Intercultural traduction: Distance and appropriation

Abstract

Interlingual translation can be construed more fundamentally as intercultural translation, having to do less with the notion of cultural essences than with cultural and historical distance. The ‘nominalist’ emphasis on text productivity rather than on conceptual synonymity entails the conception of translation as a confrontation with the text as ‘other’, as a dialectic of self and other, of the familiar and the strange, of distance and appropriation, as a simultaneous suppression and preservation of cultural distance and otherness. This otherness is not only cognitive, epistemological, but, more importantly, also has an ethical dimension. These two aspects are indeed inseparable, in that the ethical moment of confrontation with the foreignness or otherness of the source text, language or culture, will inevitably have a subtle bearing upon the success or failure of translation as a cognitive and communicative act. Appropriative or assimilative translation tends to naturalize what is strange or other and has serious limitations. Every act of translating necessarily entails a consideration of the ethics of distance and appropriation. Thus translation must experience and preserve difference without recuperating it through the facile operations of transmissibility.