Unknown Language and Radical Translation

Abstract

Were Gayatri Spivak to read Willard van Orman Quine’s Word and Object, or his other relevant writings on translation, she might be compelled to add him, on the basis of his famous “gavagai” example and the transmesis he composes in order to explain it, to her list of the excoriated foundational. That is, the notion of unknown language that calls for “radical translation,” as defined in the epigraph, can be taken as analogous to Kant’s extreme of humanity. The speakers of Jungle, as Quine calls the unknown language that produces a single lexical item, join the New Hollanders and Firelanders at the extreme edge of humanity. What they lack, however, is not material culture— they could, as I will show in what follows, just as well be space aliens trying to explain their incredibly advanced technology to us earthlings—but rather cognates with Western languages, which, as noted above, along with shared culture serve to disguise the indeterminacy of all translation. Quine wishes to use his one-word example to demonstrate the following thesis about translation: “[M]anuals for translating one language into another can be set up in divergent ways, all compatible with the totality of speech dispositions, yet incompatible with one another” (Word and Object 27). The term speech disposition is important, for it encapsulates a behaviorist view of language that linguistic utterances are responses to stimuli from a variety of sources.KeywordsScience FictionRadical TranslationShared CultureWestern LanguageExtreme EdgeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.