Brewer 1 On the Merits and Logical Validity of Foreignizing Translation Aaron Brewer March 12, 2013 A senior thesis in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Sciences (International Studies-Honors) at the University of Michigan 2013 Principal Thesis Advisor: Professor Anton Shammas Brewer 2 Abstract The modern state of translation in the United States and other English speaking countries is a system of domestication, in which the foreign elements in a translated work are removed or subdued for the sake of the target audiences. This approach is based on a humanist perspective that believes languages to be simply different ways to communicate the same ideas. A humanist view such as this is logically untenable because language defines concepts; it does not simply communicate them. Not only is the logic informing domesticating practices unsound, but this approach also has significant cultural and political implications. Domesticating translations contribute to the cultural imperialism that English speaking countries are exerting on the rest of the world. Brewer 3 Acknowledgements I would like to thank those people who helped to make this thesis possible. Meredith (Janey) Tracey, for her help developing the philosophical background, and for her final comments and criticism. Professor Anton Shammas, for his wise and informed advice and guidance on translation. Professor Kenneth Kollman, for his insights into the process of thesis writing. Laurie Brewer, for her at times vicious comments and editing. Randeep Hothi, for his philosophical and theoretical guidance. Professor William Baxter and Yan (Emma) Hu, for their patient assistance with the Chinese. Professor Deirdre de la Cruz, for her knowledge of Tagalog and Christian missionaries in the Philippines. Brewer 4 In principio erat Verbum et Verbum erat apud Deum et Deus erat Verbum. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and God was the Word. John, 1:1 Brewer 5 Introduction Since September 11th, 2001, there has been a push in the United States for an improved education and understanding of foreign language and culture. The attacks and subsequent struggles with organizing a response revealed to many people in the government and military the depth and import of America’s woefully inadequate understanding of other cultures, and the individual groups within them. In response to this revelation, the government has begun to increasingly emphasize the study of language and culture, and many non-governmental organizations have mirrored this change. However, the absence of any significant change in America’s approach to translation over the past decade suggests that this overhaul may be purely superficial; that America’s treatment of the foreign has been updated for efficiency and effectiveness but remains the same in motive and perspective. The motive, as always, seems to be the ability to handle another culture, but not to understand and certainly not to empathize with it. Even more concerning, the perspective is nearly always the foreign in the terms of the domestic. For decades, the United States, and other English speaking countries as well, have favored a style of translation in which readability and comprehensibility in English are emphasized, rather than adherence to the original. Comprehensibility is not limited to just the language either, but extends to injecting the cultural tropes of the target audience into the text, so that the English speaking audiences can recognize something of themselves in what they are led to believe is the foreign. This perspective is indicative of America’s treatment of the Other in a variety of contexts because there is always an element of translation in any interaction between two disparate groups. The English speaking world powers are effectively acting on some illusory idea of Anglo-humanism (to coin a term), Brewer 6 thinking that every group shares some linguistic and cultural foundation with themselves. There is little evidence to support this assumption; it stems more from blind ethnocentrism than from any thoughtful analysis of difference and similarity. In this thesis, I first devote significant space to building a logical argument to call into question, and perhaps refute, this particular notion of humanism. Structurally, this theoretical portion of the thesis progresses in specific steps, each step building on the previous ones. These steps are divided into labeled sections for clarity and the convenience of the reader. A significant portion of the argument is devoted to refuting the traditional idea that a translator’s goal is to find the words and phrases that reproduce the reaction of the “original readership.” I begin by discussing in depth why there is no contiguous entity constituting an original readership, and even if there was one, why its reaction would not be imitable in the readership of another culture. The initial steps in arguing this idea seemingly have little to do with translation, but they provide the philosophical foundation upon which the entire argument rests. Following this section, I discuss why authorial intent is an equally poor standard upon which to base a translation. My counter-proposition is that one should translate for the text itself, in all of its intricacies. This approach entails an extremely literal translation because every element of the original contributes to its nature as an entity; therefore, every element is indispensable for the perfect transfer of meaning to the foreign language. Of course, the preservation of every element is absolutely impossible, so the perfect translation is impossible. I would go so far as to say that nearly every element of a text could not be preserved in translation, so even an adequate translation is impossible. This impossibility does not mean that translation should not occur; it is, after all, indispensable to the modern world. The translator should simply attempt to preserve the original to the best of his or her ability, knowing that success is quite out of reach. Brewer 7 After my discussion on the philosophy of language, I provide some examples of various translated works juxtaposed with their originals, and often different translations of the same work. The purpose of this thesis is not to provide a comprehensive definition and set of examples of what constitutes a good or bad translation choice. The determination of the quality of a certain choice is far too case specific, and relative to other choices, to allow for broad generalization. Rather, I try to give a few examples of choices