about the theoretical conditions that allow for interpretation and mutual understanding, which Andrew Benjamin calls ontological-temporal conditions. They seek to identify and describe the elements that allow for affirmative thinking about semantic and interpretive potential that are inherent in words; and they argue that one can think about translation without an origin to be or not to be retrieved. Meanings and interpretations emerge out of real conditions-they are actual as well as conflictual –and can be positively and empirically described. Andrew Benjamin argues,“Emergent meaning is the actualization of the potential for meaning and not the emergence out of non-meaning”（A. Benjamin, 1989:180）. In contrast to de Man and Derrida, he argues that there is never pure difference, but that difference always has a specificity. Walter Benjamin, argues Andrew Benjamin, located “after –life,” sur-vival, by locating the potential for afterlife with the text itself. Words incorporate a site of conflict, a site of unending afterlife, which defers an end or a definitive interpretation. Interpreting Walter Benjamin’s text against the grain of fashionable deconstruction readings, Andrew Benjamin argues that in Walter Benjamin, “the possibility of a different understanding of translation and philosophy is beginning to take place” (A. Benjamin,1989:108).The aim of this book has been to break down misconceptions about competing viewpoints and to open further the door for new, alternative approaches for translation. He feels as if the first edition of this book helped provide openings for some of the work that has emerged in the field in the last decade. The deconstruction of the authorities governing translation, literary criticism, and culture in general, was merely a first step. Much work still needs to be done. Although contemporary translation theory has evolved a long way since its beginnings, it now stands on the threshold of a very exciting new phase, one which can begin to unpack the relations in which meaning is constituted, and thus better inform our postmodern conception of language, literary discourse, and identity.My understanding to the theory of deconstruction is the following. "Survival of the original through translation," "equality of translation and the original" are the points of view of deconstruction, which fundamentally improve the status of translators and translation. Deconstruction denied Western Europe and America-centrism centrism or point of view, to promote the parallel relationship between national culture and language.But the deconstruction about the uncertainty of the meaning and translation and the original relations without the similarity lead to the other extreme, which may have a negative impact on the practice of translation. The denial of the original authority and creativity is also an extreme point of view. They pronounced the death of the author and original, is the denial of their own, denied all the literature. Because human cultural heritage is the accumulation of ancient literature, including some of intertextuality, more creative part of it; but also asked some really creative, but creativity is a text-based, ignoring the translation and the difference between the original and translation, indeed, deny the translation itself.。