Translation Review - The University of Texas at Dallas

To put it in the words of another, more recent Englishauthor of clever nonsense rhyme, Geertz appears to wanthis readers to understand him as saying “I am theWalrus.”By way of conclusion, I’d like to return to the questionraised by Richard Schweder as to whether it is betterfor the translator, like the reviewer, to ignore style, or inGoethe’s terms, whether translators of nonliterary textsshould attempt to move the text toward the reader.Perhaps the first thing to say about this is that thetext that is moved closer to the target-language readerbecomes a very different text from that read by thesource- language reader. In essence, translation consistsin the interpretation and reconstruction of signs, and“style” is best understood as the way in which the signsto be interpreted are arranged. As such, style is itself asign, and even the most important one, because it is stylethat puts the other signs in relation to one another andthus communicates to the reader impressions and indicationsabout the “turn of mind” of their author.Our analysis of Geertz’s style has concentrated onhis mixing of tone and register, his manipulation ofidiomatic expression and allusion. One might also examinemore closely his syntax, rhythm, and diction, buteven this brief analysis of one chapter from AvailableLight has been sufficient, I think, to demonstrate the contributionof style to the communication of his thesis. Atranslation that ignores style may well succeed in gettingacross the gist of the argument, but the argument will bemuch less forceful and convincing than the original version.Rather than neglect style or downplay it in theinterests of better serving the target-language reader,translators of nonliterary texts would do better toattempt, wherever possible, to reconstruct the style of thesource text. Where reconstruction is not possible, as inthe case of implicit literary allusion, or where it risks creatingobstacles to readability, as with the literal translationof idiomatic expressions, explanatory notes can beintroduced to provide target-language readers with backgroundinformation shared by their source-languagecounterparts. Academic texts, in which footnotes are acustomary feature of the genre, will certainly suffermuch less than fiction from the intrusion of additionalnotes from the translator.Finally, translators should remember that they, likeanthropologists, are laborers in the vineyard of culturaldiversity. Indeed, language, and especially languagecomposed into texts, as Geertz and his colleagues havetaught us, is the primary instrument with which culture isforged and expressed. In his preface to Available Light,Clifford Geertz provides this seemingly off-hand definitionof cultural anthropology: “going about the world tryingto discover how in the midst of talk people — groupsof people, individual people, people as a whole — put adistinct and variegated voice together.” Translators generallytravel less than anthropologists, but other than that,they are engaged in a similar kind of activity. It is truethat translators are concerned primarily with the voice ofa single author, but even single voices speak of theirroots in the culture in which they were formed, and thespecial features of each written voice, otherwise knownas style, give its readers a way of interpreting where andhow that voice stands with respect to others both insideand outside of its own group. This kind of “background”information, implicitly shared by the author’s readers, isessential to a translation if its readers are to be givenequal or nearly equal access to the distinctive voice ofthe text and to the cultural diversity of which, howeverindirectly, it speaks.26 Translation Review