Teaching Translation The Hermeneutic Way1

In North America, translation studies is enjoying its moment in the sun. There are journals, colloquia and scholarly publications galore. Translators are less invisible, and translations are increasingly acknowledged as vital contributions to the circulation and transmission of knowledge. Yet there is much to be dissatisfied with, as Lawrence Venuti observes in his introduction. The paradoxes, or "antinomies," as he puts it, are these: the first is that, although there are more translation studies programs, the tendency is to staff them with faculty who don't necessarily do translation or translation research. The second is that although work in translation is now taken into account when a candidate is up for promotion or tenure, it remains the case that scholarly work in the field is deemed a desirable sideline. It is something of a professional liability if the candidate is seen to only be doing translation research.

Teaching Translation: Programs, Courses, Pedagogies powerfully affirms the value of translation studies. Not in the manner of a polemic, or a paean, but in the modest tones of close commentary: the task of each contributor to the volume is to give an account of their course design, addressing the role of the teacher and that of the students, the kind of theory included in the reading lists, and the latitude for creative, practical exercises in translation. The importance of translation studies is expressed by the deep care and intellectual thoughtfulness displayed by each contributor—these essays are inspiring documents to read. Following Venuti's introduction, the book is divided into four parts. Part 1 addresses certificate and degree programs. Part 2 explores the complexities of teaching translation with regard to more specifically oriented topics. Part 3 surveys the variety of theoretical approaches currently on offer in translation studies. Part 4 offers a critical review of various pedagogical models, and an account of the various teaching resources instructors can draw upon.

The pedagogical panorama this book surveys is rich and variegated (and the present review cannot address them all), but there is a common denominator nonetheless: many, if not all, are wedded to the hermeneutic approach. Here, supplied by Joshua Price, is one definition of what that means: "translation [is] a hermeneutic practice, in which the meaning of a text is not fixed but rather emerges as it is subject to an interpretive process—in this case, as it is translated" (193). Translators are enjoined to the idea of fixed meaning every time translation's goal is deemed a matter of reproducing the source text exactly, every time "equivalence" is given as the ideal of translation, every time the ethical spirit of translation is said to be the achievement of "fidelity." What that zeal for exact translation amounts to, is carrying over a meaning intact, and if meaning can be intact, it must already be so in the source text—meaning fixed, therefore, meaning offering itself as something that ought not be altered when it arrives at the farther shore of translation. But hermeneutics liberates translation from the (impossible) task of a transfer of invariant meaning. It is less fixated on fixed meanings, and rather less sedulous about its fidelities to the source. This liberation conduces to a truer understanding of what it is to do translation. Translation is an interpretation. A translated text is not an ideal mimesis of the original, but rather the outcome of a creative process, something akin to a dialogue and a negotiation. The pedagogical value of such an approach, I take it, is that it frees students: once translation is understood as an interpretive and creative act, they gain greater agency over what they are doing. With that understanding comes a degree of self-awareness about the practice of translation, and this is what a good course in translation studies aims to cultivate.

Yet, as Venuti observes (this is his third "antinomy"), the presence of hermeneutics in translation studies is relatively scanty, despite the fact that hermeneutics has a solid theoretical profile: there is the imposing German tradition, a strain of French hermeneutics...