Sunday, 3 May 2015

After Babel: Aspects of language and translation, 3rd Ed.,
George Steiner, OUP, 1998, page xiidnl

In what is perhaps his most famous - if not controversial among the translation theory community - book, George Steiner introduces translation in a way that not many of us may have considered:

After Babel postulates that translation is formally and pragmatically implicit in every act of communication, in the emission and reception of each and every mode of meaning, be it in the widest semiotic sense or in more specifically verbal exchanges. To understand is to decipher. To har significance is to translate. Thus the essential structural and executive means and problems of the act of translation are fully present in acts of speech, of writing, of pictorial encoding inside any given language.