Digging deep beneath Western contemporary translation theories, we reached

translation studies' infrastructure, building on Plato's metaphysical presence and

Aristotle's non-contradiction logic. According to these two philosophies, which
have served as a solid ground for translation studies until now, meaning is
before and beyond language, that is, it has an ontological status independent of
any language system and therefore can be unproblematically transferred from
one language system to another. These ideas, held by pre-deconstructionist
translation scholars, are brought to task by Derrida's school of deconstruction. In
Derrida's words, meaning does not precede language, rather, it evolves through
having a differential relationship with countless numbers of textual and
contextual factors. The impact on this paradigm shift for translation studies is to
set free the traditional Western thought about translation from the mechanical,
naïve idea of meaning transfer, and to view translation as a dynamic
transformative process, which requires the translator's decision making in the
strongest sense

The Derridian perspective of language and meaning has been heralded as a real
game-changer for the field of translation studies. Armed with unparalleled
confidence in the idea that meaning does not pre-exist and precede language,
which is to say it is not before and beyond difference, proponents of
deconstruction posit that ''pursuing meaning is not a matter of 'revealing' some
hidden presence that is already 'there'; rather, it is relentless tracking though an
endless moving play of differences.

Derrida postulates that ''meaning - not only the meaning of what we speak, read
and write, but any meaning at all - is a contextual event; meaning cannot be
extracted from and cannot exist before or outside of a specific context''

Imbued with the idea that meaning cannot precede différance, deconstructionist
scholars theorize that meaning cannot precede translation, which is to say
meaning has no anchorage in the source text, and source text no longer
provides the logo or center of meaning (Kruger, 2004). Therefore, as a result of
this stance of deconstruction on translation, the long-held idea that original text
is the center or source of meaning and translation is just a second-hand
communication activity which represents and supplements the source text, is
thrown out of kilter.

According to Derrida, ''Any language event is an irreducibly singular performance

with the meaning that effectuates from a systematic play of differences in a
specific context''

a deconstructive reading focuses on binary oppositions within a text, first, to show how those
oppositions are structured hierarchically; second, to overturn that hierarchy temporarily, as if to
make the text say the opposite of what it appeared to say initially; and third, to displace and reassert
both terms of the opposition within a nonhierarchical relationship of "difference."
The main problem of interpreting or artistic translation in deconstruction is connected with
the presumption of fallibility of reading. This results from the fallibility of language and leads
to the inevitable failure to understand the meaning.