Yearbook of Translational Hermeneutics

Editor’s Introduction: The Emergence of 4EA Cognitive Science out of Hermeneutics

Douglas Robinson — 2023-03-17

Cognition and Hermeneutics: Convergences in the Study of Translation

2023-03-17

It has recently become more apparent that there are strong commonalities and convergences between the cognitive and the hermeneutic approach to translation studies, especially as the cognitive approach has turned more and more towards affect theory and the question of kinaesthetics, and as hermeneutic research has increasingly undertaken research into the actual processes of interpretation. The second issue of the Yearbook of Translational Hermeneutics is accordingly devoted to an enquiry into the relationships that can be established between these two research fields.

Verstehen als Resultat kognitiver Prozesse. Eine konzeptuelle Neuausrichtung der Übersetzungshermeneutik?

Sigrid Kupsch-Losereit — 2023-03-17

During the last decades, cognitive science-oriented research in TS has begun to apply a new model of understanding. This cognitive paradigm neurophysiologically models translation processes as the networked integration of perceptual, linguistic and conceptual knowledge. This integrative process, frequently presented as a neuronal flow, is subjective-individual and always strategic-constructive, since only cognitive processes, so-called inferences, can interrelate linguistic and paralinguistic knowledge. Consequently, understanding is a constantly updated text- and knowledge-guided process in which linguistic utterances, cultural, social-interactive, situational, affective and cognitive factors interact with and complement each other. And from this follows a change in the basic hermeneutic paradigm of the subjective, passive understanding of the text by the translator, who intuitively determines the meaning of a text to be translated within a static accumulation of linguistic and factual knowledge. Understanding as a subjective-individual sense-making process in the translation-hermeneutic conception is specified more precisely in the cognitive-scientific paradigm as a traceable process and described as an active and dynamic mental process, as networked integration performance. Since understanding thus always requires a new organisation and networking of the neuronal pathways, there is also a constant shift of meaning that is reflected/produced in each new translation. Within this framework a new model of comprehension can be applied in so far as the understanding of the source text and the planning of a target text are the results of cognitive inferring processes and depend on interactive and communicative experiences, translation strategies and the ability of the translator to consider the prospective reader. On the basis of new cognitive-scientific insights into understanding, the search for the so-called fusion of horizons becomes obsolete. Translational hermeneutics gives preference to understanding differently over understanding better; it is receptive to the otherness and the diversity of own perspectives and experiences. Examples of French-German translations show that a translational hermeneutics understood in this way provides the framework for textual understanding and interpretation in both the receptive and productive phases of translation.

Translating Practices: Situated Bodies between Cognition and Expression

Roberto Wu — 2023-03-17

Practices correspond to a multitude of performing acts that articulate themselves in interpretation and entail circumstantial and cultural features. Considering that different sets of practices involve bodies with distinct backgrounds and diverse ways of expression, the assimilation or rejection of practices assumes to some extent translation, insofar as it requires intermediation between and among conflicting cultures. Particularly in situations marked by colonization, one is inclined to reproduce not only the hegemonic language but also its corresponding practices, often leading to a concealment of other possibilities of articulation. The capacity of translating practices involves, consequently, finding an adequate way of expression, one that understands hegemonic practices and their meanings, but which nevertheless also conveys a unique voice corresponding to one’s situation and marginal practices. It also requires attention to meanings that operate at a pre-predicative level—because practices are based in prejudices that cannot be completely manifested—and to their affective or emotional correlation. The chapter suggests that a complementary discussion of 4EA cognitive science and hermeneutics provides a conceptual base to approach translating practices, insofar as embodiment, affectivity, situatedness, language, and historicity play a key role in these theories. It concludes by exploring the potential of feminist, postcolonial, and decolonial studies, in delivering a political basis to understand how these processes of translation assume a situated body.

Translation Consciousness and Translation-Specific Double Intentionality

Masoud P. Tochahi — 2023-03-17

Translation as a mental operation follows the same fundamental principle as everything mental, namely intentionality. In translation studies as well as in philosophy, especially in those approaches that are interested in translation issues, we rarely come across an approach that has brought to bear the intentionality in connection with the translation phenomenon and examined it from this point of view. However, the phenomenological study of the translation process shows not only a complex intentional structure of this process, which consists of a collaboration of very different intentional acts, but also a complex structure in which the double intentionality of consciousness plays a crucial role. In this article, I deal with how this intentional structure is designed and how the double intentionality specifically comes into play.

A Cognitivist Risk-Management Approach to Steiner’s Hermeneutic Motion

Mehrnaz Pirouznik — 2023-03-17

This paper combines Cognitive Translation Studies (CTS) under the specific rubric of Risk-Management (RM), which is closely connected with 4EA cognition, and the magisterial Translational Hermeneutics (TH) of George Steiner’s four-stage hermeneutic motion (HM), asking what the risks are that a translator will be cognitively processing (recognising, testing, avoiding, etc.) in regard to each of the motions: trust, aggression, assimilation (appropriation) and restitution. In this spirit, a new reading of Steiner’s hermeneutic motion will be offered whereby the model is treated as an idealised model of a single act of translation in order to explore the implicit RM in it. According to Robinson (2015: 45), in the post-Kantian world “Everything we take to be reality is culturally constructed: we have no access to ‘objective’ reality”. This is equally true of risk-management, where the entire process, although culture-driven, emerges in and through and out of personal experiencing and feeling, namely fearing and daring. This paper also explores the RM implied in Steiner’s HM as the affective-becoming-conative formation of person-centred norms (a felt pressure to conform) out of perceived repetitions.

