ETHICS AND NORMS IN THE TRANSLATION

“Ethics and Norms in the Translation of Political Texts”

“Ethics and Norms in the Translation of Political Texts”

Introduction:

On the face of it, no two human disciplines (and their corresponding objects) stand further apart than the science of language and the science of wealth. A phrase like ' political economy of language' seems paradoxical in a way that 'philosophy of language' or 'anthropology of language' does not. Perhaps this is because their respective objects appear to be locked in incommensurable universes, language trapped in a world of ideas far apart from the world of material goods that form the object of analysis of classical political economy. To unite these opposed worlds becomes something like an act of alchemy, a magical overcoming of the familiar dualisms of words and things, ideas and goods, idealism and materialism, in the same act (Irvine, 1996 and Keane, 2003). For others, however, drawing comparisons between linguistics and economics had less to do with overcoming antinomies than defining disciplinary boundaries. Where 19th century thinkers often assimilated language to natural sciences like geology or biology (see for example Manning, 2004b), by the 20th century economics (formerly political economy) alone among the social sciences had established a kind of respectability and disciplinary autonomy that could serve as a model for others. Saussure was quite explicit in his desire to create an integral science of language, linguistics, part of a larger science of signs, semiology, and he was equally explicit that his model for this autonomous discipline of language was economics, and certainly not the natural sciences. According to Saussure, what linguistics and economics had in common was that they were both sciences about 'value', and this suggestion, in various forms, has tantalized many in the years since. Saussure may have been wrong in the specifics of his comparison, in the sense that his notion of linguistic value ultimately has very little in common with any of the forms of value posited in economic theory, whether classical political economy (use value versus exchange value) or economics, but in other respects, as disciplines, linguistics has a lot in common with the economics: both are social sciences in name only, their basic presuppositions make their objects quasi-natural, immune to human intentionality. Critiques of Saussurean structuralism (Keane, 2003 and Stasch, 2005) and critiques of economic theorizing share this element - that they are both objective sciences of humanity, in which the human subject appears in a rationalized form with limited agency. The subject of linguistics, the idealized speaker-hearer, a native speaker with a perfect knowledge of a language, resembles the subject of economics, the rational actor with an encyclopedic knowledge of commodities, and so on.

So, it seems clear that part of what both sciences have in common is their drive to isolate an integral object (language, economy) that can be studied apart from other considerations, and their consequent tendency to naturalize that object on the basis of purportedly universal human tendencies (talk is apparently as natural to humans as ...