Translatability
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Edward Sapir |
The question of translatability of a text became much discussed in the period before 1950s. The realization that texts are separated not just by languages, but also cultures that are unbridgeable and occasionally mutually incomprehensible, gave rise to the debate whether literary texts are actually translatable. As Edward Sapir puts it: “No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality” (qtd in Bassnett 13). So the debate centred on whether a translation from one language into another was really feasible. Perhaps this can be seen as natural in the west that was waking up to a different world after the World War II. The seemingly homogeneous colonial empires had fragmented into nationalities of varying languages and cultures; They felt inadequate to cope with this baffling variety of languages. May be this prompted them to wonder if total comprehensibility of other languages is ever a possibility.
Strategies of translation, however, were not radically different. Vladimir Nabokov, the émigré Russian writer in the U.S, did a translation of Alexander Pushkin’s Russian classic Eugene Onegin which was more ‘Russianized’ than Americanized. His argument was that Pushkin’s subtle textual and other cultural allusions would otherwise be lost. Roman Jakobson’s “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation” (1959) conceived of language as essentially a semiotic system where meaning is not a referent of reality. If this is accepted, then the question of conveying a text in one language into another language does not involve the carrying over of a message or information.Translation, according to him, is a process of recoding which “involves two equivalent messages in two different codes”.
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