Return to Saussure

Yet any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information — hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations. But do we not generally regard as the essential substance of a literary work what it contains in addition to information — as even a poor translator will admit — the unfathomable, the mysterious, the "poetic”, something that a translator can reproduce only if he is also a poet ?  —Walter Benjamin, The task of the translator Introduction: Translation and the Life of Language Walter Benjamin's The Task of the Translator contains a remark that is easy to overlook but difficult to explain. Discussing literary translation, he writes that an ordinary translator can reproduce only information, whereas "the unfathomable, the mysterious" can be reproduced "only if he is also a poet." At first glance, the statement seems almost self-evident. Poets possess a refined sensitivity to...

The Tower of Babel, Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Source: Wikipedia Translation is a mode. To comprehend it as mode one must go back to the original, for that contains the law governing the translation: its translatability. Translatability is an essential quality of certain works, which is not to say that it is essential that they be translated; it means rather that a specific significance inherent in the original manifests itself in its translatability. It is plausible that no translation, however good it may be, can have any significance as regards the original. Yet, by virtue of its translatability the original is closely connected with the translation; in fact, this connection is all the closer since it is no longer of importance to the original. — Walter Benjamin, The task of the translator Thesis Walter Benjamin's The Task of the Translator argues that translatability (Übersetzbarkeit) is not an external property added to literary works but an essential characteristic of...

Introduction Walter Benjamin's The Task of the Translator contains one of the most frequently quoted passages in twentieth-century translation theory: "The words Brot and pain "intend" the same object, but the modes of this intention are not the same. It is owing to these modes that the word Brot means something different to a German than the word pain to a Frenchman, that these words are not interchangeable for them, that, in fact, they strive to exclude each other. As to the intended object, however, the two words mean the very same thing" (Benjamin, 2000, p. 258). The example appears almost self-evident. German and French use different words for the same object, while each language approaches that object according to its own "mode of intention." Benjamin's point is not that languages merely substitute different labels for identical realities, but that each language discloses the world in its own distinctive way. But what if Benjamin had...