Is there such a thing as untranslatability?
If it is true that we often encounter undecipherable difficulties in translation, it is also true that we never entirely fail to translate.
I am not alone in this assumption. Some translation theorists have too become rather sceptical in relation to the usefulness of the concept of untranslatability. The conviction is that anything that can be said or thought in any language can be interpreted, and therefore translated (BELLOS, 2012, p. 67). Part of my argument is to suggest that where there is thought and linguistic articulation, there is always a possibility of or a potential for translation.
In the early twentieth century, however, some scholars have taken a fairly extreme position on the topic. The anthropologist Edward Sapir (SAPIR, 1946, p. 160) argues that the world in which we live ‘is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group’. Sapir’s suspitious position was later expanded and explained by Benjamin Lee Worth (WHORF, 1956, p. 65), who suggests that if we look at other languages we come to recognise that language does not merely articulate ideas, but rather it is ‘the shaper of ideas’ and that we ‘dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages’. It is not hard to see that within the Sapir-Worth hypotheses untranslatability is an inescapable idea, something that is already built into the structure of languages. In this view, since the shape of the world is determined by language, it is not clear whether or not without language it would not have any shape at all.
Even though this strong line of thought has generated productive debate and, in some ways, contributed to the dethroning of the idea of linguistic equivalence, it implies that translation can do no more than give us an idea of what we are missing. In this extreme form, if any kind of knowledge cannot be conveyed beyond the socio-linguistic environment in which they are formulated, translation becomes indefensible.
This position is, in my view, untenable. If a text may be considered untranslatable it might equally be qualified as kind of anti-writing, one which cannot be placed in any dialogical relationship outside the communicative situation in which it was produced.
- Ricoeur (RICOEUR, 2006, p.18) strikes the keynote when he says that untranslatability is only an intermittent aspect of translation.
- In his influential essay ‘Des Tours De Babel’, Jacques Derrida (DERRIDA, 1991, p. 347) speaks of the flourishing of semantic material in translation, not its extinction.
- Emily Apter (APTER, 2013, p. 3) comments that the so-called World Literature depends on the assumption of translatability, relying as it often does on the notion of cultural equivalence and substitutability. As a result, she comments, ‘incommensurability and what has been called ‘the Untranslatable’ are insufficiently built into the literary heuristic’.
The idea of untranslatability then as an impediment to translation, rather than an opportunity, is potentially flawed. It is conceavable that it is not the untranslatable that poses an obstacle to translation, but instead, it is translation that represents an impediment to the untranslatable.
Works cited
APTER, Emily. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. London: Verso, 2013.
BELLOS, David. Is that A Fish in Your Ear?:The Amazing Adventure of Translation. London: Penguin, 2012.
DERRIDA, Jacques. ‘Des Tours de Babel’ in Jacques Derrida. Ed. By Graham, Joseph F. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.
RICOEUR, Paul. On Translation. London: Routledge, 2006. Trans. by Eileen Breenan.
SAPIR, Edward. Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture and Personality. Ed. By G. Mandelbaun. Berkeley & Los Angeles University of California Press, 1949.
WHORF, Benjamin Lee. Language, Thought and Reality; Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. Ed. By John B. Carroll. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1956.
