THE NOTION OF THE 'NO-EQUIVALENT' WORD

The difficulties of literal translation are often highlighted not so much by linguistic or referential context as by the context of a cultural tradition. Bagehot wrote about 130 years ago that 'Language is the tradition of nations... people repeat phrases inculcated by their fathers, true in the time of their fathers but now no longer true.'

If you consider Faust's famous struggle to translate the word logos, a word that is virtually context-free, and therefore has to be translated for itself (Weinrich's notorious slogan 'Words are untranslatable, texts can always be trans- lated' - see his brilliant book Linguistik der Luge - is salutary but sometimes the reverse of the truth), how Faust moves hesitantly and subjectively from Wort ('word'), Sinn ('sense', 'meaning', 'thought'), Kraft ('strength', 'power', 'force') to finally Tat ('deed', 'fact', 'action', 'activity') and making his own comments quite independently of the Greek or the referential truth ('I can't possibly rate the Word as highly as that -1 must translate it differently, if only my mind will make it clear to me, so I'll write "sense", "meaning" and I have to think carefully, I'll have to think that line out again, not be over-hasty, can it be "sense" which makes and produces everything, I'll write "force" ("strength", "power") but as I write that, something is warning me I can't stay with that, so I can safely write "deed", "act", "action"') - all this illustrates a painful struggle with four key words, one of which, Kraft according to Gadamer (1976), is conditioned, not by its context in the play or the New Testament, but by its past - its connection with Newtonian physics and its development (integration) in the German public consciousness by Ottinger and Herder: 'the concept of force was made comprehensible on the basis of the living experience of force. As this integration occurred, the technical concept grew into the German language and was individualized to the point of becoming untranslatable.'

To write off as 'untranslatable' a word whose meaning cannot be rendered literally and precisely by another word is absurd, particularly when it could at least be better delineated by componential analysis into four or five words, though as a footnote, not in the text of the play. Looking at translation in an ideal sense,

Gadamer has pointed out that 'no translation can replace the original... the translator's task is never to copy what is said, but to place himself in the direction of what is said (i.e. in its meaning) in order to carry over what is to be said into the direction of his own saying'. Again, this reliance on the vouloir-dire and the significance of what the SL text deliberately left unsaid can be dangerous, and applies only to the most difficult texts, where some kind of interpretation and hermeneutics are essential if the translator is to be active, to 'become again the one saying the text'. Here the moment of period and time, as well as the translator's personality, the judgments he has made in the course of his emotional and intel- lectual development, the pre-judgments (Vorurteile) and preconceptions with which he meets a particular problem (after a year, he will translate the same text in a different way: is this chance or personal change?) - all this is important when one considers translating texts that appear to be on the borders of language and thought, and the struggle is with grammar as well as words, the nuances of mood (modals), and time (tense) and duration (aspect).

But in the vast majority of cases, Gadamer is not going to help the translator at all. His statement 'No translation is as understandable as the original' is mis- leading. Many translations have been and are a good, simple introduction, a lead-in into the original - particularly translations of languages such as German with an artificial word-order inflicted on them by their scribes, their clercs, i.e. the in fact non-SVO (subject-verb-object) languages, which postpone the lexical elements of their verbs to the end of the proposition. However, Gadamer uses his statement

'the most inclusive meaning of what's said comes to language only in the original

saying and slips away in all subsequent saying and speaking' as an argument against literal translation. 'Hence the translator's task must never be to copy what is said', which seems dangerous to me, suggesting that the translator has to anticipate

changes of meaning into language of the future. In fact, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger

and Gadamer are initially more understandable in translation than in the original.

However, where Gadamer is a healthy corrective is in his insistence on the

personality of the translator, the translator's state of consciousness and awareness, the limitations of the usually recognised types of context.