Response by Armstrong to “Translation and the materialities of communication”

Karin Littau's important contribution makes a powerful argument for the discipline of translation studies (TS) to pay explicit attention to the material dimension of the media forms in which we encounter translations. In a wide-ranging piece which seeks to bring together approaches from different disciplines, ranging from the abstractions of media theory to the mundane physicality of book history and beyond, she argues for a reframing of translation studies to take account more fully of the shaping forces, and not always noted effects, of media technologies, and the way these determine thought. I am in complete agreement with the broad premise expressed here, of the need to foreground the material dimension of historic and contemporary translation, and the interplay between the texts, tools and things of translation; likewise the necessity of drawing on approaches from cognate disciplines to expand our TS conceptual and theoretical palette. Where we diverge, perhaps, is in our approach to and understanding of the relationship between historic media technologies and their supposed “effects” on translation (simply put, the question of whether they shape or are shaped by their contemporary textual practices – or both), and the centrality of form as a critical index for scholars exploring questions of transmission and textuality.

I write this response primarily from my position as a book historian of pre-modern books, and thus would vigorously contest some of the establishing points through which Littau sets up her argument. Most prominent of these is the implication, following Gumbrecht and Pfeiffer, that the “materialities of communication  … , all those phenomena and conditions  …  contribute to the production of meaning, without being meaning themselves” (my italics). As the article progresses, it becomes clear that Littau herself is arguing for an amplified understanding of these “containers” and communicative vectors as meaning-makers through an exploration of the various disciplines she reviews, yet she does not explicitly approach them as expressive forms in and of themselves, beyond noting that, following MacKenzie, “each new physical edition is a rewriting”. I would therefore like to take the time in this response to elaborate on the “forms” of historic translation as meaningful objects (or as embodied events and practices) with inherently expressive physical, material and haptic qualities, and whose surfaces (the handworked or printed page, or the electronically generated screen image) articulate their intercultural and interlinguistic relations through the designed arrangement of visual and verbal elements. Translation, as a discrete set of interlingual and/or intermedial cultural practices is, and always has been, conducted in and by “things”: written texts are produced (and reproduced) by various historically located agents, inscribed into physical or mnemonic storage devices, circulate within social networks, with relative (and mutable) symbolic values, with the discrete object travelling through time and space. As Littau rightly notes, even electronic texts (once unthinkingly called “virtual”, thus not real or tangible) – have a fundamental material physicality and presence as objects in the world, in the forms of the devices in which they are housed, and, at the micro level, the inscription technologies of the code which store the abstracted textual “content” and allow it to be produced for the user.¹ For me, therefore, the uncontested positing of a critical universe which is so over-focused on the cultural turn as to “make us blind to the  …  material technologies and techniques which underpin cultural practices” is not one I recognize; Littau's underpinning assumption that the material is for the most part unseen or disregarded in textual studies (including translation studies as a subset of this) is therefore for me somewhat overstated.

It may be, of course, that medievalists and pre-modernists are simply more attuned to the inherently material, and translational, aspects of the texts we study, with a heightened sensitivity to distance, place and the alterity of the object borne of the conditions of our work. It is thus probably no coincidence that much of the work on materiality and translation (or at least that which is most visible to TS) has been carried out by scholars working on the textual relations and transformations (“transformissions”, as Randall McLeod would have it) between late medieval manuscript culture and early print.² Pre-modernists comfortably move between the macro (the societal), the mezzo (the individual agents) and the micro (individual translated texts), as do scholars of contemporary translation, but the temporal and conceptual distances involved, plus the lacunae in the historical record, mean that we must focus our attention more intensely on the media in which these translational transactions of the past are recorded.³ Textual, paratextual, scribal, editorial, typographical and physical strategies of mediation, and the limits and possibilities of pre-industrial revolution technology are part of the deal for us on a daily basis, and our interpretative mediality as translation historians is fundamentally conditioned and shaped by these technologies. We live closer to the material, in every sense.

Translation and transmission are the fundamental conditions of medieval scribal textualities, and to a lesser extent pre-modern print (and manuscript) ones. When every element of a book is produced by hand and often copied from another, the text-producers act on the text in multiple ways: glossing, commenting, amplifying or summarizing, signalling intertextual links to other texts and agents; marking passages of interest, diagramming or drawing in the margins as intermedial translation. Formal interlingual translation processes (vernacularization of Latin works for a local or less lettered audience, Latinizing to access a translational one; parallel or interlinear linguistic glossing; and so on) are simply part of the wider textual practices of pre-modern cultural production. In this milieu, it is perhaps easier to understand every single book as a new and unique event, in which these textual negotiations, processes and practices are encoded on every page. The text is fluid, the objects mobile, and the material of the medium meaningful.

I therefore concur with Littau when she calls for a fundamental reframing of the paradigm from the cultural “translator-focused” or linguistic “text-focused” approaches, a move from human agents to the social lives of things, and a new-found consideration of the dynamic flows of information and its interactions. Translation history is certainly a history of media technologies, among other things, but I am less sure that the history of technology has shaped (i.e. acted upon) translation practices quite so explicitly as she suggests. It seems more likely to me that the technologies reflect textual practices, and these practices – and their visual disposition on the page – remain remarkably consistent through the centuries, although the physical support evolves through time.

