The Babel Fallacy: When Translation Does not Matter

From these two incontrovertible premises he deduced that the Library is total and that its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols (a number which, though extremely vast, is not infinite): in other words, all that is given to express, in all languages.

— Jorge Luis Borges, "The Library of Babel," 54

Translation studies, especially in its theoretical forms, is defined almost solely in non-Asian terms. Is that merely because architects of the discipline are unfamiliar with work in and of Asia? They see Estonian as a neglected field that needs immediate rescue, while large continents of languages and literatures have slipped entirely off their disciplinary map. Surely that is part of the problem, and it will not be substantially improved, as Gayatri Spivak has argued, until the leading scholars in the discipline learn more of those languages and literatures. Maria Tymoczko has confronted this Eurocentrism in terms of what should be added to translation theory from non-European sources, and Martha Cheung (2005) has responded from a Chinese perspective. These are noteworthy interventions. Yet there is something more fundamentally European about translation studies than mere geography. Translation studies, in all its forms, is European because the problematic of translation is a non-Asian (or at least a non–East Asian) construction. As with all disciplines, translation studies has created its object of study, not found it a priori, and it has created that object in its own language. Jacques Derrida warns, "One should never pass over in silence the question of the tongue in which the question of the tongue is raised and into which a discourse on translation is translated" (1985, 166). Here I want to consider the very question of the tongue in which the question of translation studies is raised.

Let's go back to the beginning, at least one beginning:

1. 6. And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.

2. 7. Go to, let us go down, and there confound [Hebrew, babel] their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.

3. 8. So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. (Gen. 11:6–8, King James version)¹

Thus, the need for translation begins with God's "babeling" the language of Noah's people, and that moment is reimagined both explicitly and implicitly in a wide range of canonical works in translation studies: from the title of George Steiner's magnum opus, After Babel, to the implications of the opening lines of Friedrich Schleiermacher's "On Different Methods of Translation":

That utterances are translated from one language to another is a fact we meet everywhere, in the most diverse forms. If, on the one hand, men are thus brought together who were originally separated perhaps by the span of the earth's diameter, and if one language can become the receptacle of works written many centuries before in a tongue long since deceased, we need not, on the other hand, even go beyond the bounds of a single language to encounter the same phenomenon.

(43)

The Babelian shadow falls across the most theoretical works as well, emblematically in Jacques Derrida's "Des tours de Babel," in which he says that the Hebrew God "imposes and forbids translation" (170), and in Phillip Lewis's complex reply to Derrida, wherein Lewis writes:

What comes into English from French will therefore be something different. This difference that depends on the dissimilarity of the languages is the difference always already in translation. As the very ground of translation—its raison d'être and its principle—it cannot be overcome. The difference that blocked or deferred communication in the mythical Babelian situation may be glossed over, but it never completely disappears; translation never suppresses it totally.

(223)

And that is just a sliver of evidence for the way Babel haunts mainstream translation studies.

The...