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Translation as Rule-Governed Behaviour
Feleppa, Robert
Feleppa, Robert
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1982
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Abstract
The problems of radical translation occupy a central place in a number of
long-standing controversies in philosophy and anthropology. The
philosophical difficulties here concern the accurate recovery of speaker
meaning in translation, in light of the following two problems: (1) the
radical translator’s unwanted possession, in principle, of too many right
answers-i.e., the availability in principle of empirically equivalent, yet
divergent manuals of translation for a given society; and (2) the prima
facie undesirable, yet perhaps inescapable need to impose what is
grammatically and ontologically familiar to the linguist and to the target
language community upon the source language community in translating
their discourse. In short, these problems make clearly problematic
whether translations meeting standard criteria of adequacy can ever be
said to reveal what the source language speakers really mean. As many
anthropologists, especially those in the ‘language and culture’ tradition
generated by Boas, Cassirer, Sapir, and Whorf, take the recovery of
such culturally specific significance as central to their discipline, worries
about how to select translation manuals and related ethnographic systematizations
(such as kinship organizations and disease taxonomies)
that have demonstrable ‘cognitive (or psychological) validity’ seem to
run very deep indeed. And such concerns cannot but be deepened by the
fact that much reflection in the philosophical community on these problems,
particularly as embodied in the work of W. V. Quine, is against
the objective determinability of meaning in translation. For while anthropologists
generally worry about how to validate claims about meaning
and synonymy in light of these methodological difficulties, presuming
them to be surmountable in principle, Quine cites just these
problems in order to denigrate the various current notions of meaning
and synonymy-by rendering illusory the ‘underlying’ semantic (or
psychological) reality they purport to reveal.
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Access to full text is restricted. WSU Libraries provides access to electronic copy of this article via commercial databases and library online catalog:
http://libcat.wichita.edu/vwebv/holdingsInfo?bibId=1332858
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Sage publications
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Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Vol. 12, March 1982, pp. 1-32.
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1741-2714