Constructing a Sociology of Translation.pdf

70 Theo Hermanstions are produced over time and representational modes are selected and re-selected,and it is reflected in the programmes fleshing out the schema of translation.The programmes are not uniform. Because in the modern world translationcaters for an array of differentiated function systems, it is also itself differentiated.Nevertheless the system as a whole remains distinct. It allows itself to be irritatedby different systems in its environment, but its resonance comes from within andis determined by its form.The idea of form I am using here has an inside and an outside. It was Michelangelo,I think, who explained that the statue he wanted to carve was alreadythere waiting within the block of marble in front of him; all he had to do wasliberate it by chipping away the redundant stone. Form is two-sided. The inside iswhat is there; the outside is what had to be cut away for the inside to be revealed.Form is arrived at by selection, that is, by excluding what is not included and thenconcentrating on what is included as the inside of the form. The exclusions, fortheir part, are not just “potentialized” as I suggested above, but bracketed in time,temporalized, hence they remain available for future use.What is the point of trying to think the form of translation along these lines?Just as speaking cuts into silence, what is translated is always profiled against whatis left untranslated. But silence can also communicate: it may communicate an inabilityor an unwillingness to translate. Moreover, just as, in speaking, the words aspeaker selects push back other words, those that could have been spoken but werenot, a translation offers its particular choice of words by obscuring other choices,as we saw before. In doing so, it activates one mode of representation at theexpense of alternative modes. The temporal sequence in which these differentialchoices are made constructs a past as well as a future. The future is the horizon ofpossibilities that is conditioned by the present but that may still mine the past inunexpected ways. The past may be thought of as the storeroom in which selectionsand inclusions are archived, selectively, as part of a process of forgetting as well asremembering. We deselect outmoded ways of translating and let them sink intooblivion so as to retain only a conveniently foreshortened canon of successful pastselections as a template for day to day use. But nothing prevents us from occasionallystirring up the sediment and reinstating former rejects, bringing them backfrom the margins. This is, to name just one instance, what Lawrence Venuti did inThe Translator’s Invisibility (1995) when he extracted from the historical archive alargely forgotten genealogy of non-fluent translation as a way of buying credit forhis own programme of “resistant” translation. The past is that selection of formsthat the present holds available for future use.In all these ways, it seems to me, considering form as two-sided allows us toappreciate translation as involving ongoing selection and therefore exclusion as