Translating transition: The role of translator’s prefaces as mediative paratexts in philosophical translations in 1990s Estonia

Harriet Martineau’s ‘freely translated and condensed’ version of Auguste Comte’s Positive Philosophy (1853) made a significant contribution to the scholarly conversation on positivism in Britain. The translation of Continental philosophy into English during the mid‐nineteenth century enabled translators to rewrite and rethink the original text for their home audience according to their own political and social agenda. Yet the idea of translation can be broadened to include translating philosophical ideas into different genres in order to broaden the readership – to popularise and, to some minds, bastardise the philosophy. The translation of philosophy into literary fiction arguably bridges the gap between scholarly integrity and popularisation that Eliot feared; indeed, both Eliot and Martineau, as established translators, vividly understood their power to manipulate and mould foreign philosophies through both their literal translations and their fiction. This paper examines the translational role of Eliot’s Middlemarch (1877) and Martineau’s Deerbrook (1839) in reproducing, reshaping and popularising Comte’s positivism within the British public mind.

The nexus of philosophy and translation — what Jeremy Munday refers to as 'the inter-attraction of translation and philosophy' (2001: 163) — naturally gives rise to two principal lines of enquiry: into the philosophy of translation and the translation of philosophy. Neither has been well served by the secondary literature, and leading reference works (for example: Craig 1998; Malmkjær and Windle 2011; Snell-Hornby et al. 1999; Zalta 2013) routinely omit the subject altogether. Previous overviews have generally foregrounded the first option (Arrojo 2010; Benjamin 1989; Malmkjær 1997; Munday 2001; Sallis 2002), in other words what Anthony Pym terms the question of 'translation as an example for philosophy' (2007: 25), but as Pym goes on to point out, 'Western philosophy has no traditional discourse on translation' (ibid.; cf. Arrojo 2010: 247), or in Lawrence Venuti's more dramatic analysis: 'translation remains the dark secret of philosophy' (1998: 115). With the honourable exceptions of the Americans W. V. O. Quine and Donald Davidson (see Glock 1993; Mueller-Vollmer 2004: 148–50), even the linguistically orientated analytical philosophy of the post-war period has generally failed to engage with the topic. On the other hand, reflection on the translation of philosophy has stressed the difficulty of rendering philosophical terms and concepts which, inevitably, are intimately bound up with the expressive potential of a specific language (Ladmiral 1981; Schleiermacher 1963: 65–6; Schopenhauer 1963), leading Jonathan Rée to conclude that 'of all the kinds of translation, none is trickier than the translation of philosophy' (2001: 226).

How does philosophy learn to speak a new language? That is, how does some particular language come to serve as the means for the expression of philosophical ideas? In this paper, I present an answer grounded in four historical case studies and suggest that this answer has broad implications for contemporary philosophy. I begin with Jonathan Rée’s account of philosophical translation into English in the sixteenth century, and the debate between philosopher-translators who wanted to acquire – wholesale or with modifications – foreign terms, and those who wished to take existing words and transform them from their ordinary to a philosophical use. I sketch how these twin processes of ‘acquisition’ and ‘transformation’ manifested themselves in philosophical translations from Greek to Latin, Greek to Arabic and both Greek and Arabic to Gə’əz and argue that comparative work in this vein could yield interesting and significant results. I suggest that not only is Rée’s approach useful for thinking about philosophical translation historically, but that philosophical translation between very different languages is important for contemporary philosophy insofar as it reveals the linguistic presuppositions of philosophical theories expressed in some particular language, and that this constitutes an argument against the prevailing monolingualism in philosophy.

The paper discusses the problem of philosophical translation. The author expresses the idea that this problem has epistemological nature, that is, it is designed to solve the issue of cognitive attitudes of consciousness. The solution to the problem is considered in three main aspects: semiotic, hermeneutic and pragmatic. The semiotic aspect expresses the problem of translation as the transfer of cultural senses and meanings. The hermeneutic aspect considers the translation of a text as part of the process of interpretation. The pragmatic aspect of translation is associated with applied issues of translation activities and some aspects of intercultural communication. The paper summarizes the experience and research results of Russian humanities; a comparative analysis of their concepts is performed. As a result of the research, a number of statements are proposed that express the problem of philosophical translation in Russia. They are as follows: philosophical translation should be interdisciplinary in nature; the problem of the fundamental untranslatability of a philosophical text has no solution; philosophical translation is an interpretation, that is, an open dialogue with text and tradition; philosophical translation helps to solve some issues of intercultural communication while preserving philosophy in national language.

