indeterminacy of translation →
απροσδιοριστία της μετάφρασηςOne frequently hears it urged that deep differences of language carry with them ultimate differences in the way one thinks, or looks upon the world. I would urge that what is most generally involved is indeterminacy of correlation. There is less basis of comparison — less sense in saying what is good translation and what is bad — the farther we get away from sentences with visibly direct conditioning to non-verbal stimuli and the farther we get off home ground.[W. V. O. Quine, Word and Object (new edition), foreword: P. Smith Churchland, preface: D. Føllesdal, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2013, p.70]The general claim of the indeterminacy of translation is that there might be different ways of translating a language which are equally correct but which are not mere stylistic variants. The claim includes what one might think of as the limiting case of translation, that in which a given language is ‘translated’ into itself.
Some philosophers hold that the idea of indeterminacy is absurd, or that it amounts to an extreme form of scepticism about whether we ever understand one another, or whether correct translation is possible at all. It is not hard to see how such opinions arise. One picture of communication is like this: you have an idea, a determinate meaning, in your mind and convey it to me by your utterance. To those who have that picture, indeterminacy threatens the whole idea of communication, for it suggests that the conveying is always vulnerable to drastic failure. In the case of translation, the analogous view is that synonymy, or sameness of meaning, is the criterion of correct translation; in that case, indeterminacy may appear as a denial that translation is possible at all.
Such views, however, take for granted a view of communication, or of translation, which is very far from Quine’s. For Quine, the criterion of successful communication, whether or not it involves translation, is fluent interaction, verbal and nonverbal: “Success in communication is judged by smoothness of conversation, by frequent predictability of verbal and nonverbal reactions, and by coherence and plausibility of native testimony” (1990, 43). From this point of view, talk of synonymy and of ideas in the mind is simply a theoretical gloss which is (at best) in need of justification. Quine doubts that the gloss is justifiable; scepticism about the theorizing, however, is not scepticism about the data. Smooth communication certainly occurs, sometimes in cases where different languages are involved. That successful translation occurs is not cast in doubt by anything he says; his claim, indeed, is that it may be possible in more than one way.https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/quine/#IndTra
« Last Edit: 08 Dec, 2018, 17:38:04 by dominotheory »
Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune.