Translation after Wittgenstein 9781138799875, 9781315755823

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TRANSLATION AFTER WITTGENSTEIN

In this eminently readable study, Philip Wilson explores the later writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein and shows how a reading of this philosophy can enable the translation theorist and the practising translator to reflect upon and improve the phenomenon of translation. Wittgenstein, while a key figure in twentieth-century philosophy, remains peripheral to the field of translation studies, and Wilson argues that his later work, because it deals with the nature of language and meaning, is potentially of great significance and that an awareness of this can change translation, both literary and non-literary. Wittgenstein’s life and thought is treated in the introduction, where it is shown how his methods can be applied to areas outside philosophy. The central three chapters of the book survey: the reading of the source text for translation; the writing of the target text; the theorisation of the target text. The author demonstrates how tools from Wittgenstein’s work can be of use in translation studies: the notion of the language-game, for example, helps us to understand meaning by looking at the way that words are used, and this can both help us describe translation and suggest ways of translating. A wide variety of examples and case studies is given throughout the book, from both literary and non-literary sources. Aimed at translation studies scholars, graduate students and researchers, this interdisciplinary book will also be of interest to scholars of philosophy and literature.

Philip Wilson teaches at the University of East Anglia, UK. He has co-edited Literary Translation: Re-drawing the Boundaries (with Jean Boase-Beier and Antoinette Fawcett, 2014). He also edited and translated The Bright Rose, translations of early German verse (2015).

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 for their close familiarity and personal affinity with a particular approach but also for 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 as Metaphor Rainer Guldin Translation and Language Education Sara Laviosa

Translating as a Purposeful Activity Christiane Nord Translation and Gender Luise von Flotow

Translation and Language Peter Fawcett

Deconstruction and Translation Kathleen Davis

Translation and Empire Douglas Robinson

Can Theory Help Translators? Andrew Chesterman and Emma Wagner

Translation and Literary Criticism Marilyn Gaddis Rose

Stylistic Approaches to Translation Jean Boase-Beier

Translation in Systems Theo Hermans

Representing Others Kate Sturge

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TRANSLATION AFTER WITTGENSTEIN

Philip Wilson

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 Philip Wilson The right of Philip Wilson 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 A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-79987-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-75582-3 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Sunrise Setting Ltd, Paignton, UK

In memory of Elsie Wilson (1920–2005) and Bill Wilson (1913–2003) ‘Words are also deeds.’ Ludwig Wittgenstein (PI 546)

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CONTENTS

List of illustrations Preface Acknowledgements Abbreviations

x xi xii xiv

1

Introduction

1

2

Reading the source text for translation

14

3

Writing the target text

47

4

Theorising the target text

75

5

Conclusion

101

Bibliography Index

109 119

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 2.1

Joseph Jastrow’s duck–rabbit

22

Tables 2.1 2.2 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 5.1

The word in context Forms of life from Table 2.1 The evaluation of quality in translation studies A sample of major translation theories Reading Eliot Weinberger as Wittgensteinian Some New Testament translations Wittgensteinian tools for translation studies

31 32 90 95 96 98 105

PREFACE

This is a work in translation studies, not in philosophy, though it is in dialogue with philosophy. I hope to convince both translation theorists and translators that they have a great deal to gain from engaging with the later work of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Readers who want to learn more about Wittgenstein’s life are referred to Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius by Ray Monk (1990). I have relied on Monk for the biographical details given in this book. I follow practice in philosophical scholarship by referring to the works of Wittgenstein by title and section, or title and page where applicable: ‘Investigations 5’, for example, refers to section 5 of the Philosophical Investigations, while ‘Culture and Value p. 5’ refers to page 5 of Culture and Value. I similarly refer to the works of Plato by title and section. Chinese, Greek, Hindi, Russian and Sanskrit words have been transliterated.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to those who helped me to find my path to Wittgenstein: Michael Finnissy, Fergus Kerr and Gareth Moore. I owe the notion of linking Wittgenstein and translation to John Gledhill. I wish to acknowledge a great intellectual debt to: Jean Boase-Beier, David Cockburn,Valerie Henitiuk, Gareth Jones, Marie McGinn and Ross Wilson. Many thanks to the following for their support: Odai Alzoubi, Anna Clover, Robert Cole,Tamara Dobler, Chris Doman, B. J. Epstein, Antoinette Fawcett, Marc Fielder, Lina Fisher, Hiroko Furukawa,Tom Greaves, Peter Green, Rosalind Harvey, Jon Hills, Susanne Klinger, Oskari Kuusela, Richard Lewis, Olessia Makarenia, Andrei Nasta, Ben Needham, Trudi Needham, Silvia Panizza, Rupert Read, Susie Reynolds, Cecilia Rossi, Catherine Rowett, Clara Stern Rodríguez, Lorna Savage, Maria Serban, Simon Summers, Helen Tierney,Vlad Vexler and Ben Walker. And finally, thanks to my editors at Routledge for invaluable comments and assistance: Theo Hermans, Laura Sandford and Louisa Semlyen. PhilipWilson Norwich June 2015

Permissions Full details of all works used can be found in the Bibliography. The author and the publishers are grateful to copyright-holders of the following material for permission to reprint extracts: Kathleen Davis, for the extract from ‘Letter to Pammachius’ by Jerome, translated by Kathleen Davis; copyright © 2004.

Acknowledgements xiii

Éditions Denoël, for the extract from La disparition by Georges Perec; copyright ©1969. Harvill Press, for the extract from A Void by Georges Perec, translated by Gilbert Adair, reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd.; copyright ©1968. Modern Poetry in Translation Series 3 Number 18, for the extract from ‘An Old High German Album’, translated by Philip Wilson; copyright © 2013. Penguin Books, for the extract from The Transformation and Other Stories by Franz Kafka, translated by Malcolm Pasley; copyright © 1992. Wiley-Blackwell, for extracts from Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte; copyright © 2009. Every effort has been made to contact copyright-holders. Please advise the publisher of any errors or omissions, and these will be corrected in subsequent editions.

ABBREVIATIONS

Works by Wittgenstein CV: Culture and Value PI: Philosophical Investigations PPF: Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment RFM: Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics TL-P: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus WFV: Wörterbuch für Volksschulen

Other abbreviations (ed): editor (eds): editors np: no page tr.: translated (tr): translator (trs): translators

1 INTRODUCTION

Aim The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) has exerted an influence that extends beyond philosophy to other disciplines and fields, such as literature (Gibson and Huemer 2004) or law (Patterson 2004). This book argues that his thinking can be of relevance to translation. Wittgenstein was born in Vienna in 1889, the youngest of the eight children of wealthy industrialist Karl Wittgenstein. He was initially a student of mechanical engineering at Berlin and in 1908 moved to Manchester to study aeronautics. A growing interest in mathematics took him to Cambridge in 1912, where he applied himself to logic under the guidance of philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell, who recognised in Wittgenstein an eccentric genius. Wittgenstein, for example, once refused to discount the possibility that there could be a rhinoceros hiding in a lecture room. In the First World War, Wittgenstein served in the Austro-Hungarian army, coming under the influence of the work of Leo Tolstoy, in particular Tolstoy’s stories and his harmony of the Gospels. Tolstoy’s teachings would lead him to give away his fortune after the war. Wittgenstein was taken prisoner in Italy in 1917. During his internment, he completed his book on philosophical logic, the Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung [logical-philosophical treatise], which was published in German in 1921, and is known in English as the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (TL-P) after the bilingual edition of 1922 that included C.K. Ogden’s translation. Wittgenstein returned to the new state of Austria after his release and, convinced that his book had solved all the problems of philosophy, renounced the subject and trained as a schoolteacher, going on to work in a number of rural schools. In 1926 he published the second and final book of his career, the Wörterbuch für Volksschulen (WFV) [dictionary for elementary schools], not a philosophical book but a reference

2

Introduction

work for the classroom. Wittgenstein left teaching in 1926 and helped to design a house in Vienna for his sister. In Vienna he also engaged in philosophical debate with the Logical Positivists of the Vienna Circle, such as Moritz Schlick and Friedrich Waismann, which marks his return to philosophy. Convinced that an entirely new way of doing philosophy was now needed, he returned to Cambridge in 1929 and began a method of enquiry that would result in the Philosophische Untersuchungen [philosophical investigations], published posthumously in 1953 in an edition including Wittgenstein’s German text with a facing English translation by Elizabeth Anscombe, and known in English as the Philosophical Investigations (PI); in 2009 a revised bilingual edition was published by Peter Hacker and Joachim Schulte that modifies but generally maintains Anscombe’s translation. The Investigations is held to be representative of the thought of the later Wittgenstein in its ‘attempt to produce an overall shift in how we approach philosophical questions or the desire for understanding that they express’ (McGinn 2008:30). It deals with the philosophy of language and the philosophy of psychology in two parts, formerly known as Parts I and II, now retitled in English Philosophical Investigations and Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment (PPF) respectively. Wittgenstein was appointed Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge in 1939 and became a legendary figure there, on account of the intensity of his teaching methods and his commitment to living as a philosopher. His methods and ideas gained currency through his students, some of whom circulated lecture notes that Wittgenstein had dictated. In 1947 he resigned his post and moved to Ireland in order to concentrate on his writing. By now he was aware that his later work would only be published after his death. He was diagnosed with cancer and in 1951 he died at Storeys End, the home of his Cambridge doctor. He had never owned a home of his own. Terry Eagleton describes Wittgenstein as ‘an arresting combination of monk, mystic and mechanic … a high European intellectual who yearned for a Tolstoyan holiness and simplicity of life, a philosophical giant with scant respect for philosophy’ (2008). He can also be contextualised within the linguistic turn in twentieth-century thought, which saw a number of disciplines – such as literature, theology and philosophy – becoming preoccupied with the nature of language. The development of Wittgenstein’s thinking about language is discussed below. Since Wittgenstein’s death, other works have been published based on his papers, such as On Certainty and Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (RFM), while the 2000 Bergen Electronic Edition makes his Nachlass [literary inheritance] available. Wittgenstein is regarded as one of the most significant figures in the history of philosophy. A 1999 poll of professional philosophers in North America ranked the Investigations as the most important philosophy text of the twentieth century, while the Tractatus came fourth (Lackey 1999:331–2). It is often stressed by writers on Wittgenstein that the way he did philosophy is as important as what he actually said or wrote: philosophy is seen as an activity rather than as a body of teaching (TL-P 4.112). In addition,Wittgenstein as a person continues to exercise a fascination, and recollections abound of the sage walking the streets of Cambridge (Rhees 1984). His life continues to inspire plays, novels and films. Ray Monk asserts that academic

Introduction

3

literature on Wittgenstein often fails because it misses the spirit in which Wittgenstein wrote (2002:11), a spirit that Monk defines as the linking of the search to become a decent person with the search for clarity, as epitomised in the story of Bertrand Russell asking Wittgenstein whether he was thinking of logic or of his sins and receiving the answer that Wittgenstein was thinking of both (Monk 2002:14). The phenomenon of Wittgenstein bridges the frequent division of philosophy into the analytic and the continental. Analytic philosophy is concerned with questions of logic and of language – for example, whether the sentence ‘The King of France is bald’ is true or false or meaningless. Continental philosophy is concerned with existential questions – for example, whether history can be said to progress. Philosophers such as A. J. Ayer and Bertrand Russell are categorised as working within the analytic tradition. Philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and Martin Heidegger are categorised as working within the continental tradition.The split has been seen by many writers to have had harmful effects in philosophy: Anthony Pym notes ‘not just a lack of dialogue but serious misunderstandings’ (2007:42). Wittgenstein can resolve this dilemma because the traditional categorisation of his work as analytic does not, according to Simon Critchley, explain his appeal, which ‘might be said to be based on the way philosophical truth comes together with a certain conception of existential meaning, indeed a certain way of life’ (2001:11). Example (1)1 is from Norman Malcolm’s memoir of Wittgenstein: (1) Wittgenstein related a riddle for the purpose of throwing some light on the nature of philosophy. It went as follows: Suppose that a cord was stretched around the earth at the equator. Now suppose that a piece one yard long was added to the cord. If the cord was kept taut and circular in form, how much above the surface of the earth would it be? Without stopping to work it out, everyone present was inclined to say that the distance from the earth would be so minute that it would be imperceptible. But this is wrong. The actual distance would be nearly six inches. Wittgenstein declared that it is this kind of mistake that occurs in philosophy. It consists in being misled by a picture. In the riddle the picture itself is correct enough: for a piece one yard long would be an insignificant fraction of the length of the whole cord. But we are misled by it to draw a wrong conclusion. A similar thing happens in philosophy: we are constantly deceived by mental pictures which are in themselves correct. (1958:53) The use of a story by Wittgenstein is significant. His later work is full of stories, parables, anecdotes and practical examples. In the riddle recollected by Malcolm, for example, Wittgenstein is trying to convince his listeners that appearances may be deceptive and that they should not take things for granted. Philosophising can change how we go about our business. An extended example from Wittgenstein’s life will make this clearer.

4

Introduction

During the Second World War,Wittgenstein worked as a porter in Guy’s Hospital in London and then as a laboratory assistant, a job that took him to a research unit in Newcastle, where he played an active role in the investigation of the ‘shock’ from which many servicemen were diagnosed as suffering. Wittgenstein’s colleague Dr Basil Reeve would comment later that he was influenced by Wittgenstein in two ways: keeping in mind that things are as they are; seeking illuminating comparisons to gain such an understanding. These are both central themes of the Investigations: Wittgenstein aims to free his reader from misleading pictures by looking at how terms are used in ordinary life – for example, pain (PI 281 ff.); and he often uses analogies – for example, his investigation of games becomes an illustration of how language works as a whole (PI 77). The final report issued by the Newcastle research unit asserted that to use the term ‘shock’ at all was misguided because as a blanket term it was of no practical help. A doctor, called to a wounded person who had been diagnosed with shock, might find a wide variety of symptoms in that patient. Two patients, who had both been diagnosed with shock, might have significantly different symptoms and might need different treatments. The report concluded that what was needed was a clear description of a patient’s symptoms, and that the term ‘shock’ should be dropped. The Medical Research Council’s report for 1939–45, commenting on the unit’s work, asserted that it ‘threw grave doubt upon the value of attacking the “shock” problem as if wound “shock” were a single and pathological entity’ (Monk 1990:452). The unit was thus able to turn to detailed observations of injuries sustained in warfare, in an attempt to provide clearer diagnoses. The Wittgensteinian search for clarity had two practical effects in this context. First, it closed down misguided lines of research, following Wittgenstein’s contention that an inappropriate expression ‘is a sure means of remaining stuck in confusion’ (PI 339). Second, it opened up more positive paths, following the emphasis laid by Wittgenstein on ‘the value of the discovery’ that a picture is holding us captive, so that better ways forward can be found (PI 115). In the present book I address Wittgenstein from the point of view of translation studies rather than of philosophy. Wittgenstein did not investigate the topic of translation directly at any length, but his work can be used in describing the translation process and is also of potential value to the practising translator: it can be applied. My overall strategy is influenced by Theology after Wittgenstein by Fergus Kerr, whose primary purpose is ‘to show students of theology that they have much more to gain from reading Wittgenstein’s later writings than is commonly supposed’ (1988:vii). Translation after Wittgenstein aims to show that the same point can be made to students of translation, following the approach of Rupert Read: ‘The true test of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, the test of its vitality, of its reach, of its being more than a set of observations which are of use in the areas where he made them, is to apply his methods where he did not much apply them’ (2007:3). Translation could be one of these areas (Oliveira 2012:128). Currently, however, Wittgenstein occupies a marginal position in translation studies. Anthony Pym makes only one oblique reference to him in his essay on philosophy and translation (2007:36);

Introduction 5

Andrew Benjamin (1989), Rosemary Arrojo (2010) and Kirsten Malmkjær (2010) make none at all in their surveys of translation and philosophy. Wittgenstein may be a peripheral figure for translation studies because, as mentioned above, he did not address translation at any significant length, whereas many philosophers have discussed translation directly – for example, Jacques Derrida and Martin Heidegger, who have both been influential in translation studies. By contrast, while it is possible to survey Wittgenstein’s writings in order to garner statements about translation, Dinda Gorlée notes that many of these references are designed to illuminate philosophical issues by using examples from translation, rather than to discuss translation for its own sake (1994:88). My interest in Wittgenstein is motivated precisely by the fact that he did not address translation directly, by the fact that his later writings are about language and by the fact that translation is rooted in language. The aim of this book will therefore be to apply Wittgenstein’s philosophy to the area of translation, not to use Wittgenstein’s statements on translation to illuminate the phenomenon of translation, although some of these statements will be referenced. Wittgenstein may also have been ignored within translation studies because he has often been perceived as a vatic writer whose work has accordingly become ‘the esoteric preoccupation of a clique’ (Read 2007:4), occupying intellectual heights far removed from such a practical activity as translating, and generating a whole industry of abstruse and often contradictory exegesis (Kahane et al. 2007:2 ff.). In a letter of 1944 to Norman Malcolm, however, Wittgenstein asks what is the use of studying philosophy ‘if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life’ (in McGuinness 2008:320). Translation, in my opinion, is one of these important questions of everyday life, and the contention of this book is that a reading of Wittgenstein can improve our thinking about translation, even though the topic of translation is not central to his work. The project of the later Wittgenstein is concerned with making us see things differently. Philosophical confusions, for example, are viewed as originating in grammatical confusions. The ways that we habitually see language are questioned. Terms are investigated rather than assumed. As Ray Monk asserts: ‘Wittgenstein’s remark about philosophy – that it “leaves everything as it is” [PI 124] – is often quoted, but it is less often realized that, in seeking to change nothing but the way we look at things, Wittgenstein was attempting to change everything’ (1990:533). Hence Read describes the Investigations as ‘a philosophical self-help book’ that can help its audience ‘to cease to be tortured by various intellectual delusions’, by shifting the focus to the circumstances of ordinary lives (2007:1). To view Wittgenstein in this way can set him free for translation studies, so that – again to refer to Read – instead of being ‘the esoteric preoccupation of a clique’, Wittgenstein’s work can become ‘the valuable activity of a growing cultural force’, which means that philosophy after Wittgenstein is ‘something that we practise rather than recite’ (2007:4). The same may be true of translation after Wittgenstein.

6

Introduction

However, there has been some significant work done within translation studies using Wittgenstein (Chesterman 1997, Robinson 2003, Steiner 1998, Toury 1980, Tymoczko 2007), on which I build later in this book and which opens the possibility for further integration of his methods.

Translation studies and philosophy In her survey of the many turns that have occurred in the short history of translation studies, Mary Snell-Hornby lists the ‘sociological turn’ as the most recent (2006:172). It is time also for a philosophical turn, for further application of Wittgenstein’s writings to translation studies in order to consolidate work already done and to move Wittgenstein from the periphery to the centre, paralleling a growing interest within philosophy in linking Wittgenstein and translation. A recent volume of essays edited by Matthias Kross and Esther Ramharter (2012), for example, investigates a number of ways in which Wittgenstein can be related to translation from within philosophy, such as: the notion of translation in Walter Benjamin and Wittgenstein (Kross 2012); Wittgenstein on translation (Kusch 2012); how Wittgenstein’s notion of seeing an aspect can assist the translator (Oliveira 2012); the 2009 revision of the English translation of the Investigations (Schulte 2012). It is useful to examine the relationship between philosophy and translation studies as fields, between one of the oldest intellectual practices known to humanity and a recent discipline, sometimes considered to have been formalised by a 1972 paper by James Holmes (2004). To turn to a discipline outside one’s own is frequently seen as a vital strategy for theorists in the humanities (Boase-Beier et al. 2014:3). Translation studies has accordingly been described by Maria Tymoczko as an ‘interdiscipline’ (2007:52), which of necessity looks to other fields for support. Philosophy is one field to which translation studies has turned. Anthony Pym asserts that there are three ways in which philosophy and translation are linked (2007:24). First, philosophers have used translation as a case study or a metaphor for more general issues. Second, translation theorists and translators have used philosophical discourses to support their ideas. Third, philosophers, scholars and translators have commented on the translation of philosophical discourses. Respective examples of these three ways are: Friedrich Nietzsche’s statement on translation and power (2012); George Steiner’s use of Wittgenstein (1998:169 ff.); Lawrence Venuti’s discussion of the translation of philosophical texts (1998:106–23). In this book, I address the second connection.

Why Wittgenstein? In Philosophical Remarks 3, Wittgenstein states that philosophical inquiry has to be about language as we find it, not some ideal language; and his discussions in the Investigations are based on practical examples and stories, on ordinary life, everyday usage and everyday activities, such as going shopping (PI 1). The translator must

Introduction

7

likewise deal with language as it is found in a source text, not with an ideal language. Wittgenstein’s insistence on examining words as they are used in ordinary life supports the ‘bottom-up’ approach to translation studies suggested by Anthony Pym (2007:44). The present book examines various conceptual problems that face the translation theorist and the translator, and will suggest how a reading of Wittgenstein can be brought to these problems. As Jean Boase-Beier asserts, knowledge of theory ‘is another possible tool, a way of broadening the mind, an added perspective’ that can inform decisions made during the process of translation (2006:147). It is important to be clear about the term ‘theory’, which is used in ways that differ according to context, and is thus a potential source of confusion. In a Wittgensteinian context, the problem of how to understand ‘theory’ is acute because of Wittgenstein’s insistence in the Investigations that ‘we may not advance any kind of theory’ (PI 109), that the task of philosophy is description and not explanation (PI 126) and that the emphasis must always be on the particular case (PI 66). In Culture and Value (CV p. 30), for example, he criticises beginning with a preconception of how things must be; he sees this as an example of ‘the dogmatism into which philosophy can so easily degenerate’. I discuss theory further in Chapters 4 and 5, but here I note that Wittgenstein offers no theory in the sense of a systematisation. He expresses admiration for Nicolaus Copernicus and Charles Darwin not for discovering ‘a true theory’, but for discovering a ‘fertile new point of view’ (CV p. 26). A useful term to introduce here is ‘doctrine’, to indicate a formalised teaching of some kind. In this sense, it is clear that Wittgenstein offers no doctrines; as Marie McGinn states, ‘it is a method or style of thought, rather than doctrines, that characterises his later philosophy’ (2008:10). I follow standard practice in translation studies of using the term ‘theory’ to designate ways of viewing phenomena. Skopos theory, for example, looks at finished translations in the light of the function or functions that they fulfil, so that a translation of a legal text may be explained by the purpose it is to serve in a new legal context (Reiss and Vermeer 2013). Given that I hold that there is no Wittgensteinian doctrine of language to be extracted from the Investigations, my intention is not to offer what I could call a ‘Wittgensteinian theory of translation’, to be placed alongside skopos theory, postcolonial theory, equivalence theory, etc. on courses in translation studies. My aim is to show how a reading of Wittgenstein may be of benefit to the translation theorist and to the practising translator. The former may find support for his or her views. The latter may come to see things differently and hence to translate differently. There will, however, be no set of instructions in the Conclusion (Chapter 5) about how to translate, although I do believe that there are Wittgensteinian approaches to translating, just as there are Wittgensteinian approaches to philosophy. I am not referring to a methodology, but to a set of methods: ‘There is not a single philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, different therapies, as it were’ (PI 133).

8

Introduction

The later Wittgenstein In their book on understanding philosophy through jokes, Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein reproduce a cartoon in which an annoyed man is making this comment to an annoyed woman: (2) I never said, ‘I love you’. I said, ‘I love ya’. Big difference. (2007:137) Cathcart and Klein interpret this scene as Wittgenstein talking to a more traditional philosopher, who finds the expressions ‘I love you’ and ‘I love ya’ equivalent. Wittgenstein corrects her by explaining how the meaning of a word is determined by its use, so that, because the two expressions in question are used differently, they have very different social implications: ‘I love ya’ is a declaration of affection at best, not of love, despite the dictionary meaning of the words ‘I love ya’ being the same as ‘I love you’. Here, in a vignette, is the approach of the later Wittgenstein (cf. PI 43). Many remarks in the Investigations are in the form of dialogue, arguably between Wittgenstein and his younger self, the author of the 1921 Tractatus, a book that stands in continuity with work done in formal logic by Wittgenstein’s Cambridge mentor Bertrand Russell. The Tractatus and the Investigations can be held to represent the work of the early Wittgenstein and the later Wittgenstein respectively. So different are the approaches of the two books that it can easily seem that there are two philosophers named Ludwig Wittgenstein. There is controversy about how far any continuity can be asserted between the early and the later work, with New Wittgensteinian philosophers, such as Alice Crary and Rupert Read (2000), asserting that there is no break, in contrast to what Guy Kahane, Edward Kanterian and Oskari Kuusela call the orthodox interpretation (2007:2), as exemplified by Peter Hacker, which treats the later and the early work separately (2000). I avoid this controversy by concentrating on the Investigations, with reference to other later writings; but my sympathy lies with the orthodox interpretation, based on the reference by Wittgenstein to the ‘grave mistakes’ made in the Tractatus (PI p. 4). As Hans-Johann Glock comments: ‘In Wittgenstein’s case … we have two powerful philosophical visions, distinct and self-contained, except that the later work evolves partly out of sharp and explicit criticisms of the early work’ (2008:46). It is accordingly necessary to give some attention to the Tractatus in order fully to understand the Investigations. Central to the Tractatus is Wittgenstein’s aim of constructing a theory of how language pictures the world – for example, remarks 2.1 and 2.161, which are quoted as examples (3) and (4) respectively: (3) We make to ourselves pictures of facts. (4) In the picture and the pictured there must be something identical in order that the one can be a picture of the other at all.

Introduction

9

In Notebooks 1914–1916 p. 7, Wittgenstein refers to a report he had read in a magazine while working on the Tractatus, about a French lawsuit concerning a road accident. A model had been used in court to represent what had happened, so that a toy car represented a real car, and dolls represented real people, etc. Wittgenstein’s picture theory of language (Notebooks 1914-1916 p. 55) maintains that we similarly form mental and linguistic pictures that correspond to possible states of affairs, so that propositions are atomic and foundational. Sentences can be symbolised. Symbols can be translated. The picture theory would imply that translation is a mechanical process (Oliveira 2012:126), as in Tractatus 3.343: (5) Definitions are rules for the translation of one language into another. Every correct symbolism must be translatable into every other according to such rules. It is this which all have in common. Such a mechanical view of translation follows from the book’s concern with logical symbolism. For the early Wittgenstein, ‘I love you’ and ‘I love ya’ would be the same proposition. The work of the later Wittgenstein tells a different story about language and it is this story that is relevant to the theory and practice of translation. The approach of the later work is foreshadowed in the 1926 Wörterbuch für Volksschulen [dictionary for elementary schools]. Wittgenstein designed this dictionary to facilitate independent learning, by providing a reference work for Austrian pupils who needed to check the spelling of a German word. Most items accordingly appear without definition, so that the text has the appearance of a vocabulary list. The choice of words is governed by pragmatic considerations. In his Preface2 (WFV p. XXXIII), Wittgenstein stresses that he did not include many good German words because they were not current in Austria – for example, abgefeimt [cunning]. Similarly, dialectal items that are part of the educated language are included – for example, Häferl – which Wittgenstein defines by the High German synonym Töpfchen [little pot].The ordering of words in the dictionary is similarly pragmatic, so that strict alphabetical order is not always followed, as in example (6) (WFV p. 1). To avoid giving Wittgenstein’s text the appearance of a bilingual dictionary, I gloss it separately as example (7). (6) alt, älter, am ältesten, ältlich, das Alter, altern der Altar, Altäre das Altertum, -tümer, altertümlich (7) alt, älter, am ältesten, ältlich, das Alter, altern old older oldest elderly the age to-age der Altar, Altäre the altar altars das Altertum, -tümer, altertümlich the antiquity -ties ancient

10 Introduction

Here, as Wittgenstein comments, the noun das Alter [the age] is placed before der Altar [the altar] in order to make it easier for pupils to look up the word, by positioning it on the same line as the root adjective alt [old], even though this puts it out of alphabetical order (WFV p. XXXIV). Cognate words are grouped together: ‘each instance of clinging to a dogmatic principle tends to an arrangement that does not suit our purpose and has to be abandoned’.The dictionary is an example of the abandonment of doctrine that characterises Wittgenstein’s later thinking. It is also the work of an educator. Wittgenstein’s time in the classroom should be remembered when reading the Investigations, just as his training as an engineer may explain the mechanical view of translation taken by the Tractatus. Wittgenstein’s own involvement with C.K. Ogden’s translation of the Tractatus, in the form of letters Wittgenstein sent and corrections he made to drafts of Ogden’s target text, also shows that issues in translation are rarely as simple as any mechanical model might suggest. In a letter of 1922, Wittgenstein discusses how he found Ogden’s translation ‘far too literal’, how the sense but not the words needed to be translated, how some translated German words needed omission, whereas new English words needed insertion (Letters to C.K. Ogden p. 19). Wittgenstein was neither a translation theorist nor a native speaker of English, and here is not the place to discuss his views on how the Tractatus was rendered by Ogden. What the letter shows is the sort of issues that arise on realising that translation is not a matter of mechanical transference. As Wittgenstein remarks: ‘It is a difficult business!’ (Letters to C.K. Ogden p. 19). As mentioned above,Wittgenstein’s return in 1929 to academic life in Cambridge was marked by a new way of pursuing philosophy. Whereas the anecdote of the modelled accident is held to have inspired the Tractatus, a gesture by the Italian economist Piero Sraffa is considered to have instigated the new approach. Sraffa had brushed his chin with his fingertips (a Neapolitan sign of dismissal) and asked: ‘What is the logical form of that?’. For Wittgenstein, this was a revelation: communication depends on many factors – such as body language, tone of voice, context, etc. – that cannot be pictured by propositional calculus. According to the Tractatus, any sentence can be symbolised. Thus, following the picture theory of language, example (8) can be rendered as example (9), where A stands for ‘Anna is in the house’, B stands for ‘Ben has eaten her shoes’ and C stands for ‘Chris has taken Ben for a walk’, while the logical constants ‘-’, ‘v’ and ‘&’ represent ‘not’, ‘or’ and ‘and’ respectively: (8) Either Anna is not in the house, or else Ben has eaten her shoes and Chris has taken him for a walk. (9) -A v (B&C) Sraffa made Wittgenstein realise that the world is more complicated than the picture theory would suggest: the way that example (8) is enunciated would make a difference, for example. For Wittgenstein, this realisation destroyed the whole crystalline purity of logic. In Investigations 107, he describes the world of the Tractatus

Introduction

11

as one of ice, where there was no friction and where consequently it was easy to fall; the new work would represent a move ‘to the rough ground’, where walking is difficult but at least possible. To give an example of the limitations of the approach of the Tractatus, the following text3 admits of two radically different readings: (10) I saw her duck under the table. Did the narrator watch a female person dive beneath the table or did the narrator observe a female’s pet bird beneath the table? In the first reading, ‘her’ is a possessive adjective and ‘duck’ is a noun. In the second, ‘her’ is a direct object and ‘duck’ is a verb.The context is crucial.Without knowing the context, it is not possible to offer a single translation into another language, nor a satisfactory symbolisation. Wittgenstein’s journey from a mechanical view of language to a more pragmatic view mirrors the journey taken by many translators in how they view meaning (Bellos 2011:67). The Investigations is a very unusual book. It proceeds in numbered paragraphs, referred to by Wittgenstein as ‘philosophical remarks’ (PI p. 3), without chapters, titles or headings. Paragraphs may or may not be related to what has immediately gone before.Topics come and go and return. Questions are raised but not answered. In contrast to the Tractatus, the Investigations has an approach that Ray Monk characterises as ‘anthropological’, in the sense that it is set in the world of people, using examples, stories, dialogue, concrete instances of the use of words: the ‘stream of life which gives linguistic utterances their meaning’ (1990:261). Symbolism and truth tables are absent: the Investigations, unlike the Tractatus, is not the work of Bertrand Russell’s successor. Wittgenstein writes of how the nature of his philosophical investigations ‘compels us to travel criss-cross in every direction over a wide field of thought’, so that the book ‘is really only an album’ (PI p. 3). The style of the Investigations is essential to Wittgenstein’s purpose and has evoked ‘both high praise and widespread alarm’ (Cavell 2000:55). Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin (1973) conclude that the later work of Wittgenstein has more affinity with the Vienna in which Wittgenstein grew up, the city of the dramatist Johann Nestroy and the literary satirist Karl Kraus, than it has with the Cambridge of the logician Russell, where Wittgenstein learned to be a philosopher. Does the Investigations, then, offer a different theory of language from the picture theory of the Tractatus? It offers no theory at all. In lectures given after 1929, when he was at work on what would become the Investigations, Wittgenstein constantly stressed to his students that he was not offering a philosophical theory but rather the means to escape from theory.The distinction between saying and showing that was made in the Tractatus is applied (TL-P 4.1212). The Investigations does not tell the reader anything. It shows. The Investigations occupies the central place in Wittgenstein’s oeuvre, as the text he intended to be published after his death to represent his later thinking. As James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann assert: ‘To understand Wittgenstein as he would want to be understood, we should focus on the works that come closest to

12 Introduction

passing muster with him’ (1993:ix). It is therefore the text to which I turn most frequently.

Applying Wittgenstein Wittgenstein remarks: ‘Our inquiry is therefore a grammatical one’ (PI 90). It is through the grammatical investigation that the philosopher restores the everyday. The grammatical investigation will be analysed further in Chapters 2 and 4, but an example of the method is how Wittgenstein looks at the concept of a game in order to show that there is no common denominator linking the phenomena we categorise as games (PI 66 ff.). Any search for one runs into difficulties, and Wittgenstein uses this fact in order to attack essentialism, i.e. the view that there must be something common to all instances of a concept (Glock 1996:120). In Investigations 66, Wittgenstein remarks that if we ‘look and see whether there is anything in common to all [games]’ we discern only similarities, not some essence to be found in all of them. He compares board games and card games: (11) Look, for example, at board-games, with their various affinities. Now pass to card-games; here you find many correspondences with the first group, but many common features drop out, and others appear. Even a criterion such as ‘competition between players’ cannot link all card games: patience, for example, can be played by only one person. Wittgenstein replaces the essentialist quest with the notion that ‘family resemblance’ is a better way of describing the similarities that exist between games (PI 67). In a family there are various resemblances, such as ‘build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament and so on and so forth’, which overlap and criss-cross. The game is therefore ‘a concept with blurred edges’ (PI 71). By looking and seeing in this way, conceptual confusion may be avoided.4 If Wittgenstein is offering philosophy as a tool, as a means of solving puzzles that does not interfere with the use of language but describes it (PI 124), then it is possible to apply this philosophical method to other areas of inquiry, which would not be possible with a philosophical theory. Rupert Read stresses that ‘what matters is whether Wittgenstein’s chosen methods work … whether we can learn to go on’ (2007:4). In the following chapters, I go on by examining the phenomenon of translation, asking how it can be illuminated by the story told by Wittgenstein. Chapter 2 examines the reading of the source text for translation; Chapter 3 examines the writing of the target text; Chapter 4 examines the theorising of the target text. These three aspects reflect the way that any source text is dealt with in the process of translation: it is read for translation; then it is translated; finally, it may be theorised (for example, by an introduction or notes, or by the work of a translation scholar). These stages are not necessarily consecutive. A translator will read and reread constantly while translating and may form a view of a text, i.e. a theory, during the process of reading for translation. My investigation therefore

Introduction

13

does not prescribe an order of events, but presents an album where many of the considerations on translation will go ‘criss-cross’, as Wittgenstein describes his own project (PI p. 4). In this sense, at least, the book will resemble Wittgenstein’s later work, with its turn to the rough ground (PI 107). As Wittgenstein notes of his work: ‘Each of the sentences I write is trying to say the whole thing, i.e. the same thing over and over again; it is as though they were all simply views of one object seen from different angles’ (CV p. 7). Many remarks made by Wittgenstein will be cited and discussed. To adapt what Fergus Kerr says (1988:190), the reader will be immersed in an anthology of Wittgenstein’s texts, many of which will stay in the memory, whatever is to happen, after Wittgenstein, to the practice of translation.

Notes 1 2 3 4

Major quotations and references are given throughout in consecutively numbered inserts. Omitted in the 1926 edition but included (and translated into English) in the second edition of 1977. Thanks to David Cockburn for this example. Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance has been influential in the development of prototype theory. For an application of prototype theory to translation, see Halverson 1999.

2 READING THE SOURCE TEXT FOR TRANSLATION

In this chapter, I consider how the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein can be of use to the translator who is reading the source text for translation. I examine: Wittgenstein’s stress on looking at phenomena; his notion of language-games; his notion of forms of life; how his work supports a descriptive approach to the source text. I then apply insights from Wittgenstein to examples taken from poetry, theology and from non-literary texts. Finally, I draw conclusions.

On not thinking but looking Gary Hagberg refers to ‘the post-Wittgensteinian climate’ in the humanities in general (1995:1). Translation can now be described analogously as ‘translation after Wittgenstein’: trivially, in that it comes after his death in 1951; actually, in that Wittgenstein has changed the intellectual landscape; potentially, in that translators and translation theorists may choose to learn from his methods and to apply them. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu was once asked why he often quoted Wittgenstein in his work, and replied: ‘Wittgenstein is probably the philosopher who has helped me most at moments of difficulty. He’s a kind of saviour for times of great intellectual distress’ (1990:9). How is the later Wittgenstein able to achieve this effect, and how can Wittgenstein help the translator as well as the sociologist? The Investigations is a work that makes its readers see things differently. Wittgenstein considered using a line from Shakespeare’s King Lear as its motto: ‘I’ll teach you differences’.Translation of all types involves looking at the features of the source text in order to represent those features in another language, and Wittgenstein can help the translator in this task because he can teach us about differences, giving this instruction to the reader in Investigations 66: ‘don’t think, but look!’. I now give Wittgenstein’s story of the wood sellers as an example of his methods (RFM I-143 ff.). This story has been linked to translation by Martin Kusch (2012).

Reading the source text for translation 15

(12) People pile up logs and sell them, the piles are measured with a ruler, the measurements of length, breadth, and height multiplied together, and what comes out is the number of pence which have to be asked and given. They do not know ‘why’ it happens like this; they simply do it like this: that is how it is done. … Very well; but what if they piled the timber in heaps of arbitrary, varying height and then sold it at a price proportionate to the area covered by the piles? And what if they even justified this with the words: ‘Of course, if you buy more timber you must pay more’? … How could I show them that – as I should say – you don’t really buy more wood if you buy a pile covering a bigger area? – I should, for instance, take a pile which was small by their ideas and, by laying the logs around, change it into a ‘big’ one. This might convince them – but perhaps they would say: ‘Yes, now it’s a lot of wood and costs more’ – and that would be the end of the matter. – We should presumably say in this case: they simply do not mean the same by ‘a lot of wood’ and ‘a little wood’ as we do; and they have a different system of payment from us. It might seem that communication with the wood sellers has broken down (Cerbone 2000:300), but there is nothing more unfathomable about their practice than about the medieval custom of selling wood by the ell (Glock 2008:38). As David Cerbone notes: ‘The problem we confront in thinking about this community is not a problem in their practices, but rather a problem for us in interpreting just what it is that they are doing’ (2000:301). Could we translate what the wood sellers have to say, assuming their language were not ours? Kusch imagines them using the word myynti [Finnish: sale], and argues that translation would be possible: ‘What justifies translating “myynti” as “measuring and selling wood” is nothing to do with charity and rationality; it is simply the similarity between the tribe’s behaviour and our behaviour when we measure and sell wood’ (2012:64). Wittgenstein’s stress on practice enables the translator to see how translation can proceed. The context has to be taken into account and the imagination used, in accordance with what Wittgenstein has to say about significance: ‘What is happening now has significance – in these surroundings. The surroundings “give it its importance”’ (PI 583). And were the wood sellers to write poems, or scriptures or advertisements for wood, or legal documents about the selling of wood, then we could translate those, too. How well we would translate is, of course, another question. Wittgenstein describes philosophy as a battle against ‘the bewitchment of our understanding by the resources of our language’ (PI 109). His contention can be supported by recent work by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson on cognitive metaphor. They show how certain cognitive metaphors can mislead us into thinking that meaning has an existence independent of words, as in the ‘container metaphor’: when somebody says, for example, that it is difficult to put his or her thoughts into words (Lakoff and Johnson 2003:11). To view things as they are may be more difficult than may be at first thought because of the way that language operates. As Marjorie Perloff explains,Wittgenstein allows us to see how everything

16 Reading the source text for translation

happens exactly as it does while realising that, at any given moment, we also conjecture that everything might have happened otherwise (1996:19). That it is possible to link Wittgenstein to theorists such as Lakoff and Johnson strengthens the case for looking at his work in translation. Similarly, Wittgenstein supports and is supported by Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1995), where the stress on engaging with the words of the speaker parallels Wittgenstein’s notion of the form of life, and where Relevance Theory’s rejection of a code model of meaning in favour of an inferential model parallels Wittgenstein’s insistence on looking at how words are used. Again, Michael Burke, writing in cognitive poetics, uses the concept of the cognitive scenario as a tool to facilitate the understanding of poetry, giving the example of the pub (2003:68). Most people know the sort of things to expect when they enter a pub: drink and food for sale, quiz machines, tables at which to sit, a bar, etc. The translator must become acquainted with the cognitive scenario of the text that he or she is to translate: love poem, song, legal document, scientific report, etc.Wittgenstein’s methods offer a way to construct the cognitive scenario. The attentive reader of the Investigations is offered tools to allow him or her to become adept at seeing what is at stake in a text, at becoming at home there. For the translator, this involves moving to a better position to translate, by seeing aspects of the source text and responding to them, just as one might note differences between a German pub and an English pub, but come to feel at home in both. It is trivially true that nobody can translate a text that he or she has not read. Clive Scott sees a translator as ‘someone who reads in order to write’ (2008:17). Parallel to physical necessity is aesthetic necessity, however, because the translator must make decisions during the process of reading about how he or she will write the target text. In Investigations 164, Wittgenstein shows how the term ‘reading’ is used for ‘a family of cases’, so that we are misled by the use of the same word ‘reading’ into thinking that, for example, reading silently and reading aloud are the same thing, whereas very different criteria apply. As Jean Boase-Beier points out, ‘reading for translation’ differs from other types of reading, such as reading for pleasure or reading for information (2006:24). To sit down and read, say, an article on the Cold War with a view to translating it may lead to the translator noting how certain aspects of the source text might be maintained in his or her translation. The tentative formulation of a rendering becomes part of the reading process. The Investigations offers a series of exercises that can be used by the translator to this end. In Investigations 336, for example, Wittgenstein tells the story of a French politician who failed to look outside the constraints of his own language: (13) [The case when] someone imagines that one could not think a sentence with the curious word order of German or Latin just as it stands. One first has to think it, and then one arranges the words in that strange order. (A French politician once wrote that it was a peculiarity of the French language that in it words occur in the order in which one thinks them.)

Reading the source text for translation 17

A speaker of French may find it ‘curious’ that in German the main verb is in terminal position in subordinate clauses, as in example (14): (14) Weil die See blau ist. because the sea blue is The error is to fail to realise that what we have is a different way of using language, not a faulty encryption of a French pattern, where the verb would follow the subject, as in example (15): (15) Parce que la mer est bleue. because the sea is blue Germans, similarly, are surprised that in French the predicative adjective agrees with the substantive in gender, which it does not in German (PI 538). In example (15), the adjective bleu has become bleue because it must agree with the feminine noun la mer. No such change was necessary to the German adjective blau in example (14). Wittgenstein’s French politician has made the error of seeing French as a language that corresponds to the language of thought, an essentialist view that fails to note how language is a dynamic system that can be used in different ways. Essentialism is one of Wittgenstein’s major targets. Rather than one essence, phenomena exhibit many differences. To give two examples: contemporary French is very different from the French of the Middle Ages; there are many varieties of French at any one time.Wittgenstein satirises the politician’s view that French is the norm, i.e. the one and only language in which it is not necessary first to think the words and then to arrange them into the curious word order of the other language in question. By the use of a particular example, he questions the whole tendency to form ideologies of language. Anthony Lodge, for example, argues that French, like any other language, may exhibit clarity and logic not in itself but in the way that it is used by effective speakers (1998:29). It is necessary to look at how speakers and writers choose to speak or to write, i.e. how they use the language, rather than to begin with a theory of how language directs its speakers. We have a tendency to divide texts arbitrarily into content and form, rather than looking at the texts themselves. Matt Madden, discussing his presentation of the same domestic story in ninety-nine different drawings, concludes that the debate needs to be moved away from the eternal battle between form and content or style and substance to a new model: ‘form as content, and substance inseparable from style’ (2006:1). Wittgenstein can help the reader to do this by his assertion that meaning is ‘a physiognomy’ (PI 568). If I want to know what somebody is feeling, then it is a good idea to look at his or her face. David Cockburn notes how much ‘of what we learn about others we learn through their emotional expression’ (2009:128). If I want to know what a Shakespeare sonnet or an advertisement or a joke means, then I similarly need to look at the physiognomy.

18 Reading the source text for translation

We can understand physiognomy in terms of choice of words, following Wittgenstein (‘Philosophy’ p. 165): (16) The choice of our words is so important, because the point is to hit upon the physiognomy of the thing exactly, because only the exactly aimed thought can lead to the correct track. The car must be placed on the tracks precisely so, so that it can keep rolling correctly. Thus the sentences in examples (17) and (18) may be thought to have the same meaning because they can be used in the same way, i.e. they both describe the same event: (17) Brutus killed Caesar. (18) Caesar was killed by Brutus. However, the physiognomies differ: (17) is in the active voice and (18) is in the passive voice. As Steven Pinker notes, many stylists have advocated avoiding the passive, but recent linguistic research has shown that this voice ‘has a number of indispensable functions because of the way it engages a reader’s attention and memory’ (2014:3). Example (18) foregrounds the figure of Caesar and therefore his betrayal at the hands of his friend Brutus (if we assume that the reference is to the events in Rome in 44 BCE). How something is said is as important as what is said. Elements such as repetition, iconicity, emphasis, etc. can all change the meaning of an expression. They are not ornamental, as can be seen by comparing the sentences in examples (19) and (20): (19) I ought to buy a present for my friend. (20) I ought to buy a present for my friend. The use of italics in (20) can be read as implying that I am not going to buy my friend a present, even though I feel that I should. In a law report, the choice of one word over another can give rise to a vast amount of exegesis. Enrique Alcaraz and Brian Hughes note how judges are often forced to become ‘linguists and philologists’ (2001:26), and they offer a detailed description of the characteristics of legal English in their book on legal translation (2006:4–14). They are describing the physiognomy of legal English. Similarly, Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane and Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy are all nineteenthcentury novels (in French, German and Russian respectively) with eponymous female protagonists who engage in affairs.The writers, however, choose to tell their stories very differently. Wittgenstein sees reading as a set of practices that can be taught, in accordance with the general contention of the Investigations that the mastery of a language is the mastery of a technique (PI 199). Wittgenstein can therefore be used in the

Reading the source text for translation 19

training of translators, whether at the beginning of their careers or in terms of ongoing development. Jean Boase-Beier, addressing how literary translators can be trained, stipulates that attention must be given to the way in which they read the source text and not on the way in which they translate. She concludes: ‘What training of translators involves is showing them how language works, above all how literary language works, so that in any individual case they will have at their disposal the means for understanding how the particular text works’ (1998:41). Her point would apply to any text being translated, not just literary texts. In order to translate a text, the translator needs to have investigated its physiognomy. In Culture and Value p. 80, Wittgenstein analogously stresses that to learn how to appreciate music begins with learning how music works, and the Investigations forms a set of exercises that students could undertake in order better to understand how language works. To read one of the book’s stories, such as the builders who communicate using only the four words ‘block’, ‘pillar’, ‘slab’ and ‘beam’ (PI 2 ff.), is to be invited to see language in a different way and to deepen our understanding of it, hence illumining the reading for translation of any source text. (This story is discussed in the next section.) Human beings bring many preconceptions to the understanding of what goes on in reading. If I pick up a piece of paper covered in symbols and am able to read an account written by somebody whom I have never met, detailing events of which I could have had no prior knowledge, then this appears to be very like breaking a code, and the code model of communication, defined by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson as the belief that ‘communication is achieved by encoding and decoding messages’ (1995:2), has been very influential in views on reading. The young Jude, in Thomas Hardy’s 1895 novel Jude the Obscure, has such a code model in his head when he forms the desire to learn Latin and Greek, a task that seems to him to be straightforward: (21) He concluded that a grammar of the required tongue would contain, primarily, a rule, a prescription, or clue of the nature of a secret cipher, which, once known, would enable him, by merely applying it, to change at will all words of his own speech into those of the foreign one. (2007:28) Jude’s ‘childish idea’ is to assume that there is a ‘law of transmutation’ (2007:29), and he is devastated to learn that this is not so and that he will have to learn the necessary vocabulary and grammar. Jude has a false picture of language. He is freed from it by his study of the classics, but his idea remains emblematic of the human tendency to see meaning and hence translation in terms of cryptography, by which the reader with a key can crack the code and find the solution to what was formerly unintelligible (Piper and Murphy 2002:2). Language does have a code aspect: to teach somebody to read English it is necessary to show how certain letters relate to certain sounds. But this is not the whole picture and Wittgenstein makes clear that language is much more than a calculus; it is a human practice, as discussed in Investigations 81:

20 Reading the source text for translation

(22) All this, however, can appear in the right light only when one has attained greater clarity about the concepts of understanding, meaning something and thinking. For it will then also become clear what may mislead us (and did mislead me) into thinking that if anyone utters a sentence and means or understands it, he is thereby operating a calculus according to definite rules. The code model is not used by contemporary linguists, though some scholars who did use it, such as Roman Jakobson, still have an influence on contemporary work in translation studies (cf. Jakobson 2012). It might therefore seem that to turn to Wittgenstein as a way of freeing oneself from the code model is to use the philosopher to fight against a straw man. This is not the case, however, because to see language as a calculus is a psychological rather than a logical compulsion (Bellos 2011:258), a point made by Wittgenstein in Investigations 140; and the compulsion has not gone away because of developments in linguistics. Maria Tymoczko calls decoding/encoding the ‘black box model’ of translation, remarking that outside scholarly debate ‘the overall picture of a single translator engaged in a mysterious inner process (conditioned, of course, by social context) continues to hold sway’ (2006:18).Wittgenstein’s own journey in text (22) mirrors the journey that translators may have to make, from seeing language as a calculus to realising that the situation is much more complicated. Modern manuals on translation therefore still find it necessary to point out to their readers that translation is not about decoding. Douglas Robinson, for example, states: (23) What we do not do is sit down with a comprehensive set of rules for linguistic equivalence and create a text that conforms to them. That is the image projected by traditional linguists when they have studied translation; the image does not correspond to reality. (2003:148) The code model lives on as a cognitive tendency that must be resisted. From a Wittgensteinian point of view, the model of reading as decoding represents a failure in how a text is to be read. It is not that the decoding model is a possibility that can be rejected as part of a strategy, but that the decoding model is wrong per se, by being too narrow and by failing to do justice to what people can do with language. Robinson, following Wittgenstein, stresses that translators ‘don’t translate words; they translate what people do with words’ (2003:142).The Investigations is a set of exercises that can lead a translator to this conclusion. Again and again Wittgenstein shows our tendency to see language as a calculus. Again and again he seeks to undermine this tendency, through sustained use of parables, stories, dialogues, analogies, etc. in order to change his reader’s way of thinking, by encouraging his reader to look. Why should we bother with Wittgenstein if other authorities are available? There are certainly important similarities between Wittgenstein and, say, the

Reading the source text for translation

21

Russian Formalists, such as the stress on what Wittgenstein would call a physiognomy and the Formalists would call style; but Jon Cook and Rupert Read ask whether there are any differences that make using the Wittgensteinian philosophical investigation worthwhile and conclude that Wittgenstein’s work can offer ‘a phenomenology of the experience of reading literature’ (2010:473). Such a phenomenology, which I think holds for the reading of all texts, would run parallel to other approaches to reading, such as linguistic or literary approaches, rather than replacing them, because it is a philosophical inquiry. It forces us to see the bewitching effects of language. In terms of accounting for phenomena, Wittgenstein introduces the term ‘surveyable representation’ (PI 122). (Wittgenstein’s German expression übersichtliche Darstellung [overviewing representation] is often given in English as ‘perspicuous representation’, based on the translation by Elizabeth Anscombe (2001). The 2009 revision of the Investigations by Peter Hacker and Joachim Schulte uses ‘surveyable representation’ on the grounds that it preserves the references to ‘view’ and ‘survey’ in the German (PI p. 252)). Wittgenstein defines the surveyable representation as the attempt to form an overview in which one is enabled to see connections. It is important for the translator as reader to form a surveyable representation of the source text, which begins by not seeing it as something to be decoded, and proceeds to look at the physiognomies that are to be found there. Wittgenstein speaks of ‘the dawning of an aspect’, i.e. when we see phenomena in new ways, something that is important in translation. As Clive Scott notes, to translate is ‘both to capture one’s perception of the text and to develop new modes of seeing it’ (2014:ix). Wittgenstein compares the dawning of an aspect and the ‘continuous seeing of an aspect’, using Joseph Jastrow’s ‘duck–rabbit’ as an illustration (PPF 118). The duck–rabbit was designed by Jastrow to show how seeing something is more complicated than often thought. The drawing can be correctly described as that of a duck or of a rabbit. It is reproduced as Figure 2.1. For Wittgenstein, the duck–rabbit shows the difference between ‘seeing’ and ‘seeing as’. Two people may both see the figure, and one may see it as a duck, the other as a rabbit. The second viewer may suddenly see a different aspect, so that the image can now be described as a duck. Neither view of the duck–rabbit is exclusively correct, hence its blended name. Wittgenstein stresses that if I say that I see it as a picture of a rabbit, then ‘I would simply have described my perception’ (PPF 122). Somebody might look at the picture and only ever see a rabbit.When the new aspect dawns, it is both an expression of a ‘new perception and, at the same time, an expression of an unchanged perception’ (PPF 130), assuming that we do not conclude that the original perception was wrong. Wittgenstein’s use of the duck–rabbit illustrates his own method of trying to change the way that people look, especially at language (PI 144). Nothing in the phenomenon changes; what changes is how we see it.With respect to reading for translation, the duck–rabbit can be viewed in two ways. First, it shows how the translator may decide to maintain in translation aspects that he or she has noted in the source text (Oliveira 2012). Second, the translator may, through attention, come to see aspects other than those that were initially apparent.

22 Reading the source text for translation

FIGURE 2.1

Joseph Jastrow’s duck–rabbit

The traditional French saying given as example (24) puns on the fact that je suis can mean both ‘I am’ and ‘I follow’, though the equivocation is not initially apparent: (24) Je suis ce que je suis; I am that what I am je ne suis pas ce que je suis; I (not) am not that what I follow si j’étais ce que je suis, if I were that what I follow je ne serais pas ce que je suis. I (not) would-be not that what I am Initially, the saying comes over as a puzzle, because the speaker seems to be saying that he or she both is and is not what he or she is.When it is guessed or revealed that the words are spoken by a farmer driving a donkey to market, other aspects dawn and the relevant meanings of je suis can be inferred (as in my gloss of (24)). The speaker now is a philosopher, musing on human nature. Failure to see aspects is referred to by Wittgenstein as ‘aspect-blindness’, akin to the lack of a musical ear (PPF 260), and the Investigations can be described as an attempt to overcome aspect-blindness. As Hans-Joachim Glock comments, the aspect-blind person can use words correctly, but ‘has no “feel” for their physiognomy’ (1996:40). Successful translation depends upon such a feel for physiognomy. The best-selling Swedish novel Män som hatar kvinnar [Men who hate women], by Stieg Larsson, has been translated into English by Reg Keeland as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on the basis that overt gender politics would not go down well in an English title (Humphrey et al. 2011:np). Overcoming aspect-blindness is a matter of training. Wittgenstein notes how it is possible to be trained to read a poem with feeling, by paying particular attention to the intonation, so that the poem is read in a different way from how it would be read if scanned for information (PPF 264). Reading a poem with feeling is a practice: ‘I can also give a word an intonation

Reading the source text for translation 23

which makes its meaning stand out from the rest, almost as if the word were a portrait of the whole thing’ (PPF 264). Meaning, then, is a matter of coherence, of things making grammatical sense in context. John Gibson (2004:117) calls such coherence ‘the wonder of agreement’, citing Wittgenstein’s example in Investigations 50 of the standard metre in a Paris archive, held to be the measure for making rulers, etc. There is nothing arcane about this metre-rule, which has ‘no extraordinary properties’. It was simply used by those who needed it, on the proviso that, wherever the metrical system was established, it should be taken as standard. Similarly, custom decrees that the word ‘dog’ in English means what it does in the contexts where it is used. A word has an agreed application within a context. Words can therefore change or expand their meaning – for example, the noun ‘mouse’ has taken on a new meaning as a piece of computer hardware. The Paris metre remained in Wittgenstein’s day a standard by which things could be measured, just as a dictionary may be used when finding out the meaning of words. Dictionaries, standard measures and words all have different uses in our lives, but their meaning is to be sought in the way that they are employed. Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy ‘is radically at odds with a traditional conception of philosophy as a form of positive theoretical inquiry into the nature of world, mind and language’ (Kahane et al. 2007:11), as can be seen in Wittgenstein’s definition of his discipline in Investigations 126: (25) Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything. – Since everything lies open to view, there is nothing to explain. For whatever may be hidden is of no interest to us. Philosophy is a matter of description rather than of discovery. Reading for translation therefore involves the formation of the surveyable representation by looking rather than thinking, and by realising that nothing is hidden.

Language-games Wittgenstein opens the Investigations with a passage from Augustine’s Confessions (PI 1): (26) When grown-ups named some object and at the same time turned towards it, I perceived this, and I grasped that the thing was signified by the sound that they uttered, since they meant to point it out. This, however, I gathered from their gestures, the natural language of all peoples, the language that by means of facial expression and the play of eyes, of the movements of the limbs and the tone of voice, indicates the affections of the soul when it desires, or clings to, or rejects, or recoils from, something. In this way, little by little, I learnt to understand what things the words, which I heard uttered in their respective places in various sentences, signified. And once I got my tongue round these signs, I used them to express my wishes.

24 Reading the source text for translation

Here is a story of how language is learned. I shall refer to it as ‘the Augustinian paradigm’ to distinguish it from Augustine’s theory of language (Kerr 1988:56), which lies outside the scope of this book and to which Wittgenstein does not refer. The Augustinian paradigm describes learning language as a process of denotation, of ostensive definition. If I want to show a child what a dog is, I point at the dog; the word ‘dog’ denotes the furry animal in the corner of the room and the child learns how to recognise and then apply the term.The theme of the Investigations has been introduced, i.e. the investigation of the human person as linguistic. As Peter Hacker comments, human linguistic behaviour has to be ‘understood and interpreted in the sense in which the behaviour of inanimate nature and much of animal behaviour do not’ (2001:68). Wittgenstein, in the opening sections of the Investigations, takes his reader through a series of scenarios designed to show that the Augustinian paradigm is too narrow. It offers a code model of language, a picture theory like that of Wittgenstein’s early work, in which terms are held to stand for things in the world (TL-P 2.161). Wittgenstein shows the limitations of this view. For example, in Investigations 2 he tells the story of the two builders, A and B, as an instance of where ‘the description given by Augustine is right’: (27) A is building with building stones: there are blocks, pillars, slabs and beams. B has to pass him the stones and to do so in the order in which A needs them. For this purpose they make use of a language consisting of the words ‘block’, ‘pillar’, ‘slab’, ‘beam’. A calls them out; B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring at such-and-such a call. – Conceive of this as a complete primitive language. At this very basic level, A and B function as builders who successfully communicate, in the sense that things get built, so that Augustine ‘does describe a system of communication’ (PI 3). It is too limited, however, to fit the way that people live outside the story.The Augustinian paradigm shows how nouns might be learned, as Wittgenstein remarks: (28) Someone who describes the learning of language like this is, I believe, thinking primarily of nouns like ‘table’, ‘chair’, ‘bread’, and of people’s names, and only secondarily of the names of certain actions and properties; and of the remaining kinds of word as something that will take care of itself. The builders function according to the Augustinian paradigm as they only need to use the four nouns for different types of building material; but once other elements are introduced, such as numbers or demonstratives, then the paradigm collapses (PI 8 ff.). The significance of the paradigm lies in how it exemplifies a common and natural way of looking at language (Bellos 2011:83), but which is more like an account of how people learn a second foreign language than a first language, as Wittgenstein points out in Investigations 32. It is as if the child

Reading the source text for translation 25

Augustine had gone abroad, already able to think and already having a language, but not the language of the new country. Things in the world as we find it are more complicated. For a start, there are many different types of utterance. In Investigations 23, Wittgenstein attacks the traditional view in logic (fundamental to the Tractatus) that there are three types of proposition: the statement, the question and the command. Against his earlier picture theory of language, Wittgenstein investigates the way that people use words in the language as a whole and in immediate context. He introduces the concept of the ‘language-game’ to explain this (PI 23): (29) We can think of the whole process of using words … as one of those games by means of which children learn their native language. I will call these games ‘language-games’ and will sometimes speak of a primitive language as a language-game. … I shall also call the whole, consisting of language and the actions into which it is woven, a ‘language-game’. He indicates a multiplicity of linguistic activities that can be categorised as language-games (PI 23): (30) Giving orders, and acting on them – Describing an object by its appearance, or by its measurements – Constructing an object from a description (a drawing) – Reporting an event – Speculating about the event – Forming and testing a hypothesis – Presenting the results of an experiment in tables and diagrams – Making up a story; and reading one – Acting in a play – Singing rounds – Guessing riddles – Cracking a joke; telling one – Solving a problem in applied arithmetic – Translating from one language into another – Requesting, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying. Instead of three types of linguistic activity, there are many: the list could be extended indefinitely. It is interesting that translation is described as a languagegame. The sorts of activity that Wittgenstein describes are also those typically encountered by translators, who translate orders, descriptions, hypotheses, jokes, curses, prayers, etc., rather than one form of source text. As Wittgenstein notes, to ask ‘What is a word really?’ is like asking what a piece in chess is (PI 108). A piece in chess has a set move that it can make according to agreed rules, but there are many positions in which it might end up and many ways

26 Reading the source text for translation

in which it can be used, especially when it is recalled that no chess piece operates in isolation. The mistake would be to describe its physical appearance and to think that here was an end of it. Something similar is true of words. To say that ‘dog’ is a noun of three letters may be an important observation, but there is a lot more that can be said about how the word can be used. Such an approach is of use to the translator, who can be brought to see that reading is not an invariant procedure but a practice carried out by people in many different ways as they engage with the various language-games played in a text, rather than dealing with denotations. Wittgenstein describes how a sentence from a story may make complete sense in isolation, so that a context may be invented, but that ‘I do not understand it in the sense in which I should understand it if I had read the story’ (Philosophical Grammar I 5). As Peter Hacker comments, meaning is not a matter of scientific discovery (2007b:46). It is much more than denotation, than the Augustinian paradigm of the child pointing at the furry animal in the corner and working out that it is the dog. In Investigations 43, Wittgenstein advances a different way of looking at meaning: (31) For a large class of cases of the employment of the word ‘meaning’ – though not for all – this word can be explained in this way: the meaning of a word is its use in the language. This remark is probably the most celebrated in the Investigations (Hacker 2010). Wittgenstein is careful to stress that exceptions do arise, because there are cases when the Augustinian paradigm is correct, i.e. when the meaning can be explained by ‘pointing to its bearer’ (PI 43), as in the case of the primitive language employed by the builders in Investigations 2. In most cases, however, meaning is best grasped by looking at use. An example of how this epistemological instruction1 can be applied to everyday language is given by Duncan Richter, who examines the concept of happiness, showing that it is a ‘blurry and elusive’ concept (2009:198). When a City banker and a Buddhist say they are happy, they may be playing different language-games, confusing psychologists by their employment of the same adjective, so that is the psychologists wrongly assume that they are referring to the same phenomenon. To understand the difference between the two individuals would involve looking at a wide range of examples from their respective lives, which may, for example, lead to a conclusion that the happy banker is talking about hedonism and the happy Buddhist is talking about spirituality. What matters is what they are doing with the word ‘happy’. There is one word but two uses. It is not as if there were some mystical meaning attached to ‘happy’ so that word and meaning are separate entities. Wittgenstein gives this parable to illustrate the point: we do not have both the money and the cow that we can buy with it; we have only the money, which means that we can do certain things, such as buy a cow (PI 120). It is therefore important, as Hacker asserts, to distinguish between a meaningful sentence and the meaningful use of a sentence (2010:32–3). The sentence in the following example

Reading the source text for translation 27

is meaningful: it is well formed according to rules given by English grammars and would be readily understood by a competent speaker of English: (32) I am happy. To establish its meaningful use, however, a number of other criteria are relevant, such as: who says it; when it was said; in what circumstances it was said; how it contributes to a move in a language-game, etc. If I am told that it was said by a banker to her boss after receiving her bonus, then I have a meaningful use of (32). I can see how a language-game is being played and this may help me to read it for translation. Any source text can be read in terms of the language-games played. James Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses, which tells of one day in Dublin, uses a variety of narrative approaches that can be seen as language-games: drama (1992:561–703); catechism (1992:776–871); interior monologue (1992:871–933), etc. Similarly, the legal translator dealing with a text concerned with court proceedings will find different language-games being played: the legalese of lawyers; the everyday language of lay witnesses and litigants; the slang of the police and the criminal underworld; the technical jargon of expert witnesses (Alcaraz and Hughes 2001:14). Looking at language-games enables the translator to be aware that a great number of things may go on in the text. It enables him or her to be aware that language is a ‘spatial and temporal phenomenon’ rather than ‘some non-spatial, atemporal non-entity’ (PI 108). The Augustinian paradigm of language as labelling is too limited but is a common one. As Marie McGinn notes, in the Augustinian paradigm (33) we are focusing on one central case – the case of naming people or things – and overlooking the complexity that is inherent in our languagegames; it is only when we turn our attention to language in use that we begin to see our original picture as a misleading over-simplification. (2008:62) By turning our attention away from the denotative, we realise how much more complicated matters are, for even the simplest form of language-game admits of variation (PI 6). Wittgenstein shows how problematic the notion of ostensive definition is by the example of trying to define the notion of ‘two’ by showing somebody two nuts (PI 28). There is a danger that the student may think that he or she is learning the word for a particular group of nuts. The contrary can also happen, when the student mistakes the name of a particular group of nuts for the number ‘two’. Wittgenstein concludes: ‘an ostensive definition can be variously interpreted in any case’. This notion is taken further in philosophy by Willard Van Orman Quine, who addresses the ‘indeterminacy of translation’ through the story of the field linguist who finds it impossible to pin down the meaning of the word Gavagai, which

28 Reading the source text for translation

is uttered by locals whenever a rabbit appears: it could mean ‘rabbit’, or ‘food’ or ‘let’s go hunting’, etc. (2013:23ff.). As Wittgenstein notes, there comes a point when even pointing at places and things will only work when the pointing ‘occurs in the use of the words too and not merely in learning the use’ (PI 9). Wittgenstein’s distinction between surface grammar and depth grammar is useful here (PI 664): (34) In the use of words, one might distinguish ‘surface grammar’ from ‘depth grammar’. What immediately impresses itself upon us about the use of a word is the way that it is used in the sentence structure, the part of its use – one might say – that can be taken in by the ear. – And now compare the depth grammar, say of the verb ‘to mean’, with what its surface grammar would lead us to presume. No wonder one finds it difficult to know one’s way about. The distinction between surface grammar and depth grammar does not contradict Wittgenstein’s stress in Investigations 126 that everything of interest is on the surface and that nothing of interest is hidden, because we can only understand depth grammar by a careful reading of surface grammar. Surface grammar is what the grammatical form of a statement seems to offer; depth grammar is how the statement is used, something indicated by the context. Jean Boase-Beier, for example, notes that translation is not only about transferring the surface features of the source text onto the target text (2011:17). (It is interesting to note that Noam Chomsky uses the terms ‘surface structure’ and ‘deep structure’. However, although Chomsky’s surface structure is similar to Wittgenstein’s surface grammar, his deep structure is used in a different way from Wittgenstein’s depth grammar: it ‘determines properties of semantic significance’ (Collins 2008:160)). Peter Hacker compares two utterances: (35) I don’t know what he means. (36) I don’t know what I want. (2010:31) The two sentences are similar in terms of surface grammar. They both begin with ‘I don’t know what’, followed by subject and main verb in the simple present indicative active. In terms of depth grammar, they are different, however, because the respective use is different: (35) is a confession of ignorance, while (36) is a confession of indecision (and the situation may become more complicated if the context is stipulated). As Hacker comments, in craving uniformity we overlook the ‘fluidity, flexibility, forms of context-variability and distinctive uses of our language and its instruments’ (2010:31). It is a critical lesson for a translator to learn: how to see differences. When reading well formed sentences for translation, the surface grammar is usually clear enough, but the depth grammar can be more problematic. Louis Sass notes, for example, how Daniel Paul Schreber’s memoirs of his mental illness have

Reading the source text for translation 29

a ‘tentative, non-literal quality’ more apparent in the German source text (Schreber 2003) than in the English target text (MacAlpine and Hunter 2000), where the translators omit ‘many frequently used phrases and particles that would have been translated in English as “in part”, “on the other hand”, “so to speak”, “up to a point” and “in a way”’ (Sass 1994:28). The translators’ strategy has the effect of making Schreber seem less aware that he is mentally ill in the target text than in the source text, so that source and target texts can be said to have different depth grammars. A reading of Wittgenstein suggests that the translator ought to preserve depth grammar. In the case of Schreber’s account, a significant feature of his illness will not be available to English readers and so it will fail as a surveyable representation. Wittgenstein’s presentation of the Augustinian paradigm is not meant to dismiss as stupid the way that we instinctively operate: ‘the difficulty is to remove the prejudice which stands in the way … It is not a stupid prejudice’ (PI 340). Norman Malcolm records that Wittgenstein’s decision to use Augustine came about ‘not because he could not find the conception expressed in that quotation stated as well by other philosophers, but because the conception must be important if so great a mind held it’ (1984:59).The Augustinian paradigm shows the way that we naturally tend to think about language, although Augustine himself never claims that his account of how he acquired language should be seen as an account of the whole language. The paradigm is not easy to shift, hence the lengthy treatment of Augustine’s story in Investigations 1. Wittgenstein’s aim is to bring about clarity in the reader, as he points out in Investigations 133: (37) For the clarity we are aiming at is indeed complete clarity. In this remark,Wittgenstein is not arguing for some ultimate illumination of life or philosophy, but for the realisation that we must proceed by looking at examples one by one, so that problems are solved and difficulties eliminated, not a single problem. Therefore the Investigations puts forward no theory (PI 109); we need rather to be wary of our forms of expression, which send us ‘in pursuit of chimeras’ when really ‘nothing extraordinary is involved’ (PI 94). By identifying language-games we facilitate reading for translation. In a literary text, for example, a language-game may be being played that is not immediately obvious. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Middle English The Canterbury Tales includes a description of a Benedictine monk who is very fond of hunting: (38) 1 He yaf nat of that text a pulled hen, he gave not of that text a plucked hen 2 That seith that hunters ben nat hooly men, that says that hunters be not holy men 3 Ne that a monk, when he is reccheless, nor that a monk when he is irresponsible

30 Reading the source text for translation

4 Is likened til a fissh that is waterlees, is like to a fish that is waterless 5 This is to seyn, a monk out of his cloister. this is to say a monk out of his cloister 6 But thilke text heeled he nat worth an oyster; but this text held he not worth an oyster 7 And I seyde his opinion was good. and I said his opinion was good (1965:56) Chaucer here is playing several language-games: describing somebody; reporting what was said; narrating a story; satirising a cleric. The final language-game is the key one to note when reading line 7. It is the point of Chaucer’s description of the monk, making the description an exercise in humour, not hagiography, for the monk is being praised for activities that betray his vocation. The depth grammar is the opposite of the surface grammar.The translator may note the techniques that have enabled these games to be played and decide to imitate them in his or her translation (Attridge 2004:75). The language-game becomes clear when contextualised. As Wittgenstein remarks: ‘If someone says, “When I heard this word, it meant … to me”, he is referring to a point in time and to a way of using the word. (Of course, it is this combination that we fail to grasp.)’ (PPF 7).

Forms of life Wittgenstein argues that human beings agree not in opinions but in form of life (PI 241), i.e. the way they live, so that language becomes ‘the conversation that is carried on with the characteristic activities of a form of life’ (Kerr 1988:30). To go shopping involves playing the language-game associated with that activity, to have a store of set phrases, expressions of politeness, items of vocabulary, transactional structures, etc. A game of football is played according to a certain kit of expressions. An item such as ‘handball’ is meaningless outside the form of life that is football, where players, apart from goalkeepers, may not use their hand to touch the ball; in many other sports, such as netball or rugby (or in everyday life), there is no offence in doing this. Wittgenstein stresses that he uses the term ‘language-game’ in order to emphasise that ‘the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life’ (PI 23), thus linking the two concepts through his characteristic emphasis on practice. In this section, I argue that to explore the concept of the form of life can help the translator who is reading for translation. The meaning of words can be related to forms of life – for example, ‘dog’ can be used in different language-games depending on the form of life in question. Thus ‘dog’ can be used conventionally as a concrete noun or as a verb, but not as

Reading the source text for translation

31

an adjective or as an adverb. A reader who was confused by its occurrence in a sentence could look it up in a dictionary, but would need to recall the context in which the word occurred in order to find a fitting definition, so that care would have to be taken as to whether the source text used ‘dog’ as a verb or as a noun. In Table 2.1, a number of examples are given, all including the word ‘dog’. Each example consists of two sentences in order to make the context clear, with an explanation in the right-hand column. The one word ‘dog’ has many uses. Wittgenstein advises his reader, when puzzled about a meaning, to think of how he or she learned the meaning of this word, from what sort of examples and in what sort of language-games, in order to see that a word (his example is ‘good’) must have a family of meanings (PI 77). Here he builds on the discussion of family resemblance from Investigations 66, as discussed in Chapter 1. There is no single ideal of exactness (PI 88), because language is a labyrinth of paths (PI 203). In inviting his reader to think in this way, Wittgenstein points to a rich picture of speaker interaction. The point of talking about language-games is not merely to clear up cases of ambiguity. It is of course important to know, when Anna refers to ‘a mouse’, whether she is talking about a rodent or a piece of computer hardware; but Wittgenstein takes his reader much further than this, as is made clear by his linking of the language-game with the form of life. John Searle sums up: (39) For the later Wittgenstein, all the criteria of meaning are ultimately social, not personal, and still less private. Words derive their meaning from the contexts in which they are used, and these in turn depend on social practices and thus ultimately on forms of living, forms of life. (in Magee 1987:339) The word ‘dog’ in the examples in Table 2.1 is ultimately bound up with forms of life, with the fuzzy way that we use the word in so many more ways than to TABLE 2.1

The word in context

Example

Explanation

There is a dog in the kitchen. He is called Ben.

A barking domestic quadruped, i.e. a member of the genus canis and subspecies canis lupus familiaris, is in the kitchen. I always seem to be unlucky.

Bad luck seems to dog me. I lost at cards last night again. You lucky dog. You won at cards, so I hear. He was as sick as a dog. Too much brandy. This choir is going to the dogs. The last concert was terrible.

You were so fortunate. He vomited in a degrading way. This choir is in decline.

32 Reading the source text for translation TABLE 2.2

Forms of life from Table 2.1

Example

Form of Life

There is a dog in the kitchen. He is called Ben.

Dogs are kept as pets and treated as family members, given names (often human ones, as here) and referred to by a masculine/feminine personal pronoun. Bad luck is given an animate form as a dog, an animal with tracking abilities. We tend to think in metaphors. My envy leads me to dehumanise you, though the choice of a domesticated animal stops the image being too offensive. The mores of this society prohibit being sick in public and expect a self-control that we do not expect of dogs. Dogs are regarded by most people as inferior to humans.

Bad luck seems to dog me. I lost at cards last night again. You lucky dog. You won at cards, so I hear.

He was as sick as a dog. Too much brandy. This choir is going to the dogs. The last concert was terrible.

designate the fuzzy animal in the corner, as illustrated in Table 2.2, which uses the same examples as Table 2.1 in the left-hand column and indicates possible forms of life in the right-hand column. The examples in Tables 2.1 and 2.2 are typical of the sort of issue that translators face in their work. A translator would have to pay particular attention to the sentence ‘This choir is going to the dogs’, for example, as this could mean either that the choir was in decline or that the choristers were going off to the greyhound races. The sentence that follows – ‘The last concert was terrible’ – makes it clear which language-game is being played here. Translations often exhibit presumably unintended shifts in meaning when translators fail to look at the form of life. Willis Barnstone discusses a Spanish translation of a poem by Dylan Thomas in which the Argentine translator renders ‘she bore angels’ as ella aburrió a los angeles [she bored angels], and he concludes that this is not free interpretation of the English verb ‘to bear’ but a mistake, a rendering that is not at home in the language-games of the poem (1993:118). Like anthropologists, translators face different forms of life in their work because their work crosses cultures and contexts. They need to be aware that there are different forms of life if they are to read successfully for translation. Wittgenstein criticises the anthropological work of James Frazer precisely because it fails to recognise such differences (‘Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough’ p. 125). In The Golden Bough, Frazer had described various rituals of so-called primitive peoples as being in error, and Wittgenstein notes that he has failed to see that a different form of life was in question:

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(40) What a narrow spiritual life on Frazer’s part! As a result: how impossible it was for him to conceive of a life different from that of the England of his time! There is a failure of imagination. Frazer projects his own form of life onto the people he studies, so that Bosnian Turks are seen as making a mistake when they perform an adoption ritual that mimics the act of giving birth. As Wittgenstein comments: ‘it is surely insane to believe that an error is present and that [an adopting mother] believes that she has given birth to the child’ (‘Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough’ p. 125). Similarly, any translator must be aware of his or her own form of life and avoid seeing the other as merely a version of himself or herself. Wittgenstein goes on to criticise Frazer for viewing priests of other and earlier cultures as misguided Anglican parsons of the twentieth century. Forms of life imply that there are factors that account for the production of any text, factors that are important for the translator to investigate. The translator of the New Testament, say, may research the theological and historical background to the source text in addition to reading it. The translator of a historical document may research the time in which it was written. Such research is necessary in order to be able to imagine the form of life behind a text. Does this emphasis on what can account for a text contradict the earlier emphasis on meaning as a physiognomy? I do not think so, because appreciating a form of life is a necessary condition for meaning to function as a physiognomy. We need to ask why certain choices have been made. It is analogous to being in a foreign country, where knowledge of social mores may be of great help to a visitor, even to one who can speak the language, by facilitating communication (Lewis 1999). To appreciate music, according to Wittgenstein, it is necessary to learn the rules of music: learning the rules ‘actually changes your judgement’ (Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief p. 5). The same is true of translation. The form of life and the language-game are mutually enlightening. The translator as reader is now in a position to make a philosophical description, a surveyable representation, of the text (see ‘Philosophical descriptions’ below). Daniel Raveh describes what can go wrong if a translator fails to take forms of life into account when making such a description. In a discussion of translations of the Indian mystic Patañjali’s Sanskrit Yogasu¯tra, he notes that many translators of this sacred text into English have failed to recognise that translation is not just an ‘interlinguistic phenomenon’ but something that involves ‘transpositions of culture and thought’ (2008:169). Raveh argues that many contemporary translators of Patañjali ‘have suppressed or even defused the world-renunciation directives of this ancient philosophical text in their eagerness to project more moderate, palatable images of yoga to their anticipated audience in the west’ (2008:179). He surveys the translation of nirodha, for example, which could be translated as ‘stoppage’ or as ‘restriction’, and notes that only three of the ten translators in his sample opt for a view of yoga as a stoppage of mental activity; the other translators deradicalise the text by seeing nirodha merely as a form of restriction. Such choices in translation

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serve to hide the asceticism that is at the heart of Patañjali’s approach. Raveh notes how one translation even links the source text to the science-fiction film franchise Star Wars. His conclusion is that the Yogasu¯tra has suffered ‘contamination’ in translation (2008:180). A form of life may refer not just to a culture but also to a language. Different languages provide different ways of viewing the world. English does not have gendered articles, for example, unlike other European languages. In German, a noun is masculine, feminine or neuter, and shows its gender by the form of its article, so that ‘the fir tree’ is masculine, i.e. der Fichtenbaum, and ‘the palm tree’ is feminine, i.e. die Palme. Heinrich Heine is able to use the genders to suggest two trees being in love, in an untitled poem of 1856: (41) 1 Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam a fir-tree stands lonely 2 Im Norden auf kahler Höh. in-the north on bare height 3 Ihn schläfert; mit weißer Decke him slumbers with white blanket 4 Umhüllen ihn Eis und Schnee. surround him ice and snow 5 Er träumt von einer Palme, he dreams of a palm-tree 6 Die, fern im Morgenland, who far in-the orient 7 Einsam und schweigend trauert lonely and silently mourns 8 Auf brennender Felsenwand. on burning rock-wall (1976:36) Writing an interlinear gloss for the poem raises issues in translation. The third person singular pronoun er [he/it] in line 5 would usually be translated as ‘it’ when referring to a tree, but here ‘he’ seems a better choice because of the personification of the dreaming tree. Similarly, the relative pronoun die [who/which] in line 6 would usually be translated as ‘which’ when referring to a tree, but here ‘who’ seems a better choice because of the relationship between the trees that has now been constructed, and because einer Palme in line 5 is a feminine noun in the dative case. An English gloss cannot represent the gendered articles of the trees in lines 1 and 5. Gender is one way in which some languages must say certain things, as Roman Jakobson notes (2012:129). Heine is conditioned by the form of life of German, but

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is able to use this constraint creatively in order to evoke an image of hopeless love as a language-game within the poem. Factors such as gender may, as forms of life, make speakers of different languages perceive the world differently. The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis asserts that languages shape the way that their speakers see reality, so that the speakers of two different languages may not share a common point of view at all (Whorf 1956). Most current thinking rejects such hard determinism, but admits that language is one way in which we form reality, so that the gender of a noun, for example, may affect the way that the noun in question is perceived (Deutscher 2010:151). Jakobson reports a Russian child being astounded to see death depicted as an old man in a translation of German tales (2012:130). In German, ‘death’ is a masculine noun, der Tod; in Russian, it is a feminine noun, smert’, so that to a Russian reader death is ‘obviously a woman’ (2012:130). The language I use is part of my form of life and by becoming aware of my form of life I may be able to translate better because I am aware of how the way that I see the world is not how others see the world.The Russian child in Jakobson’s anecdote, for example, sees another aspect of the world by encountering a picture: people see concepts such as death differently in different cultures, so that a German speaker will naturally tend to personify death as a man; a Russian speaker will naturally tend to personify death as a woman.When I translate, I should not impose my own form of life on that of the source text. Many marketing campaigns have failed because advertisers have not taken account of cultural differences. One pharmaceutical company, for example, commissioned a series of pictures, to be read from left to right, in order to show how a medicine should be taken. This strategy failed with Arabic customers, who read from right to left; the company had not realised that the pictures themselves would need to undergo a form of translation (Humphrey et al. 2011:np). Awareness of how language forms reality is an important intercultural skill. Richard Lewis describes how different languages make people see cultural interaction differently, so that for an English-speaker to demand ‘fair play’ is meaningless if he or she addresses somebody whose culture has no tradition of organised games and has no term for ‘fair play’ in his or her language (1999:15). The point can be extended to the translator who is reading for translation, because awareness of forms of life – which are varied yet ultimately human practices – can make the translator aware of both the difficulties and the possibilities of translation. John Searle asserts that it is local cultural factors that make activities such as translation difficult, while the shared ‘Deep Background’ we have as human beings makes them possible (2011:122). (He refers to ‘Deep Background’, where Wittgenstein would use ‘form of life’, as that which is necessary for human beings to function socially: to do something like attend an academic conference depends on a lot of shared know-how.) A similar point is made by David Bellos, who argues that translation can take place because we are all different and yet all the same (2011:338). People can understand forms of life because of the nature of the human body, which, as Searle notes, means that there is a common human form of life; this is the view on which cognitive linguistics is based (Lakoff and Johnson 2003) and gives us

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a further reason for looking at Wittgenstein, who offers support for and elucidation of such views. According to Wittgenstein, if a lion could talk, we would not be able to understand it (PPF 327). The reason for this, as Gordon Baker and Peter Hacker point out, is not because a lion would not speak clearly but because the form of life accessible to lions is too far removed from our form of life for anything that a lion said to count as sense: talking lions in fantasy, such as the cowardly lion in the film The Wizard of Oz, are blends of the human and the leonine (2009:73). Lions as they really are do not speak, of course: the phenomenon of language, and its investigation in the Investigations, is necessarily both anthropological and anthropic. Current research in linguistics and neuroscience supports Wittgenstein’s approach. Anna Wierzbicka, writing in linguistics, notes that cultures differ markedly in the vocabularies they employ, but that there exist lexical universals that allow languages to be compared (and, by inference, translated). For example, different languages have unique lexical items referring to types of food: Polish has a special word for plum jam, powidła, which English does not, whereas English has a special word, ‘marmalade’, for an orange (or orange-like) jam, which Polish does not (1997:2). However, both languages have concepts for at least sixty ‘universal semantic primitives’, such as the attributes ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘big’ and ‘small’ (1997:26). Points of similarity allow points of difference to be appreciated: different types of jam can be compared because the languages share evaluative concepts. Writing in neuroscience, David Robson notes that recent research has overturned the view of the body as a vehicle driven by the brain, replacing it with a view of a partnership between brain and body (2011).This view of the person is in line with Wittgenstein’s non-dualistic approach to human identity. Such support from outside philosophy is further warrant for using Wittgenstein’s methods within translation studies to describe what translation does and as a tool for practice.

Philosophical descriptions In the German review Das Magazin, June 2009, a cartoon by Adam on page 83 depicts three men sitting in a room. One man is speaking and his words are cited as example (42), followed by my translation as (43): (42) Hallo, ich bin Tom und ich freue mich so sehr, hier zu sein. hello I am Tom and I rejoice myself so much here to be (43) Hello, I am Tom and I am so very pleased to be here. What makes Tom’s words at least potentially funny is the clash between his conventionally polite speech, which expresses pleasure at where he is, and its context, as shown in the cartoon. His body language is that of a man resigned to a terrible fate. Of the other two men in the image, one seems bored and the other seems irritated. On the open door are the words ANONYME SARKASTEN [anonymous sarcastics]. The context makes the meaning clear. Sarcasm is a language-game, just as

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Wittgenstein holds that lying is a language-game (PI 249). The form of life is that of the contemporary West, where addiction to drugs, alcohol, etc. has become common, so that self-help groups proliferate, and Adam is playing with the fantasy of a self-help group for those addicted to sarcasm. In context, the words of the speaker, precisely through their surface grammar of formal politeness, perfectly express the depth grammar, i.e. the language-game of the addict who is far from over addiction. Such insights would be of use to anybody engaged in translating Adam’s cartoon. The translator might choose, for example, to reference vocabulary associated with self-help groups in the target culture, for example translating ANONYME SARKASTEN as SARCASTICS ANONYMOUS, reversing the position of adjective and noun in line with the UK organisation Alcoholics Anonymous. The use of Wittgensteinian tools can therefore elucidate a text, in this case a cartoon. The end to which they are used is that of the philosophical description. In Investigations 109, Wittgenstein asserts that the task of philosophy is one of description, which should be seen in the greater context of how Wittgenstein approaches phenomena, i.e. through the grammatical investigation: ‘our inquiry is therefore a grammatical one’ (PI 90). The grammatical investigation is a tool in Wittgenstein’s battle against what he sees as our bewitchment by language (PI 109), and he undertakes grammatical investigations of many terms, such as ‘expectation’ (PI 434–45) or ‘negation’ (PI 446–8). As Marie McGinn asserts, his method has two purposes (2008:14): first, he shows the dichotomy between our idea of how we believe that a concept works and the way that it works in practice; second, he shows the many different ways in which a concept can be used. In his investigation of expectation, for example, he presents the term as having a linguistic rather than an essentialist function (PI 445), and also as a term that has various uses in the ways that people speak (PI 444). Concepts are examined as to how they function. The goal is the description, the surveyable representation (PI 122), which by its nature is an ongoing task, undertaken criss-cross, like the Investigations itself, which constantly approaches language from new angles (PI p. 3). Wittgenstein’s methods can be used to form a philosophical approach for the description of the source text, which is a necessary task for any translator. It may be objected that there can be no such thing as an objective description of a text.To ask two people to describe an incident may result in two very different descriptions, while somebody who has never seen a duck will only ever recognise the rabbit in Joseph Jastrow’s image (Figure 2.1). How then can we proceed? Wittgenstein’s approach is summed up in Investigations 79: (44) Should it be said that I’m using a word whose meaning I don’t know, and so am talking nonsense? – Say what you please, so long as it does not prevent you seeing how things are. (And when you see that, there will be some things that you won’t say.) We are constrained by the facts, but within this constraint we have great freedom. To be sure, the notion of a fact is not straightforward. Derek Attridge notes

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the problems involved when choosing which aspects of any work can count as facts to be described – for example, should the typeface of a book be mentioned (2004:156)? As Wittgenstein remarks: ‘Nothing is so difficult as doing justice to the facts’ (‘Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough’ p. 129). Following Wittgenstein, however, the word ‘fact’ must be seen in relation to how it is used (PI 43). There is no objective notion of the fact to which we can appeal, but we can look at practices. In Investigations 48, Wittgenstein imagines a ‘sentence’ with the following arrangement, where R, G, W and B represent ‘red’, ‘green’, ‘white’ and ‘black’ respectively: (45) RRBGGGRWW How could this sentence be described? Wittgenstein remarks: (46) Well, does the sentence consist of four letters or nine? – And which are its elements, the type of letter, or the letters? Does it matter which we say, so long as we avoid misunderstandings in any particular case? To say that there are four letters in example (45) makes sense, but it is not wrong to say that it contains nine letters. Everything depends on what we mean by ‘letter’ in this particular case. Hans-Joachim Glock comments that for Wittgenstein one cannot point at a fact, only point out a fact (1996:120).What is true or false is what human beings say, because agreement is to be found in forms of life (PI 241). Thus a translator may decide not to mention the typeface of a news report or a legal report, but may decide that the typeface ought to be mentioned when describing an advertisement or a Reformation Bible, to answer Attridge’s question above (2004:156). Brian Magee refers to the misconception of Wittgenstein adopting an ‘anything goes’ attitude: ‘He did not think we can use language how we like and then claim meaning or validity for our utterances on equal terms with anyone else’s’ (1987:335). In example (46), Wittgenstein insists that if we look at the facts then there will be certain things that we will not say – for example, that there are twenty letters in example (45). The meaning of the word (or of the sentence or of the text) is to be looked for in utterance and in the human practices that sustain it. The worst that can happen, as Peter Hacker explains, is that one person may find that he or she is using words differently from somebody else, but in that case the different uses can be explained and work can carry on (2007a:105). As well as describing facts about texts, we can describe how texts are used, i.e. the depth grammar. Again there can be no objective procedure. In Zettel [fragments] 235, for example, Wittgenstein remarks how a timetable can be interpreted in various ways, even if somebody may not be aware of this as he or she uses it in one particular way. (A future historian may read a bus timetable as a source of information about twenty-first-century forms of life, while a local councillor may analyse it in order to back up an argument about the need for better services; a

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student, however, may use it to work out when the next bus to the university is due, without worrying about these possibilities.) The translator who notes facts about a text that he or she can maintain in a translation may therefore also be able to maintain the depth grammar of a work in translation. If I pay attention to the physiognomy of the source text when I translate, then readers of the target text will be able to use it in ways that are analogous to the ways in which the source text is used, like Wittgenstein’s example of the timetable. The Bible, for example, is a text that is frequently interpreted, and scholars working in different languages are able to work within the same interpretive fields because the translations of the Bible that they use can be mapped on to each other. Wittgenstein refers to interpretation as stepping from one level to another (Zettel 234), but such a move is only possible once the facts have been laid out. The later Wittgenstein looks at human practices, one of which is the reading of texts, addressed in Investigations 652: (47) ‘He sized him up with a hostile glance and said …’ The reader of the story understands this; and he has no doubt in his mind. Now you say: ‘Very well, he supplies the meaning, he guesses it.’ – Generally speaking, he supplies nothing, guesses nothing. Wittgenstein is not saying that the opening words have to be taken as the final statement on what is happening in the story – he goes on to note that the character’s hostility may be a pretence – nor does he (I assume) want to stop readers of detective fiction guessing who committed the murder. As Sonia Sedivy asserts, he shows that ‘a text presents an immediate meaning just as a face presents an immediate expression’ (2004:166). The translator can concentrate on identifying this immediate meaning (which may of course be puzzling or ambiguous) and considering how it may be rendered for the reader who does not command the source language. Wittgenstein opposes what Ray Monk calls the ‘idol-worship of science’, i.e. the assumption that it is possible to discover the truth about all phenomena by applying set procedures (1990:416). There may be procedures in calculus, but not in philosophy, which leads Wittgenstein to a stance against theory in the sense of systemisation. For Wittgenstein, the investigation of the particular case has to come first, and to perform such an investigation is the limited but demanding task of philosophy. Description is a human activity that varies from case to case. It is not objective, but can nonetheless be rigorous.

Applying Wittgenstein I give three extended examples of how Wittgenstein can be applied to reading the source text for translation. The examples chosen are limited by space, and necessarily reflect my own interests and translation background, but I hope that they can be seen as exemplifying the application of Wittgenstein.

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In making use of Wittgenstein’s terms, there is a danger of falling into what Rupert Read calls the ‘technicalisation and jargonalisation of what … must above all be an activity, a set of methods’ (2004:85). I hope to avoid this danger, though the genre of the academic study involves a necessary referencing of Wittgensteinian tools. A clue to procedure is to be found in the book of essays The Danger of Words by Maurice Drury (1973), which has been described by Monk as ‘perhaps, in its tone and concerns, the most truly Wittgensteinian work ever published by any of Wittgenstein’s students’ (1990:264). What is noteworthy is that Wittgenstein is rarely referred to in Drury’s essays (although the intellectual debt is fully acknowledged in the Preface). Drury simply submits psychological terms to grammatical analysis by examining how they are used and by showing how this use causes confusion in the practice of psychiatry. I think that translation after Wittgenstein can proceed in a similar way. Wittgenstein would be mentioned as a source and then applied (as in Tymoczko 2007). In Tractatus 6.54, Wittgenstein writes that his thoughts are like a ladder that must be thrown away once it has been climbed. The point of turning to Wittgenstein is to be able to use his methods like a ladder in order to be able to ascend to a new position.

Reading literature for translation Wolfgang Huemer asserts that for Wittgenstein meanings are not in the head, but in ‘words anchored in social practice and physical environment’ (2004:7). One such practice is literature, and here I investigate poetry. In a Wittgensteinian sense, poetry is ‘a language-game governed by its own conventions’ that puts an emphasis on such formal features as rhyme and rhythm, so that the reader has to be able to notice certain aspects (Huemer 2004:9). For Joachim Schulte, ‘certain insights articulated in the context of [Wittgenstein’s] later philosophy can … assist us in our attempts to understand what it means to come to grips with or master the content of a poem’ (2004:146). Example (48) is taken from the Old High German poem Das Hildebrandslied [the song of Hildebrand], forming lines 49–57 of the extant text (in Müller 2007:31).The speaker is Hildebrand, a warrior fated to kill in single combat his son Hadubrand, whom he addresses here. The sole surviving manuscript of the poem has been dated to 800, though the poem’s events are set in the fifth century and the poem can be placed in the Indo-European heroic tradition (West 2009:442). Caesuras are indicated by forward slashes. (48) 1 welaga nu, waltant got, / wewurt skihit. alas now powerful God ill-fate happens 2 ih wallota sumaro enti wintro / sehstic ur lante, I travelled summer and winter sixty out-of land 3 dar man mih eo scerita / in folc sceotantero: there one me always placed in folk of-warriors

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4 so man mir at burc e˛nigeru / banun ni gifasta, so one to-me at town any bane not seized 5 nu scal mih suasat chind / suertu hauwan, now shall me own child with-sword hit 6 breton mit sinu billiu, / eddo ih imo ti banin werdan. cut-down with his blade or I to-him to bane become 7 doh maht du nu aodlihho, / ibu dir din ellen taoc, but may you now easily if to-you your courage is-valid 8 in sus heremo man / hrusti giwinnan, in thus old man armour win 9 rauba birahanen, / ibu du dar enic reht habes. prize gain if you there any right have I have given the source text an interlinear gloss, following good practice in translation studies, in order to enable an English-speaking reader without knowledge of Old High German to be able to work out what is going on. In addition, example (49) is my plain prose translation of the poem. Written in grammatical English, it is based on the translation choices made in the gloss and again aims to offer the reader insight into what is going on, without itself functioning as a poem. (49) But alas, powerful God, an ill fate is coming about. I travelled for sixty summers and winters out of the land; there I was always placed among the warriors, and death did not seize me at any town. Now my own child shall hit me with his sword, cut me down with his blade – or I shall be death to him. But you may now easily, if you are a brave man, win the armour from such an old man and gain the prize, if you have any right to it. Glosses, whether in the form of interlinear cribs or of plain prose translations, function as surveyable representations because they enable the reader to form an overview of a translation situation and to make connections between source and target text. In the language-game of poetry translation, however, translators usually produce a target text that can also function independently of the source text as a poem, and, in Chapter 3, I offer a poetic translation of the section of the Hildebrandslied discussed here. Wittgenstein notes that poems may appear to be about transmitting information, because they are inevitably written in the language of information, but that information transmission is not the purpose of the language-game of poetry (Zettel 160): the impressions that poems make on their readers go beyond that (Zettel 170). Schulte explains that Wittgenstein is saying here that poetry, ‘even though it employs the same building-blocks as ordinary (“prosaic”) speech, is subject to different conventions from those regulating the manifold kinds of uses of language which serve to impart information and to communicate facts’ (2004:154). Such conventions are summed up by Wittgenstein in Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology II 501:

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(50) But now you remember certain sensations and images and thoughts as you read, and they are such as were not irrelevant for the enjoyment, for the impression. – But I should like to say that they get their correctness only from their surroundings: through the reading of this poem, from my knowledge of the language, with its metre and with innumerable other things. (These eyes smile only in this face and in this temporal context.) The final reference to physiognomy stresses that meaning is on the surface, that it lies in the choices made by the author, and in the language-games played as a consequence. What is important is to learn how to read the surface. Wittgenstein uses his own reading of the German poet Friedrich Klopstock (who wrote unrhymed verse with intricate metrical patterns) to illustrate the phenomenon, describing how, when he finally read Klopstock with a stress on the metre, he was able to say, ‘A-ha, now I know why he did this’ (Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief p. 4). Such an experience, what Wittgenstein refers to as ‘A-ha’, is the becoming aware of the style, of seeing that form and content are inseparable. Previously Wittgenstein had felt bored by Klopstock, but was now able to appreciate the poetry by seeing it in a new way. A Wittgensteinian reading of the Hildebrandslied would therefore stress: the poem’s meaning as its physiognomy; the language-games being played there; the form of life on which the language-games depend. In terms of formal features, the following aspects might dawn on a reader: the use of alliteration as a binding technique, as in the repetition of initial ‘w’ in line 1, i.e. welaga, waltant and wewurt; the caesura dividing each line; the absence of rhyme; the juxtaposition of an invocation of God in line 1 with an awareness that fate is in charge in welaga nu, waltant got, / wewurt skihit; the shift between Hildebrand’s dramatic monologue in lines 1–6 and his address to the other combatant, i.e. his son Hadubrand, in lines 7–9. This laying-out of facts is in line with Wittgenstein’s stress on description (PI 124). The human form of life depicted in the poem is one we can still recognise, because we can shiver as Hildebrand laments to God that a wicked fate is working itself out that will force him to kill the son who does not recognise him. The difference between the poem’s language and of form of life and my own language and form of life in 2015 will make translation difficult; but such shared forms of life as loss and pain-behaviour will make translation possible (Searle 2011) because the same language-games can be played. A reading of Wittgenstein in the context of poetry again shows that words are things with which we operate (PI 1) rather than entities to which meaning adheres, which allows interesting questions to be asked about poetry translation. How could we operate with one of the oldest poems in German by using the voice of a contemporary English-speaker? How could the poem’s formal features influence the translation? How could it be placed in dialogue with other poems? What happens if Wittgenstein’s contention that meaning is a physiognomy (PI 568) is taken seriously? Translation becomes an exercise in anthropology. The translator must forsake the crystalline beauty of the world

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of the Tractatus, where translating from one language to another would be a matter of substitution, an exercise in calculus (TL-P 3.343), for the ‘rough ground’ of the world of the Investigations, where meaning has to be investigated case by case in the everyday world of transaction (PI 107). Douglas Robinson applies Wittgenstein’s instruction to look for the meaning of a word in its use (PI 43) to translation, arguing that a ‘person-centred approach to any text, language or culture will always be more productive than a focus on abstract linguistic structures or cultural conventions’ because the translator needs to be aware of the anthropology behind any utterance (2003:112). What would the people in the Hildebrandslied – both the characters and the narrator – say in translation? How could the anonymous voices that composed this poem still speak through Hildebrand? Such questions indicate a turn from reading the source text for translation to writing the target text, the topic of Chapter 3.

Reading theology for translation Here I use the Hellenistic Greek New Testament as an example of theology. There are many aspects of the New Testament, but I follow Andrew T. Lincoln in seeing the theological aspect as the most important (2005:1). In investigating a text, I show how the consideration of surface grammar and depth grammar can help the reflective practitioner of translation, in line with Wittgenstein’s epistemological instruction that meaning can be found by examining use (PI 43). In Investigations 373, Wittgenstein makes the following comment: (51) Grammar tells us what kind of object anything is. (Theology as grammar.) By examining the grammar of the New Testament, we can encounter its theology and become better placed to translate it. John 19:30 describes Jesus’s death by crucifixion. The Hellenistic Greek in example (52) follows Aland et al. (1968): (52) hote oun elaben to oxos [ho] Iesous eipen, when therefore received the vinegar [the] Jesus he-said Tetelestai: kai klinas tên kephalên paredôken to pneuma. it-has-been-finished and reclining the head he-gave-up the spirit The surface grammar is a simple narrative account of four actions: Jesus drank vinegar; he said that it was over; he bowed his head; he died. My translation in (53) therefore appears to be satisfactory, because it represents these actions: (53) So when Jesus had taken the vinegar, he said:‘It is finished’. And, bowing his head, he died. Or should the final clause be translated as ‘he gave up the ghost’? This translation would both document the Greek and replicate the King James Bible rendering,

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which has become a standard (although possibly facetious) expression for dying. The question seems to be one of stylistic choice and nothing more. Attention to the way the Greek is written, however, shows that other aspects have not been taken into account in this reading, i.e. the implications of the verbs Tetelestai and paredôken. The first verb often has a purposive sense, a sense of fulfilment, consonant with the stress throughout the whole of John’s Gospel on how Jesus, as Word of God, is in control of events, foreseeing his death as something planned (John 10:18), so that the crucifixion can be seen as a glorification, and his final word as a cry not of abandonment but of victory (Lincoln 2005:478). The second verb can also mean ‘hand over’, hence Jesus could be said here to be handing over the Holy Spirit to the Church. It is a question of reading the text with a view to the form of life that produced it, what Nicholas King calls ‘the kind of life that lurks beneath the text of the New Testament’ (2004:12). Here is King’s rendering of the source text: (54) And when he had taken the vinegar, Jesus said, ‘It is perfected’. And inclining his head, he handed over the Spirit. (2004) King brings out the theological implications and enables the reader to construct the depth grammar, even if Jesus’s death is implied rather than stated. His translation retains theology as grammar.

Reading non-literary texts for translation If reading a poem or theology for translation is demanding, as shown in the previous two sections, then reading a non-literary text might be thought to be easy, a simple identification of the information that is to be transferred.Translation is often divided into the literary and the non-literary (Barnstone 1993:4), but the division is problematic because any attempt to define literature is problematic (Hermans 2007b:78–9). The New Testament, traditionally considered to be a theological, non-literary text, can be read in a literary way (Keefer 2008), for example, and Christine Calfoglou (2014) demonstrates how stylistic features (such as iconicity) are potentially inherent in all text types, which means that the Wittgensteinian grammatical investigation can be carried out on any source text, not just on literature or theology. The situation lacks clear boundaries. Writing in the Yorkshire magazine Dalesman, Ali Schofield describes her meeting with ethical entrepreneur Isobel Davies under this headline: (55) Where there’s a wool, there’s a way. (2014:47) To investigate this headline grammatically involves matching it against the common English proverb ‘Where there’s a will, there’s a way’ and noting how the

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successful production of fashionable woollen clothing is blended with the refusal to slaughter for meat the sheep used for the production of wool. The headline thus indicates somebody who has come up with an unusual solution in a particular context. We have a play on words, which must be recognised as such, and, when necessary, translated as such, which I discuss in Chapter 3. The headline only makes sense in the context of the article and within the form of life of ethical entrepreneurship in woollen fashion; by itself it is puzzling and functions as an encouragement to the reader to proceed with the article in order to solve the puzzle. Forms of life, in other words, are crucial when reading non-literary texts for translation. The translator needs to examine the forms of life of both source and target cultures. Jean Boase-Beier argues, for example, that if an advertisement for cars is to be translated then it is more likely to be the home market that ‘determines how the car in question is viewed and therefore how the advertisement is translated’ (2011:52). Reading an advertisement for translation involves more than looking at the information. In this context, a translator would need to be aware of the form of life of the home market for cars. Advertisements for Volkswagen cars typically keep the motto Das Auto [the car] in translated advertisements in order to highlight the car’s German origins, which are typically perceived by target markets as of high quality. In Brazil, however, this strategy failed, because Brazil had been producing Volkswagen Beetle cars for years under the Portuguese slogan Você conhece, você confia [you know, you trust], and retaining the German slogan was seen as offensive (Humphrey et al. 2011:np). Similarly, David Bellos describes journalists taking the ‘plain information’ of news reports in a source language and turning them into ‘arresting, entertaining or readable prose suited to the culture, interests and knowledge of the people who read them’, a process going beyond common notions of translation, while the journalists in question would not think of themselves as translators (2011:252). The forms of life determine how translation is done. Wittgenstein’s stress on practice can also be used to discern what qualifies as the source text. Translation studies has traditionally focused on written source texts (Tymoczko 2006:17). Wittgenstein’s later work, however, largely deals with spoken language. In Investigations 243, for example, he imagines human beings who speak only in monologue, and describes how an explorer who watches them and listens to their talk might succeed in translating their language. The explorer would then be able to predict what people are going to do, because he can hear them making resolutions and decisions. This approach would support the way that the field of translation studies is being expanded to include many forms of translating and interpretation. In his analysis of film and translation, for example, Michael Cronin investigates interpretation as well as translation, and describes Sofia Coppola’s presentation of the Japanese interpreter in her film Lost in Translation (2009:81). Reading a non-literary text, then, is more complex than might be thought, and certainly more complex than preparing for the solely ‘semantic transfer’ with which Antoine Berman categorises non-literary translation (2012:241). Paulo Oliveira views the polarity of literary and non-literary as incompatible with Wittgenstein’s later work (2012:166). After Wittgenstein, the standard generic opposition between

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the literary text and the non-literary text can fall away. A text is literary not because of its genre but because of the way that its language can be used. An advertisement, for example, can display literary language, through such techniques as alliteration, and can be said to have a literary function if this is the case (Boase-Beier 2011:21). A poem can fail to display literary language by not making any demands on its reader and can fail to have a literary function. There is a larger debate to be had here, as clearly it often makes practical sense to refer to two types of translation (Chesterman and Wagner 2002:5), but it can at least be said that when reading the non-literary text for translation, Wittgenstein’s instruction in Investigations 66 is still relevant: ‘don’t think, but look!’.

Conclusions ‘How should I translate?’. The answer to this question is to point out that translation is a practice and that this practice begins with reading, i.e. reading for translation. If John Berger is right to assert that what we see is affected by what we know (1977:8), then it follows that a knowledge of Wittgenstein will enable a reader to see the text as a physiognomy and to be freed from the (probably unconscious) paradigm of decoding. Wittgenstein stresses that what must be overcome are not difficulties of the intellect but of the will (CV p. 25). My claim is not that a reading of Wittgenstein will produce perfect translators and perfect translations. Any such claim would view translation as a scientific procedure analogous to a calculus, a view alien to the later Wittgenstein. To use Wittgenstein is a philosophical way of describing the processes of reading for translation. There are other ways available: the sociological, the cognitive, the literary, the psychological, etc. Nor do I wish to suggest that using Wittgenstein means that we cannot use the insights of other philosophers. Any way of describing a process is bound in turn to become part of that process. By using Wittgenstein, it is possible to acquire what he calls ‘new conceptual glasses’ (Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology I 94). This is not to suggest that to use Wittgenstein is necessary for translation. The existence of successful translations written before the publication of the Investigations in 1953 is sufficient to dismiss that notion. My claim is rather that the story told by Wittgenstein in his later work is too important for practitioners and theorists of translation to ignore, because he offers a perspective on language that can enable the task of reading for translation to be approached with clarity.

Note 1 Thanks to Catherine Rowett for this term.

3 WRITING THE TARGET TEXT

In this chapter, I consider how the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein can be of use to the translator who is writing the target text. I examine: how Wittgenstein’s work can be used to undermine dualism; the language-game of translation; how the notion of the form of life can be applied to the life of the translator; how the translation of a play on words can be seen, under Wittgensteinian investigation, to be emblematic of translation. I then apply insights from Wittgenstein to examples taken from literature, economics and philosophy. Finally, I draw conclusions.

The translator and the fly-bottle In Investigations 309,Wittgenstein states that his aim in philosophy is to show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle (a simple form of trap). This image has been taken as a metaphor for Wittgenstein’s project of subverting a metaphysical way of thinking that has been highly influential in the West (Kerr 1988:55 ff.). The destruction of a false way of thinking makes it possible for the world to be seen clearly. The Investigations is an important text in philosophy not because it investigates language, but because of what follows from that investigation. As Peter Hacker states, Wittgenstein (56) resolved many of the deep problems that have dogged our subject for centuries, sometimes indeed for more than two millennia, problems about the nature of linguistic representation, about the relationship between thought and language, about solipsism and idealism, self-knowledge and knowledge of other minds, and about the nature of necessary truth and of mathematical propositions. (2007a:116)

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At first sight, this achievement may seem to have little relevance to translation studies, even if it is granted that certain of Wittgenstein’s methodological tools, such as the grammatical investigation, can be applied outside philosophy. However, the story told by Wittgenstein offers a philosophical rationale for rejecting a way of thinking that has been of huge influence in the West, and it is worth examining this in detail because it affects the way that meaning is perceived, and translators are concerned with meaning. Wittgenstein avoids naming individual targets in the Investigations. As Marie McGinn argues: (57) The philosophical doctrines and pictures of how language works that Wittgenstein looks at, some of which may be identified with the views of particular philosophers, are really of interest to him insofar as they represent a style of thought which he believes makes misunderstanding and confusion inevitable. (2008:20) That style of thought can be identified as dualism, a way of thinking that can be traced back to Plato: ‘our tendency to mistake the map for the territory, to focus on pure and defined “forms”’ (Taleb 2007:xxv). In other words, we separate form and content. Style, for example, is regarded as ornamental, not essential, even in literary works. In Plato’s Republic 393d, Socrates analyses Homer’s account in The Iliad of Chryses the priest appealing to the Greeks on behalf of his daughter, decoding the episode, stripping away the style in order to find ‘the pure narrative, which is free from representation’: signifier and signified are separated in the same way that Platonic dualism separates body and spirit. And the dualist perspective did not end with Plato. David Bellos notes how structuralism, for example, maintains ‘the long tradition of treating language as the dress of thought’ (2011:325). The parable of the cave in Republic 514 ff. is central for understanding Plato’s views on meaning. Socrates describes prisoners who lie shackled in an underground cave lit by a fire, to which they have their backs. They watch shadows cast on the wall, as events take place behind them, and mistake these shadows for reality. Socrates asserts that philosophical activity can allow the prisoner to leave the cave and to see the true world in the light of the sun. He advances the doctrine of the Forms, which are non-material essences that instantiate in an ideal way the qualities that we can dimly discern in life. That we describe an action or a wine as ‘good’, for example, can be explained by how that action or that wine partakes of the Form of the Good. The sun in the parable symbolises the Form of the Good, which in turn enables other Forms to be discerned, such as the Form of Justice. Within the cave, the fire in turn symbolises the sun, which only allows us to see appearances. The artist makes copies of the material world. If a painter depicts a bed, for example, he is at two removes from reality, because he is copying something (an actual bed) that takes its existence from something else, the ideal bed. Art as imitation is a kind of forgery that keeps us in the cave;

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therefore artists would be banished. (Translation in turn could be seen as a forgery: see Scott 2008:16.) The Platonic paradigm also takes an essentialist view of language, postulating a one-to-one correspondence between words and their meanings. Maurice Drury records this comment by Wittgenstein: (58) It has puzzled me why Socrates is regarded as a great philosopher. Because when Socrates asks for the meaning of a word and people give him examples of how that word is used, he isn’t satisfied but wants a unique definition. Now if somebody shows me how a word is used and its different meanings, that is just the sort of answer I want. (1984:115) What is at stake is a dualist tradition implying that there is a language of ideas behind reality, to which an individual can gain access by introspection (James 1981:185). An utterance or a text is seen as a translation into ordinary language from this ideal language. In a dualist tradition, where form and content are separated and where words have a one-to-one correspondence with ideas, translation will be about transfer, about the text as code to be decoded. Lawrence Venuti writes of the prevalence of an instrumental model of translation that sees translation as the ‘reproduction or invariant contained in or caused by the source text’ (2012b:3) (also Arrojo 2010; Berman 2012; Tymoczko 2006). Yet as Wittgenstein points out: ‘How strange if logic were concerned with an “ideal” language and not with ours. For what would this ideal language express? Presumably, what we now express in our ordinary language; in that case, this is the language logic must investigate’ (Philosophical Remarks 3). Sections 256–314 of the Investigations are usually categorised as the ‘private language argument’ because of Wittgenstein’s relentless stress on how there can be no such thing as a private language. Rupert Read asserts that Wittgenstein depicts ‘the reader’s (and the author’s) inclination to fantasise that a “private” language will satisfy his desires, giving him certainty, the kind of foundation that he philosophised in order to obtain’ (2010:595). The desire for a private language parallels the desire that translators have for an invariant language to which they can gain access and then decode – what Maria Tymoczko calls the ‘black box model’ (2006:18), as discussed in Chapter 2. To search for an ideal language remains, however, a very human tendency, and is seen in the way that some people trust that using a bilingual dictionary will be sufficient to translate well, whereas it often results in the sort of English announcements in European continental hotels and restaurants that English-speaking travellers find bizarre (Reynolds 2011:13). A reading of Wittgenstein suggests that meaning is found in the forms, not in the Forms; as I argued in Chapter 2, the meaning of a text is its physiognomy. The tendency to see meaning as something that can be extracted and transferred persists, however. Ian Mason, for example, discusses the official advice given to translators in Canada to translate ‘not the words or the structures of the source text

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but rather the message or, in other words, the author’s intention’ (Translation Bureau 1984:3). Mason describes the assumption that a message can be separated from its structures as ‘questionable’, because any attempt to translate the author’s intention would involve ‘wholesale changes’ to the source text (2012:401). The search for an ideal language is seen in the way that the process of translation is often described. In a discussion of machine translation, for example, Emma Wagner asserts that translation is a process in three stages: step 1 is the analysis of the source text; step 2 involves ‘visualising the abstract non-linguistic sense of the language’; step 3 is the synthesis, the writing of the target text (Chesterman and Wagner 2002:124). A reading of the Investigations shows that it makes no sense to talk about a non-linguistic sense of the linguistic. I am not denying that thought can take place without language. Steven Pinker notes how many creative people report thinking in mental images, not words, when they are inspired, citing Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s account of how he composed the poem ‘Kubla Khan’ (Pinker 1994:70), while Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson argue that recent research shows many animals can think, although they cannot use language (2005:241ff.). My denial is that it makes no sense to look at a linguistic string and to try to work out its non-linguistic sense.To do so is to fall into the trap of decoding. It is not the case that we have a non-linguistic meaning that we turn into linguistic meaning by some sort of mental act (PI 120). The dualist view of language is one of the major targets of the Investigations.The Augustinian paradigm sees meaning as ostensive, as a mental activity. Fergus Kerr describes the paradigm with the metaphor ‘the hermit in the head’ (1998:57). The mind is viewed as something isolated and distinct from the body, so that knowledge is conceived as mental and individual, and meaning is seen as hidden, which is the view of the early Wittgenstein, for whom the task of the philosopher as logician is to excavate meaning by formalisation. For the later Wittgenstein, the case is different, as shown by his attack on the Augustinian paradigm, which can be linked both to the picture theory of his early work and to the Platonic tradition described above. In Investigations 1, Wittgenstein tells the following story to show how the mentalist view of the world is absurd, how there cannot be a hermit in the head: (59) Now think of the following use of language: I send someone shopping. I give him a slip of paper marked ‘five red apples’. He takes the slip to the shopkeeper, who opens the drawer marked ‘apples’; then he looks up the word ‘red’ in a chart and finds a colour sample next to it; then he says the series of elementary number-words – I assume he knows them by heart – up to the word ‘five’, and for each number-word he takes an apple of the same colour as the sample out of the drawer. – It is in this and similar ways that one operates with words. The key point is in the final sentence: ‘one operates with words’. The shopper is involved in a transaction where what matters is the use of language in order to

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obtain the five red apples; and the behaviour of the shopkeeper is similarly transactional. Counting, for example, is not a mysterious mental activity, but a technique, in which somebody can be trained. If I have been taught how to count then I can give somebody five apples, five oranges, five bananas, etc. Wittgenstein comments: ‘But what is the meaning of the word “five”? – No such thing was in question here, only how the word “five” is used’ (Investigations 1). To find the meaning of a word it is necessary to look at its use (PI 43), not to try to relate the word to an internal concept. Wittgenstein attends to practice. Language is about doing things, so that learning a language is about learning to do things, and the same is true of translation. The rest of the Investigations can be seen as Wittgenstein’s working-out of the insight that language is about use, not correspondence. All the key Wittgensteinian concerns follow from this notion: the language-game, the form of life, the surveyable representation, the impossibility of a private language, the way in which rules are followed, etc. Wittgenstein offers methods that allow the grammatical investigation of terms, what he calls the occasions on which ‘we call to mind the kinds of statement that we make about phenomena’ (PI 90). The Platonic tradition is a picture that holds us captive because of the bewitching nature of language: ‘And we couldn’t get outside it, for it lay in our language, and language only seemed to repeat it to us inexorably’ (PI 115). Many translation theorists seek to show that translators face a misleading picture and that they need tools to overcome it. Rosemary Arrojo, for example, argues that Platonic thought is responsible for the picture of translation as transference, and she uses Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical work as a tool with which to combat it (2010).Translation studies, unaided, cannot offer a theoretical or an ideological reason why the picture must be dissolved. Arrojo’s use of Nietzsche is both interesting and convincing, arguing that Nietzsche’s view that languages are human creations shows that there is no essential meaning to be separated out to be transferred elsewhere (2010:249). It seems apposite, therefore, also to bring Wittgenstein into this debate. His methods can justify how the practice of taking meaning as something to be extracted and conveyed can be replaced by looking at the application of words (PI 340) and moving on from there. His treatment of language is much fuller than Nietzsche’s, and his dialogical way of writing allows, I think, greater engagement, while his methods can become heuristic tools. As with his presentation of the Augustinian paradigm, Wittgenstein’s critique does not dismiss as stupid the way that we instinctively operate; his approach takes our practices very seriously. One of the key ways in which Wittgenstein attempts to free his reader from false pictures is through offering other pictures. Wittgenstein compares words to different tools in a toolbox in order to bring out how words can have diverse functions (PI 11); he describes looking into the cabin of a locomotive, where the similar-looking handles must be manipulated in different ways, in order to show how words can be used differently (PI 12); he describes the languagegames of the builders, discussed in Chapter 2, in order to show how the meaning of a word can be found by looking at its use in the language (because any of their

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four words could be used in different ways to get different transactions to take place (PI 2, 7 ff.)); he uses this urban image to describe language as a whole (PI 18): (60) Our language can be regarded as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, of houses with extensions from various periods; and all this surrounded by a multitude of new suburbs with straight and regular streets and uniform houses. The point of this image is to subvert any inclination to impose a unified view onto language.Wittgenstein’s ancient city contrasts with the enthusiasm for planned and orderly towns expressed by the dualist philosopher René Descartes (Kerr 1988:31). For Wittgenstein, every person is born into a language community with a history, into the traditions and techniques in which he or she must be trained. To see language as an ancient city (as opposed to a planned town) will make a difference to how one conceives of language and accordingly will have consequences for how one translates. As David Bellos argues, it is easy for English speakers to be misled by the etymology of the word ‘translation’ i.e. ‘carrying-across’, from the Latin trans [across] and latum, the supine of ferre [to carry] (2011:25). The etymology is common to many European languages and suggests and supports the idea of translation being summed up by the conceit of the ferry or truck moving something from A to B. Willis Barnstone describes how Greek vans often bear on their sides the logo METAFORA [carrying across] to signify ‘transportation’; the noun, cognate with English ‘metaphor’, suggests the transference of a word to another sense, as well as the movement of goods (1993:15). Etymology is a valuable tool, but Wittgenstein’s advice to seek meaning in use shows that it is dangerous to equate etymology with meaning. Bellos notes that knowing that the noun ‘divorce’ comes from the Latin divortium [watershed, fork in the road] does not tell us what the word means now, i.e. how it is used to designate the legal end of a marriage (2011:26). In ‘carryingacross’, we have a metaphor of one way of seeing translation that simplifies a complicated phenomenon (Tymoczko 2007). Wittgenstein provides a rationale for seeing things in this way, even if, as Matthew Reynolds notes, the metaphor is very difficult to shake (2011:4). It is not a stupid prejudice because it is understandable in view of the human need to generalise, but it is a prejudice that must be overcome. As I stated in Chapter 2, my claim is not that translation only becomes possible after Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein shows the translator both the existence of the fly-bottle and the way out, which begins with the realisation that translation has more to do with shopping than with mental processes. Both Socrates and Wittgenstein use images of freeing the captive. Socrates wants to release prisoners from a cave by introducing them to philosophy. Wittgenstein wants to set the fly free from the fly-bottle by dispelling confusion.The crucial difference is that the prisoner has been born in the cave whereas the fly has flown into the fly-bottle. Socrates describes a situation that is metaphysical and demands a change in the whole human condition by looking

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beyond to the Forms; Wittgenstein looks at language and demands a change in our way of thinking about it. Socrates contributes to one of the great myths of the West; Wittgenstein, as Fergus Kerr notes, has ‘written a text that enables the reader, with patience and luck, to become suspicious of the power the myth still wields’ (1988:75). There is one further consequence for the translator. There has been a harmful tendency to split the literary and the linguistic within translation studies (Barnstone 1993:223). Whereas traditional language studies had looked at both language and literature, a division opened in the twentieth century between those following the literary path, using ideas taken from structuralism, poststructuralism and postmodernism, and those following the linguistic path, taking their cue from the generative linguistics of Noam Chomsky. Surveying the contemporary field of translation studies, Lawrence Venuti notes how linguistics-oriented approaches remain prevalent in the training of translators, while literary and cultural studies dominate translation research (2012a:391). Roman Jakobson argued as follows in an unsuccessful attempt to forestall the split: ‘The separation of the two fields [poetics and linguistics] is based on a current but erroneous interpretation of the contrast between the structure of poetry and other types of verbal structure’ (1960:351). The bridge between the two fields has now been built in literary studies by the growth of stylistics, but it is a bridge that has not yet been fully constructed in translation studies. Current work on stylistic approaches to translation may be seen as making a start (Boase-Beier 2006), and the work of Wittgenstein is here of potential importance. First, he gives a rich picture of communication, thus helping the translation theorist restore what Elz˙bieta Tabakowska calls the ‘human factor in communication’ (1993:10). Second, he shows that if communication is based on language-games then we do not need to split language into the linguistic and the literary. Wittgenstein notes the following as being language-games: reporting an event; making up a story and reading one; translating (PI 23). One list includes both the literary and the linguistic. The bridge is built in the Investigations. It can now be constructed by the translator, who can write the target text while responding to the source text.

The language-game of translation As Edith Grossman remarks, translation ‘is an occupation that many critics agree is impossible at best, a betrayal at worst, and on average probably not much more than the accumulated result of a diligent, even slavish familiarity with dictionaries’ (2010:63).The apparent impossibility of translation is due to the demand for perfect equivalence: Willis Barnstone argues that if ‘truly literalist assumptions’ prevailed, translation would indeed be impossible, because in translation ‘A=A is impossible’ (1993:18).The work of linguistic determinists such as Benjamin Whorf, as discussed in Chapter 2, supports the view that translation is impossible, for linguistic determinism in its strong form implies that no form of translation could ever be successful. Whorf argues that Hopi and English, for example, cannot be ‘calibrated’ against

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each other because they embody different metaphysics, different ways of looking at the world (1956:215). If we think that we can translate from Hopi into English then we deceive ourselves. However, Whorf does use English to show the contents of sample Hopi sentences. Like Wittgenstein’s explorer (PI 243), he has managed to produce a translation despite the difficulties, and his position is self-destructive (Davidson 2001:128). One argument against those who believe that translation is impossible is to take them into a library and to point out that many of the books on the shelves have been translated from other languages. How, though, can we know that they are genuine translations? How can we know that translation is possible? I take Wittgenstein’s later account of language to show that translation is possible once meaning is recognised as not being something private, i.e. when it is seen as intersubjective, not objective. Meaning in the Investigations is to be understood by looking at interaction: between individuals; between communities; between the individual and the community. As Wittgenstein notes, justification lies in appealing to something outside oneself; it is not possible for a totally isolated person to look up words in a mental table, for this would be like buying several copies of the morning paper to assure oneself that its contents are true (PI 265). What a dictionary does is to ‘justify the translation of a word X by a word Y’, i.e. it serves as an independent authority but one that cannot be used in isolation from the world, just as the morning paper needs to be checked against the world. It is impossible to translate a newly discovered language without some form of independent reference. The Rosetta Stone, created in 196 and discovered in 1799, displays a text in Ancient Egyptian, a language that had proved impossible to translate. That the Stone also contains the text in Ancient Greek, which could be translated by scholars, enabled linguists both to translate the Ancient Egyptian text and to form a basis for understanding the entire language – a result of triangulation (Parkinson 2005). Where no triangulation has to date been possible, neither has translation, as in the case of the Ancient Greek script Linear A (Davidson 2011:256).Wittgenstein stresses that there can be no private language (PI 256-314), and translation is also a shared languagegame (PI 23). Linear A is not in principle untranslatable. The description of translation as a language-game is convincing because translation is an activity already practised within the communities into which we are born – an activity that pre-exists the individual – so that a person can in turn be trained to translate. Cultures have professional translators, who translate novels, interpret at conferences and provide subtitles for foreign films. Translation also takes place in informal situations when an interpreter is needed. There is a heuristic aspect to translation, to which Wittgenstein appeals by naming it a language-game, an activity that can be carried out by the child learning a second language and by the scholar working on a new rendering of an essay by Jacques Derrida. Translation has history and traditions. A constantly growing body of texts has been produced by translators, describing what they have done, giving advice, justifying strategies, etc., from Herodotus’s fifth-century BCE comments in his Histories to the translator’s notes in the recently published edition of a translated philosophical text. Wittgenstein sees

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the language-game of translation as analogous to such activities as: giving orders; presenting the results of an experiment in tables and diagrams; guessing riddles; thanking (PI 23). Wittgenstein advises his reader to look for the meaning of a word in its use (PI 43). For the practising translator, this is a way into playing the language-game of translation. He or she can look at the source text and decide what use is being made of words. Charles Travis gives the example of dining in France with a companion who does not speak French. The waiter makes the following announcement: (61) Les oursins sont arrivés. the sea-urchins have arrived (2011:np) Travis translates the sentence to his companion as ‘They have sea urchins’ and asserts that his is an acceptable translation because the language-games he plays in English make the same demands on the correctness of words and their use as those played by the waiter in French. In Investigations 20, Wittgenstein remarks that sentences in different languages can have the same sense because they can have the same use, illustrating this by Russian having ‘stone red’, whereas German has der Stein ist rot [the stone is red]. He notes that the copula is not missing in Russian, that it does not have to be attached ‘in thought’ by Russian speakers.Andrew Chesterman and Emma Wagner give the example of translating into English the label on a packet of white powder in a Greek supermarket (2002:5). The translator needs to make sure, say, that nobody dies by adding rat poison to coffee, and will choose words that signify to an English-speaking tourist what is in the packet, producing a text that has the same use in English that it has in Greek. Words do not even have to be used: an iconic sign such as the skull and crossbones would make matters clear (Davidson 2011:325). Chesterman is therefore right to call equivalence ‘a red herring, in that it is virtually unattainable, and hence not a useful concept in translation theory’, pointing to Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblances (PI 67) as a more fruitful way of examining meaning (1997:9). As Travis notes, Wittgenstein shows there is ‘a gap between what words mean and what is said in them on occasion’ (2008:70). The slipperiness of meaning is something often noted by translation scholars. Grossman, for example, asserts that translators need to avoid the literalist trap, because ‘words do not mean in isolation’ but are part of a ‘contextual whole’ (2010:71). Good translators can thus be said to translate context (Bellos 2011:71). John Gledhill asserts that Wittgenstein’s concept of the language-game can be used as a means of translating:‘The translator needs first to identify the nature of the “game”, and then to use the translation strategy most appropriate for the particular language-game’ (2007:1). Wittgenstein’s way of describing language becomes a method of translating, of how to figure out ‘how to make all this good stuff happen again – in Greek, in Thai, in Georgian, in Arabic’, as Daniel Hahn puts it (2014:10). It is the refusal to play the game, the insistence on seeing translation as objective transference, which makes translation seem impossible. It is not just that stylistically

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difficult texts such as James Joyce’s 1939 prose work Finnegans Wake (1950) are untranslatable if there is a search for equivalence: all texts are untranslatable if there is a search for equivalence. If the search is dropped then possibilities open up for forming strategies that are both practical and based on the way in which we read texts. Translation scholars frequently express insights about writing the target text that can be supported by Wittgenstein, as shown by the following three examples. First, Grossman sees good literary translators as proceeding ‘by analogy – that is, by finding comparable, not identical, characteristics, vagaries, quirks, and stylistic peculiarities in the second language’ (2010:10). Second, Attridge sees literary works as translatable because their singularity can be imitated in the target text (2004:76). Third, Bellos urges that translators should translate the genres in the text, by which he means something analogous to language-games, so that a good translator will not translate a Chinese kitchen recipe into English, but into a kitchen recipe (2011:78). Each assertion could be given a philosophical underpinning from Wittgenstein. To develop a strategy based on the language-games in the source text is coherent in the way that another frequently advocated strategy is not, i.e. translating for the same effect. David Constantine, describing his translation of Faust, asserts that he aims to attain ‘equivalence of effect’ (2005:xxxix). As Chesterman notes, however, talk of equivalent effects is inconsistent because no two readers can ever approach the same text with the same set of cognitive assumptions (1997:35). There will be a variety of effects associated with a text such as Faust because many different readers read it at different times. A twenty-first-century reader will not experience the same effects as an eighteenth-century reader. The notion of playing the same language-game in the target text avoids the problem because the (extremely important) effects can look after themselves if the language-games are imitated. Translation is more about playing games than breaking a code, something that good translators have always known. Eliot Weinberger remarks that ‘translation is more than a leap from dictionary to dictionary; it is a reimagining’ (Weinberger and Paz 1987:34). A reimagining has many possibilities, just as a game can be played in many ways. If the later Wittgenstein is right, it means that the translator cannot extract a meaning from a text that he or she can move somewhere else, as a mechanical operation. Wittgenstein offers support for the notion that even a single word has to be seen in context (Bellos 2011:75). Anthea Bell explains the problems of terminology she faced in translating Franz Kafka’s German novel Das Schloss [the castle], giving the example of the Bauern [plural form], whom the protagonist K. meets when he first arrives at the Bridge Inn (Bell 2009b:xxix). Bell notes that a bilingual dictionary would offer ‘peasant’ or ‘farmer’ for Bauer [singular form], but that neither possibility appealed to her, the first sounding too medieval and the second suggesting the modern National Farmers’ Union in the UK, while many of those described by Kafka as Bauern are not farmers anyway. Her translation choice, ‘the local rustics’, indicates how translation is not a search for equivalents. Later uses of the same word by Kafka are given different renderings by Bell, depending on context: ‘the locals’, ‘the rustics’ and ‘the villagers’.

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In Zettel 698 [also in Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology I 778] Wittgenstein asks this question: (62) How is this joke (e.g.) to be translated (i.e. replaced) …? As Matthias Kross remarks, Wittgenstein refers to replacement, but not to duplication (2012:44). Wittgenstein sees no quasi-mystical procedure by which one text is transformed into another. One text is, rather, simply replaced by another (Hermans 2007a:103–8). Instead of a French recipe, I use its English translation, which replaces the French source text in my form of life.That is all; but the implications are important.The text that replaces the source text can be a surveyable representation or can fail to be one (a topic discussed further in Chapter 4). There is no single way of solving the problem of replacement because there is no systematic method to which appeal can be made (Zettel 698), which opens out the possibilities of translation and ought to enhance the status of translators, which are the twin aims of Maria Tymoczko’s Wittgensteinian book on translation (2007). To aim to produce a replacement rather than a perfect rendering of the source text into pure language should remove any need to apologise, as translators so often do in their prefaces (Fawcett and Guadarrama García 2010:10). The translator becomes an author, a solver of problems, a creator, not just a cipher; and although a problem in translation can be solved, so that a joke can be replaced, there is no systematic method of solving it. George Steiner notes the importance of the distinction that Wittgenstein puts forward in Zettel 698 of how a solution can coexist with the absence of any systematic method of solution, and sees it as being true not only of translation itself but also of the descriptions and judgements made of it (1998:290). Wittgenstein notes how a poet’s words ‘can pierce us’ and that this is connected with the ‘use that they have in our life’ (Zettel 155). Translations can be written that have an analogous use in our lives to those of the source text in other lives. The translator can choose to write in such a way as to respond to the source text by playing the same language-games, just as John Milton’s 1629 translation from Horace, ‘Ad Pyrrham’ [to Pyrrha] (2007:100), is a response to the Latin poet’s ‘specific verbal arrangement’, according to Attridge (2004:74). Milton asserts that he translates Horace ‘almost word for word without rhyme according to the Latin measure, as near as the language will permit’ (2007:100), thus highlighting aspects of the Latin at a certain cost to the English word order. The legal translator can respond to the specific arrangement of a legal document, and the translator of recipes can respond to the specific arrangement of a recipe. Reading and applying Wittgenstein helps the translator to respond consciously because there is a stress both on the form of life of the source text and on the language-games played within it. We constantly need to pay attention both to the way we see meaning and – this follows logically – to the way that we see translation. Wittgenstein can be a tool to this end, a tool employed in the forms of life of the translator, to which I now turn.

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The forms of life of the translator Paschalis Nikolaou and Maria-Venetia Kyritsi, noting the frustration that has accompanied experiments with machine translation, assert that human consciousness remains central to the task of translation (2008:3), and quote Wittgenstein to explain why: ‘Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it’ (Notebooks 1914–1916 p. 48). It is impossible to divorce the translator from the target text, for language is a part of being human, not a faculty that can be practically isolated. Noam Chomsky (2000) and his followers argue that there is a language faculty, but Wittgenstein’s inquiry is different, coming out of philosophy, not cognitive science. Rachel May identifies what she calls ‘a sort of translator-consciousness’, translational tendencies that persist across cultures and across time – for example, the way that the target text is often seen as more authoritative than the source text (1994:6). If translators act not only on the text but in it, i.e. if there is a translator-consciousness, then this consciousness must be something that can be formed, for which a reading of the Investigations, described by Rupert Read as a ‘philosophical self-help book’ (2007:1), can be used. One of the central drives of the Investigations is to show that language and behaviour are products of how we are trained. In Chapter 2, I argued that Wittgenstein’s philosophy can help train the translator as reader of the source text. In this section, I investigate the language-game of writing the target text, as found in the forms of life of the translator, in order to examine how a translatorconsciousness can be formed, in initial training and in ongoing development that moves beyond intuition. Wittgenstein asserts: ‘Instinct comes first, reasoning second. Not until there is a language-game are there reasons’ (Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology II 678). Edith Grossman gives the example of Gregory Rabassa, whose main concern as translator of Gabriel García Márquez was whether his English was up to the task, not his Spanish (2010:72). It would be absurd to suggest that reading Wittgenstein is a necessary condition for being able to write well in one’s own language. However, the reading of Wittgenstein can make the translator aware of the language-games that he or she is attempting to play, and this will help the translator’s language to be up to the task, if only because attention to language makes people into better writers (Pinker 2014:12). Reasons can follow instinct. In the practice of translation, the expression ‘form of life’ can be used in at least three ways: to describe a way of living that the translator takes on (a vocation); to refer to the way of life of the writer of the source text (a particular form of life that has produced a particular work); to refer to any forms of life depicted in source and target texts. (Wittgenstein’s term is frequently to be understood as plural because every person is involved in many different forms of life.) Translation as vocation is a way of living, sometimes a way of earning a living, and it begins in a way of reading (as described in Chapter 2, where I argued that the notion of reading for translation can be extended to include oral practices) and moves into writing. Translation is a practice in which one can be trained, in which one can become qualified. To read accounts of translation, whether in the

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paratextual material attached to a particular translation or in theoretical writing about translation, is to find forms of life with their own language-games, involving concepts such as source-target, equivalence, untranslatability, free-vs-literal, all-writing-is-translating, etc. These are the five translation supermemes identified by Andrew Chesterman, who describes them as themes that have occurred throughout the history of translation (1997:7–14). The grammatical investigation of such concepts is something that a reading of Wittgenstein can bring to translation studies, as exemplified in Chapter 4. The forms of life of translation include: reading translation theory; reading one’s own translations; reading translated literature; keeping one’s language skills up to date; keeping up to date with new developments in the field (for example, by attending conferences); drafting the target text; delivering the target text. These are practices. People often describe themselves as translators – for example, Cassandra, the heroine of Barbara Wilson’s novel Gaudí Afternoon (1991:74). Perhaps this is to say no more than that (in the novel’s Western context) translators are professionals; but this is to say a lot, and Wittgenstein’s work also points towards the investigation of practices where the translator is not a professional (Tymoczko 2006:18). In sociology, Pierre Bourdieu advances the notions of ‘field’ and ‘habitus’ to explain cultural phenomena such as professions (2005). A field is defined as the domain in which somebody acts. Cassandra works in the field of translation, being engaged in the translation of a South American novel. Habitus is defined as the set of aptitudes that somebody must develop if he or she is to flourish in a field, what Bella Brodzki refers to as the ‘shrewd critical skills and opinions that Cassandra has honed as a practising translator, cosmopolitan traveller, and social critic’ (2007:45). Field and habitus can be seen as an extension into sociology of the concepts of form of life and language-game developed in philosophy by Wittgenstein, and Bourdieu’s work is influential in translation studies as a way of describing the complexities of the translation process (Inghilleri 2005). From a Wittgensteinian point of view, Cassandra’s work as a translator involves her in forms of life, which result from her competence at playing the language-game of translation. Certain English texts (that replace certain Spanish texts) exist because of her aptitude.Translators tend to identify themselves with what they do. Patricia Clancy has described her work as the translator of the French detective novels of Pierre Magnan, discussing the difficulty of translating lexis when dealing with an author whose novels contain a wealth of detail from Provence. For example, Clancy wonders if Le Blayeul is a village, a mountain, a range or a river (2006:7). Such questions send her to: the internet; long out-of-print French dictionaries and encyclopaedias; contacts in Provence; the source-text author. The meaning of the term Le Blayeul can be found by looking at its use in the language, following Wittgenstein (PI 43), and Clancy discovers that it was used by Magnan to designate a mountain. The translator, professionally concerned with meaning, must address the issue of contextualisation, because all expressions must be seen in context by referencing the source text to the form of life that produces it: ‘after nine years in Magnan’s company, I feel as if I have lived there’ (Clancy 2006:7).

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The translator stands between source and target text and can depict the aspects that have dawned in his or her reading by attempting to play the language-games of the source text, as can be seen in the following example. In Franz Kafka’s German story ‘Ein Landarzt’ [a country doctor], the doctor’s maid is called Rosa, a name that connotes the adjective rosa [pink] and the feminine noun Rose [rose], a traditional symbol of love, beauty, perfection and purity (Nozedar 2010:309). The doctor must abandon his maid in order to go treat a wound that is described as follows: (63) Rosa, in vielen Schattierungen, dunkel in der Tiefe, hellwerdend zu den pink in many shadows dark in the depth brightening to the Rändern, zartkörnig mit ungleichmä ig sich aufsammelndem Blut, offen edges tender with irregularly itself collecting blood open wie ein Bergwerk obertags. like a mine to-the-air (Kafka 1963:58) As well as connoting the colour pink and a rose, Rosa here represents the maid herself because its initial capitalised position makes it a possible proper noun. Kafka’s choice of name for the maid relates to both uses, and to reach for a dictionary to translate the word and not to go further would be to remain within the fly-bottle. Malcolm Pasley comments how Kafka’s use of Rosa links the doctor’s ‘two newfound concerns, erotic and spiritual’ (1963:22).This close reading of the source text can be detected in Pasley’s writing of the target text: (64) Rose-red, in various shades, dark in the depths, paler towards the edges, finely grained, with blood welling unevenly, open like a mine at the surface. (1992:159) In his translation, Pasley has changed the name of the maid from Rosa to Rose, which in English has a multiple resonance that echoes that of the source-text word, and that is picked up in the initial word of (64). He thus conveys both the use of multiple connotations, typical of Kafka’s style, and the linking of the erotic and the spiritual central to the story’s meaning. It is a translation that maintains meaning as a physiognomy (PI 568), a literary translation that responds to the literary languagegames played by Kafka in the source text. One becomes a translator, as evidenced both in the title and the content of Douglas Robinson’s Becoming a Translator (2003), where he examines field and habitus. Translation is a field that has been characterised by translators writing about their craft. Many such statements have been taken as setting out a dualist view of language.

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In 395, for example, Jerome wrote an account of his methodology that has been regarded as foundational in translation studies: (65) Indeed, I not only admit, but freely proclaim that in translation from the Greek – except in the case of Sacred Scripture, where the very order of the words is a mystery – I render not word for word but sense for sense. (2012:23) Whether or not Jerome is actually advancing a dichotomy between word and sense is a matter of debate, but his comment has often been viewed in this way (Bellos 2011:104 ff .). The opposition of word and sense has recurred again and again in the history of translation, and is discussed further in Chapter 4. The work of Wittgenstein shows that any such dichotomy is a false one, reliant on a Platonic view of the world, as I argued above. We have no access to meaning outside language and it is on forms that we must rely, not on the Forms, otherwise translation becomes a process of attempting to discover the correct answers, as when Eugene Nida and Charles Taber define translation as ‘reproducing in the receptor’s language the closest natural equivalent of the source-language message’ (1969:12), which is to see translation as a science, based on equivalence. It is easy to set up equivalence as a straw man. It is obvious, for example, that the French and German nouns chien [dog] and Hund [dog] are not equivalents in the sense of being interchangeable, because a long list of differences can be compiled, such as different acoustic values or different cultural connotations. Therefore I could be accused of using Wittgenstein in order to win a debate that has been won in translation studies without his work. My contention, however, is that any translator who sits down to translate a text will still be tempted by the same sort of dualism that has been seen in Jerome. Why should this be so? In Big Typescript 423, Wittgenstein comments on his later method: (66) One keeps hearing the remark that philosophy really makes no progress, that the same philosophical problems that had occurred to the Greeks are still occupying us. … The reason is that our language has remained the same and seduces us into asking the same questions over and over. As long as there is a verb ‘to be’ which seems to function like ‘to eat’ and ‘to drink’, as long as there are adjectives like ‘identical’, ‘true’, ‘false’, ‘possible’, as long as one talks about a flow of time and an expanse of space, etc., etc., humans will continue to bump up against the same mysterious difficulties. That we are bewitched by language may be because of the way the mind works. Steven Pinker suggests that the mind’s settings were fixed in the remote past, and describes what he calls ‘cognitive quirks’, i.e. mental habits that worked well once but do not fit the modern world – for example, the use of the conduit metaphor of language (similar to the container metaphor discussed in Chapter 2), which suggests that it is possible to know something and to send it on to others in a package

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(2007:83 ff.). This situation can explain why translation theorists still maintain that we are in thrall to a model of translation based on transference (Tymoczko 2007). The model can be changed by changing our view of language by reading Wittgenstein, who can show that the sense is in the word, and that words are deeds (PI 546). The semantic model lying behind equivalence, according to Anthony Pym, is that of the tertium comparationis [Latin: third of comparison], which involves deverbalising the source text in order to listen to the sense, which is then translated (2010:18). A twentieth-century advocate of this approach is Danica Seleskovitch (Seleskovitch and Lederer 1984). Pym comments that her theory is in many ways naïve and idealistic because it seems to be impossible to make sense of a sense that is deverbalised; but he maintains, writing twenty-five years after Seleskovitch, that the operational values of her approach ‘correspond to some very widespread ideas about what translation is (or should be)’ (2010:20). Translators, from a Wittgensteinian perspective, keep flying into the fly-bottle and are unaware that they are doing so (PI 309). Pym reasserts the equivalence model despite the numerous difficulties he sees associated with it: (67) Equivalence might appear to be dead, except for the occasional deconstructionist who has read little translation theory and needs a straw man. Then again, history has not finished. (2010:38) Equivalence is not a straw man. Our dilemma lies in the fact that we think that it is. Pym admits that his defence of the equivalence model will be unpopular but maintains that the model underlies all thinking about translation (2010:6 ff.) and that it is still the ‘dominant paradigm’ (2010:91). My reading of Wittgenstein can offer several ways forward. First, it shows that the equivalence model is misleading, as I argued above and shall take up again in Chapter 4. Second, it focuses on the forms of life of translation, so that the translator can be seen as a reader of forms and as a re-writer of them as forms. Third, the use of Wittgenstein offers insights into the way that language works, insights that can free us from false ways of seeing and that can offer clarity in the sense of being able to see ways of moving on. Peter Winch argues that the humanities do not function through correspondence to objective facts, but through agreement on what could be held to be true (2008). We thus agree to call something a translation, just as we agree to call something a theory in literature. The translations that are produced are similarly located within traditions of reading and writing. Gordon Baker notes that the criteria for judging the correctness of a description are ‘as indeterminate as the criteria for judging the correctness of the description of a painting’ (2004:48), and something similar must apply to describing translations. What can be formed, however, is an educated judgement, i.e. awareness of what one is doing and of what one might do

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in translation. For Wittgenstein, educated judgement is a result of work on oneself (CV p. 24): (68) Work on philosophy – like work in architecture in many respects – is really more work on oneself. On one’s own conception. On how one sees these things. (And what one expects from them.) This remark shows how one becomes a translator: through work on oneself (Ouelbani 2012:213). One works at how one sees things (in the source text), at what one expects from them (in the target text), and at mastering the forms of life (through action).Wittgenstein asks who it is who says that a poem can be translated to our satisfaction (RFM III-85). For the translator of the poem, of the newspaper report or of the notice in a museum, the answer is to look in the mirror and then to work on himself or herself. The ideal I am putting forward is the one described by Johann Gottfried von Herder, who wonders: ‘Where is the translator who is at once philosopher, philologist, and poet?’. Such a translator, as Herder puts it, would be a bright morning star (1997:207).

Translating a play on words How do you translate a play on words? It is an important question because it cuts to the heart of translation. Jokes, proverbs, puns and plays on words bring in a cluster of problems at both cultural and communicative levels. As anybody who has ever tried to translate a pun knows, to attempt to transfer its meaning through conscientious word-by-word rendering is often to come up with something that will only puzzle the addressee, which is usually not the aim of translation. In Last Writings on Philosophical Psychology I 278, Wittgenstein asks and answers a question about translation: (69) What is the correct German translation of an English play on words? Maybe a completely different play on words. The remark shows how the goal of playing the same language-game allows the translator a great deal of freedom. If I need to translate a joke in a play, the key factor may be that a joke is being told, rather than that somebody is making a pun on a certain verb, so that the best choice may be to write an entirely different joke. In his relocation of Aristophanes’s play Lysistrata, David Stuttard translates the topical jokes in the source text with topical jokes in the target text, indicating in footnotes that directors should feel free to substitute different references that fit the context of the production (2010). J. Michael Walton comments on Stuttard’s translation: ‘Let the jokes be of any time so long as they are funny’ (2010:19). Conference interpreters may simply state that a delegate has made a joke, rather than translate it (Bellos 2011:274).

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By using the word ‘maybe’ in example (69), Wittgenstein makes it clear that writing a different play on words is only one strategy. The translator who wishes to preserve the foreignness of the source text may choose to render idioms word for word, the strategy recommended by Antoine Berman, who cites André Gide’s French translation of Joseph Conrad’s novel Typhoon (Berman 2012:250). I give two English texts by Conrad as examples (70) and (71), with Gide’s translations as examples (72) and (73): (70) He did not care a tinker’s curse … (71) Damme, if this ship isn’t worse than Bedlam! (72) Il s’ en fichait comme du juron d’ un étameur … he himself of-it was-indifferent as of-the curse of a tinker (73) Que diable m’emporte si l’on ne se croirait pas à Bedlam! that devil me take if one not oneself would-believe not at Bedlam As Berman notes, there is a common French expression that would convey the same idea as that of not caring a tinker’s curse, while the mention of Bedlam is potentially confusing for a French reader because it was an English institution for the mentally ill, so that a translator might have gone for Charenton, a similar French institution (2012:251). By rendering the proverbs like this, Gide preserves the foreignness of the source text for literary purposes. Following Wittgenstein’s stress on the importance of the use of the literary work in our form of life (Zettel 155), a proverb can therefore be translated in various ways depending on its use in a particular source text and on the aspect the translator decides to maintain. To translate a play on words involves first of all seeing the play on words, so that a strategy can be chosen to render it. An example is the way that Anthea Bell translates the characters’ names in René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo‘s cartoon Astérix le Gaulois (known in English as Asterix the Gaul). Her key realisation is that Goscinny and Uderzo are playing more than the language-game of naming when they invent names for their characters: (74) Names: the books to date contain some four hundred proper names of people … nearly all of which have had to be changed in translation, since they are not really names, but comic spoofs on names made up out of French words in the original. (Bell 2009a:np) She gives the example of the village bard Assurancetourix, whose name in French sounds like assurance tous risques [comprehensive insurance] but which Bell translates as ‘Cacofonix’, maintaining the –ix suffix that denotes him as a Gaul, but also reflecting his terrible musicianship by choosing a name that connotes cacophony. In this translation, a strategy appropriate for the language-game of punning has been chosen,

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with reference to the form of life of the character in question. Bell’s key insight is that the names of the Gaulish characters in the source texts are not really names.The correct translation of a name in this case is therefore a completely different name, which goes against the tendency for proper names not to be translated – and many other correct translations would have been possible within the constraint of punning. Stress on formalism (correctly viewing form and content as inseparable) may make translation seem impossible. Roman Jakobson argues that punning or paronomasia ‘reigns over poetic art’ and that poetry by definition cannot be translated, that only ‘creative transposition’ is possible (2012:131). The Wittgensteinian surveyable representation (PI 122) is, I think, a more coherent concept than the creative transposition, because Jakobson’s term is too broad: all sorts of things can count as transpositions, whereas a representation keeps the source text always in mind. What does a translator do, however, when faced with translating not a single play on words but an entire novel playing on words? Georges Perec’s La disparition [the disappearance] is a product of a French movement that seeks to evoke creativity by imposing constraints on authors, the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle [workshop of potential literature], or Oulipo. Perec’s novel is lipogrammatic – the letter ‘e’ does not appear – a considerable creative feat given that many common French words use ‘e’, such as elle [she], je [I], le [the: masculine singular definite article]. Here is the opening of Perec’s novel: (75) Anton Voyl n’ arrivait pas à dormir. Il alluma. Son Jaz Anton Voyl not was-arriving not to sleep he lit-up his Jaz marquait minuit vingt. Il poussa un profond soupir, s’ assit showed midnight twenty he pushed a deep sigh himself seated sur son lit, s’ appuyant sur son polochon. Il prit un roman, on his bed himself leaning on his bolster he took a novel il l’ ouvrit, il lut; mais il n’ y saisissait qu’ un he it opened he read, but he not there was-seizing only an imbrolglio confus, il butait à tout instant sur un mot imbroglio confused he was-hitting at each instant on a word dont il ignorait la signification. of-which he was-not-knowing the signification (1969:17) Discussing the English translation by Gilbert Adair (1995), Marjorie Perloff comments that Oulipo ‘seems to have exerted as powerful a force in translation as in the original’, so that ‘the central motive and its working out are wholly translatable, whatever the surface details’ (2004:45). Adair translates under the same constraint as Perec, as can be seen in his translation of Perec’s opening: (76) Incurably insomniac, Anton Vowl turns on a light. According to his watch it’s only 12.20. With a loud and languorous sigh Vowl sits up, stuffs a

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pillow at his back, draws his quilt up around his chin, picks up his whodunit and idly scans a paragraph or two; but, judging its plot impossibly difficult to follow in his condition, its vocabulary too whimsically multisyllabic for comfort, throws it away in disgust. (1995:3) The challenge facing Adair is indicated by how the English gloss in example (75) uses the letter ‘e’ 32 times, with ‘he’ occurring seven times for il in the source text. To work within the constraint demands rewriting, such as translating un roman [a novel] as ‘his whodunit’. All translation can of course be said to be an act of rewriting because no target text is in the same language as the source text. The word ‘rewriting’ is understood here as showing that the task of the translator is more than the transference of meaning, that new formulations are required. There is even a play on words in Adair’s translation of the title, because A Void both conveys the title’s reference to disappearance and also shows what Adair is attempting: it reinforces acoustically that he must try to avoid something, i.e. the vowel ‘e’. As Perloff comments: ‘The Wittgensteinian language-game paves the way for some of the most interesting poetic experiments of our own moment … To translate texts like … La disparition is to subordinate oneself to the original’ (2004:45). The Spanish translation similarly subordinates itself by avoiding the letter ‘a’, not ‘e’, because ‘a’ is the most common vowel in Spanish (Arbués et al. 1997). The initial decision about what is the most important language-game in the source text will itself have ramifications because it affects which aspects the translator chooses to bring out in his or her rendering (Oliveira 2012:172). By choosing to write a lipogrammatic target text, certain moves are closed to Adair. He cannot reproduce the repetition of il [he] in text (75), for example.Translation is analogous to a series of ‘moves, as in a game’, as Jirˇ í Levý asserts, where ‘every single move is influenced by the knowledge of previous decisions’ (2000:148–9). It is noteworthy that Levý, like Wittgenstein, sees translation as a game. In referred earlier in this chapter to how some works of literature are viewed as untranslatable, I cited Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (1950) because of its stylistic difficulty. Yet translations of Finnegans Wake do exist, Joyce himself (with Nino Frank) translating parts of it into Italian (1979). John Gledhill, discussing this translation, notes: ‘To translate like Joyce, you have to write like Joyce, or at the very least be a brilliant imitator of his style’ (2007:118). A translation can be said to be successful when it can be used in the same way at the source text. Phyllis Gaffney has analysed renderings of Gerard Manley Hopkins into French by Pierre Leyris and concludes that Leyris’s translation ‘not only says what the original poem says, but does what the original poem does’ (1999:57). And such considerations of use do not apply only to literary translation: Matthew Reynolds notes that when we buy a microwave, the instructions are adequately translated from Japanese if they enable us to make the oven work (2011:20). Texts such as Perec’s are not exceptions in foregrounding a play on words. They are typical. All writing is a play on words. Metaphor, for example, is pervasive

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throughout life (Lakoff and Johnson 2003). What is the correct translation of a literary work? Maybe a completely different literary work.What is the correct translation of an advertisement? Maybe a completely different advertisement.What is the correct translation of a legal document? Maybe a completely different legal document. Members of a family are completely different people, even though they will resemble each other in certain aspects (PI 67) and sometimes the only way to establish family resemblance in translation is to accept that the target text is a different piece of work from the source text, with a different author, even though there will be aspects in which it resembles the source text (Chesterman 1997:9). Daniel Hahn records how he once asked an author if he could change the ‘chickens’ in the source text to ‘parrots’ in the target text (2014:11). Such a strategy would almost certainly be inappropriate for the translation of a manual on agriculture or a description of a house for sale, but everything depends upon the language-game being played, i.e. on the use. Hahn records that he had his reasons for making the request that he did. Wittgenstein can offer a way for the translator to form such reasons.

Applying Wittgenstein Wittgenstein’s methods can not only describe translation but can also be used as tools to translate. In order to illustrate this I shall use my own translations that were written with Wittgenstein’s approach to language in mind and describe the work of a translator who can be assumed to have been influenced by Wittgenstein. In all three examples, I use Wittgenstein’s accounts of language and the tools of the Investigations to show how being reflective about practice can change practice. Gordon Baker notes:‘Conscious analogies and comparisons are useful tools for curing diseases of the intellect, whereas unconscious ones generate insoluble problems by exercising an imperceptible tyranny over our thinking’ (2004:34). Wittgenstein writes to change the way that people think by making things clear (PI p. 4) and – given that translation involves thinking – his work can change the way that people translate. His method involves suggesting analogies that allow the reader to realise that if something is true of one situation then it may be true of others, thus undermining preconceived ideas (PI 1) and giving us conscious analogies and comparisons. What I write here is also analogical, because I trace a link between the grammatical investigations of Wittgenstein and the task of the translator. If Wittgenstein is right about language then this has consequences for the translator: the story told in the Investigations enables him or her to find different ways of expression. Wittgenstein’s philosophy becomes a useful translation tool – and his notions become useful translation tools – through direct application.

Translating literature Anthea Bell describes how ‘the literary translator is always, as it were, playing a part like an actor, trying his or her hardest to become the author of the original’

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(2011:215). Wittgensteinian notions, such as the language-game, can help the translator to do this (and not just in literary texts). Text (77) represents my translation of the extract from the Hildebrandslied that was presented as text (48) in Chapter 2: (77) 1 Alas, most powerful God, an evil fate is coming on us. 2 I wandered summers and winters, sixty, out of the land, 3 when they always placed me at the fighters’ front: 4 yet never at any place did the bane seize me. 5 Now my own child shall hew me with his sword, 6 break me with his blade, or I shall be his bane. 7 Yet you may easily, if your courage avails, 8 from such an old man win the armour 9 and gain the prize, if you have any right. (Wilson 2013:79) I give six remarks about my translation. 1.

2.

As discussed earlier in this chapter, we can translate because justification consists in appealing to something independent (PI 265). At the very least the source text can be glossed. In this context I wanted to go further than a gloss, to provide a target text that could work as a poem in English, so that it could play a similar role in the target language to the one that the source text plays in the source language (Zettel 155). My translation involved moving beyond the gloss so that use could be maintained (PI 43) by seeking strategies to enable the same language-games to be played in the target text as in the source text (Gledhill 2007:5). Text (77) therefore maintains the visual pattern of the source text by using the caesura, a technique no longer common in English poetry, but which allows the lines to function antiphonically, as grim detail is piled upon grim detail.The caesura also encourages slow reading, suitable for the solemnity of the situation described. The alliteration of the source text is suggested – see ‘fighter’s front’ in line 3 and ‘break me with his blade or I shall be his bane’ in line 6 – but there is no attempt to impose any alliterative pattern. There is a switch not only in voice but also in register in lines 7–9: the tone is more resigned and practical; Hildebrand has accepted the situation and is playing a different language-game from that in the previous lines. By attempting to play the same language-games in translation, I was freed from the temptation to tidy up the source text in translation, a tendency that has been observed by many commentators (Weinberger and Paz 1987). The repetition of ‘bane’ in lines 4 and 6 is maintained, for example. The Investigations shows that there are many ways of approaching problems, hence Wittgenstein’s warning against doctrine (PI 109) and his stress on the particular case (PI 66). Many translators do, however, translate according to a

Writing the target text

3.

4.

5.

69

single strategy that precedes looking at the text, as is evident from much paratextual material. An approach to translation after Wittgenstein would by contrast examine the source text’s meaning by looking at its form and responding to that. A translator might therefore bring a variety of strategies to his or her rendering. Here, for example, there is some use of archaic forms, such as ‘Alas’ in line 1 and ‘bane’ in lines 4 and 6, which are used in order to suggest the antiquity of the poem; but the lexis is otherwise of the twenty-first century. Using Wittgenstein frees the translator from dualism. Raleigh Whitinger, for example, describing his translation of Eduard Mörike, writes of being in the ‘uncomfortable position’ of ‘having to produce English equivalents of German verse’, and can be seen to be trapped by the paradigm (2005:xix). Translation after Wittgenstein is not a matter of seeking equivalences; it is a creative activity. The fly is freed from the fly-bottle (PI 309) when the translator is liberated from the false picture that translation is the moving of meaning from one place to another. I am not transferring Old High German to English. If that were my aim, it might be better to read Old English poetry roughly contemporary with the source text, such as Beowulf, following Douglas Hofstadter (1979:380). (As few people can read Old English in the twenty-first century, such a strategy would be self-defeating if the aim were to gain an audience.) To translate involves recreating the source text, not attempting to clone it. The word order of the target text is a blend of Old High German word order and current English word order in order to recreate the heightened feeling of tragic necessity in the source text. The words could be spoken by a character in a current fantasy film such as The Hobbit. They have a highly dramatic quality. Although they do offer the reader information about the characters, the language-games played are not about giving information (Zettel 160). A translation, to be identified as such, must be taken as standing in some sort of a relationship to the source text. In Wittgenstein’s terms, this means that the target text must be a surveyable representation of the source text. The surveyable representation (PI 122), as discussed in Chapter 2, clarifies something to an audience by making connections. Danielle Moyal-Sharrock views literary works as surveyable representations (2009:165), and her theory can be extended to literary translations. The target text of the Hildebrandslied was written to be a surveyable representation of the source text, a relationship that was made clear by the way the poem was published in a bilingual edition, a tactic considered further in Chapter 4. Here I note that by writing in order to produce a surveyable representation, Wittgenstein’s notion becomes a tool. As Maria Tymoczko notes, representation ‘constructs an image, but implies as well the exhibition of that image’ (2006:28). Because the translator after Wittgenstein is not attempting to find equivalences, many different translations of any text are possible. Baker sees any surveyable representation as ‘one of many possible orders, not the order’ (2004:34). The consequence is not, however, that anything goes, given

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Wittgenstein’s insistence that we must respect how things are (PI 9). Text (78) is another possible order: (78) 1 Oh no, by God above, an ill fate strikes. 2 For sixty summers and winters I fled 3 where I was numbered as a warrior, 4 and never did any town seal my doom. 5 Now my own child shall hack me with his sword, 6 cut me down with his blade – or I’ll be his doom. 7 So an easy task awaits you. If you’re brave, 8 then you can win the armour from this old man, 9 can gain the prize, if you have any right.

6.

This text is written to a basic iambic pentameter and has a more colloquial feel than (77). The Old High German welaga nu is represented here as ‘Oh no’, for example, in contrast with ‘Alas’ in (77); but the translation still represents the physiognomy of the source text: the alliteration in the Old High German is refracted through the harsh onomatopoeia in ‘hack me with his sword’ in line 5, for example. Another possibility for the translator would be to relocate the poem, as is fitting in a story that has turned up in various cultures. Here the notion of the language-game would be very helpful, for a new setting could be chosen that would allow the same language-games to be played in a different context, while varying the time and place. Hildebrand could face his son in the midst of the Troubles of Northern Ireland, in the current conflict in Afghanistan or face her daughter in the middle of a financial scandal on Wall Street. Again the notion of surveyable representation helps to explain what is going on in these possible scenarios. As Matthew Reynolds notes: ‘a translation, since it represents a source, is always provisional: it can always be done again differently’ (2011:275). Wittgenstein’s project is a descriptive one (PI 109). In remarks 1–5, I have described my Wittgensteinian translation work on a German source text. Given that I have completed the work, it might be thought that the description is now of no use to me. However, as Jean Boase-Beier argues, a description of any practice will affect future practice because it affects the way that we see things (2011:77). Therefore my description of my practice will affect my future practice, as well as the practice of those who read the description, not by offering a methodology, but in the way that Richard Rorty understands the Wittgensteinian language-game as related to ‘practices, traditions, the kind of things that people pick up without learning any rules but just by “knowhow”’ (Rorty and Vattimo 2005:59). Wittgenstein’s philosophy becomes a useful translation tool through indirect application.

