I believe that course number 2-The Relationship between what is termed ‘translation’

and what is termed ‘original’ correctly identifies the positive and negative aspects generated
by translation as a re-writing of an original text.
Sometimes reading a book may prove to be a daring adventure, of which most of the times we
are completely unaware. Readers of translated novels forget that the text of the book is in fact
the result of a translation process thus becoming mere ‘slaves of the translator’. Few readers
accept the translator as a mediator between them and the writer. Taking this into consideration
Derrida’s suggestion that translation becomes the original is entirely valid and plausible. If
you come to think of it we are initiated in the universe of different cultures with the help of
the translations of major authors. We may say that we draw our general knowledge of the
world from translated novels, science books, and encyclopedias. From this point of view we
can understand the power involved in this practice and all of the sudden the questions of
exactness and quality of translation are very important.
Language is the only social institution without which no other social institution can
function. Translation, involves the transposition of thoughts expressed in one language by one
social group into the appropriate expression of another group at a given time and in a given
place, entailing a process of cultural de-coding, re-coding and en-coding. Translation has a
particular meaning only for a particular social group at a different time in the evolution of the
world and of the culture so there is no doubt that ‘translations are textual artefacts whose
functions are inscribed in the particular social culture that hosts them’. Concerning the
Translation Studies, I would like to underline just as the final course did, the fact that
nowadays it is facing an interdisciplinary problem. Yves Gambier described the coherence of
Translation Studies as a possible “co-errance”, the state of various disciplines getting lost
together. Gambier nevertheless names the very real problem of interdisciplinarity, although he
seems to offer no immediate solution.
However the course did not mention that, a solution was proposed for this problem:
Translation Studies, like translation itself, should be seen as a social problem-solving activity.
And the stability of our interdiscipline would then require work on definitions of the problems
to be solved, a task which has not yet been undertaken effectively.
There are several benefits involved. The most obvious is that the problem may be
relatively independent of disciplinary locations, and possible solutions may be sought in any
number of old or new sciences. If, for example, we want to measure the extent to which
people trust a particular mode of translation, what particular discipline should we place
ourselves in? The definition of “trust” would require philosophical inquiry; its operationality
1
would need some kind of psycholinguistics; the selection of a population assumes sociology;
empirical methodology is nowadays a discipline of its own; the definition of “translation”
might even require some translatology, and so on. The problem exists independently of the
disciplines that can be used to solve it.
Needless to say, Translation Studies currently struggles to recognize such problems; it thus
has remarkably few conceptual tools for working on them. But the first step is to insist on the
general form of problem-solving as a way to approach such things. To propose solutions to a
social problem means trying to help someone. To solve problems is to propose solutions, to
someone, in the hope that some kind of improvement might result.