translation studies. retrospective and prospective views

speech. Any scientific worker or technician could find all the words he
needed in the list devoted to his own speciality, but he seldom had
more than a smattering of the words occurring in the other lists. Only
a very few words were common to all lists, and there was no
vocabulary expressing the function of Science as a habit of mind, or a
method of thought, irrespective of its particular branches. There was,
indeed, no word for 'Science', any meaning that it could possibly bear
being already sufficiently covered by the word Ingsoc. (923)
The three are meant to cover and fulfil all human needs and actions,
reduced to what the words in the language might have as referent.
Strikingly enough, however, the metalanguage of this linguistic
propaganda is not envisaged at all, although its role is predominant and
domineering.
The central idea with Newspeak is that, if something cannot be said,
then it cannot be thought, this giving rise to the question of whether we
define ourselves, as speakers, through the language that we use, or whether
we are the ones to define the language we are using.
“Divorced from thought” (Thom, 1993: 78 – our translation), political
discourse is characterised by simplicity, primitive mechanisms and
uniformity of stylistic processes. This is observed and developed by Orwell
in a novel which uses the influencing powers of fiction to denounce the
annihilation of the richness of language when the political class denies the
members of a society the freedom of speech – an element defining
totalitarian ideologies in general. He shows how language grows uglier as a
result of the degradation of thought, and thought undergoes a similar
process of degradation due to language becoming increasingly ugly. He
underlines the notion that political discourse is destined to make lies sound
true and crime respectable. The dictatorship Orwell imagines intends to
modify language completely, and in this respect it acts firstly at the lexical
and semantic levels so as to limit thought. In so doing, it no longer allows
language to function as a vehicle for communication but, as already stated,
as a vehicle for ideology. Secondly, it is directed against communication
and cultural or diachronic, intercultural or synchronic mediation (usually
the task of translation), rendered obsolete, anyway, if language is dead and
thought prohibited.
Considerations of prestige made it desirable to preserve the memory
of certain historical figures, while at the same time bringing their
achievements into line with the philosophy of Ingsoc. Various writers,
such as Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Byron, Dickens, and some others
were therefore in process of translation: when task had been
completed, their original writings, with all else that survived of the
literature of the past, would be destroyed. (764)
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