This article is a contribution to a symposium on Kit Wellman’s intriguing monograph, Rights Forfeiture and Punishment (Oxford University Press 2017). Primarily, the article grapples with Wellman’s claims regarding the moral permissibility of sadistic punishment. The metaphor of “philosophical languages” is employed throughout, to compare (translate) Wellman’s use of rights-forfeiture discourse to an approach that is grounded in practical-reasons discourse. This study in philosophical translation allows us to reassess and critique Wellman’s conclusions regarding the moral permissibility of sadistic punishment. On one level, the article is an attempt to engage with Wellman’s book and rights-forfeiture based arguments on, and in, their own terms. Yet, the article is also an attempt to explain and defend a practical-reasons based approach to appraising moral permissibility. If the article succeeds, it both pays tribute to Wellman’s masterful rights-forfeiture arguments, while making the case that practical-reason arguments illuminate a wider range of salient considerations that we should wish to keep in view when considering the moral permissibility of sadistic punishments.

Based on translation and interpretation works of Daode Jing from Carmelo Elorduy, Jose Ramon Alvarez and Inaki Preciado Idoeta, this thesis will explore the hierarchy and level of translation works among metaphysics by mainly focusing on Tao, Yu, and Wu. Recent translation works are more involved with literature and business application and less with philosophy and thoughts. As a result, even such translation works often discuss the composition of poems or statement of rhymes, they may not offer comprehensive translation for certain philosophical translations. However, translation itself is a way of interpretation. In this thesis, the research method of the analysis and discussion will be built in the ground of Truth and Method by H. Gadamer. This thesis will firstly summarize and analyze the outcomes of previous studies, including discussion of western and eastern literature review, summary of Sinology of Spain, and interpretation of metaphysics from Sinologists. Secondly, the author will provide Spanish translation of chapter one, chapter four and chapter twenty-five from Daode jing in order to offer further understanding of Tao interpretation from Sinologists. Lastly, the conclusion, which is approach of philosophical translation, can serve as response to the contribucion of Spain Sinologists. To sum up, the dilema in philosophical translation cannot be eliminated with one standard solution. However, we could explore new meanings from historical texts by applying translation from varied angles. If we could attract people’s attention toward historical texts through new interpretations, then the abundant meanings can be more extended and evolved.

Aletheia: The Truth of Philosophical Translation as a Translation of Thruth.An Encounter of Martin Heidegger, Paul Ricœur and Antoine BermanThe article analyzes the specificity of philosophical translations insofar as they generate a new meaning and present themselves as originals that must be retranslated. This goes against Ricœur’s conception of translation as a creation of comparable terms. We will show that philosophical translation consists in the creation of an incomparable term, which cannot be measured in terms of equivalence, adequacy or fidelity. All these terms correspond to a notion of truth understood as adequacy, therefore we operate a deconstruction of aletheia, the Greek concept for “truth”, in order to show that what we hold today to be the truth of translation has been the result of a translation. Through Heidegger’s reading of aletheia and through Berman’s account of the terms that name translation in Europe, we reinterpret the Roman philosophical translations as examples of traductio and we show, in the end, that by retranslating aletheia, the rules for the practice of translation change, allowing the latter to be guided by an ethical approach towards the otherness rather than by righteous fidelity and adequacy.

This book introduces readers to Indian philosophy by presenting the first integral English translation of Vaiśeṣikasūtra as preserved by the earliest canonical commentary of Candrānanda (7th century AD) on the old aphorisms of the Vaiśeṣika school of Indian philosophy. The present monograph offers a canonical description of the fundamental categories of ontology and metaphysics, among which the category of 'particularity' (viśeṣa) plays a major role in the 'problem of individuation' of the 'nature' of substance in both Indian as well as Western metaphysics. This commentary should be read primarily in relation to Aristotle's Categories. It is structured in 3 parts. Chapter 1 contains a general introduction to Indian philosophy and the Vaiśeṣika system. Chapter 2 is a textual-philological discussion on the commentary itself, since its first publication in 1961 by Muni Jambūvijayaji up to the present day. Chapter 3 is a 'philosophical translation' that reads Vaiśeṣika in the global context of Comparative Philosophy and aims to render this text accessible and comprehensible to all readers interested in ontology and metaphysics. A new reference work and a fundamental introduction to anyone interested in Indian and Comparative Philosophy, this volume will be of interest to scholars and students in Classical Studies, Modern Philosophy, and Asian Religions and Philosophies.

