Constructing a Sociology of Translation.pdf

Translation, irritation and resonance 3personal. The participating bodies and minds are not themselves social. What issocial is the to and fro of 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 of 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 of and responded to.Communication, the key to it all, is conceived here as the coincidence of utterance,information and understanding. In this description “utterance” (Luhmann’sGerman term is Mitteilung) stands for the communicative act, the performativeaspect of 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 of thedifference between utterance and information: a receiver construes a speaker assaying something.It may be worth adding a few footnotes to this idea of 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 of 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 of a communication is a matter of drawing inferences from a signal. Communicationis not transfer, the transmission of 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 of packaging and transportation dear to traditional conceptualizationsof 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 of 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 of systems theory, Luhmann on theback of 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 proffers, only some are retainedand used to trigger connecting communications, which are again filtered out