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(2014) Literary translation, Dordrecht, Springer.

On the work of philosopher-translators

Duncan Large

pp. 182-203

The nexus of philosophy and translation — what Jeremy Munday refers to as "the inter-attraction of translation and philosophy' (2001: 163) — naturally gives rise to two principal lines of enquiry: into the philosophy of translation and the translation of philosophy. Neither has been well served by the secondary literature, and leading reference works (for example: Craig 1998; Malmkjær and Windle 2011; Snell-Hornby et al. 1999; Zalta 2013) routinely omit the subject altogether. Previous overviews have generally foregrounded the first option (Arrojo 2010; Benjamin 1989; Malmkjær 1997; Munday 2001; Sallis 2002), in other words what Anthony Pym terms the question of "translation as an example for philosophy' (2007: 25), but as Pym goes on to point out, "Western philosophy has no traditional discourse on translation' (ibid.; cf. Arrojo 2010: 247), or in Lawrence Venuti's more dramatic analysis: "translation remains the dark secret of philosophy' (1998: 115). With the honourable exceptions of the Americans W. V. O. Quine and Donald Davidson (see Glock 1993; Mueller-Vollmer 2004: 148–50), even the linguistically orientated analytical philosophy of the post-war period has generally failed to engage with the topic. On the other hand, reflection on the translation of philosophy has stressed the difficulty of rendering philosophical terms and concepts which, inevitably, are intimately bound up with the expressive potential of a specific language (Ladmiral 1981; Schleiermacher 1963: 65–6; Schopenhauer 1963), leading Jonathan Rée to conclude that "of all the kinds of translation, none is trickier than the translation of philosophy' (2001: 226).

Publication details

DOI: 10.1057/9781137310057_12

Full citation:

Large, D. (2014)., On the work of philosopher-translators, in A. Fawcett & P. Wilson (eds.), Literary translation, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 182-203.

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