Abstract: Intercultural Empathy and Egocentric/Other-Centred Translating

Patrick Boylan, University of Rome III (Italy) <>


The full paper will appear here when published / La versione estesa apparirà qui quando sarà pubblicata.

"All communication is translation," as Steiner reminds us (in Katan 1999). For even when we explain an event to someone using our native language, we end up translating (or transposing) one order of representation into another — turning mental imagery into verbal concepts — in function of our interlocutor's capacity to understand.

If this is so, then interlingual translation may be termed the systematic practice of intercultural communication. The present paper adopts just such a view and uses it to answer four key questions raised in the Conference announcement:

1. "How are we to understand and theorise the experiential role of translation in Language and Intercultural Communication (henceforth, LAIC)?"
2. "How should our pedagogic practices develop so as to reflect new theories?"
3. "To what extent does our new theorising impact on notions of the nature, quality and accuracy of a translation as traditionally dealt with?"
4. "Should translation be a core feature of a LAIC curriculum? What form should it take?"

Briefly put:

1. The act of translation is not the transposition of lexical items or pragmatic units (speech acts) but rather a transposition of existential states. Good translators "live" a source text as a communicative event by introjecting the cultural values of the epoch or milieu in which the text was framed. Like actors, they acquire a new identity with every text they live. Translating, then, is the search for functionally homologous "roles" (existential states) in a target culture -- after, of course, having first introjected the cultural background and expectancies of the target public. In rendering this second existential state in the target language, translators create a text capable of producing effects functionally homologous to the original, i.e. a "translation" (Boylan 1999).

It is clear then that, at its core, the act of translating has nothing to do with "words" or the production of texts: it is simply the search for functionally homologous existential states within the target culture. Once translators have found such states, they then become authors, not translators: their activity closely parallels the creative writing process that the author of the original text undertook within the framework of the source culture.

2. The pedagogical consequences of this view of the translation process are two: 1. translators must learn languages, not just as formal systems of representation, but in particular as modes of being; 2. translators must learn to be creative writers in the target language they intend to use (generally their native tongue). Both kinds of knowledge may be termed empathetic. Translation -- as all intercultural communication -- is founded on a displacement of the self through empathy.

Traditional university programs for translators generally fail to teach either knowledge: they teach L2 linguistics and pragmatics instead of L2 ethnolinguistics and participant observation; moreover, they take for granted that students are naturally competent as creative writers in their native tongue and need no training (rarely the case). See Byram & Fleming. 1998.

3. The specific kind of education received tends to produce a specific kind of translator. Traditional programs, emphasising language-as-a-conceptual-system and neglecting creative writing, tend to produce egocentric translators, i.e. translators unable to displace themselves into the cultures of the source text and the target public. Egocentric translators reproduce their own experience of a text from within their native cultural framework; moreover, they use words the way they (and not necessarily their readers) react to them. Little wonder that they communicate mostly themselves.

Instead, the pedagogy indicated in point 2. can help students become other-centred translators, capable of the double transformation of consciousness described in point 1. This enables them to communicate the otherness of texts to readers with backgrounds other than theirs.

4. Learning to translate professionally constitutes a speciality discipline and should NOT be a core feature of a LAIC curriculum: it simply requires too much time to become creative in the L1 and to acquire the tools of the trade (how to create glossaries, how to define clients' needs, etc.). On the other hand, a course focused on the core of the translation process -- the equating of existential states -- could be quite useful in a LAIC program. One such course, conducted at the University of Rome III, is described in this paper. Students narrate (in an L2) culturally-connotated real-life events. This means translating their "Italian" experiences into words and imagery that create a homologous effect on a native speaker of English. Success is measured by testing if the observed reactions of native speakers of English, upon hearing or reading the target text, are similar to those of Italians when hearing or reading the original culturally-marked event narrated in the source text.

Bibliography

P. Boylan. 1999. "La traduzione in un corso di laurea in Lingue" [Translation in a University Language Degree Course]. In: P. Pierini (Ed.), L'atto del Tradurre, Rome: Bulzoni, pp. 129-151.

M. Byram & M. Fleming. 1998. Language Learning in an Intercultural Perspective: Approaches through drama and ethnography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

D. Katan. 1999. Translating Cultures: An Introduction for Translators, Interpreters and Mediators. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.