It is well known that the English word “philosophy” was translated into Japanese astetsugakuby Amane Nishi.The writer makes clear the circumstances under which Nishi coined the termtetsugaku.However, before Nishi coined it, the wordrigakuwas the term most com-monly used to mean “philosophy.” In 1791-92, in a translation of a Dutch book on astronomy, YoshinagaMotoki translated “philosophy” into various terms, such as 儒教・智学・窮理学・性理学・性理術. This was the first recorded translation of “philosophy” into these terms. And after twenty years, in a few Dutch-Japanese or English-Japanese dictionaries compiled around 1810, we can find the wordrigaku (理学).A case can be made that Yoshinaga Motoki and Dutch interpreters played an important role in the translation of the word “philosophy” into Japanese. But why didtetsugahucome to replacerigakuas the commonly accepted translation whenrigakuhad been used for so many years.After presenting a report at the regular monthly meeting in April, 1993, the writer tried to throw new light on this question, as well as on the issues of why opinions are divided on the books in which the termtetsugakuappeared, and why “philosophy” was not translated into its exact Japanese equivalentaichigaku (愛智学).

recently been much more concerns of the West than of China (though this is now changing). In the West, the ancient Greeks did little translation (with few and late exceptions, such as the translation of the Septuagint) and accordingly developed hardly any philosophy of translation either. As a relatively self-sufficient and dominant culture, they had little need of either. Translation, and in its train the philosophy, or theory, of translation, only became major preoccupations in the West with the Romans, who were culturally dependent on the Greeks and therefore needed to translate their works into Latin. Since the Romans,

The previous chapter has given some sense of the enormous impact of the translation movement during the 'Abbāsid caliphate, which rendered Greek works of science and literature into Arabic. The translation of what we would now consider to be properly philosophical works was only a small part of this movement. Translation of philosophy went hand in hand with the translation of more “scientific” texts, such as the medical writings of Galen and the astronomical and mathematical works of Euclid, Ptolemy, and others. Under the 'Abbāsids the most important group of translators, in terms of sheer output and the quality of their translations, was that of the Christian Hunayn ibn Ishāq (808-873 C.E.), and his son Ishāq ibn Hunayn (died 910 C.E.). Hunayn and his school produced many translations, including of works by Plato and Aristotle (especially the logical corpus); particularly important to Hunayn himself were translations of Galen, which formed the basis for Hunayn’s own treatises on medicine. A second, slightly earlier group was that gathered around the person of Abū Yūsuf Ya‘qū b ibn Ishāq al-Kindī (died about 870 C.E.). Al- Kindī’s circle did not produce as many translations as the Hunayn circle, yet some of the works they did translate were of immense importance in determining the Arabic reception of Greek philosophical thought. It is quite likely that the choice of which texts to translate was guided in part by the philosophical concerns of al-Kindī and his collaborators.

Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari won the prestigious Wheatland Prize for Translation in 1987 for their translations and critical edition of the works of Nietzsche. That version in Italian (1960–1975) was the first collection of all of Nietzsche’s works in their entirety. The late and posthumous recognition of their work has been followed in 1995 by the project of the University of Washington to translate the Colli-Montinari critical edition of Nietzsche’s complete works into English, still in progress. But Giorgio Colli is also the author, the passeur, the translator, of Greek Wisdom (1977), a monumental project that aimed to reform Diels and Kranz’s famous edition of Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker with particular attention to the religious antecedents of Presocratic thinking. Colli’s premature death in 1979 interrupted the edition, which ended with the third volume (out of a projected eleven).

Nineteenth and early twentieth century scholars thought Cicero a bad source for Hellenistic philosophy. They thought that the speeches in his dialogues were translated, often badly, from single sources. Thus they read him only to reconstruct his sources by Quellenforschung. I first give a sympathetic account of these scholars' projects, which is often dismissed too easily today. Second, I give a complete argument that these scholars were wrong, and that today's more positive, but often incompletely defended, view of Cicero is correct. Third, I argue that Cicero wrote dialogues not only to introduce Hellenistic philosophy to a Latin audience, but also as literary unities to impress a learned Roman audience who already knew philosophy in Greek. His models for the dialogue form were Plato, Aristotle, and Heraclides of Pontus, but he adapted it to to serve his radical Academic skepticism, in which he followed Carneades and Clitomachus. He hoped to be the model for a Latin tradition of good writing about philosophy, that would "illuminate" both philosophy and Latin. Cicero's creativity as a philosophical author shows why Quellenforschung failed, and that he is a good source for Hellenistic thought.

The first comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of the complex relationship between the field of translation studies and the study of philosophy. The book examines: canonical philosophers on translation; translation studies and philosophy; the translation of philosophy; emerging trends.

The translation of philosophy into fiction