University of Vienna
True ways of translating
In this talk, I use Yablo’s account of aboutness to explain an important aspect of translation and, by way of illustration, bring it to bear on Bar-On’s refutation of Quine’s claim about the indeterminacy of translation.
Yablo explicates the subject matter of a sentence S as the set of sets of worlds exactly alike with respect to how they make S true or false. Each such set of worlds therefore represents one way S can be true (or false), a ‘trueway’ (or ‘falseway’), for short. These trueways can be considered the admissible interpretations of a sentence. This makes the account a useful tool for explicating what translators actually think about.
I will give a short introduction to translation theory building on Vermeer’s Skopos Theory and Reiss’ functionalist categorisation of texts to help the audience understand where in the translator’s multifaceted work trueways effectively come in. It will also explain the misgivings translators have had with some things Quine said about translation.
Quine famously used translation to substantiate his scepticism about meaning. He claimed that rival translations fit the totality of speech behaviour to perfection, so that translation is indeterminate – there are always many acceptable translations. Bar-On criticises Quine’s argument as incompatible with actual translation practice. Usually, the problem is not that several translations of a source language (SL) statement are equally adequate, but rather that we often do not even have a single “exact” translation available in the target language (TL).
I show that the translators’ aim is to find an expression that conveys all aspects relevant to a TL readership. They pin down the important linguistic aspects in the SL expression and convey as much as possible of both the thought and the form of expression in the TL.
Yablo’s trueways are ideally suited to model the process. They come in various degrees of determination, the lowest being the proposition, call it P1, the highest the finest grain of relevant difference between the ways S can be true, call it Pκ. In understanding an utterance in light of the overall topic, presuppositions, etc., as well as aspects in the form of expression (word order, grammatical construction, prosody, pronunciation, etc.), we understand it to present us with a subset of these trueways at some level of determinacy between P1 and Pκ. Ideally, the translator’s task would now be to find a TL expression that emulates all relevant formal features and yields the same collection of trueways. But no two languages are exactly alike in all these respects. So, the translator aims for the right balance in copying important formal aspects and matching sets of trueways. The translator’s skill and art consists in finding a TL expression rendering all the important trueways of S.
Literature
Bar-On, D., (1991), ‘Indeterminacy of Translation: Theory and Practice’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53:4:781-810
Fine, K. (2020). Yablo on subject-matter. Philosophical Studies, 177:1:129-171.
Leal, A. (2018). Equivalence. In The Routledge handbook of translation and philosophy (pp. 224-242). Routledge.
Quine, W. V., (1960) Word & Object, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
– (1987) ‘Indeterminacy of Translation Again’, The Journal of Philosophy, 84:1:5-10
Reiss, K. and Hans Vermeer (1984/2013) Towards a General Theory of Translational Action: Skopos Theory Explained, translated by Christiane Nord, English reviewed by Marina Dudenhöfer. Manchester: St Jerome.
Yablo, S., (2014) Aboutness, Princeton University Press
– (2016) Parts and differences. Philosophical Studies, 173:1:141-157.
– (2017) Reply to Fine on Aboutness. Philosophical Studies, 1-18.