Philosophy of translation meets translation studies

Abstract

Though there are no clear-cut boundaries between the philosophy of translation and translation studies, they are obviously not the same. They differ not only in how they address their subject matter but also in that they occupy different “niches” in the culture. In the terminology of Bourdieu, they partake in different, though possibly partly overlapping cultural fields. This article attempts to create a meeting place for two representatives of these disciplines: Paul Ricœur, a leading figure in French hermeneutics of the 20th century, and Gideon Toury, a prominent researcher in the field of translation studies. Ricœur’s concept of the (non-existing) “third text” is compared with Toury’s concept of “the adequate translation as a hypothetical construct”, which was proposed in the 1980s and negated in the 1990s; and Ricœur’s view of translation as “equivalence without adequacy” is compared with Toury’s stand on this issue. The possibility of working with both and reading each of them in light of the other is examined by applying their ideas to a test case—three Hebrew translations of Kipling’s “If ”. The underlying assumption is that establishing links between translation studies and the philosophy of translation can contribute to the understanding of the phenomenon, which is the subject matter of both.