Revisiting western translation theories : an integrational approach to translation

Abstract

Translation as an academic field is a protean discourse, crisscrossing vastly different disciplines and vested interests in the subject. Translation scholars (or translatologists) engage in unending discussions on a gamut of topics, yet mostly to the exclusion of a fundamental question – ‘what is translation?’. Translatologists either see it as too obvious and trivial to give an answer to or are hard-pressed to provide a barely satisfactory answer. Translatologists’ apprehension toward said question is a phenomenon that merits attention, for it is what accounts for the jarring gap between theory and practice which persists to the present day in the translation discourse.

As maintained in this thesis, the tension between theory and practice is rooted in the propensity to depersonalize translation in translation theorization, for methodological convenience, reproducibility of key terms and methods in translation, or for political or other purposes. The main line of reasoning in this thesis runs as follows: In integrational terms, depersonalization assumes the form of a ‘translation myth’ (Harris, 2011, p.85), an integral part of the ‘language myth’ (Harris, 1981). The language myth encapsulates some key misassumptions about language and communication most patent in the West, which revolve around the central contention that the first-order reality of language is, in essence, delineable languages (or language codes, made up of depersonalized linguistic signs). Dovetailed with this contention is a code-based conception of linguistic communication, a telementational fallacy (Harris, 1981, p.9) according to which language users communicate by sharing the same signs of a code and getting their meanings across to each other’s minds through deploying these signs. Derived from the language myth, the translation myth takes over the aforementioned assumptions lock, stock and barrel, thereby painting a picture of translation as ‘equivalence in meanings in between language codes’ generally accepted in Western translatology. Revisiting Western translatology from the classical era through modern-day biosemiotics, this thesis centers on the predominance of the translation myth in translation theory, covering the reasons for the conception and perpetuation of this myth, the theoretical deadlock brought about by the myth (the predicament of ‘untranslatability’, which originated in the struggle of applying the single-code telementational communication model in explaining inter-language-code translation), together with some of the notable attempts at controverting the myth (and why they do not suffice as a wholesale rejection of the myth).

An alternative way at perusing translation is offered in this thesis, namely, an integrational approach. As a semiologist and communication theorist, the integrationist proceeds with nothing but the personal translating experience as the only terra firma for developing a lay-oriented translation theory, a theory based on the concept of an integrational sign – a personal, contextualized, and radically indeterminate sign, the identification and interpretation of which cannot be separated from the communicational functions it serves in the perspective of the situated translator qua sign-maker. An integrational semiology thus rules out depersonalization or any of the language-/translation-mythical assumptions as the bedrocks of an integrational explanation of the translational reality, a human reality characterized by its volatility and communicational transparency.