that are better or worse than others, more for the illustration of my theoretical arguments than for the construction of a rule book for translation. I include a few translations, such as the Middle English of The Canterbury Tales, that are exceptions to the standard work because they inform and elucidate the practices of translation as a whole. All of the specific examples should be understood as illustrative or explanatory of the theory that preceded them. Finally, the thesis concludes with an analysis of the consequences and implications of Americans’ current views on translation. There can be no doubt that America exerts an ethnocentric and culturally imperialistic influence on the rest of the world. Translation practices are only one manifestation of this covert imperialism, but they both inform and reveal the others. Cultural and linguistic variety across the planet is in decline, and it is not a stretch to link that destruction with American imperialism. English is by far the language most translated out of, and English speaking countries translate very few works into English (Venuti 14). There is clearly an imbalance of cultural exchange, which would certainly contribute to the diminished cultural variety. I believe that this largely ignored issue is of the highest importance. The homogenization of humanity is horrifying; consider the prevalence of dystopian novels, in which a homogenous populace is a primary characteristic of the disturbing culture. Diversity is an Brewer 8 invaluable attribute of human beings, and American translation practices must be radically updated or reconfigured to help ensure that this diversity is not lost. Part 1: Theory 1.1 There is an expression, often used in political science or anthropological contexts, that states, “There is no great blue heron.” This means that there does not exist a singular entity that embodies the concept of a great blue heron, but rather that humans categorize a large number of unique individuals under the label of great blue heron. We can break down this label in an effort to find the fundamental essence of what we call “great blue heronness.” That term encompasses a large number of individual birds, and each bird is different from the next in a wide variety of ways, so already we begin to see the multiplicity inherent in such a singular label. If each individual is separate and different in this way, we must begin to examine what exactly it is about the nature of these birds as a collective that inclines us to classify them under the eaves of a single term or name. Upon being asked that question, the vast majority of people would quickly reply that it is one or several of the many similarities common to all of them that makes possible their categorization under one label. Biologists, and indeed many laypeople, would proffer the traditional notion that the members of a species are defined as such by their ability to reproduce, and have fertile offspring, with each other. This initially seems to be a valid definition of what constitutes a great blue heron and all other species as well, but this definition is by no means universally agreed upon. For example, some biologists argue that one should determine species by tracing some common ancestry rather than by the ability to reproduce. Without going any further into biology, one can see that the system of classification for species, one of the most rigorously and scientifically Brewer 9 defined terms, is not an inherent or natural attribute of the collectives that we name species. While a group of entities may share characteristics, the particular characteristics that we select to unite these individuals under one name are the result of an arbitrary human decision. The label is by no means self-evident; there is no reason why we could not classify blue herons according to beak length, geographic location, or appearance on the Discovery Channel in the year 1999. There is an effectively infinite set of traits common to a variety of entities that could be used to dictate classification; the selection of one out of those endless possibilities is an indiscriminate human process. The diagram below should serve to help illustrate the concepts discussed above. Each point represents an individual entity. It is important to note that any physical separation seen in the diagram is the result of random scattering. It has no significance regarding any similarity between the entities. Blue Objects Blue Herons Birds Objects in Maryland Brewer 10 This rather crude illustration is an attempt to show what has previously been mentioned, that people define classification in terms of relative similarity according to arbitrary standards. These classifications are by no means necessarily fixed. For example, as the diagram shows, the English language has a term for a group of entities called great blue herons, as well as a term for the group of entities called birds, into which the great blue herons also fall. A given language will contain innumerable overlapping categories; under the term bird, for instance, there are labels for songbirds and shorebirds, and within the shorebird label are herons, and then Blue Herons are contained within that name. Yet, even this incomprehensibly intricate system of labeling cannot begin to cover the possibilities for naming contained within the entities themselves. Referring back to the diagram, there are two classes circled that do not have their own term, blue objects and objects in Maryland. There is no inherent reason why English should not have terms for these two categories, but it does not. The potential places to draw distinguishing or categorizing lines are essentially infinite, and therefore, within a language the locations of the divisions between concepts are arbitrary human inventions. 1.2 We have established that individual entities are not classified according to a natural set of distinctions, and a result of that logic, the typical human notion of what constitutes an entity is equally baseless. The entities that people consider to be contiguous are undergoing constant flux, which calls into question the validity of describing an ever-changing object with only one, unchanging label. Returning to the great blue heron example, if one such bird were to lose a feather, or chip its beak, it would still be considered a heron despite being different, which feeds into a traditional nihilistic argument. One can strip away parts of a heron until there is nothing left, and somewhere along the way we will have stopped calling it a heron; but upon further