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ABSTRACT
This article discusses the language problems resulting from translations of the bilingual philosophical legacy of Ludwik Fleck (1896–1961). Since Fleck wrote in both Polish and German, some specific problems can be encountered which no single source can resolve, as both the Polish and German texts are of equal value and it is impossible to say whether his theory was formulated in one of these languages first. To solve this problem, this article suggests that we assume that the level of equivalency of the original sources is at the level of concepts. The case of ‘communication’ is analysed in detail in accordance with the frequency of certain expressions and the context behind them. Fleck used derivatives of ‘communication’ in Polish only twice, yet in English translations there are 51 uses of it. Most of the uses in the English translations come from the Polish ‘porozumieć’ and the German ‘Verkehr’ – expressions that have different meanings. The conclusion to this article argues that all of the translations should be revised. Some recommendations are formulated, especially in regard to the krążenie myśli/Denkverkehr/‘circulation of thought’ expressions that differ in lexical meaning but denote the same concept devised by Fleck.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Martina Schlünder for her many insightful and critical remarks on this article, Johannes Fehr (†) for all of his doubts which enabled me (I hope) to express my thoughts more clearly and Rainer Egloff for several discussions on the problems of translating Fleck’s writings which were very helpful while writing this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. For biographical information see (Leszczyńska Citation2009; Sady Citation2012).
2. (A) Maria Tuszkiewicz was a microbiologist (Fleck’s student); her translation of Fleck’s book was consulted with Jerzy Gierasimiuk, Polish philosopher. The German papers were (separately) translated into Polish by the Polish Germanists Wieńczysław Niemirowski and Sylwia Werner; (B) the latter translated also several papers into German, her translations were consulted with Claus Zittel, a German philosopher and literary scholar. Other papers were translated into German in cooperation with Thomas Schnelle, a German sociologist, and Bogusław Wolniewicz, a Polish philosopher; (C) the German book was translated into English by Fred Bradley (born into a Jewish family in Germany and later emigrated to the UK), a freelance translator, and Thaddeus Trenn, an American historian and philosopher of science; Robert Merton revised this translation. It is not clear who exactly translated the Polish papers published in (Schnelle and Cohen Citation1986a) since the translations are not signed and there is just a short remark in the Introduction: ‘Dr Felix Lachman (London) was of immense help with the preparation of translations from the Polish’ (Schnelle and Cohen Citation1986b, xviii), so it is reasonable to assume that it was the result of a collective effort of the editors – T. Schnelle, Robert S. Cohen, an American philosopher, and Feliks Lachman, a Polish chemist naturalised in the UK in 1950. Other papers were translated into English by Ilana Löwy (a historian of medicine born in Poland but living in France from the 1950s).
3. Fleck also wrote one paper in English (Fleck Citation1960) which was published posthumously (Fleck Citation1986a). The quality of the self-translated passages in the English text shows that Fleck was not fluent in English, so it cannot be treated as representative of the expressions he used in Polish and German.
4. Under a modified title (Über einige spezifische Merkmale des ärztlichen Denkens), although some translations from Polish reprinted in this volume are ‘revised’ (by S. Werner), there are very few changes.
5. (Schnelle and Cohen Citation1986b; Schnelle Citation1981, 734).
6. Kołtan’s commentary is restricted to just over a dozen expressions taken from only two Polish papers (Fleck Citation1936, Citation1938) comprising the polemics with Izydora Dąmbska, and he discusses only its Polish and German equivalents (he does not discuss the expressions discussed in the current article).
7. This article is a part of a wider project which is an international cooperative effort between Paweł Jarnicki from Poland, Johannes Fehr (†) and Rainer Egloff (both of whom are from Switzerland). Its main aim is to suggest changes in translations in Polish, German and English and prepare a trilingual glossary of Fleckian expressions (a tool that can be used by translators into other languages as well as for preparing new critical editions of Fleck’s philosophical writings). The next aim of the project is to describe how the translations influenced reception in Polish and in English.
8. For example, we check what the translations of expression A are, and we find that A is translated as x – the most obvious and frequent translation – but also as y and even z; then we search the corpus again for the most obvious equivalent for z and y, i.e. C and B in the source language. This method can be seen in – these expressions were quite often translated into and from each other, which shows that the translators struggled with them and did not recognise them as equivalent terms.
9. www.dictionary.com 21.05.2014.
10. This distinction also concerns translations of Denk- and Gedankenverkehr into English.
11. The noun myśl (‘thought’) has the same ending in the plural and singular genitive forms in Polish.
12. And once more in relation to Auffasung and Idee (‘conception’ and ‘idea’), once to Aussage (‘utterance’) and once to Wort (‘word’), but never in its nominal form.
13. ‘Ruch’ is more abstract than poruszanie się (and is not reflexive).
14. See, for instance: (Möller Citation2007; Egloff Citation2014).
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Paweł Jarnicki
Paweł Jarnicki wrote his dissertation titled “Metaphorical conceptualizations of the concept of «text» and changes of thought styles in history and theory of literature” in 2012 in Polish at the Faculty of Polish Philology (University of Wrocław, Poland). His main fields of scientific interest are: the problem of metaphor in science, and Ludwik Fleck’s philosophy of science and eugenics. Since April 2013 he is principal investigator in the project realised in cooperation between Project Science Foundation (Wroclaw, Poland, Paweł is member of the Board) and Ludwik Fleck Zentrum (Zürich, Switzerland, Paweł is associated researcher).