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Translating economics Mélika Ouelbani, summing up the application of the later Wittgenstein to translation, writes that in order to translate one sentence into another the translator must first know the whole language, and second take part in the forms of life with which the language-games are connected (2012:205). In 2007 I was commissioned to translate from a 2004 French essay by Robert Boyer (2004). The essay asked whether Pierre Bourdieu can be seen as a theoretician of change. Bourdieu was not a writer I knew at that time, and I had no experience of economic theory. After reading the source text for translation, I introduced a number of alterations into my form of life, just as Patricia Clancy did when translating the novels of Pierre Magnan, as described earlier. Six of these were as follows. 1. 2. 3.

4.

5.

6.

I read a number of works by Boyer in French, in order to familiarise myself with the language-games in his work. I read works by Bourdieu both in French and in English to the same end. I read English sociology and economics textbooks and journals, such as the Economist, in order to work out how important notions in Bourdieu’s work have been translated, and to gain an insight into how sociology and economics are written in English – how language-games are played that are unique to those fields. I accordingly used terms such as ‘cultural capital’ and ‘Paretan optimum’ in the translation because these are current in English. At times, however, decisions between current usages had to be made. Boyer, for example, is linked to a group of French economic theorists who form the école de la régulation [school of regulation].The word régulation is sometimes found in English as ‘regulation’ but is sometimes untranslated. My own decision was to keep the French term in order to emphasise the fact that this school of economists is one that has been identified with one particular country, i.e. with a form of life. I turned to online resources in order to determine how French expressions in the source text are used in the target language, so that a reference to the marché au cadran [market to the dial] made sense when tracked down in a different context as a ‘computerised [strawberry] market’. This is not a search for equivalence but a search for use. I became aware that Boyer’s use of technical terms from economics and the presumption of a knowledge of economic theory on the part of his readers make the translation of the source text difficult. Yet the source text is ultimately about people. Boyer investigates why people make the choices that they do. Such a stress on practice makes translation possible (Searle 2011). Using this Wittgensteinian framework helped me to maintain my motivation during what was a challenging task. To translate this or any source text accordingly involves work on oneself (CV p. 24). Jean Boase-Beier, discussing the translation of an article in the German magazine Focus, argues that any translation would need to imagine the sort of attitude likely ‘in an author of a short article in a similarly popular English

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magazine’ (2006:119). Wittgenstein’s methods became heuristics available while working under pressure and enabled me to be able to make the sort of leap of imagination recommended by Boase-Beier. Text (79) represents the opening of Boyer’s essay; text (80) follows as my translation: (79) Critiques des hypothèses de la théorie néoclassique critics of-the hypotheses of the theory neoclassical concernant la rationalité, le traitement du temps et la notion concerning the rationality the treatment of-the time and the notion d’équilibre (Aglietta [1976]), les travaux régulationnistes n’ ont pas of balance (Aglietta [1976]) the works regulationist not have not manqué de rencontrer la sociologie de Pierre Bourdieu dans leur failed of to-meet the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu in their recherche d’ une logique de l’ action qui soit compatible research of a logic of the action which might-be compatible avec une approche historique et institutionelle. with an approach historical and institutional (Boyer 2004:1) (80) The critical research work that has been carried out by régulation theorists on certain hypotheses of neoclassical theory – concerning rationality, the treatment of time, and the notion of equilibrium (Aglietta 1976) – has tended to interpret Bourdieu’s sociology as a logic of action, compatible with a historical approach. (Wilson 2008:348) By attempting to play the same language-games, my aim was to translate Boyer not into English, but into an economic essay (Bellos 2011:291).

Translating philosophy One translator who can be said to have been influenced by Wittgenstein is Elizabeth Anscombe (2001), the pupil whom he chose to be the first translator of the Investigations. The current edition is effectively a revision of her work by Peter Hacker and Joachim Schulte, who refer to her 1953 translation as ‘an impressive achievement’ (2009:viii). Wittgenstein demands an aesthetic effort from his readers (Cavell 2001:250), and Anscombe writes a translation that replicates this demand. Her rendering of Wittgenstein’s explanation of why philosophical arguments arise has been examined by Lawrence Venuti (1998:108). The German is as follows (PI 38):

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(81) Denn die philosophischen Probleme entstehen, wenn die Sprache for the philosophical problems arise when the language feiert. celebrates/idles/stops work As shown by the gloss, the translator faces a problem with the final verb, feiert, which has three senses. Anscombe’s translation is: (82) For philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday. Venuti calls it a choice ‘that goes beyond any equivalence based on lexicography’ (1998:109). (In this and the following example, Anscombe’s translations are maintained word for word in the 2009 edition.) The expression has become part of English-speaking Wittgensteinian terminology. It preserves both the positive and the negative implicatures of Wittgenstein’s remark. When Anna goes on holiday, for example, she looks forward to it and is pleased to be going, but it does mean that she will not be around to do any work. As Venuti comments: ‘Anscombe’s translation can be said to have communicated Wittgenstein’s ideas, even to have mimicked his style of writing’ (1998:109). She has identified the language-games in the text and has adopted strategies to play them in her own rendering. Hacker and Schulte assert that she found ‘English analogues for Wittgenstein’s stylistic idiosyncrasies’ and an English rhythm to convey his ‘carefully crafted prose’ (2009:viii). The translation is a surveyable representation, which is reinforced by the bilingual edition, with the German on the left page and the English on the right, which enables readers to follow the German, so that even monolingual readers can track key terms. The example of feiert again shows a play on words being translated by a completely different play on words, as does the way in which Anscombe renders this pun by Wittgenstein (PPF 15), quoted as (83) in German and as (84) in English: (83) Wenn ich sage ‘Herr Schweizer ist kein Schweizer’, so meine ich das erste if I say Mr Schweizer is not-a Swiss so mean I the first ‘Schweizer’ als Eigenname, das zweite als Gattungsname. ‘Schweizer’ as proper-name the second as common-name (84) If I say ‘Mr Scot is not a Scot’, I mean the first ‘Scot’ as a proper name, the second one as a common name. Wittgenstein’s pun arises from the fact that Schweizer means ‘Swiss man’ but is also frequently found as a surname. By translating Schweizer as ‘Scot’, Anscombe avoids the English translation becoming an example of the sort of confusion that Wittgenstein was aiming to clear away (CV p. 9). It is confusing to write: ‘If I say Mr Schweizer is not a Swiss, I mean the first “Schweizer” as a proper name, the second one as a common name’.The use of notes could support the translator who chooses this rendering, but would add paratextual material not in the source text

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and would interrupt the flow of the prose. Anscombe’s rendering solves the problem and also imitates Wittgenstein’s use of a nation apart from Germany where German is spoken (i.e. Switzerland) by the use of a nation apart from England where English is spoken (i.e. Scotland). Anscombe’s 1953 translation of the Investigations is not without its problems: Hacker and Schulte explain that she made errors in her translation of certain grammatical terms, for example, while the German source text on which she worked has since been amended by scholars (2009). Such problems are addressed by Hacker and Schulte in their revision of her work, showing how any translation is part of the flow of human life, and is subject to editing and to amendment.

Conclusions Wittgenstein asserts that language, music and architecture all contain ‘significant irregularities’ (CV p. 40). In Chapter 2, I showed how a reading of Wittgenstein can help the translator to discern significant irregularities in the language source text; in this chapter, I have shown how a reading of Wittgenstein can help the translator to recreate significant irregularities in the target text. Wittgenstein’s philosophy can play a dual role for the practising translator and the translation theorist. First, it can help him or her realise that translation is more than transfer, despite what our intuitions may tell us. Samuel Johnson’s seminal 1755 Dictionary of the English Language, for example, defines translation as ‘to change into another language retaining the sense’, which matches the Platonic contention that form and content can be divided (Republic 514a ff.). Wittgenstein’s methods undermine this dualistic intuition, as if by various therapies (PI 133). Second, Wittgenstein supports the contrary intuition, often put forward by creative writers, that translation is indeed about more than transfer. Matthew Sweeney and John Hartley Williams, for example, advise that the goal of translating poetry is to come up with a poem that ‘lives in the new language’, so that ‘a poem that’s ragged in the original needs to be ragged in the translation’ (2005:156). This comment about poetry translation is applicable to other types of translation (Reynolds 2011:7). Their insight is reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s remark, ‘What’s ragged should be left ragged’, though Wittgenstein is here addressing religion, not translation (CV p. 51). Wittgenstein offers a set of tools, such as the language-game, to support those who choose to translate this way. With respect to the study of translation, a correlative of my reading of Wittgenstein is that his methods oppose work on language and translation that assumes a code model of language or that stresses equivalence (Tymoczko 2006). His methods, by contrast, support an occasion-sensitive approach to language in philosophy (Travis 2008) and a stylistic approach in translation studies (Boase-Beier 2006). Wittgenstein asserts – in Anscombe’s translation – that philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday (PI 38), i.e. when it idles, divorces itself from context. The same is true of translational problems and Wittgenstein can help us to see this – and therefore to translate.

4 THEORISING THE TARGET TEXT

In this chapter, I consider how the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein can be of use to the translator or the theorist who is theorising the target text. I examine: Wittgenstein’s story of the beetle in a box, which I read as a parable about the nature of translation; how the target text might be described; the problem of evaluating quality in translation; how the grammatical investigation can be applied to the supermemes of translation as well as to translation theories. I then consider how Wittgenstein can be applied to theoretical work by: considering the work of one theorist; examining one cluster of translation; showing how Wittgensteinian notions can influence the presentation of the target text. Finally, I draw conclusions.

The beetle in the box Translation studies attempts to account for both the practice and the product of translation, i.e. the activity and its artefacts. Confusion can be avoided from the start by being clear how the word ‘translation’ is being used to describe both process and product, and is then used in different ways in those descriptions. By employing Wittgenstein’s methods in an investigation of translation theory, we can clear up conceptual confusion and open the way to clarity, by showing that there is no meta-practice involved, but a variety of practices that results in a variety of outcomes. From the Wittgensteinian point of view, the phenomena precede the theorising, as in the approach to the study of literature advanced by Derek Attridge: ‘I do not wish to begin … as many theoretical accounts of literature do, with the various philosophical projects that have largely determined our approach to these issues and the vocabulary we use, but rather with the observable phenomena themselves’ (2004:1). Philosophy, for Wittgenstein, likewise begins with looking, not with doctrine (PI 66). Attridge acknowledges the influence of the later Wittgenstein on his work, particularly in making him

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‘cautious about the search for closed definitions’ (2004:143). And this is what is at stake in this chapter on the theorising of the target text: that the investigation should not be a search for closed definitions. As discussed in Chapter 1, the later Wittgenstein takes a radical position on theory, given his assertion that ‘we may not advance any kind of theory’ (PI 109), which has led some of his followers to advocate a total rejection of theory (Cook 2007). It is worth examining the original German: (85) Und wir dürfen keinerlei Theorie aufstellen. and we may absolutely-no theory put-up The verb aufstellen [to put up] is commonly used in German in the sense of ‘to begin with’, so that the sentence can be read as a warning not to start with a theory, in line with Attridge’s position. There is no implicit ban on theory here. The refusal to advance theory and to avoid the hypothetical involves a stress on the concrete and on examples from the everyday. As John Searle asserts, just because Wittgenstein did not advance a theory does not mean that his readers cannot have a theory about anything (in Magee 1987:143). In Investigations 293, Wittgenstein tells the story of the beetle in the box: (86) Suppose that everyone had a box with something in it which we call a ‘beetle’. No one can ever look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. – Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing. – But what if the word ‘beetle’ had a use nonetheless? – If so it would not be the name of a thing. The thing in the box doesn’t belong to the language-game at all; not even as a Something: for the box might even be empty. – No, one can ‘divide through’ by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is. The example is about the public and the private, about the impossibility of knowing something according to internal criteria only. It illustrates Wittgenstein’s previous discussion in Investigations 293 about whether it is possible to know what pain is ‘only from my own case’, and should be seen in the context of the remarks about the possibility of a private language in Investigations 256–314.There is no way of knowing within the constraints set out by Wittgenstein what somebody else has in their box. A box could even be empty. As long as we look inwards for the meaning of the word ‘beetle’, it remains meaningless.The beetle would have to be shown for the term to be meaningful. Wittgenstein’s beetle in the box has received a vast amount of exegesis, as detailed by David Stern (2007). It has usually been taken as ‘a reductio ad absurdum of Cartesian dualism’, i.e. of the view that the person is composed of two distinct essences (body and mind), but has received many other interpretations, so that Stern describes it as a parable with its own afterlife

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(2007:249). The parable can enter translation studies if the word ‘beetle’ is replaced by the word ‘translation’. It only becomes clear what a translation is when all the translations are taken out of their boxes and examined. By examining the use of the term, we can fulfil the anti-essentialist project at the heart of Wittgenstein’s later work, as illustrated by Investigations 116: (87) When philosophers use a word – ‘knowledge’, ‘being’, ‘object’, ‘I’, ‘proposition/sentence’, ‘name’ – and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language in which it is at home? – What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use. The metaphysical is rejected in favour of the everyday. Instead of trying to define the phenomenon and then looking for examples, the correct process is to pay attention to how the term is used in everyday discourse, in situations where it is ‘at home’. To expect a single answer to the question ‘What is translation?’ is to fail to recognise that the meaning of the term ‘translation’ is complex. Considerations of time, place and context all apply. The box must be opened and the beetle examined. The term ‘translation’ refers to very different sorts of activity and to very different sorts of outcome. For the translation scholar, clarity is attained by comparing the phenomena under investigation (PI 50). It is, for example, all too easy for Western scholars to see translation solely from a Western perspective, forgetting that non-Western traditions instantiate different approaches (Tymoczko 2006). For example, anuvad is a Sanskrit and Hindi term for written translation that can be translated as ‘repeating’ or ‘saying later’ (Spivak 2007:274), so that translation in this context can be seen as a process of ‘updating and elaborating, rather than as some kind of physical movement across cultures’ (Pym 2010:2). Different Western translation practices have also dominated in the past – for example, the notion of foreignisation is very different in the nineteenth-century writings of Friedrich Schleiermacher (2012) from in the contemporary writings of Lawrence Venuti (1998, 2008). The term ‘translation’ is therefore far from straightforward. Roman Jakobson proposes a tripartite classification: intralingual translation or rewording; interlingual translation or translation proper; intersemiotic translation or transmutation (2012:127).These definitions are too broad to allow certain texts to be satisfactorily categorised. A relocation, for example, involves a specific strategy on the part of the translator: £9.99, Adriana Hunter’s translation (2002) of Frédéric Beigbeder’s French novel 99 francs, moves the setting of the source text from Paris to London, yet according to Jakobson’s system it can only be classified as an interlingual translation, which would not differentiate it from translations that do not relocate. Other theorists place translations on clines: Jeremy Munday, for example, contrasts the ‘derivative’ (such as phonological translation) with the ‘primary’ (such as creative

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translation) (2009:8). Again, the mapping is too restrictive. The translation of Catullus by Celia and Louis Zukofsky (1969) is both phonological and creative, for instance. Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance, discussed in Chapter 1, enables the scholar to avoid the problems of classification that arise in systems such as those of Jakobson and Munday, as argued by Maria Tymoczko (2007:83–90). Just as the search for any one characteristic, found in all members of a family, is typically fruitless, so Tymoczko argues that trying to apply any all encompassing category to the variety of phenomena addressed in translation studies is futile. She uses the term ‘cluster concept’ to designate a concept that includes different aspects, and proposes translation as a cluster concept, being, like ‘game’, a concept with ‘blurred edges’ (PI 71). The term is brought back from a metaphysical to an everyday use, as part of an anti-essentialist project. Seeing translation as a cluster concept can clarify the use made of the term. The meaning of the word chosen to describe individual acts of translation depends upon its use (cf. PI 43). The opera Faust by Charles Gounod, for example, can be described as a translation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s dramatic poem Faust, but I should probably cause frustration if I brought back the score when asked to get a translation of Faust. I should have failed to carry out a grammatical investigation of what was wanted. Tymoczko, as part of her grammatical investigation of the phenomena of translation, accordingly writes the term with an asterisk, i.e. ‘*translation’, in order to signal to the reader that it is a cluster concept that can include different practices of translation and hence signify ‘the cross-cultural understanding that translation studies must move towards’ (2007:59). An advantage of seeing translation in this way is that it allows overlap between different types of translation and different types of translating. The translation of Beigbeder by Hunter (2002), for example, can be analysed according to several aspects: the purpose of the relocation, the consistency of the relocation, the way that the style echoes the style of the source text, the accuracy of the rendering of French expressions, etc. All are part of the cluster. The description of any target text will involve its identification as a translation. This point will be elaborated in the next section. Here it is important to note the variety of words used to describe translations and to apply Wittgenstein in order to show that terms such as ‘adaptation’, ‘literal translation’, ‘version’, etc. only have sense in the way they are used. There is no essence behind a concept to which appeal may be made, just as the box may not even contain a beetle in Wittgenstein’s story. By referring to *translation, Tymoczko is able to challenge what she sees as the predominant Western paradigm of translation, i.e. the transference of meaning (analogous to a scientific process), as discussed in Chapter 3. She regards this paradigm as too narrow, principally because it excludes non-Western ways of engaging with the source text. She quotes the Chinese fanyi [turning over] as an example of one such way, and it would also apply to the Sanskrit and Hindi anuvad mentioned above. Her call is for the broadening of the term ‘translation’ in critical and scholarly

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discourse in order to include such non-Western conceptualisations and thus to move away from a situation that is ethically unacceptable because it assumes the superiority of Western paradigms (2006:20). Munday predicts that the response to Tymoczko’s call will be of immense importance, possibly involving a radical change in the whole discipline of translation studies, ‘a new “turn”, detour, byway or complete translocation’ (2009:19).What begins as a look at how a term is used may end by changing everything, as is Wittgenstein’s aim in philosophy (Monk 1990:533). Faced with a cluster, there is a tendency for the critic to oversimplify, but, following Wittgenstein, it is a tendency to be resisted. Tymoczko argues that it is a mystery ‘why theorists are so determined to defuzz the discipline’ of translation studies (2007:90). Defuzzing ignores the ‘rough ground’ of linguistic practices (PI 107) by seeing language as an artefact of ‘crystalline purity’, a preconceived ideal that ‘can only be removed by turning our whole inquiry around’ (PI 108). An example of the defuzzing tendency is the way that translation is often viewed in polarities. It is possible to read many classic statements from translation practitioners and translation theorists as polarities, where one method of translating or viewing a translation is contrasted exclusively with another (Pym 2010:33). Christiane Nord, for example, contrasts documentary translation with instrumental translation (1997).Yet a translation may be documentary in one sentence and instrumental in another; or documentary in one part of a sentence and instrumental in another part; or both documentary and instrumental at once (Boase-Beier 2006:27). When translation is viewed in polarities, the solution offered is two-dimensional, whereas the ideal solution would be at least three-dimensional, just as Wittgenstein uses the colour octahedron (as opposed to a colour wheel) as an example of a surveyable representation (Philosophical Remarks 51–2). We should attempt to see and describe clusters and not to impose concepts and clines. The beetles must be brought out of their boxes and described. After all, more than 4,000 different species of beetle have been categorised in Britain alone (Cooter and Barclay 2006:xiv).

Describing the surface For Wittgenstein, meaning is on the surface, and nothing is hidden (PI 126). Depth grammar is the way that a text is used, not some mystical addition to a word or text (PI 664). In this section, I show how the surface can be described in order to produce a theory of the text. Following the discussion in Chapter 1, I use the term ‘theory’ to mean ‘view of ’ rather than ‘doctrine about’. I begin by considering Wittgenstein’s application of his methods to mathematics, which may in turn suggest how his methods can be applied to translation. Wittgenstein stresses not the subject taught in classrooms but the use of mathematics in ordinary life, a use he calls ‘outside mathematics … the meaning of the signs, that makes the sign-game into mathematics’ (RFM V-2). Parallel to the language-game is the ‘sign-game’ (such as a sum), which only makes sense in context, in how mathematics is carried out. As Ray Monk comments, for Wittgenstein, mathematics is

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(88) first and foremost the motley of techniques and practices we employ that use mathematical signs; we count out the money we give to the bus driver, we calculate how much money we will need to save to afford a holiday, we estimate how fast a car was going when it hit a pedestrian etc. etc. (2007:287) Mathematics is viewed as a human practice, like language. This unconventional view of mathematics explains what Wittgenstein means by the following comment on translation in Zettel 698 (also in Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology I 778), part of which was discussed in Chapter 3 in the context of translation as replacement: (89) Translating from one language into another is a mathematical task, and the translation of a lyrical poem, for example, into a foreign language is quite analogous to a mathematical problem. For one may well frame the problem ‘How is this joke (e.g.) to be translated (i.e. replaced) by a joke in the other language?’ and this problem can be solved; but there was no systematic method of solving it. The first sentence of (89) might suggest to somebody unacquainted with Wittgenstein’s views on mathematics that translation is a mechanical task following a pre-set procedure. This is not the case. I may use such a procedure if I want to work out the product of (49 x 49), but there is no procedure involved if I am trying to work out how to save up for a holiday. Instead, there are such considerations as where I would like to go, other projects I wish to undertake, how long I want to be away for, how much money I have saved, etc. Similarly, with regard to translating a lyrical poem, a variety of considerations arise about which aspects can be imitated in translation – rhyme, rhythm, meter, imagery, etc. – in order to write a target text with the same language-games as the source text. With reference to translating a joke,Wittgenstein stresses that the problem can be solved, i.e. that translation is possible, but that there is no systematic formula for solving it. (In Last Writings on Philosophical Psychology I 278, he makes a similar point about how the correct translation of an English play on words may be a completely different play on words, as discussed in Chapter 3.) The same joke may be translated differently on different occasions, depending on the context, just as there are many ways of arranging my finances so I can go on holiday. Neither the sign-game nor the language-game can be divorced from the form of life. To adapt Monk (2007:287), translation is by implication first and foremost the motley of techniques and practices we employ that use linguistic signs when we replace one text with another in a different language. Monk describes Wittgenstein as a ‘methodological anarchist’ (2007:287). It is an error to search for a rule to enable me to translate this joke into German. What is possible, however, is to describe the ways that people do translate a joke (a poem, a legal report, a website) into German, descriptions that may in turn suggest to me

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ways of translating, as I learn from practices and am trained in techniques. Wittgenstein’s position is found in PI 109: (90) All explanation must disappear, and description alone must take its place. The stress is on looking rather than on thinking, on considering phenomena rather than on imposing doctrine on phenomena. The approach leads to the surveyable representation of phenomena (PI 122), which may in turn give us a partial explanation. If I describe how a man fell from a window, for example, this may explain his broken leg, though there may be other causes: he was pushed by his boss, who was angry with him, etc. There can never be any total explanation because explanations ‘come to an end somewhere’ (PI 1) and the concept of a total explanation (or description) remains illusory (Keil and Wilson 2000). Descriptive Translation Studies, to which I now turn, is associated with the work of Gideon Toury, who cites Wittgenstein as a source (1980:17–18). Edwin Gentzler notes how Toury uses Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance in order to view translations as original texts that contain ‘clusters of properties, meanings, possibilities’, so that the concept of one correct translation is no longer possible (2001:126). Family resemblance is a way of showing that such common notions of ‘translation as transference’ and of ‘translation as equivalence’ are wrongheaded because they oversimplify complicated phenomena. Because translation is a human activity (PI 23) and a cluster concept (Tymoczko 2007), there are many ways of approaching it. The translation theorist can show his or her reader what is going on in the target text, while avoiding any suggestion of a correct model of translation underlying the process like a Platonic Form. Descriptive Translation Studies represents a refusal to proceed by imposing a paradigm on the phenomenon of translation and its products – for example, by seeing translation as either instrumental or documentary (as discussed in the previous section), as if there were only two ways in which it could be described. (Some descriptivists do go on to evaluate translations in terms of polarity – for example, Toury (1995) sees translations as either ‘acceptable’ or ‘adequate’.) The existence of many different sorts of polarity in the field of translation theory is itself an indication that different people choose to describe things in different ways, and that things can indeed be described in different ways. Any attempt to describe translation from a Wittgensteinian point of view will investigate the language-games played by source text and target text as well as the ‘particular historical and cultural context of any translator, any translation event, and any translation movement’ (Tymoczko 2007:41), i.e. the form of life that produces the artefact. Two examples can illustrate this point. First, the 1715 translation of Homer’s Iliad by Alexander Pope (1931) is written in rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter, whereas the Ancient Greek source text is written in unrhymed dactylic hexameter. Pope’s practice can be contextualised by pointing to the fact that he was using the dominant form of eighteenth-century English verse; many of his readers would also have been familiar with the source text, and

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would have been interested in how Pope handled it, rather than looking for the transmission of content. Describing Pope in this way offers a partial explanation of the translation, by relating it to the form of life. The more descriptions we can offer, the fuller our picture of any phenomenon may become and the more we may understand it, which is why Bertolt Brecht maintains that a person with only one theory is lost and that we should stuff many theories ‘in our pockets like newspapers’ (in Makaryk 1993:vii). Second, the study of the translation of museum texts by Marie-Noëlle Guillot (2014) can be seen as Wittgensteinian in how it proceeds. She describes the translation into French of an English description of a Lucian Freud painting, showing how it is longer and more complex than the source text (2014:87). The description is linked to a form of life by turning to developments in museum theory, where scholars have argued that museums need to recognise that foreign visitors bring with them ‘different assumptions about, and expectations of, the museum’ (2014:91), so that a translator may choose to expand a text for a French audience. We now have a partial explanation of the differences in the texts that have been compared. By linking the study of translated texts to the background, the translation scholar can avoid two dangers: essentialism and thinking in polarities (2014:76). The stress on description, rather than the putting forward of a doctrine, is typical of many of the classic texts of translation studies, written by practising translators about their work.Willis Barnstone asserts: ‘Before the second decade of our century translation theory, despite the name, was not so much theory as a history of the practice of translation’ (1993:61). In his Circular Letter on Translation of 1530, for example, Martin Luther writes a justification of the sense-for-sense approach of his translation of the New Testament into German, and explains how he aims to write a German that would be readily understandable by the ordinary people of the sixteenth century (1997).This descriptive tradition continues in the paratextual material often found accompanying the target text in published translations. Theorising the target text begins by describing it as translation, which then allows work on that description. Descriptive Translation Studies is an example of this approach, but the descriptive paradigm is wider; as Anthony Pym stresses, it has roots in texts from the history of translation studies and is now the dominant model of theorising about translation (2010:64). Other paradigms of translation theory, such as polysystem theory or skopos theory, are similarly descriptive.Wittgenstein’s descriptive approach therefore becomes important. Profundity can be attained by describing the surface (PI 126). Central to Descriptive Translation Studies is the case study – for example, the ‘assortment of case studies’ from Hebrew translation that Toury offers to illustrate a variety of genres and translation approaches: renderings of William Shakespeare’s sonnets; indirect translation; mediation in translation; literary translation; interim solutions; translations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet; translation of lexis; experimental translation; bilingualism and translation (1995:113 ff.). Such stress on examples is a Wittgensteinian approach. In a 1935 letter to Wittgenstein, C.L. Stevenson comments: ‘I have learned over again what you often said, and practised in your

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classes – that clarity is almost all a matter of giving examples’ (in McGuinness 2008:182). The use of a variety of cases avoids black-and-white thinking and can contribute both to the training and the professional development of translators. Andrew Chesterman notes how translations are related to forms of life: ‘the boundaries of the concept “translation” are not set by something intrinsic to the concept itself, but by the ways in which members of a culture use the concept’ (1997:62). A translation needs to be accepted as such. To describe things in reference to other criteria is Wittgensteinian in its anti-essentialism (cf. PI 190), and the way Chesterman references Wittgenstein frequently in the work from which this quotation is taken gives him a rationale for his theorising. That translation needs to be seen in context is worth pointing out because translated texts are still frequently described as if they were written in the target language. James Lasdun (2009), for example, reviewing the novel The Kindly Ones, fails to mention that it is a translation by Charlotte Mandell of Jonathan Littell’s French novel Les Bienveillantes, thus treating Mandell’s translation as if it were a non-translated work in English. While this may be a common approach in the language-game of reviewing, within the framework of Descriptive Translation Studies the description can only be a surveyable representation if it describes the target text as translation, if that connection is made explicit. Twentieth-century translation theory is often seen as moving away from practice into obscure realms of no help to the practising translator. Walter Benjamin’s 1923 essay ‘The Translator’s Task’ (2012), for example, was written as the introduction to his own translation into German of the French of Charles Baudelaire’s Tableaux parisiens [Parisian scenes], but never references the source text. Barnstone comments that the essay is ‘a little world made cunningly of theory, literary translation and language’ (1993:4), and that the German translations of Baudelaire ‘do not seem to be written by the same man who discusses theory and method in the prefatory essay’: there is ‘an absolute split between theory and practice’ (1993:61). Many practising translators are wary of theory precisely because of this split. In dialogue with Chesterman, Emma Wagner comments that most translators encounter theory as students and later forget it as they undertake practical work; she sees a gap between theory and practice greater than in other professions (Chesterman and Wagner 2002:1 ff.). For her, theory is useless because it fails to offer concrete advice, guidelines and doctrines. Chesterman’s response is to express sympathy with her complaint but to state that she has misunderstood the theoretical project. He makes an analogy with literary criticism, which is not expected to be used as a tool to produce creative writers, and claims that her desire for prescriptive theory misses the point, because to prescribe would be to ignore practice. Translation theory is primarily a descriptive project in which, as Pym points out, ‘scholars have set out to describe what translations are, rather than just prescribe how they should be’ (2010:65). The descriptive project is a reaction against the prescriptive approach and against theory divorced from practice, and it represents a turn in translation studies, described by Maria Tymoczko as a move away from a positivist, quasiscientific position (2007:16).

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Using Wittgenstein ought not to be a case of calling on a philosophical police officer by appealing to rules. To do so would not be in the spirit of Wittgenstein. In Investigations 123, he remarks: ‘A philosophical problem has the form: “I don’t know my way about”’. My contention is that his work provides tools for the translation theorist, who is enabled to find his or her way about by describing the target text, adopting a theory in the sense of taking a view of a text, not in the sense of forming a doctrine of what translation is. The project of theorising the target text after Wittgenstein would be anti-essentialist and anti-prescriptive. It would work through examples and through case studies. It would aim at giving a surveyable representation of the target text as translated. It would provide tools for analysing existing translation theories. It would enable the theorist to relate the target text to the form of life of the source text and of the translator. And it would be ‘bottom-up analysis’ (beginning with the text) rather than ‘top-down analysis’ (beginning with a theory), as advocated by Pym (2010:66).