Hermeneutics as a Route to Translating Auditory Aspects of Emotion in Silvina Ocampo’s Fictional Worlds: An Analysis of “Okno, el esclavo”

Silvina Katz — 2023-03-17

Hermeneutical translation studies is increasingly interested in how interpretation works (Robinson 2020), and interpretation in the context of translation is inextricably linked to issues of understanding. As Hermans (2015) notes, the hermeneutic endeavour springs from a desire to understand, but the practice of gaining that understanding is an art. In fact, he remarks that translation occupies the most challenging end of the hermeneutic spectrum, in part due to the complexity inherent in voicing an understanding across languages. In addition to verbalisation, however, understanding in this context can also refer to hearing, and to having heard a text in its fullest sense. Indeed, Toolan (2016/2018: 250) suggests that written stories are “incompletely appreciated if the sounds and rhythms of their language are not registered, along with any implied meanings those sounds prompt readers to derive.” The auditory dimension of written texts thus seems an essential component of literary translation, whereby the translator must be able to hear, feel, and identify emotional aspects elicited from reading. As Bernofsky (2013: 229) highlights, a translator should hear a text’s heartbeat in the cadences of its phrases. Drawing on the affective literature in Translation Studies (e.g. Hubscher-Davidson 2017; Koskinen 2020; Robinson 1991), this chapter will explore the emotion-eliciting auditory aspects in Argentinian writer Silvina Ocampo’s haunting short story “Okno, el esclavo” (1988/2014). Combining close reading and computer-aided qualitative data analysis, salient characteristics will be discussed that provoke sound sensations (noise, music, silences) contributing to the story’s emotional impact and reader experience. In this way, it becomes possible to understand the translator’s daunting cognitive and affective task when (re)interpreting the soundscape of Ocampo’s atmospheric worlds.

The Affordances of the Translator

Douglas Robinson — 2023-03-17

This article explores affordance-theoretical readings of Walter Benjamin’s “Task of the Translator,” looking first at Aleksei Procyshyn’s mobilization of Anthony Chemero’s “radical embodied cognitive science” approach to affordances, in which, as Procyshyn summarizes it, “language use is an enactive process of meaning creation, which affords an appropriately situated and capable agent specific potentials for further action.” A closer look shows not only that Procyshyn has not drawn on the full potential of Chemero’s theorization, but that Chemero himself has not developed a 4EA-cogsci affordance theory fully—and that the application of affordance theory to Benjamin ultimately doesn’t work without a complex reframing of both Benjamin and affordance theory. Specifically, toward the end of Benjamin’s essay he moves toward a more personalized understanding of human translators as situated agents—notably Friedrich Hölderlin, but also Martin Luther, Johann Heinrich Voß, A. W. Schlegel, and Stefan George—and another pass through Wilhelm Dilthey’s hermeneutical theory of the Zusammenhang des Lebens (“nexus/intertwining of life”), which Benjamin invokes by name, helps flesh out both an affordance theory of translation and an extended application to Hölderlin’s Sophocles translations. The historical chain from Dilthey through Husserl and Merleau-Ponty to Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s The Embodied Mind ties hermeneutics, phenomenology, and 4EA cognitive science together under the rubric of the affordances of the translator.

Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutics: or, How to Understand Texts

Brian O'Keeffe — 2023-03-17

Translation, Gadamer, and the Hermeneutical Perspective

Brian O'Keeffe — 2023-03-17

Rezension zu: GIL, Alberto / GILI, Guido (2022): La differenza che arricchisce. Comunicazione e transculturalità. Roma: Edizioni Santa Croce s.r.l. 212 S. ISBN: 979-12-5482-040-7.

Ursula Wienen — 2023-03-17

Review of: LEAL, Alice (2021): English and Translation in the European Union. Unity and Multiplicity in the Wake of Brexit. Abingdon-on-Thames: Taylor & Francis. 228 pp. ISBN: 9780367244910.

Béatrice Costa — 2023-03-17

Review of: MALMKJÆR, Kirsten (2019): Translation and Creativity. London / New York: Routledge. 130 pp. ISBN: 9781138123274.

Adriana Şerban — 2023-03-17

Review of: OKULSKA, Inez (2018): Wer hat’s geschrieben, wer übersetzt? Autor- und Übersetzerschaft als kontingente Rollen. Wissenschaftliche Reihe des Collegium Polonicum. Berlin: Logos Verlag. 139 S. ISBN: 978-3-8325-4524-6.

Larisa Cercel — 2023-03-17

Rezension zu: SANMANN, Angela (2021): Die andere Kreativität. Übersetzerinnen im 18. Jahrhundert und die Problematik weiblicher Autorschaft (= Beihefte zum Euphorion. Zeitschrift für Literaturgeschichte, Bd. 113). Heidelberg: Winter. 330 S. ISBN: 978-3

Béatrice Costa — 2023-03-17

Rezension zu: STANLEY, John W. / O’KEEFFE, Brian / STOLZE, Radegundis / CERCEL, Larisa [eds.] (2021): Cognition and Comprehension in Translational Hermeneutics. Bucharest: Zetabooks. 521 S. ISBN: 978-606-697-126-3.

Sigrid Kupsch-Losereit — 2023-03-17

Forum: Bernd Stefanink und Nathalie Mälzer im Gespräch

Bernd Stefanink — 2023-03-17