TRANSLATION AND MEANING: A CULTURAL- COGNITIVE ...

literary and cultural experience is essential in the process, but a good reader
of literature (the dominant function of the translator at this initial stage)
needs to be able to interpret those ambiguities, understatements,
informational gaps or the entire flow of information by supplementing
knowledge with a certain degree of imagination. The hermeneutic search is
a complex and, according to what Cornis-Pop (2000:11) calls
antimetaphysical approaches to literature, a never-ending activity of
meaning negotiations at various stages of reading and re-reading the text, in
close connection to the kind of ideological and normative frameworks
determining successive returns to a given text. Thus post-structuralist
theorists such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco and others,
have expressed in various ways a growing concern for the impossibility of
ever reaching a satisfying, final understanding of the literary text,
particularly when the very act of reading is seen as productivity, as a
dynamic process refined by successive re-readings, reinterpretations,
continuous negotiations in search of some form of interpretational
coherence. In his comprehensive study of views on interpretation as a
critical act and the search for that ultimate meaning, Marcel Cornis-Pop
views critical interpretation as a mode of re-writing, a continuous translation
and readjustment of meaning (2000: 18). Rob Pope (1998: 242) also speaks
of the process of active reading - and hence of understanding a text,
responding to it - as a re-writing of the original. On the other hand, the
philosophy and practice of translation have not been the same since George
Steiner’s seminal study After Babel (1975), where he pushed the limits of
the concept of translation by stating that interpretation is translation, hence
any type of interpretation of meaning is to be understood as a form of
translation. The three perspectives presented are only slightly different: the
first sees interpretation as a critical practice that is characteristic of all
conscientious readers, the second approaches literary texts from the point of
view of the multiple possibilities for textual intervention, whereas the third
approaches translation as a hermeneutic process impossible outside the
larger cultural framework of all meaning exchanges. Considering that the
translator is one of the conscientious readers and critics of the literary text,
as well as the target reader’s authority as regards the meaning(s) of the
source text, and being its rewriter in target language as well, the
aforementioned approaches can be seen to converge, explaining each how
the translation is carried out as an interpretation while also accounting for
the difficulty of the process.
The translator’s interpretation of the literary text appears as one of
the possible outcomes of the hermeneutic process, one of the ways in which
the original is rewritten. The resulting rewriting involves the second role of