Translated to our satisfaction It is natural enough to want to know if a translation is any good, especially if you are paying for it as a consumer or commissioner. Joanna Drugan notes that there has been an increasing focus on quality in the translation industry since the 1990s (2013:69), and there is a corresponding growth of interest in evaluation within translation studies (Chesterman and Wagner 2002:82 ff.). In 1945 Wittgenstein wrote to Norman Malcolm that he had been reading a recent American translation of the Bible and disliked the rendering of the New Testament, but thought that the translation of the Old Testament ‘makes a lot clearer to me and seems to be well worth reading’ (in McGuinness 2008:385). This is the sort of reception most translators hope their work will have: that readers will find it well worth reading. It is significant that Wittgenstein was drawn to the translation because it made things clearer for him. He saw it as a surveyable representation, something that he recognised as a translation and that made clearer to him aspects of the network of Bible translation, presumably by his cross-referencing it to other translations he had read, given that he could not read Hebrew. By contrast, the Icelandic novelist Halldór Laxness made the following complaint in a letter written to Johannes Lindberg in the same year: ‘I had the misfortune of being introduced in Sweden … by a rotten translation from the Danish of my novel Salka Valka’ (in Ringmar 2009:262). This condemnation is stronger than Wittgenstein’s expression of dislike for the New Testament translation because Laxness expresses a judgement that there is something qualitatively wrong with the translation of his work. These examples make clear that the evaluation of translation is itself a practice that can be related to the Wittgensteinian notion of the form of life. How we evaluate is based on other works we have read, evaluations made by other people, norms within a field, etc. As Wittgenstein remarks, people want to know that the translation they read is in some sense reliable (RFM III-85):

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(91) (Who says that this English poem can be translated into German to our satisfaction?!) There are two issues here: of authority and of judgement. I begin with the question of judgement. David Damrosch argues that any translation may fail on two counts: there may be outright error or there may be a fundamental inadequacy in face of the ‘force and beauty of the original’ (2012:426). It is the possibility of the failure of translation that allows its evaluation. If Wittgenstein’s picture theory of language in the Tractatus is correct, then evaluation ought to be easy enough. This is not, however, the case. Text (92) is written to illustrate a discussion of translation evaluation by Brian Mossop that uses French as the source language (2007:185): (92) La voiture est rouge. the car is red If I translate this sentence as ‘the car is yellow’ then, as Mossop argues, the error would be serious if I were translating a police report about a missing car. In other circumstances, however, it could be insignificant – for example, in the translation of a novel. It is even possible to imagine circumstances where rendering rouge as ‘yellow’ was a sound translation choice: in translating a poem, ‘yellow’ might provide a convenient rhyme; in translating an advertisement, it might in certain contexts be advisable to change the colour of the car because of cultural differences. The issues that arise when evaluating the translation of such a simple item as La voiture est rouge show that things are not as straightforward as the picture theory of language would suggest, even if the theory remains deeply embedded in Western culture (Cook 1998:74). The central thrust of the Investigations is to resist the picture theory as an oversimplification. Context is crucial for meaning, and there are no essentialist standards to which we can appeal when making judgements, which is what makes evaluation in translation so challenging (Drugan 2013:107). The standard metre in Paris as described by Wittgenstein is not absolute in itself: everything depends on how it is used (PI 50). Thus a student may lose a mark in an examination for a lexical error when translating rouge as ‘yellow’, while the 1804 translations of Sophocles from Classical Greek to German by Friedrich Hölderlin (1952) have become canonical despite what seem to be numerous lexical errors. Judgement in translation depends upon the realisation that different sorts of translation demand different standards. As Maria Tymoczko argues, we must look at actual translation products rather than starting out with theory, which involves looking both at our own forms of life and the forms of life of translation, which will show us that there are many divergent ideas, canons and standards in translation: ‘standards of diplomatic translation, medical translation, legal translation, and literary translation are all quite different’ (2014:166–7). Again, this fits in with the Wittgensteinian stress on practice, where the investigation of language reveals a variety of language-games being played, each with its own conventions and – by

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implication – each demanding different standards of assessment. The translation industry typically demands fluency in the translation of non-literary texts, for example, whereas some translation theorists have questioned fluency in literary translation (Drugan 2013:44). There is no contradiction here when it is noted that different language-games are being played. By evaluating translation, we move beyond description. As Kirsten Malmkjær (2004) argues, the target-text-oriented philosophy of Descriptive Translation Studies makes it difficult to justify evaluation theoretically because any translation choice may have been the result of following a norm, however bizarre. Malmkjær distinguishes between identifying patterns of manipulation and identifying errors, and appeals to the notion of ‘semantic fields’ as a way of procedure. Analysing the translations from Danish to English of Hans Christian Andersen by Mary Howitt, she gives the following example. The Danish source text appears as (93) and Howitt’s translation as (94): (93) over Isen across the-ice (94) over the iron (2004:150) Malmkjær argues that best description of text (94) is that the polyglot Howitt has treated the Danish noun Isen as a ‘false friend’ by assuming that it is cognate with the German noun Eisen [iron], and has thus misrepresented the Danish by postulating a semantic link where there is none.This is more reasonable than assuming that Howitt was trying to create a particular literary effect. It is an error, but we can only come to this conclusion if we look outside the text at the ‘formal characteristics of the language items involved’ (2004:154). Appeal to semantic fields is one way of looking outside the text, as is the appeal to language-games, and they are not exclusive, because avoidance of error can be seen as integral to the languagegame of translation. If a translation can function as a surveyable representation, as argued in Chapter 3, then the surveyable representation itself must be seen as such: that is, it must be shown. Again, for something to be a surveyable representation depends on the context. Wittgenstein’s example, the colour octahedron, can be categorised as a surveyable representation because it can be related to something we know from everyday life, i.e. colours, of which it is one possible scheme (Philosophical Remarks 51–2). Translations similarly show themselves as such within human practices: the name of a translator may be on the target text; paratextual material may be attached to the target text; laws and professional codes have been formulated in many countries to regulate translation. In spite of the existence of such phenomena, resistance to translation is often described as endemic in the Anglophone world (Venuti 2008), where many target texts are effectively disguised as original work, both in how they are written and

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how they are presented. Wittgenstein’s later work reminds us that the world is constituted by different practices. It is significant that Wittgenstein came from a multilingual Vienna and served in a multilingual army in the First World War (Eagleton 2008). Many people in the world do live at some sort of linguistic interface – for example, India, Luxembourg or Quebec – and most people speak more than one language in increasingly globalised societies, so that the typical linguistic situation is dynamic and not static (Drugan 2013:15). How we organise translation may help us to perceive the world as linguistically dynamic, even within monolingual cultures; just as we cannot check the news by buying more copies of the same morning paper (PI 265), so we cannot understand translation without examining the phenomena that surround it, i.e. the different linguistic practices and cultures that exist in the world. A reading of the later Wittgenstein therefore supports such strategies as publishing bilingual editions as opposed to monolingual, as discussed in Chapter 3. The translation by David Luke of Eduard Mörike’s German poem ‘Das verlassene Mägdlein’ [the abandoned maid], for example, offers Mörike’s source text, Luke’s English translation and a Scots translation by Gilbert McKay (Luke 1997:105). The whole is a surveyable representation that shows, through its layout, two of the many ways of translation that are available. As Anthea Bell comments, it provides ‘an interesting and valuable insight into the comparative opportunities for translation offered by different but related idioms and vocabularies’ (2000:972). Texts frequently appear in multilingual versions: in the EU, legislation is published in every official language, with no text having superior status; a washing-machine manual may offer instructions in different languages; films on DVD offer subtitles in different languages; Microsoft routinely translates its English source texts into 80 languages. In all these cases, translation is made evident, even where the bilingual or multilingual presentation is accidental to the work’s function. It is unrealistic to expect publishers of prose works to bring out bilingual editions, due to considerations of cost and bulk – although Wittgenstein’s major works are available as such – but one possibility is to include at least some of the source text alongside the target text if the context is appropriate, which is the approach taken in Seamus Heaney’s translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf (1999:2). Another solution is to link printed translations to online material in order to enable translators to write at greater length about their work, which might not be possible in print due to lack of space. The Italian website La nota del traduttore [the note of the translator] (2011), for example, offers such an opportunity. In terms of organisation, the surveyable representation could also influence how translations are marketed. The design of the target text can fight against the invisibility of the translator, for example, by referencing the translator’s name and including his or her biography, just as the colour octahedron can make people see the grammar of the spectrum in one particular way, other views being possible. The practice of reviewing, similarly, can reference the translator. In the previous section, I referred to a review by James Lasdun (2009), in which he fails to mention that the novel under review is a translation (by Charlotte Mandell of Jonathan Littell).

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By contrast, Anthony Beevor (2009), in his review of the same work, comments that it is a translation and discusses Mandell’s translation of style. The notion of surveyable representation explains why Matthew Sweney takes issue with the translation by Ewald Osers of a collection by the Czech poet Víte˘zlav Nezval, noting among other things: misprints; omitted dedications; unacknowledged abridgement; omission of source-text poems. Sweney concludes that the reader is being offered a ‘botched job’ due to poor editing: there has been no comparison of input and output (2010:98). Clearly only an expert in the field could make such a judgement, but Sweney’s review is wholly appropriate in the context of a journal of literary translation. Wittgenstein’s question about translation, given as (91), also asks who can say that a text has been translated to our satisfaction. Many people are of course involved in translation evaluation. Scholars, critics and teachers are typically those who judge translation within the field of translation studies (Chesterman and Wagner 2002:83), but there is systemic evaluation of translation by professionals within the translation industry and, more informally, users also evaluate translations (Drugan 2013). Turning to Wittgenstein can help all evaluators to become informed about what goes on in translation, i.e. to become informed readers (Fish 1996), because philosophy involves reflection on practice. The use of Wittgenstein for translation evaluation would promote Maria Tymoczko’s project of broadening the scope and possibilities of translation and of empowering translators (2007) because it would introduce debate about the nature of meaning and would show that translation is never simply about transference and that judging a translation is a complex matter, more like judging a portrait in oils than marking a sum (Bellos 2011:331). Wittgenstein’s comments on translation are not dogmatic: his remark on the correct German translation of an English play on words being ‘maybe a completely different play on words’ is qualified by the use of ‘maybe’ (Last Writings on Philosophical Psychology I 278). There is no prescription. It is worth noting again his advice in Investigations 79: (95) Say what you please, so long as it does not prevent you from seeing how things are. Within constraints – within the views put forward in the Investigations of how language works – there is the freedom that comes from clarity. If the use of Wittgenstein can make theorists clearer about what is being evaluated, it indicates a further move that can be made in evaluation, i.e. to situate translation within the greater context of production. Douglas Robinson (2003), for example, stresses that translation is about people, not least at the level of the project. The target text on sale in bookshops and the website translated from a source to a target language are collaborative products that have been commissioned, translated and edited. Translation scholars often write as if the translator alone is responsible for the decisions in the target text, some of which may have been taken at the editorial level, as anybody who has ever translated a text is aware (Mossop 2007).

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Katy Derbyshire’s translation of Clemens Meyer credits the whole team behind the book, including the editors (2011:243), which is the sort of move that Wittgenstein’s work, which stresses how we constitute each other, would demand, supporting the use by translation scholars of such theorists as Pierre Bourdieu in order to describe the complications of the translation process (Inghilleri 2005). Following Tymoczko (2007), we can see not only translation as a cluster concept, but also the translator. Joanna Drugan comments on the huge gulf between theorists and practitioners when it comes to the evaluation of translation. Theorists typically begin with theoretical models which are tested on cherry-picked cases, focusing on products and not on processes, while practitioners look towards practice and how it can be improved (2013:39). As a result, translation theorists tend to be descriptive, whereas practitioners tend to be prescriptive. Wittgenstein can be used to help to bridge this gap, not least because he is often considered to be the sort of philosopher who can appeal to those outside the academy. Terry Eagleton calls him ‘the philosopher of poets and composers, playwrights and novelists’ (1994:153), and translators could be added to this list for three reasons. First, Wittgenstein’s rejection of the picture theory of language together with the epistemological instruction to see meaning as use (PI 43) imply the need to begin with practice not with theory (PI 109). Tymoczko argues that one of the ‘most pernicious aspects of much contemporary translation theory is the tendency to make pretheoretical assumptions about translation in attempting to promulgate theory’ (2014:169), and Wittgenstein’s work can be used to support this argument in order to show that translation evaluation must begin with the observation of practice. Second, the Wittgensteinian goal of being clear about terminology can be applied in order to clear up confusion between theorists and practitioners. For example, Andrew Chesterman and Emma Wagner note how the translation industry focuses on practical procedures for quality assurance, whereas theorists tend to focus on norms (2002:94). The existence of two different terms – ‘quality assurance’ and ‘norms’ – can obscure the fact that the terms are being used in very similar ways.The notion of ‘fit-for-purpose’ translation within the translation industry can similarly be linked to ideas from skopos theory (Drugan 2013:44). Again and again in the Investigations,Wittgenstein shows how reflection on the employment of terms in everyday activities can remove confusion. Third, support can be offered to models of evaluation that have been formulated by translation theorists, once it is stressed that practice must be examined before theorisation takes place and that processes must be looked at, not just products. Chesterman, for example, states that there are four basic approaches to the evaluation of translation quality in translation studies (Chesterman and Wagner 2002:83–4). I sum these up in Table 4.1, together with the support that could be offered to each from Wittgenstein. There is an analogy with the practice of law. Fergus Kerr notes how law courts reach judgements that do not match the standards of proof and verification that are expected in science, such as in engineering, but argues that it does not follow that such judgements should be regarded as flawed (2008:92–3). Similarly, the translation theorist approaching translation will use a variety of strategies in what is not a scientific procedure. By asking if a poem can be translated ‘to our satisfaction’,

90 Theorising the target text TABLE 4.1

The evaluation of quality in translation studies

Approach

Wittgensteinian Support

Comparing the target text with the source text.

The surveyable representation (PI 122) is based on comparison, contextualisation and family resemblance: the reader is enabled to see connections, i.e. between source and target texts. Seeing translation as a cluster concept recognises that there is no definitive way of translating (Tymoczko 2007). The reader’s form of life can be described. The reader can become informed. Paratextual material can be seen as facilitating the surveyable representation. For literary translation, this may involve reading translators’ prefaces and notes as well as the source and target texts. For nonliterary translation, this may involve reading clients’ briefs, the quality control measures in place within a company, etc. as well as the source and target texts.

Comparing the target text with parallel texts. Measuring the reactions of general, typical readers. Trying to get at the decision-making process within the process of translation.

Wittgenstein implies that there is no objective criterion here, but rather criteria determined by our forms of life (RFM III-85). The final judgement can only be whether the source and target texts stand in a relation of relevant similarity, as Chesterman maintains (Chesterman and Wagner 2002:92).

Grammatical investigations The grammatical investigation is fundamental to Wittgenstein’s approach to philosophy (PI 90), a tool in his battle against what he sees as our bewitchment by language (PI 109), as discussed in Chapter 2, where it was shown that the grammatical investigation has two aspects: it makes clear the dichotomy between our idea of how we believe that a concept works and the way that it works in practice; it brings out the many different ways in which any concept can be used (McGinn 2008:14). As Wittgenstein puts it, philosophical problems disappear under correct analysis (PI 122). In the next section, I investigate grammatically two common terms in translation studies, and in the following section, I examine translation theories after Wittgenstein.

Investigating the supermemes Andrew Chesterman refers to ‘translation supermemes’ (1997:7), as mentioned in Chapter 3, and here I conduct a grammatical investigation of two of them:

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‘equivalence’ and ‘free-vs-literal’.What follows is not intended to be a commentary on Chesterman.While I refer to some points that he makes, I do so only when they represent a Wittgensteinian stance. Chesterman defines equivalence as the expectation that ‘a translation is, or must be, equivalent to the source, in some sense at least’ (1997:9). As discussed in Chapter 3, this is a problematic expectation. In mathematics, for example, it makes sense to say that (2+2) is equivalent to 4 because the two expressions can be interchanged. In language, however, even a single word may have its own form of life, which means that an equivalent may not be found automatically. Raymond van den Broeck argues that if (96) we take into account the fact that expressions in context not only have conceptual meanings but also convey connotative, stylistic, affective, reflected and collocative meanings, it will in fact be difficult to discover any pair of expressions in actual speech which are really equivalent. (1978:36) The point applies within a language and, by extension, across languages, and is both Wittgensteinian and in line with contemporary linguistics (Malmkjær 2005:24). The same is true when viewing things at the level of whole works. It would be misleading to assert that any one translation of Faust is the English equivalent of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, or that Christopher Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus is the English equivalent because it is an English dramatisation of the Faust legend. An English translation cannot be equivalent because, as Tim Parks notes, even the best translation ‘is a total transformation’ (2007:244). Marlowe cannot be equivalent because the two poets treat the legend in very different ways, Marlowe linking it to a Renaissance form of life and Goethe to an Enlightenment form of life. Does this mean that the concept of equivalence should be banned from translation studies? Not necessarily, as long as care is taken with what is meant when using the term, following Wittgenstein’s notion that meaning is use (PI 43).As Wittgenstein notes, meaning is not fixed (PI 79): (97) And this can be expressed as follows: I use the name ‘N’ without a fixed meaning. (But that impairs its use as little as the use of a table is impaired by the fact that it stands on four legs instead of three and so sometimes wobbles.) Chesterman uses Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance in order to see equivalence in terms of similarity (1997:9), following Gideon Toury (1980:9).Thus the French sentence Il pleut [it rains] and the English sentence ‘It is raining’ can be said to be similar, and therefore equivalent, because they can often be used to the same purpose. There are important differences, however – for example, the tense of the English sentence is present continuous, which does not exist in French;

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there are more syllables in the English sentence. To speak of similarity does not rule out difference. If I say that Anna is similar to Chris, this makes sense, even if it is pointed out that Anna is female and Chris is male, because it can be presumed that I am referring to one particular aspect of their character or of their appearance. An English translation of Goethe’s Faust may be said to be similar to the source text, even though the former is written in English and the latter in German; but Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is a very different work from Goethe’s Faust, despite both plays being part of the cluster of creative work around the Faust legend. As Wittgenstein notes, there are things that you will not say (PI 79). Willis Barnstone uses the notion of similarity within constraints in order to define translation as ‘creating related difference’ (1993:18). Maria Tymoczko, following Wittgenstein, asserts that equivalence is best seen as ‘a relation constructed by the translator … a similarity relationship – involving both likeness and difference – and as such … contingent on many cultural factors’, having ‘an a posteriori value, rather than a positivist or absolutist value’ (2007:41). Thus many translations are possible of any source text. As I argued in Chapter 3, one of the most misleading pictures that face a translator is that translation must go through a decoding process in order to establish an a priori equivalence. Equivalence is in any case a concept that has grown out of a Western view of the world, perhaps due to the fact that the Bible was read in translation, so that its translations were held to be equivalents. The supermeme is misleading because of its use in the language-games of mathematics and science, which tends to be taken over into ordinary language and then used in translation studies, where it can suggest an essentialist function of carrying meaning across, linked to the view of ‘translation’ as ‘carrying-across’ suggested by its etymology (as discussed in Chapter 3). Equivalence therefore demands careful definition in context by writers who choose to use it. It would make sense to speak of one translation being equivalent to another in a legal context, for example. Theo Hermans describes how the Dutch, French and German versions of the Belgian constitution are deemed by Belgian law to be equally authoritative (2007a:12). In a Belgian court, a lawyer cannot appeal to, say, the Dutch version of the constitution as expressing a meaning not found in the German and French versions. It is not possible to play that language-game. In the language-game of the Belgian court, these three texts have been authenticated as equivalent. And this illustrates Wittgenstein’s case. A term such as equivalence makes sense in certain languagegames and not in others, unless redefined. As Hermans concludes: ‘Rather than being an inherent feature of relations between texts, equivalence is declared’ (2007a:24). I turn now to a second supermeme, free-vs-literal, which Chesterman describes as the ‘binary opposition between free and literal translation’ (1997:12), as found in Jerome, who has been seen as opposing translation as ‘sense for sense’ (i.e. free) and ‘word for word’ (i.e. literal) (2012:23), as discussed in Chapter 3. Grammatical investigation questions the tendency to think in polarities, as argued in earlier in this chapter, because even a single translated sentence can display different styles of

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translation. There are also problems of definition at the level of the text. If all translation is transformative then all translation is free. If all translation is about letters then all translation is literal. The problem with this polarity, as with many polarities, is that it presents a three-dimensional cluster as something two-dimensional, and hence fails to be a surveyable representation. Grammatical investigation can also clarify the different uses of terms such as ‘literal’. Antoine Berman, for example, uses it to signify ‘attached to the letter (of works)’, i.e. the restoration of ‘the particular signifying process of works (which is more than their meaning)’ (2012:252). His usage contrasts with Vladimir Nabokov’s sense of literal as ‘word for word’ (2012:119). To assert that both Berman and Nabokov recommend literal translation is therefore both true and, without explanation, highly misleading. Ian Mason notes that when terms such as ‘equivalent’ are used in institutional advice to translators, they are usually under-specified and raise more questions than they resolve (2012:402). Translation after Wittgenstein shows the sterility of continuing the ‘word-forword’ vs ‘sense-for-sense’ debate in translation that Jerome (2012) is considered to have raised in 395, that still engaged Luther (1997) in 1530 and that lives on as a supermeme. Wittgenstein shows that it is a false dichotomy and his work supports calls by translation theorists for an end to the conflict (Bellos 2011:114). The sense of a text is in the words. To set out to do either a free or a literal translation is to be bewitched by our language. Wittgenstein can offer tools so that we can look at the use of the words and investigate the consequences of that use. Any term can be a source of confusion unless its use is clearly circumscribed To assert this is not to argue against concepts being blurred (PI 71), but once we are aware that they are blurred then we can use them carefully. Norman Malcolm comments that Wittgenstein’s conception that words are used without fixed meanings produced in some of his students the tendency to assume that ‘precision and thoroughness were not required in their own thinking, which led to philosophical work of poor quality’ (1984:63). Care must be taken when importing terms into translation studies – and as an interdisciplinary activity, translation studies will always be in the business of importing – because the meaning of any term is found in a cluster of options and, as Malcolm notes, failure to be precise will result in slovenly work. The correct process is described by Wittgenstein: expressions sometimes need to be withdrawn from language and given a cleaning before being returned to circulation (CV p. 44). ‘Translation’ is one such term. Douglas Robinson concludes that equivalence is ‘an interpretive fiction that helps the translator work toward the true goal of translation, a working target language text – and is only one of many such fictions’ (1991:259). Wittgenstein’s account of meaning in the Investigations shows that many terms used in philosophy, such as ‘expectation’, are fictions, and have their meaning in the context in which the fictions are told: ‘If I do speak of a fiction, then it is of a grammatical fiction’ (PI 307). The same applies to terms used in translation theory, such as the

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supermemes. Wittgenstein’s method enables these fictions to be handled with care, so that they are not assumed to be objective realities. They may, if the theorist chooses, become useful fictions, as is the case with equivalence; or they may be rejected as harmful fictions, as is the case with free-vs-literal.The story can then have a happy ending. But it matters that we know that it is a story, just as it matters that one knows that one is playing a language-game if one is to play it well. Every translator inevitably theorises his or her own text, simply by having a view about it (Boase-Beier 2010:xii).To be clear about our use of terminology and to be exact in description will ultimately affect and improve practice because how we see things changes how we do things.

Translation theories after Wittgenstein In contrast to the description of individual practice that characterises texts on translation produced before the twentieth century, the twentieth century itself saw the production of theories about translation as a phenomenon (Barnstone 1993:222).What happens to these theories after Wittgenstein? Given Wittgenstein’s hostility to theory (PI 109), should they be banned? There are three reasons why this is not the case. First, to take such an attitude is again to turn Wittgenstein into a police officer, which is against the spirit in which he wrote, as I argued earlier in this chapter. Second, the major theories remain descriptive, and can be aligned with the Wittgensteinian project of description, even if they address large-scale phenomena rather than particular cases. Third, these theories operate in ways that differ from Wittgenstein’s philosophical approach. Skopos theory, for example, can be viewed as an attempt to explain translation sociologically (Reiss and Vermeer 2013). It is not possible to sit down and to write a skopos translation. Skopos theory is an interpretation and operates at a different level from a tool. As Wittgenstein asserts, when we interpret, we step from one level to another (Zettel 234). It would be an error to condemn a non-philosophical theory for not being philosophical. The major translation theories can be supported by Wittgensteinian tools. To apply Wittgenstein’s work to translation theories in detail would go beyond the scope of this book, but Table 4.2 offers a sketch of how such an inquiry might proceed, giving an example of a translation theory in the first column, a brief description of it in the second and an example in the third of a Wittgensteinian tool that can be used in support.

Applying Wittgenstein Three examples of applying Wittgenstein are given to show how his methods can be of use in the theorisation of translation: reading a translation theorist as Wittgensteinian; applying the cluster concept; presenting the target text in the light of reflections on Wittgenstein.

Theorising the target text TABLE 4.2

95

A sample of major translation theories

Theory

Description

Descriptive Translation Studies (Toury 1980)

Translations are described, Descriptive Translation rather than the process of Studies is influenced by translation being analysed. the Wittgensteinian contention that the task of philosophy is to describe (PI 40). Linguistics is seen as a source The Investigations is a for modelling translation. philosophical investigation of how language works (PI 1 ff). Translation is viewed as a Meaning is seen as use (PI 43), process of finding so that equivalence can be equivalences. seen as something that is constructed. Translations are analysed The form of life (PI 19) in according to their which a translation is used function. can be discussed. Translations are placed Family resemblance (PI 67) within systems. and the cluster concept (Tymoczko 2007) can be used to describe systems. Insights from feminist theory Wittgensteinian tools can can describe translation. facilitate feminist analysis (Scheman and O’Connor 2002). Insights from post-colonial Wittgensteinian tools can theory can describe facilitate political analysis translation. (Holt 1977). Translation is related to what Communication is described is relevant in as a practice (PI 1 ff.). communication. Literary meaning is viewed as Meaning is seen as a being in the style of a physiognomy (PI 128). work.

Linguistic theories (Malmkjær 2005)

Equivalence theories (Nida and Taber 1969) Skopos theory (Reiss and Vermeer 2013) Polysystem theory (Evan-Zohar 1990)

Feminist theory (Simon 1996)

Post-colonial theory (Bassnett and Trivedi 1999) Relevance Theory (Gutt 2000) Stylistics (Boase-Beier 2006)

Wittgensteinian Tool

Reading a translation theorist as Wittgensteinian Jon Cook and Rupert Read offer a reading of the poet Wallace Stevens ‘as “a Wittgensteinian”’ because Stevens is (98) making, through his “strong-grammared” poetry, a set of moves that invite the reader to learn almost exactly the kinds of thing about themselves and about their tendencies to mire themselves in misunderstanding and

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delusion that Wittgenstein invites his reader to learn, through his therapeutic writing, his philosophy of delusion and its overcomings. (2010:482) Here I examine Eliot Weinberger’s commentary on the translation of the Chinese poem ‘Lù Zhái’ [deer grove] by Wang Wei (Weinberger and Paz 1987:2 ff .). How Weinberger can be read as Wittgensteinian is represented in Table 4.3. Description of texts, description of translation practice and evaluation of texts are linked in Weinberger, criss-cross. The practice is Wittgensteinian without being Wittgenstein. Reading Weinberger as a Wittgensteinian involves using Wittgenstein to confirm my intuitive positive reaction to Weinberger’s work. The reading of Wittgenstein becomes a way of evaluating texts on translation and also a way in which one’s own views on translation can be formulated as the result of philosophical deliberation and not solely as the result of intuition, which recent research shows to be unreliable (Chabris and Simons 2011). Following Cook and Read (2010), there is a crucial difference between reading an author as a Wittgensteinian and giving a Wittgensteinian reading of a text. The latter can be done of any text, the former only of certain texts.

Applying the cluster concept There exist a vast number of translations of the New Testament, usually as part of a translation of the whole Bible. The issue of what is meant by translation here is complex: as Jean Boase-Beier and Michael Holman assert, the Bible TABLE 4.3

Reading Eliot Weinberger as Wittgensteinian

Wittgensteinian Feature

Example (Weinberger and Paz 1987)

The stress is on practice.

Twelve renderings of the source text are given, with descriptions (8–31). The source text is given in Chinese, transliteration and gloss (2–7). An ‘absolute humility towards the text’ (17) is demanded. Translation ‘is more than a leap from dictionary to dictionary; it is a reimagining of the poem’ (43). Weinberger (29) comments on the translation by G.W. Robinson (28) that it is ‘unhappily’ widely available. (Robinson introduces a group of people to the target text where there is none in the source text, which Weinberger sees as a deformation.)

There is a surveyable representation of the source text. There is close reading of the source text. Translation is not about transfer.

There is evaluation of translation.

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(99) is a text that blurs the distinction between original and translation in that it is available to the vast majority of its readers worldwide only in translation, but rarely regarded as anything other than an original work in the particular language of the individual reader in question. (1999:3) This assertion can be supported by Wittgenstein’s notion of how concepts are often blurred rather than sharp: in Investigations 71, he notes that ‘game’ is a concept with blurred edges, as discussed in Chapter 1, so that it is very difficult to define a game without excluding certain activities definitely held to be games, and asks: ‘Is it even always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn’t the indistinct one often exactly what we need?’. Within translation studies, it can be shown that the New Testament is situated within a complex web of translation, and a task of the translation theorist is to describe this web.To this end, the work of Wittgenstein offers useful tools. Wittgenstein’s investigation can be applied to our understanding of what a translation is. We meet translations within forms of life. We learn how to read them, how to use them and how to recognise them (or else we fail to recognise them). A translation can be done in many different ways because there are many different forms of life, and this in turn results in many different types of target text (Bellos 2011:182). As Wittgenstein notes, there are no rules in tennis about how high one should throw the ball when serving, or how hard one should hit the ball, but this does not mean that tennis cannot be played (PI 68). Similarly, a translator works within certain constraints, such as: the target language specified in a commission; the expectations of a particular market; the range of meanings attached to a particular word. Such working practices can be described as ‘rules’, but there are no rules that determine just how a particular word – and, by extension, a particular text – must be translated, and translation is none the worse for that. Rules emerge in so far as they are useful; they are not imposed. They are practices. They are what we do (PI 217). The cluster concept, discussed in the first section of this chapter, can describe the situation in New Testament translation, following Maria Tymoczko’s use of Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance (2007). Table 4.4 shows ten New Testament translations that can be linked in family resemblance, despite considerable differences. The table begins with three editions of the Hellenistic Greek New Testament and then lists seven translations in chronological order of composition. The choice of texts has been made to illustrate variety, and the table could be extended. My own form of life makes the choice of texts Euro-centric, and it would be interesting to describe translations into non-European languages. All of these texts can be described as translations. The Hellenistic Greek New Testament, on investigation, is no more original than any other translation, because at some point the words of Jesus must have been translated from Aramaic to Hellenistic Greek, possibly by Mark, whose Gospel is described by Maurice Casey as ‘an unrevised translation of an Aramaic source’ (2010:63). The texts in Table 4.4 are therefore orphans. There is no common denominator and they can

TABLE 4.4

Some New Testament translations

Text

Description

The Greek New Testament (Aland et al. 1968)

An edition of the earliest surviving Christian scriptures accepted as canonical, written in Hellenistic Greek in the first century and used by many translators as the source text (for example, King 2004). An interlinear gloss of the source text with a marginal English translation to enable the reader to cross-reference meanings. An internet site that includes the source text: words can be clicked on to show their English meaning, including the grammar of nouns and verbs where applicable – a virtual interactive extension of the interlinear translation. The 405 Latin translation by Jerome that acquired great prestige and canonical authority in the Catholic Church as the Vulgate, from the Latin versio vulgata [version commonly used]. The 1522 German translation by Luther, which he describes as an attempt to render German as commonly spoken (1997:87). The 1582 Counter-Reformation English translation of the New Testament by exiled English Catholics that helped to formalise the identity of the persecuted Catholic community in Reformation England. Published in 1611 under the authority of the Church of England as a Bible in English for use in worship. A modern translation that can be described as a surveyable representation because it contains an interactive study guide in the form of commentary and questions addressed to the reader, interspersed with the target text. A German translation that aims to avoid exclusive or offensive language: for example, the masculine nominative plural noun in John 20:19, ‘hoi mathêtai’ [the disciples], is rendered as ‘die Jüngerinnen und Jünger’ [the female-disciples and male-disciples]. A modern translation that includes noncanonical Gnostic writings and aims to convey the poetic style of the New Testament.

The New Greek–English Interlinear New Testament (Brown and Comfort 1990) New Testament Gateway (2012)

Nouum testamentum latine [New Testament in Latin] (Jerome 1911)

Die Bibel [the Bible] (Luther 1999)

The Rheims–Douai Bible (1582)

The Bible: Authorized King James Version (2008) The New Testament (King 2004)

Die Bibel in gerechter Sprache [the Bible in just language] (2007)

The Restored New Testament (Barnstone 2009)

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be seen as exhibiting family resemblance. Even if the Hellenistic Greek is taken to be the source text, certain texts here were not translated from it. The Authorised King James Version, for example, is best described as a revision of previous translations into English, as is stated in its Preface: ‘we never thought from the beginning, that we should need to make a new Translation, nor yet to make of a bad one a good one … but to make a good one better, or out of many good ones, one principal good one’ (2008:12). And the Rheims–Douai Bible was translated from the Latin Vulgate of Jerome because of the prestige in which Jerome was held by the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century, as shown in the subtitle: ‘The New Testament of Jesus Christ, Translated Faithfully into English, out of the Authentical Latin’. Jerome himself did not translate the New Testament from the Hellenistic Greek, his translation being ‘chiefly a revision of an existing Latin text of the New Testament with occasional corrections based on Greek manuscripts’ (Bratton 1967:230). Each text can be linked to others in the table by family resemblance, as Gideon Toury notes about translation in general: ‘we think of translation as a class of phenomena, the relationships between the members of which are those of family resemblance’ (1980:18).

Presenting the target text Françoise Wuilmart is the translator into French of the anonymous German war memoir Eine Frau in Berlin [a woman in Berlin].Wuilmart (2015) describes how the memoir was discussed on French radio, with many passages read aloud from the target text, and how she was surprised and dismayed when her name was not mentioned at any point; she comments that it was ‘“my” words that were being broadcast, or rather the words of the anonymous German woman that my labour had transposed into French’ (2009:40). Reading Wittgenstein shows why it could be argued that the broadcasters had made a mistake. A translated text is inevitably part of a cluster. Not to acknowledge the translator is to fail to recognise an aspect of the target text that might be thought to be appropriate in the context of literary translation, where the dual authorship of texts has often been stressed by theorists, even if it is accepted that not all aspects of every text can be stressed in every situation. It is akin to stating of the duck–rabbit that it is a duck but failing to see that it is also a rabbit (see Figure 2.1 in Chapter 2). In turn I came to translate Wuilmart’s commentary, thus extending this cluster (Wilson 2009). In an attempt to use the presentation of the article to represent the situation, I added a translator’s note in order to make the reader aware of three aspects of the cluster around the war memoir: the anonymous author’s German source text; Wuilmart’s French target text; Philip Boehm’s English target text. Wittgenstein’s later work supports two ways of introducing the translator to bibliographies within translation studies, as shown in examples (100) and (101): (100) Wuilmart, F. (2009) ‘The Idiot of the Literary Family?’, tr. by P. Wilson, In Other Words 33: 40–2.

