Constructing a Sociology of Translation.pdf
Constructing a Sociology of Translation.pdf
Constructing a Sociology of Translation.pdf
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<strong>Translation</strong>, irritation and resonance 3personal. The participating bodies and minds are not themselves social. What issocial is the to and fro <strong>of</strong> communicative exchange, as one communication hooksinto another and their linkage starts building a chain over time.This concatenation is an ongoing concern in which the event character <strong>of</strong> individualcommunications is crucial. Communication happens. It does not linger.Communications have to connect if the system is to get going and to keep going.Signals have to be picked up, made sense <strong>of</strong> and responded to.Communication, the key to it all, is conceived here as the coincidence <strong>of</strong> utterance,information and understanding. In this description “utterance” (Luhmann’sGerman term is Mitteilung) stands for the communicative act, the performativeaspect <strong>of</strong> communication. Information, the constative aspect, concerns what theutterance is about. It refers to something outside the communicative act itself. Ifinformation presents a communication’s external reference, the utterance is itsself-reference. Understanding (Verstehen) then means observing the unity <strong>of</strong> thedifference between utterance and information: a receiver construes a speaker assaying something.It may be worth adding a few footnotes to this idea <strong>of</strong> communication. First,communication, in this model, begins with understanding. That is, it begins withthe receiver, not with the sender. Understanding means that the receiver graspsboth utterance and information as selections, ascribing a communicative intentionto the sender and assuming that the topic that is broached is <strong>of</strong> relevance in oneway or another. It gets under way when a receiver responds to a communicationand in turn finds a responsive receiver. Secondly, the model is inferential. Makingsense <strong>of</strong> a communication is a matter <strong>of</strong> drawing inferences from a signal. Communicationis not transfer, the transmission <strong>of</strong> pre-existing content via a conduitsuch as language. Instead, we have the same stimulus and inference model thatalso underpins Relevance theory. Applying this model to translation will meansacrificing the metaphors <strong>of</strong> packaging and transportation dear to traditional conceptualizations<strong>of</strong> translation. Thirdly, inference leaves room for misunderstanding.Or better: misunderstanding is that apparent mismatch between intended andconstrued meaning that can only be established by making it the theme <strong>of</strong> furthercommunicative exchanges, which themselves require inferential interpretation.Before we return to translation, we need a few additional general points. Here,then, brutally simplified, are some essentials <strong>of</strong> systems theory, Luhmann on theback <strong>of</strong> an envelope, so to speak.1. Communications are fleeting events, therefore they must be connected. To dothis, the system scans and latches on to communications selectively. Of all thepossible meanings a given communication pr<strong>of</strong>fers, only some are retainedand used to trigger connecting communications, which are again filtered out