Deconstruction

Derrida's concept of deconstruction was more or less along similar lines. His thoughts on translation are preoccupied with the notion of the absence behind the presence or the other that shadows the written / spoken word. According to him, western metaphysics has always been obsessed about “being as presence”, or absolute truth-values. It is this “logocentric” obsession with definitive truth-values that he undermined through his theory. He analysed (destroyed) a text to lay bare its inherent contradictions, to construct another narrative out of it, thereby showing that there is no stable text with a unified meaning. The absence or the lack behind the word that is present, is what he denotes as ‘trace’. In translation, he is not concerned with the original message or the adequacy of its rendition into another language, but is interested in the complicated paths that a text follows in its translation into another language. Gentzler argues that Derrida's concept of the ‘play of the trace' when applied to translation theory, is not the identification of meaning but movement along uncharted territory. Just as play of the trace “can never be presented…as one tries to stop its movement and grasp it, it disseminates, separates, and continues to move on, crossing over to another place” (160), translation is also an exercise in which whatever is attempted to be carried over tends to evaporate. So translations never fix meaning but allow for infinite play and open up new possibilities. However, despite the fact that there is no stable meaning or text to carry over, the translator/translation desires to represent a unified “kernel” or universal fact.

This, according to Derrida, is a futile activity; because there is no meaning behind words, but only words that explain other words. It is just a superficial chain of signifiers. Translation is an activity that reminds us most of the plurality of languages and meanings. His argument is that even when we are writing in one language, we are writing in different languages as we are choosing some meanings over others. So even the act of writing becomes an act of translation. Every language contains the elements of other linguistic systems within itself and the writer is juggling words from one system or the other. This process of choosing and elimination of words carries within it the silences which we actually have to listen to.

In fact, according to Derrida, translation is an impossibility. He would much rather have the term ‘transformation' or rather ‘regulated transformation': “Difference is never pure, no more so is translation, and for the notion of translation we would have to substitute a notion of transformation: a regulated transformation of one language by another, of one text by another” (qtd in Gentzler 167). Derrida effectively undermines the basic idea behind translation: that of a stable meaning inhering in the source text that has to be carried over to the target language. Equivalence is no longer an issue because there is no ‘meaning' as such that has to be retained intact.