100 Theorising the target text

(101) Wilson, P. (tr) (2009) ‘Françoise Wuilmart: “The Idiot of the Literary Family?”’, In Other Words 33: 40–2. In (100), the translator is credited, but the text is given under the name of the source-text author, which is the usual way of referring to translated works when the target text is being considered in its own right. In (101), the translator is given as the source-text author because the translation is being discussed. (As far as I have been able to discover, this practice originates with Jean Boase-Beier: see BoaseBeier 2006, for example.) One target text can therefore appear twice in any bibliography, reflecting the dual nature of the translated work. Such sound practices in translation studies may in time be adopted in practices outside the discipline, given the increasing dialogue between disciplines that is now taking place, and given calls for translation studies to extend its boundaries (Boase-Beier et al. 2014:7). Wittgenstein’s work strengthens the case for such developments, which could even lead to a translator being credited when his or her words are read out on the radio.

Conclusions David Bellos argues that the main issue in translation studies is not to understand what translation is, but to understand ‘what translation does’ (2011:2). The later work of Wittgenstein provides tools for anybody engaged in this quest, because it facilitates the description of the target text. It allows the various practices of translation to be juxtaposed in family resemblance, so that the beetle is taken out of the box (PI 293). The translation theorist can form his or her own theory of translation, in line with the advice given by Anthony Pym: (102) When theorising translation, when developing your own translation theory, first identify a problem – a situation of doubt requiring action, or a question in need of an answer. Then go in search of ideas that can help you work on that problem. There is no need to start in any one paradigm, and certainly no need to belong to one. (2010:166) The work of the later Wittgenstein can be of benefit to the translation theorist because it matches Pym’s advice in three ways. First, the phenomenon must precede any theorising about it: for Wittgenstein, description is crucial. Second, many of Wittgenstein’s ideas are valuable for the translation theorist, such as: the surveyable representation (PI 122); family resemblance (PI 67); the language-game (PI 23); the form of life (PI 19); meaning as use (PI 43). Third, the Wittgensteinian approach militates against commitment to any one paradigm, because it is anti-doctrinal. Wittgenstein can indeed help us to understand what translation does.

5 CONCLUSION

Wittgenstein’s story The later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein tells a story about language that can change the way that the world is seen and, by implication, the way that translation is seen and conducted. It is important to set this story against one that offers a different picture, the picture from which Wittgenstein would liberate his readers in a process analogous to therapy (PI 133). Just as there is talk of folk psychology, i.e. commonsense accounts of human behaviour that seem to make sense but that are revealed as misleading when analysed (Stich and Ravenscroft 1994), so the Augustinian paradigm, according to Wittgenstein, is one that is widely and deeply but unconsciously held. It can be categorised as a folk linguistics that is profoundly dualist. Given the sort of beings we are, it is not surprising that we interpret the world in a dualist way, as George Steiner notes: (103) … the hybrid nature of the language-experience, its material-immaterial, abstract-concrete, physical-mental dualism is a central donnée [French: given fact] of consciousness. We cannot escape from the inherent coincidentia oppositorum [Latin: coincidence of opposites]. (1998:135) Wittgenstein asserts that the prejudice to which we are in thrall is not a stupid one (PI 340). From a translation point of view, however, the dualist story is pernicious when it influences how we translate or how we describe the rendering of texts. Wittgenstein’s story shows how translation is possible. As Steiner argues, it is an operational model of the linguistic process and refutes any deterministic parallelism of thought and speech (such as that associated with the work of Benjamin Whorf) through its proposal in Investigations 43 that the meaning of a word is its use

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in the language (1998:97). Wittgenstein gives a rich picture of this use: words are seen in context, as part of the flow of human life, in accordance with what he writes in Last Writings on Philosophical Psychology II 118: ‘An expression has meaning only in the stream of life’. The stream of life is presented in many different ways in the Investigations. Language is shown to be constituted by its activities, so that we can speak of language-games, such as reporting an event, telling a joke or translating a text (PI 23); a language-game only makes sense against a form of life (PI 19); concepts are seen as blurred and linked by family resemblance, rather than as essential (PI 67); grammar can be both surface and depth (PI 664); meaning is a physiognomy because the meaning of an utterance depends on the words that we choose to use (PI 568); it becomes more important to look than to think (PI 66); it is possible to make a surveyable representation, a description of what has been seen (PI 122). Such a story is of immense value in translation studies because it is a story about language that offers practical tools. The translator who is brought to see how language works is in a better position to read the source text, to write the target text and to theorise the target text. Here is the value of reading Wittgenstein, who was recorded by Rush Rhees as claiming: ‘I don’t try to make you believe something you don’t believe, but to make you do something you won’t do’ (Rhees 1970:43). Wittgenstein’s philosophy contributes not to human knowledge but to human understanding (Hacker 2007a:117), so his methods can be applied wherever we attempt to make sense of the human condition, a condition that involves translation. Given that translation is a language-game (PI 23), it is a practice particularly suited for the application of Wittgenstein’s account, which begins and ends with language. While it is difficult to see how the work of certain philosophers – David Hume, say – could be regarded as required reading for translators anxious to master their craft, to read Wittgenstein can bring practical benefits because it transforms our understanding about language. Wittgenstein enables us to see things as three-dimensional, much as the colour octahedron (used by Wittgenstein as an example of a surveyable representation in Philosophical Remarks 51–2) enables us to see the spectrum in three rather than two dimensions. At the very least we are delivered from false paradigms. We are able to free ourselves from misleading pictures and to escape from the fly-bottle (cf. PI 309). But there is more than this. A world of possibilities is opened up as Wittgenstein’s work shows us new ways of translating, once we realise that there is no paradigm to which we must conform. Wittgenstein offers tools, not a blueprint of how to translate. As Peter Winch asserts: ‘a historian or sociologist of religion must have some religious feeling if he is to make sense of the religious movement he is studying and understand the considerations which govern the lives of its participants’ (2008:82). The translator similarly needs to develop feeling for the practices of translation, and the Wittgensteinian approach can facilitate such development, whether the translator is reading the source text, writing the target text or theorising the target text. Philosophy is a practical activity, not the working-out of some doctrine. Wittgenstein is to be seen not as a linguistic police officer but as a therapist and as a coach, who used to say that a philosopher

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who was not taking part in discussions was like a boxer who never went into the ring (Drury 1984:117). After reading Wittgenstein, the translator or translation theorist can go into the ring.

Practice and theory Gary Hagberg notes how, following Wittgenstein, it is ‘now widely understood that any particular concept of linguistic meaning to which one subscribes can shape one’s beliefs in related fields of philosophy such as the philosophy of mind, metaphysics and the philosophy of perception, and of course aesthetics’ (1995:1). How we see language influences how we see the world. Here is the major effect of applying Wittgenstein to translation studies: that it will change the way we see things and therefore the way we do things. Wittgenstein, as argued in Chapter 1, was not a theorist, though many have taken him to be a guru. What he was offering was not a theory in the sense of a doctrine, but what Gordon Baker and Peter Hacker call ‘a single penetrating vision’ (1986:35). His work remains opposed to any attempt to build a theory of language, despite this being the tendency in contemporary analytical philosophy (Baker and Hacker 1986:29), and it therefore cannot form the basis of any theory of translation or any philosophy of translation, not even a Wittgensteinian one. Wittgenstein ‘in effect reverses the traditional direction of fit between meaning and understanding, completely reorienting the role of explanation in an account of the nature of language and linguistic competence’ (Baker and Hacker 1986:29). It might therefore be thought that the Wittgensteinian position should be a resolute ‘no theory’ approach, which is what some of his followers have advocated (Read 2007). What would this actually mean? Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey argue that if the later Wittgenstein is right then ‘theory itself is in most cases a logically inappropriate form of explanation for humanistic subject matter’ (2001:2). Their argument rests on a view of theory as an attempt to see unity in diverse phenomena and hence to reveal a hidden link between the phenomena under investigation. Wittgenstein’s work would resist theory conceived in this way because it sees phenomena linked by family resemblance rather than by unity (PI 66 ff.) and because it sees nothing as being hidden: everything lies open to view (PI 126). The project of the Investigations is descriptive, so that we ‘may not advance any sort of theory’ (PI 109). Wittgenstein compares a rule to a signpost (PI 85): (104) Does the signpost leave no doubt about the way I have to go? Does it show which direction I am to take when I have passed it, whether along the road or the footpath or cross-country? As Allen and Turvey comment, doubt does not arise in how we interpret a signpost, because a signpost is traditionally used in a certain way: ‘It is embedded in a practice in which the accepted thing is to follow the pointing finger, rather

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than going the opposite way’ (2001:9). We do not have a theory of the signpost but rather a practice of the signpost. However, it all depends on what you mean by theory, as they say in philosophy. The term ‘theory’ itself can be shown to exist in a network of family resemblance. As Dwight Furrow argues, it has so many uses and applies in so many different contexts ‘that it probably cannot be given a very precise definition capturing all of its instances’ (1995:1). A theory can be any of the following: a hypothesis; an explanation; a finished piece of work; a view; a doctrine; a stance taken towards practice; soft (as in the humanities); hardcore (as in the sciences). The final two items in the list are of key importance here, terms coined by Wolfgang Iser, who asserts that soft theory is descriptive and proper to the humanities, whereas hardcore theory is prescriptive and proper to the sciences (2006:9). Wittgenstein can be used to support Iser. Allen and Turvey maintain that the rejection in the humanities of what Iser would call hardcore theory (105) by no means rules out descriptive or explanatory generalisations about human behaviour from the realm of humanistic scholarship. … The key point is, however, that such generalisations should not be confused with theoretical generalisations, such as those found in the natural sciences, even though generalisations about human beings may sometimes seem like “discoveries” of hidden “laws” governing human behaviour. (2001:24) In the humanistic investigation of translation, we can follow Wittgenstein and not advance any theory if we put the text, its translation and/or its examination first, rather than beginning by advancing a doctrine. Such an approach is in line with good practice in translation, as George Steiner notes: ‘Like mutations in the improvement of the species, major acts of translation seem to have a chance necessity. The logic comes after the fact. What we are dealing with is not a science, but an exact art’ (1998:311). To see translation as an ‘exact art’ opens the door on how theory – understood as soft theory, as something appropriate to an art, not to a science – may be used in translation after Wittgenstein. Douglas Robinson makes the point that it is time ‘to offer translators tools, not rules’ because rules tend to suggest that a translation can be done according to a formulaic view of equivalence (1991:xvi). Wittgenstein’s ideas in the Investigations can be used as tools by the reflective practitioner of translation, as shown in Table 5.1, which includes nine Wittgensteinian tools. These are both practical and theoretical tools. They can be used when translating a text and also to support or to theorise the translational strategies chosen. There is a significant example of how Wittgenstein’s work can be used in translation in Robinson’s guide to becoming a translator (2003), where he tries to undermine the picture of the translator sitting opposite a source text and magisterially rendering it like Jerome in his isolated cave. Robinson aims to show

Conclusion TABLE 5.1

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Wittgensteinian tools for translation studies

Wittgensteinian Tool

Example of Application

The language-game (PI 23 ff.)

The language-games of the source text can be identified and played in the target text. The forms of life of the source text can be identified and related to the forms of life of the projected readership of the target text. Rules are descriptive of practice, not prescriptive. It is practice that is fundamental to inquiry. Terms can be investigated to ensure clarity and consistency in describing a translation. The deep grammar of a sentence can be investigated to show how surface grammar may be misleading. To see meaning as use can emancipate the translator from a naïve view of equivalence as dictionary meaning. The target text can be seen as an attempt to give a surveyable representation of the source text, both in how it is translated and how it is presented. Wittgenstein’s argument against a private language shows the translator that it is a mistake to see a perfect language lying behind a text. The physiognomy of the source text can be taken into account so that translation is not seen as transferring information.

The form of life (PI 19)

Following a rule (PI 185 ff.)

Grammatical investigation (PI 90) Deep and surface grammar (PI 664)

Meaning as use (PI 43)

The surveyable representation (PI 122)

Private language (PI 269 ff.)

Aspect-blindness (PPF 118 ff.)

that translation is as much about people as texts, and uses Wittgenstein for support: (106) While words and meanings are unquestionably important … they are really only important for the translator (as for most people) in the context of someone actually using them, speaking or writing them to someone else. When the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein quipped … that ‘the meaning of a word is its use in the language’, he meant that people using language always take precedence – or at least should take precedence – over meanings in the dictionary, semantic fields in the abstract. (2003:112) Robinson illustrates this point by telling a story of Jim and Maria who co-habit and speak English, although this is not Maria’s first language. At times they have a misunderstanding over the word ‘silly’, which Jim uses as a term of endearment but

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which Maria takes to be offensive. She learns eventually that the way the word is used means that Jim is not trying to hurt her, and she is then able to notice the occasions when he does use it to mean ‘stupid’. Robinson’s referencing of Wittgenstein is then linked to a practical application (2003:124–6). Robinson asks: ‘If, as Ludwig Wittgenstein says, “the meaning of a word is its use in the language”, and that use varies from person to person and from situation to situation, how is it ever possible to know what someone else means?’. Robinson gives a series of exercises – such as considering the multiple meanings of common words, repeating taboo words or deliberately speaking in bad grammar – in order to encourage the reader to explore Wittgenstein’s concept, an approach in line with the method of the Investigations and with Robinson’s anthropic view of translation. A false picture of the practice of translation is destroyed and the way is open for clarity in practice, though no prescriptions are given. Authority is not so much appealed to as demonstrated, and it seems to me that this is a reasonable way to represent a philosopher who struggled against dogmatism and for the achievement of flexibility without loss of rigour (Kuusela 2008:3). Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin assert that Wittgenstein must be seen ‘not merely as a terminus ad quem [Latin: finishing point], but also a possible terminus a quo [Latin: starting point]’ (1973:261). To read the later Wittgenstein is to be offered ways to the issues at the heart of translation. As Fergus Kerr notes: ‘After working through Wittgenstein’s writings we simply have a different way of expressing ourselves … we have simply changed the subject’ (1988:170).

Why Wittgenstein? Can we then take Wittgenstein as an oracle who will provide for our every translating need? Laurence Goldstein warns against any such move: ‘Much of Wittgenstein scholarship is sycophantic: many writers … think that Wittgenstein, in his late writings, was right about just everything’ (1999:ix). Such has not been the point of view of this book, for I have not assumed that Wittgenstein is right, but have given extended examples from the Investigations and worked through them to show why I hold Wittgenstein to be right in his vision of language. Elizabeth Anscombe recalled how reading Wittgenstein for the first time functioned as medicine that effectively attacked the throbbing nerve of her philosophical worries (Monk 1990:497).There is more to the human person than a throbbing nerve, but it makes a great difference to one’s life to have the throbbing nerve soothed. Wittgenstein in his later writings on language has a vision that is immensely important, but he did not address all the philosophical issues that face a translator, nor can answers be read off from his work, as if from an almanac. If I were faced with a question of ethics in translation – whether to translate a text that I found offensive, for example – and wanted support for my course of action, then Wittgenstein might be of use to clarify the terms in which I put things, but I should be wise to look also at philosophers who have written on morals, such as Aristotle or Immanuel Kant. To

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think that Wittgenstein is sufficient is to fail to read the Investigations carefully. It begins, for example, with a motto from the satirical Austrian dramatist Johann Nestroy (PI p. 2): (107) The trouble about progress is that it always looks much greater than it really is. The motto is a clue to how Wittgenstein cannot be approached as offering the final word on all matters. The reflective practitioner of translation cannot open the Investigations to find a theory of translation or a philosophy of translation, nor can these be adduced from what Wittgenstein writes in that book. Philosophy has taken note of his work and moved on, with Wittgenstein, for many philosophers, becoming a point of reference rather than an oracle. It would be absurd to claim that a reading of Wittgenstein absolves the linguist from reading Noam Chomsky, for example. It is necessary to see on which level something is being addressed (Schiffer 2006). If somebody wanted to know how language is acquired, I should recommend that he or she reads Chomsky and his followers. If somebody wanted to know how language is used, I should recommend reading Wittgenstein. To limit oneself to Wittgenstein is to make a category error. As Fergus Kerr notes at the end of his discussion of theology after Wittgenstein: ‘There must be other methods besides Wittgenstein’s; but … it would be perverse … to avoid his studies of what we may properly say’ (1988:187). Wittgenstein wrote about his work: ‘I am by no means sure that I should prefer a continuation of my work by others to a change in the way people live which would make all these questions superfluous’ (CV p. 61). For ‘live’, we might read ‘translate’, or ‘theorise about translation’. One consequence of translation after Wittgenstein would be that of translations after Wittgenstein and studies of translation after Wittgenstein. While I do not think that it is possible to use Wittgenstein to come up with a theoretical philosophy of translation, translations after Wittgenstein might be said to be a practical philosophising of translation. A question facing the translator at the beginning of the twenty-first century is that of machine translation. Andrew Chesterman asks if, in a world where a computer has defeated a world champion at chess, the only hope for translators is to specialise as literary translators, ‘since literature is surely beyond a machine’s capability’ (Chesterman and Wagner 2002:115). To investigate whether this is the case or not goes beyond the scope of this book, but one point can be made. Michael Cronin argues that the translation debates of recent decades inspired by new technology ‘have returned again and again’ to the central debates of translation studies, such as ‘the question of source- or target-language orientation’ (2012:477). As I have shown, Wittgenstein’s writings can contribute to such debates (Nikolaou and Kyritsi (2008:3), as discussed in Chapter 3). Machine translation after Wittgenstein is, however, a topic for further research and one that will have to respond to developments in artificial intelligence and natural-language processing.

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Emma Wagner concludes the debate with Chesterman about theory and practice by asserting that ‘narrowly prescriptive theory wouldn’t work’ for the translator and that ‘perhaps what we need instead is a different kind of theory, that we could help create: practice-oriented theory – a theory rooted in best practice, directed at improved practice, and attentive to practitioners throughout the profession’ (Chesterman and Wagner 2002:133). Wittgenstein is not mentioned by Wagner or by Chesterman in their dialogue, but Wagner’s stress on ‘practice-oriented theory’ does suggest the possibility of a Wittgensteinian response.

Story’s end All stories come to an end. The consequences of reading Wittgenstein in order to transform translation studies can be summed up as follows: a false paradigm of translation (as transference) is destroyed; the concept of translation is broadened; tools are offered with which to read, to translate and to theorise. In Investigations 65, Wittgenstein imagines a dialogue with an interlocutor who seems to represent the early Wittgenstein: (108) Here we come up against the great question that lies behind all these considerations. – For someone might object against me: ‘You make things easy for yourself! You talk about all sorts of language-games, but have nowhere said what is essential to a language-game, and so to language: what is common to all these activities, and makes them into language or parts of language. So you let yourself off the very part of the investigation that once gave you the most headache, the part about the general form of the proposition and of language.’ And this is true. – Instead of pointing out something common to all that we call language, I’m saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common in virtue of which we use the same word for all – but there are many kinds of affinity between them. And on account of this affinity, or these affinities, we call them all ‘languages’. The search for the general form of the proposition that motivates the Tractatus (and for which the picture theory of language accounts) is over. The later Wittgenstein examines language as we find it, not a hidden language or a perfect language. This is why his work can be of interest to those involved in translation. The story comes to an end. Except that it carries on.Wittgenstein maintains that he writes ‘not to spare other people the trouble of thinking’ but to stimulate them to thoughts of their own (PI p. 4). In the world of translation after Wittgenstein, that is what matters.

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INDEX

Note: Numbers in bold refer to material within a table. Boase-Beier, J. and M. Holman 96 Adair, G. 65–6 Bourdieu, P. 14, 71–2, 89; habitus and Adam 36–7 field 59 advertisements 17, 35, 38, 45–6, 67, 85 Boyer, R. 71–2 Alcaraz, E. and B. Hughes 18, 27 Brecht, B. 82 Allen, R. and M. Turvey 103–4 Brodzki, B. 59 analogy 56 Broeck, R. van den 91 Anscombe, G.E.M. 2, 21, 72–4, 106 builders 19, 24, 26, 51 Aristophanes 63 Burke, M. 16 Arrojo, R. 5, 49, 51 aspect: aspect-blindness 22, 105; dawning of Calfoglou, C. 44 6, 16, 21–2, 40, 42, 60 case studies 6, 82, 84 Attridge, D. 30, 37–8, 56–7, 75–6 Casey, M. 97 Augustine 23–5, 29 Cathcart, T. and D. Klein 8 Augustinian paradigm 24–9, 50–1, 101 Cerbone, D. 15 Ayer, A.J. 3 Chaucer, G. 29–30 Chesterman, A. 6, 56, 59, 83, 90–2, 107–8 Baker, G. 62, 67, 69 Chesterman, A. and E. Wagner 50, 55, 83, Baker, G. and P.M.S. Hacker 36, 103 89–90, 107–8 Barnstone, W. 32, 52–3, 82–3, 92, 94, 98 Chomsky, N. 28, 53, 58, 107 beetle in the box 75–9, 100 Clancy, P. 59, 71 Beevor, A. 88 clarity: by giving examples 83; Bell, A. 56, 64–5, 87 in philosophy 3–4, 20, 29, 62, 88, 105; Bellos, D. 35, 45, 48, 52, 56, 100 in translation 46, 75, 77, 106 Benjamin, A. 5 cluster concept 78, 81, 89, 90, 95; Benjamin, W. 6, 83 application to New Testament Berger, J. 46 translation 96–8 Berman, A. 45, 49, 64, 93 Cockburn, D. 17 Die Bibel in gerechter Sprache 98 Bible translation 39, 84, 92, 96, 98–9 see also code model of language 16, 19–21, 24, 49, 56, 74 New Testament translation cognitive linguistics 35, 46 Boase-Beier, J.: on referencing translations cognitive scenario 16 100; on stylistic approaches 53, 74; on Conrad, J. 64 translation 7, 16, 19, 28, 45, 70–2

120 Index

Constantine, D. 56 context: and depth grammar 28, 31–2, 36–7, 50, 70; in mathematics 79–80; and meaning 10–11, 15, 23, 42, 74, 85, 90–3, 102; of translation 80–3; translating 55–6, 59, 63, 71, 105 Cook, J. and R. Read 21, 95–6 cord around the earth 3 Crary, A. and R. Read 12 Critchley, S. 3 Cronin, M. 45, 107 Damrosch, D. 85 Davidson, D. 54 definition 9, 24, 27, 31, 49, 76 Derbyshire, K. 89 Derrida, J. 3, 5 Descartes, R. 52 Descriptive Translation Studies 81–3, 86, 95 Drugan, J. 84, 89 Drury, M. 40 dualism 47–8, 61, 69, 76, 101 duck–rabbit 21–2, 99 Eagleton, T. 2, 87, 89 economics: translating 71–2 equivalence: critique of 55–6, 69, 71, 74, 81; equivalence theories of translation 7, 61–62, 95; grammatical investigation of 91–94; traditional views of 20, 53, 104–5 essentialism 12, 17, 37, 49, 77–8, 82–5, 92 etymology 52, 92 evaluation 84–89, 96; Wittgensteinian support for 90 explanation 7, 81–2, 103–4 facts 8, 37, 38–9, 41–2, 62 family resemblance: application in translation studies 97–100, 102–4; in equivalence 55, 91; in prototype theory 13n4; in polysystem theory 95; as a tool 12, 31 feminist theory 95 folk psychology 101 following a rule 97, 105 form of life: in evaluation 90; notion of 16, 30–6, 42, 100, 102; of the reader 90; of texts 91, 95; as a tool 105; in translation 44–5, 57, 64–5, 71, 80–2, 84; of translation 58–9 Frazer, J. 32–3 free-vs-literal 59, 91–2, 94 Furrow, D. 104 Gaffney, P. 66 gender of nouns 17, 34–5

Gentzler, E. 81 Gibson, J. 23 Gide, A. 64 Gledhill, J. 55, 66 Glock, H.-J. 8, 22, 38 Goldstein, L. 106 Gorlée, D. 5 grammar (surface and depth) 28–30, 105 grammatical investigation 12, 37, 44, 48, 51, 59, 67, 78; as a tool 105; see also supermemes of translation; translation theory Grandin, T. and C. Johnson 50 Grossman, E. 53, 55–6, 58 Guillot, M.-N. 82 habitus and field see Bourdieu, P. Hacker, P.M.S. 8, 24, 26–8, 38, 47, 102 Hacker, P.M.S. and J. Schulte 2, 21, 72–4 Hagberg, G. 14, 103 Hahn, D. 55, 67 Heaney, S. 87 Heine, H. 34–5 Herder, J.G. von 63 Hermans, T. 44, 57, 92 Das Hildebrandslied 40–3, 68–70 Hofstadter, D. 69 Hölderlin, F. 85 Holmes, J. 6 Huemer, W. 40 Hume, D. 102 Hunter, A. 77–8 invisibility of the translator 87 Iser, W. 104 Jakobson, R. 20, 34–5, 53, 65, 77–8 Janik, A. and S. Toulmin 11, 106 Jastrow, J. see duck–rabbit Jerome 61, 92–3, 98–9, 104 Johnson, S. 74 Joyce, J. 27, 56, 66 judgement 33, 57, 62–3, 84–5, 88–90 justification 54, 68 Kafka, F. 56, 60 Kahane, G., E. Kanterian and O. Kuusela 8 Kerr, F. 4, 13, 30, 50, 53, 89, 106–7 King James Bible 43, 98–9 King, Nicholas 44, 98 Klagge, J. and A. Nordmann 11 Kraus, K. 11 Kross, M. 6, 57 Kross, M. and E. Ramharter 6 Kusch, M. 6, 14–15

Index

La nota del traduttore 87 Lakoff, G. and M. Johnson 15–16 language-game: in Chaucer 29–30; in evaluation 83, 85; notion of 25, 27, 51, 108; of poetry 40; as a tool for translators 55–6, 68–9, 71, 73–4, 100, 105; of translation 41, 42, 53–7, 102; of the translator 58–63 Lasdun, J. 83, 87 Laxness, H. 84 legal translation 7, 18, 27, 57, 68, 85 Levý, J. 66 Lewis, R. 35 Lincoln, A.T. 43 linguistic theories of translation 95 literature: and linguistic turn 2; reading for translation 40–3; translating 67–70 Lodge, A. 17 logic 25, 49–50, 104 Luther, M. 82, 93, 98 machine translation 50, 58, 107 Madden, M. 17 Magee, B. 38 Magnan, P. 59, 71 Malmkjær, K. 5, 86 Mason, I. 49–50, 93 mathematics 79–80, 91–2 May, R. 58 McGinn, M. 2, 7, 27, 37, 48 meaning 15, 18, 23, 26; and form of life 32; as not fixed 91, 93; as public 39, 54, 79, 102, 105–6; in translation 63, 66, 69, 77–8, 88, 95; and understanding 103; as use 8, 26–8, 31, 38, 43, 55, 89, 100–1, 105; Wittgenstein’s view as opposed to Platonic view 48–9, 50–2, 56, 61; see also code model of language; physiognomy; picture theory of language metaphor 6, 32, 52, 66–7; cognitive metaphor 15; conduit metaphor 61; container metaphor 15 Milton, J. 57 Monk, R. xi, 2–3, 5, 11, 39–40, 79–80 Mossop, B. 85 Moyal-Sharrock, D. 69 Munday, J. 77–9 music 19, 22, 33 Nabokov,V. 93 Nestroy, J. 11, 107 New Testament translation 33, 43–4, 82, 84, 96–9; examples of 98; see also Bible translation; cluster concept

121

Nida, E. and C. Taber 61 Nietzsche, F. 6, 51 Nikolaou, P. and M.-V. Kyritsi 58, 107 non-literary texts: reading for translation 44–6 non-Western traditions in translation 77–9 Ogden, C.K. 1, 10 Oliveira, P. 6, 45 Ouelbani, M. 71 Oulipo 65 Pasley, M. 60 Perec, G. 65–6 Perloff, M. 15, 65–6 perspicuous representation see surveyable representation philosophical description 33, 36–9 Philosophical Investigations: importance of 2, 5; themes 4, 24, 51, 58, 85, 89, 102; translation of 6, 21, 72–4; style 6–11, 14, 22, 29, 37, 48, 58; tools in 16, 19–20, 67–8, 95, 104–5 Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment 2 philosophy: analytic versus continental 3; translating 72–4; and linguistic turn 2; and translation studies 4, 6 physiognomy: meaning as 17–22, 33, 39, 49, 102; in poetry 42, 46; in translation 60, 70, 95, 105 picture theory of language 9–11, 24–5, 50, 85, 89, 108 Pinker, S. 18, 50, 61 Plato 48–53, 61, 74, 81 play on words 45, 63–6, 73, 80, 88 poetry see physiognomy; language-game; literature polysystem theory 82, 95 Pope, A. 81–2 post-colonial theory 95 practice: and evaluation 89; improving translation practice 36, 67, 70–1, 81, 94; language as a practice 19, 95; mathematics as a practice 80; reading as a practice 18, 22, 26, 51, 58; and rules 97; and theory 103–6; translation as a practice 6–9, 46, 75, 80, 84–6; and translation theory 82–3; Wittgenstein’s stress on practice 15, 30–1, 38–40, 45, 59, 85–7, 96 presentation of the target text 69, 73, 87, 99; see also surveyable representation private language argument 49, 51, 54, 76, 105 prototype theory see family resemblance Pym, A. 3–4, 6–7, 62, 77, 82–4, 100 Quine, W.V.O. 27–8

122 Index

Raveh, D. 33–4 Read, R. 4, 8, 12, 40, 49, 58 reading a translation theorist as Wittgensteinian 95–6 recipes: translation of 56–7 Reeve, B. 4 Relevance Theory 16, 95 relocation in translation 63, 70, 77–8 Reynolds, M. 52, 66, 70 Rheims–Douai Bible 98 Richter, D. 26 Robinson, D. 6, 20, 43, 60, 88, 93, 104–6 Robson, D. 36 Rorty, R. 70 Russell, B. 1, 3, 8, 11 Sapir–Whorf hypothesis 35 Sass, L. 28–9 Schleiermacher, F. 77 Schofield, A. 44 Schreber, D.P. 28–9 Schulte, J. 6, 40–1 science 39, 61, 89, 92, 104; cognitive science 58; neuroscience 36 Scott, C. 16, 21, 49 Searle, J. 31, 35, 76 Sedivy, S. 39 Seleskovitch, D. 62 semantic fields 86 shopping trip 6, 50–1 sign-game 79–80 skopos theory 7, 82, 89, 94–5 Snell-Hornby, M. 6 Socrates see Plato Sperber, D. and D. Wilson 19 Steiner, G. 6, 57, 101, 104 Stern, D. 76 Stevenson, C.L. 82 Stuttard, D. 63 stylistics 53, 74, 95 supermemes of translation 59, 90–4 surveyable representation: describing the target text 83–4, 93, 96, 98; evaluating the target text 90; notion of 21, 65, 79, 81, 100–5; presenting the target text 41, 86–8; reading for translation 23, 29, 33, 37; writing the target text 57, 69–70, 73 Sweeney, M. and J.H. Williams 74 Sweney, M. 88 theology: as grammar 43; and linguistic turn 2; reading for translation 43–4 theory 7–12, 17, 29, 39, 76, 79, 82–4 therapy 7, 74, 96, 101, 102

Toury, G. 6, 81–2, 91, 95, 99 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 1-2, 8–11, 25, 40, 43, 85; translation of 10 translation as a profession 54, 59, 83, 86, 88, 108 translation studies 4, 6, 75, 93; application of Wittgenstein 12–13; application of Wittgensteinian methods 4–5, 30, 45, 48, 51, 59, 77–9, 103, 108; and philosophy 6–7; split between linguistic and literary 53; split between theory and practice 83 translation theory 55, 62, 75, 81–4, 89, 93–4, 100; Wittgensteinian tools for major translation theories 95 translator-training 19, 22, 53, 58, 83 Travis, C. 55, 74 Tymoczko, M.: on translation 20, 49, 57; on translation as a cluster 78–9, 97; Wittgensteinian approach 6, 40, 83, 85, 88–89, 92 Venuti, L. 6, 49, 53, 72–3, 77, 86 Vienna Circle 2 Walton, J.M. 63 Weinberger, E. 56, 96 Western traditions in translation 77–9, 85, 92 Whorf, B. 53–4, 101 Wierzbicka, A. 36 Wilson, B. 59 Winch, P. 62, 102 Wittgenstein, L.: conception of philosophy 3, 5–7, 23, 80, 84; difference between early and late philosophy 8–12, 43; life 1–2; major works see Philosophical Investigations, Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wörterbuch für Volksschulen; philosophical tools see aspect, family resemblance, following a rule, form of life, grammatical investigation, grammar (surface and depth), language-game, private language argument, sign-game, surveyable representation; remarks on the translation of the Tractatus 10; stories see beetle in the box, builders, cord around the earth, duck-rabbit, shopping trip, wood sellers; spirit of Wittgenstein 3, 84, 94; use in translation studies 4, 6–7; Vienna, significance of 11, 87; work on shock 4 wood sellers 14–15 Wörterbuch für Volksschulen 1, 9–10 Wuilmart, F. 99–100 Zukofsky, C. and L. 78