|Translation, philosophy: philosophically interesting in the transmission of a text into another language is its indeterminateness - the fundamental impossibility of choosing between available competing versions, if the source language is too little known. See also Gavagai, idiolect, uncertainty of translation, indeterminacy, translation manual, ostension, pointing._____________Annotation: The above characterizations of concepts are neither definitions nor exhausting presentations of problems related to them. Instead, they are intended to give a short introduction to the contributions below. – Lexicon of Arguments. |
|I 337 ff
Translation/Flusser: the model of the human being as a black box - this is not a psychological, sociological or philosophical question about the inner being, but a formal question.
Definition Translation/Flusser: How to translate? By comparing. Comparison requires a third element, tertium comparationis.
For example, when I translate from English into French, I compare both languages with a third.
This third language is the hybrid between the two languages in my memory.
So it is not a real language, but a meta-language. Meta-linguistic decisions have an individual character.
Portuguese Jesuits in Brazil, for example, have written a tupi Portuguese dictionary without a template.
The question of choice is therefore not a bottomless one like the question of language learning.
The structural relationship between languages is more important than the repertory one.
The question must be asked at what level the translation takes place and how the translation of poems relates to that of chemistry books and telephone conversation.
Definition Translation/Flusser: general broadcasts in which different programmed codes have been selected.
I can theoretically translate all languages into French. i.e., the competence of French in theory includes all other languages.
This imperialism of all open languages is reversible to all others, however: theoretically I can translate everything into Cro-Magnon, but distorted.
The universe of French as an imperialist metacode is quite different from the universe of Cro-Magnon as an imperialist metacode._____________Explanation of symbols: Roman numerals indicate the source, arabic numerals indicate the page number. The corresponding books are indicated on the right hand side. ((s)…): Comment by the sender of the contribution. The note [Author1]Vs[Author2] or [Author]Vs[term] is an addition from the Dictionary of Arguments. If a German edition is specified, the page numbers refer to this edition.
Kommunikologie Mannheim 1996