Friday, July 02, 2004
Linguistic Pragmatics and Issues of Translation
B
Y ARTHUR MCKEOWNPHD CANDIDATE, SANSKRIT AND INDIAN STUDIES
H
ARVARD UNIVERSITYP
RESENTED FOR ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSIONB
UDDHIST STUDIES GRADUATE STUDENT CONFERENCEA
PRIL 2004© A
RTHUR MCKEOWN 2004-----
Steiner and the Supplement:
Steiner characterizes the act of translation as both loss and supplement:
24Unquestionably there is a dimension of loss, of breakage--hence, as we have seen, a fear of translation, the taboos on revelatory export which hedge sacred texts, ritual nominations and formulas in many cultures. But the residue is also, and decisively, positive. The work translated is enhanced. This is so at a number of fairly obvious levels. Being methodical, penetrative, analytical, enumerative, the process or translation, like all modes of focused understanding, will detail, illumine, and generally body forth its object. The over-determination of the interpretative act is inherently inflationary: it proclaims that "there is more here than meets the eye," that "the accord between content and executive form is closer, more delicate than had been observed hitherto.
Steiner, G., After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. 3rd ed. 1998, New York: Oxford University Press, 316
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Bakhtin:
One example concerns the discourse theory of Mikhail Bakhtin. In his analysis of
authoritative discourse and internally persuasive discourse,
authoritative discourse, and an internally persuasive discourse.40The tendency to assimilate others' discourse takes on an even deeper and more basic significance in an individual's ideological becoming, in the most fundamental sense. Another's discourse performs here no longer as information, directions, rules, models and so forth -- but strives rather to determine the very bases of our ideological interrelations with the world, the very basis of our behavior; it performs here as an
Authoritative discourse demands unconditional allegiance, not appropriation or assimilation. Internally persuasive discourses are different, in that one may discriminate and appropriate what one considers relevant. From multiple discourses, one's own voice may be constructed.
41When thought begins to work in an independent, experimenting and discriminating way, what first occurs is a separation between internally persuasive discourse and authoritarian enforced discourse, along with a rejection of those congeries of discourses that do not matter to us, that do not touch us One's own discourse is gradually and slowly wrought out of others' words that have been acknowledged and assimilated, and the boundaries between the two are at first scarcely perceptible it is not so much interpreted by us as it is further, that is, freely, developed.
40
Bakhtin, M.M., "Discourse in the Novel," in The dialogic imagination : four essays. translated by M. Holquist, University of Texas Press Slavic series ; no. 1. 1981, Austin: University of Texas Press, p34241
ibid, p345Hazem Azmy
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