I finally managed to formulate my thoughts on translation as a practice in a more coherent and systematic fashion. It only took about eighteen years. The first idea came out in a Poroi essay published in 2005 after a conference at the University of Iowa on empathy. It seems to have been viewed 540 times and downloaded 1585 times. I don’t quite understand these numbers (wouldn’t the views have to at least match the downloads?), but fine. The essay is called “The Oxymoron of Empathic Criticism: Readerly Empathy, Critical Explication, and the Translator’s Creative Understanding.” It can be accessed here.
The basic idea there was that, when they do it enough, translators engage in something like a practice in the Aristotelian sense, which encourages them to see the world or at least the part of the world they engage in most, which is combinations of words on a page, in a distinctive way. The question is how? I’ve tried to define it various time but was never satisfied.
A conference on scholarly translation that Sean Cotter organized at the University of Texas at Dallas last year gave me another crack at thinking it through. The result felt better and will come out in an essay called “When Dragons Show Themselves: Research, Constructing Knowledge, and the Practice of Translation,” the proofs of which I just finished checking. On its way out soon at Know: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge.
I’ll update this post when it’s out.
###
Russell Scott Valentino 