translation studies. retrospective and prospective views

themselves become models of intellectual responsibility, never faltering in
justifying an opinion or grade, which will encourage students to do
likewise. This will further encourage students to assume responsibility for
their own thinking, and, ultimately, their education.
Translation can thus become an exercise of inquiry which encourages
self-correction (i.e., self-criticism and self-control — the qualities C. S.
Pierce (1931) identifies as deriving from self-correction) and sensitivity to
context (i.e., inferential reasoning which is not dissimilar from Aristotle’s
call for understanding the individual within the general and not vice
versa). It also helps identify fallacious thinking as well as recognize the
logical basis of figurative language, as for instance in simile and metaphor.
It further helps make and exercise good judgments, as when interpreting a
text, critically responding to an oral message or building a sound
argument. Translation skills, along with communication and conceptformation
and reasoning skills can then ensure competency in inference.
It follows that education for critical thinking – translation being one
suitable way among other 1 — is profitable on both short and long terms
because it increases the quantity and quality of meaning that students
derive from what they read and perceive and what they express in what
they write and say.
2. Annotation: A transcultural and transtextual practice
Annotation, as etymologically assumed [L. annotāre — ad, to, notāre, -
atum, to mark], means the making of notes, a note of explanation; a
comment to be added to a book or piece of writing to explain parts of it
(Chambers Concise Dictionary; Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English).
As annotation transmits information, it follows that it is as much receiveroriented
as text/author-oriented. It then means that it veers more towards
criticism/interpretation than translation proper. The latter, as partaking of
the status of a work of art, is free-standing, that is, foreign reader-oriented,
since art, as Walter Benjamin remarks, “posits man’s physical and spiritual
existence, but in none of its works is it concerned with its response.” (1955:
69) Similarly, a literary work “tells very little to those who understand it,”
Benjamin points out in order to make the distinction between bad
translation, (i.e. any translation which performs a transmitting function)
and good translation (i.e. translation as a work of art) more conspicuous. In
his now famous argument on ‘The task of the translator,’ the theorist
postulates that “translation is a mode” and translatability “an essential
feature of certain works” or “vital connection” between the original and its
translation. (1955: 70; 71) This means that, of all literary forms, translation
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