Two questions stand out for me here: when Littau asks “Is there a correlation between translational practice and codicological practice?” and “Did the invention of print alter practices of translation, and if so, how?” This response does not allow for a detailed historical account, of course, but for me the key is to see these as two sides of the same coin – to ask not only how technology acted on translation, but also how translation acted on, and is reflected in, the design of translation book-objects. Littau writes: “The point is this: medial forms – handwritten, printed, electronic – bring about changes in the ways in which we read, write, and translate.” As a medievalist, I am unclear as to how we could map and assess that for pre-modern textual communities, without engaging in speculative exercises beyond the material record (and, to be sure, I have no problem with that if presented as such). However, the design of the book-objects, plus the traces of readers which remain, do suggest we can say with at least some security that book technology reflects the uses of the translation-object and the textual practices of its users. Text-objects (i.e. books and other supports) dedicated to foreign language learning and/or textual exegesis are simply the most obvious example of this. In books (and other supports) of this type, such as school textbooks, dictionaries or language-learning manuals, there is a remarkable continuity in the forms of the page, those metaphorical concepts which underpin them, and the implied reading practices found in those textual objects which visualize intercultural, interlingual transfer. And this continuity endures across languages, writing systems, historic contexts, and media from the manuscript, through the printed book, to electronic resources. The parallel-text bilingual or multilingual layout, either in columns on a single page, or across a full opening, endures as the dominant format from the medieval period to the present day, performing in the most striking way the concept of linguistic equivalence, albeit an equivalence which is modified by the relative disposition of other graphic elements of the page which permit a nuanced management of translational concerns – and perhaps even transnational anxieties.⁴ Even now, the Google Translate text box <translate.google.com> is articulated on the same left–right directionality, with its presumptions of the direction of cognitive travel, which is found in a fifteenth-century facing-form Italian-German dictionary, the Introito et porta (1477).⁵ There can be no doubt that earlier readers and book producers were perfectly aware of the potential of the page as an expressive form of translation, given the sophistication of their understanding of the technological means and media, shapes and spaces of translation in the book; and, likewise, that there is still much work to be done by translation scholars on the visual design aspects of our translation objects.

I conclude my response, just as Littau concludes hers, with an affirmation of the importance of the material in textual studies. She makes the argument that literary translation studies should move away from the comparative literature model, into a richer, multidimensional, and more multi-modal landscape: “Translation has been the cornerstone of comparative literature. What I am proposing is that translation become the glue for comparative media studies. …  We need, therefore, an expanded notion of comparative literature just as we need an expanded notion of translation studies.” I would go further and argue that “materiality”, rather than translation, is the key, and all things (pun intended) follow from that. Translation, whether interlingual, intermedial, transmedial, spatial and so on, is one function of textual relations, rather than their governing principle, and it is the forms in which these texts are made, and remade, which offer us the coordinates for our explorations. Of course we should go beyond the text, and of course “print-minded assumptions” are inadequate for the fast-changing media systems in which we operate. But new media do not imply that the old ways of seeing, and being, are now obsolete. Our new digital objects and media assemblages are as historically situated and context-produced as the older ones, although they may be bigger (or indeed, smaller), faster and less legible in their material forms to the non-computational layperson. Perhaps the next challenge for TS is therefore not so much to enlarge comparative literature by bringing, for example, book historical or media theory approaches into the field, but to find a way to conceptualize and read through an immensely scaled-up digital media ecosystem, where the dominant graphic and metaphorical model is no longer the lens of photographic or film media, but now the ceaselessly updating datastream, the image collage of Pinterest or Tumblr, the short snatches of text, speech and video which speed by us in our personalized online echo chambers. What is clear is that at this critical moment of transmedial superabundance, as Littau has shown us, it has never been more necessary to attend to the material, in all its many modes and forms.

Note on contributor

Guyda Armstrong is senior lecturer in Italian at the University of Manchester. Her research focuses on early Italian literature and its transmission across languages, cultures and media from the medieval period to the present day, with wider interests in early modern print cultures, visual design, digital humanities, and gender. She is the author of The English Boccaccio: A History in Books (2013; paperback edition 2015) and a co-editor of the new Cambridge Companion to Boccaccio (2015). She is currently completing a new edition of the 1620 English translation of Boccaccio's Decameron for the MRHA (Modern Humanities Research Association).

Notes

1. For a stimulating material reading of our digital devices, see Kirschenbaum (2008).

2. “Randall McLeod, writing as Random Cloud, captures perfectly one of the key conjunctions of the co-processes of printing and translation with his crucial idea of ‘transformission’: when a text is physically transmitted, it is necessarily transformed, and potentially transformative” (Coldiron 2015, 16).

3. I follow Gisèle Sapiro's (2008, 163) terminology here, deliberately back-projecting these terms anachronistically onto the distant past in the knowledge that the material and commercial conditions of textual production in the medieval and early modern are vastly different to those modelled in this framework.

4. I discuss the information design of translation from a graphic design perspective in a recent article, where I ask “what do we actually see, when we read an early modern translation? What is it for, and how does it work? And how is the interlingual transfer encoded in the information design of the translated book?” (Armstrong 2015, 78). Anne Coldiron is customarily insightful and wide-ranging on the visual patterns of translation in her recent book Printers Without Borders, and article “Form[e]s of Transnationhood: The Case of John Wolfe's Trilingual Courtier” (both 2015).

5. On translation directionality and the information values of visual composition, see my “Coding Continental”, especially pp. 88–89.