[Xmca-l] Re: on translation

[David Kellogg]

My wife read the Vegetarian and liked it. But I would say that when she
reads Korean she inadvertantly mistranslates everything, because Korean has
a stock of older, pure Korean words which cluster around every day usage
and then a much larger stock of words borrowed from Chinese and adapted in
various ways, rather the way that English has a stock of Germanic words
like "table" and a much larger stock of words borrowed from Latin and Greek
and adapted in various ways for scientific use. To me, Korean words are sui
generis, and this means I am a lot slower than she is: I don't look at a
Korean word and try to discern a historically distant Chinese soul. On the
other hand, I do use a much more "top down" strategy: so for example when I
read the Vegetarian I quickly realized it was a kind of rewrite of Kafka's
"Metamorphosis" but the heroine is turning into a plant rather than an
insect: "You are what you eat". So then the details didn't matter, but the
result was that she finished the book and I didn't.

The argument we sometimes hear that this or that text is untranslatable is
either simply stating the obvious or else it is a claim of linguistic
exceptionalism based on national exceptionalism. Obviouisly, all languages
are ineffable, because all words are; language evolves to fill semantic
niches as efficiently as possible. But precisely because this is true,
translation from a semantic niche in one language to a semantic niche in
another is not only possible, it's an inevitable part of communication even
within the language. So I think that there isn't really any such thing
as "mistranslation," there are only more or less successful types of
translation for different purposes. The translator has the right to take
all kinds of liberties, so long as the translation is replicable and the
liberties are undoable. That's why what Alexander Pope and George Chapman
did to the Iliad is perfectly valid, and it's also why what the Soviet
editors did to Vygotsky, even though they were actually changing Russian to
Russian, was not. There is a wonderful French translation of Voloshinov's
"Marxism and the Philosophy of Language" which is bilingual--Russian on one
page and French on the facing one. When I read it, I find it non-redundant:
the whole is more than the multiplication of the part.

When we translated "Thinking and Speech" into Korean we read it in French,
Italian, two English versions, and Japanese as well as the original
Russian. What struck me then--what still strikes me today--is that the key
problems have absolutely nothing to do with translation, and with all the
kerfuffle over mistranslation they remain entirely unaddressed. Chapter
Five, for example, says that true concepts emerge in adolescence and not
until; Chapter Six has the tension between the everyday and scientific
concept right there in elementary school. Why does Vygotsky treat
adolescence before elementary school, and complexes like
pseudoconcepts after everyday concepts? You might say--well, he changed his
mind, and in the preface he does say that he changed his mind and had to
discard a lot of work. But neither chapter was discarded, ergo they must
fit together in some way.

One way to resolve it does bring us back to issues of translation by a
slightly different route. There are two very different models of concept
formation being presented. One is based on binaries, like "tall/short",
"narrow/wide", and it is a laboratory abstraction. The other is based on
what is usually called "expanding horizons" (the measure of generality),
and it's a generalization of everyday life. The binary based model is
self-contained and "sui generis", the way that I read Korean texts (and it
is why I have no trouble with pairs of words like "Gemeinschaft" and
"Gesellschaft", "coherence and cohesion", "societal and social"). The
"expanding horizons" version is more like the way my wife reads (and it is
why every word she reads undergoes a slight mistranslation, but she always
manages to finish the book).


David Kellogg

Recent Article in *Mind, Culture, and Activity* 24 (4) 'Metaphoric,
Metonymic, Eclectic, or Dialectic? A Commentary on “Neoformation: A
Dialectical Approach to Developmental Change”'

Free e-print available (for a short time only) at

http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/YAWPBtmPM8knMCNg6sS6/full


On Tue, Jan 16, 2018 at 2:21 AM, Wolff-Michael Roth <
wolffmichael.roth@gmail.com> wrote:

> For those interested in the translation issues I raised earlier on this
> list, you might be interested in this (and David K. might have a lot to say
> to this point, too):
>
> Lost in (mis)translation? English take on Korean novel has critics up in
> arms
> https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2018/jan/15/
> lost-in-mistranslation-english-take-on-korean-novel-has-critics-up-in-arms
>
> Michael
>
> Wolff-Michael Roth, Lansdowne Professor
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> --------------------
> Applied Cognitive Science
> MacLaurin Building A567
> University of Victoria
> Victoria, BC, V8P 5C2
> http://web.uvic.ca/~mroth <http://education2.uvic.ca/faculty/mroth/>
>
> New book: *The Mathematics of Mathematics
> <https://www.sensepublishers.com/catalogs/bookseries/new-
> directions-in-mathematics-and-science-education/the-
> mathematics-of-mathematics/>*
>