Translation constructs meaning anew rather than transferring finished meaning across languages.
Evidence
Translation, as Derrida puts it, is quite unlike buying, selling, swapping—however much it has been conventionally pictured in those terms. It is not a matter of shipping over juicy chunks of meaning from one side of the language barrier to the other—as with fast-food packs at an over-the-counter take away outfit. Meaning is not a readymade, portable thing that can be “carried over” the divide. The translator is obliged to construct meaning in the source language and then to figure and fashion it a second time round in the materials of the language into which he or she is rendering it. The translator’s loyalties are thus divided and split. He or she has to be faithful to the syntax, feel and structure of the source language and faithful to those of the language of translation.… We face a double writing, what might be described as a “perfidious fidelity.” … We are drawn into Derrida’s “Babel effect.” — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 855
Categorization
- DEFINE: Defines translation as double construction — ‘perfidious fidelity’ — a conceptual mechanism for how meaning is always produced, never carried.
- XREF: Extends the constructivist thread: translation as paradigm for all cultural/meaning production, parallel to the ‘Africa’ being reworked in the Caribbean weave and to how any identity category is negotiated across divides. — connects to: Translation choices can erase a religion’s core self-definition; Classical translations routinely distort meaning through culturally specific terms — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 1600; The same Latin phrase flipped meaning across eras due to cultural change — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 243
- QUESTION: Worth chasing: how does Hall deploy Derrida’s Babel effect further, and how does the double-writing of ‘perfidious fidelity’ model the position of the colonized subject speaking the master tongue?