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Translation, in a sense, is communication; for translation involves
the transfer, or the carrying over, of a pre-conceived entity from one
language form to another. This pre-conceived entity, which makes
translation possible, could be nothing but a certain unascertainable
vision of reality channeled through the medium of language. The link
between language and the external world is mutually indissoluble. The
relation of language to the external world has become a controversial
issue over which philosophers and linguists disagree. Radical
sceptiscism, of which Hulme is a true representative, rejected the
knowledge of the external world as indefinite and un-self-validating.
Radical sceptics tried and failed to discover a link between the laws
of deductive logic and the nature of experience derived from real-life
events. For them the link between thought processes and external
phenomena was simply missing. Kant set out to liberate thought from
the prison-house of reason in which Hulme and his fellow-sceptics had
deadlocked it. Kantian philosophy postulates that "knowledge is the
product of the human mind, the operations of which could only interpret
the world, and not deliver it up in all its pristine reality."
(Christopher Norris: 'Deconstruction: Theory and Practice', (1982, p4).
The structuralist outlook to the external world springs from a
sceptical divorce between mind and reality. Ferdinand de Saussure
argues that our knowledge of the world is shaped by the language that
serves to represent it. The 'arbitrary' nature which he bestowed upon
the 'sign' seems to have undone the link between word and thing,
between language and reality. According to Saussurian structuralism
language ceases to be a window through which we countenance reality; it
is an autonomous, self-validating system in which "reality is carved up
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