Translatability From The Perspective Of Deconstruction

Translatability concerns the possibility of translation, thus translatability inevitably further comes to the very basic nature of translation. In the long history of translation studies, scholars have intensively debated the issue of translatability/untranslatability. Scholars of translation studies made both transcendent and empirical enquiries on this issue. Especially in practice, scholars had different approaches toward the issue, including the sense-for-sense approach, the equivalence approach, the functional approach, and other approaches, and reached different conclusions. The disputes have been going on while different opinions rest their attention on different aspects. However, these opinions are based on the presupposition that there is a stable meaning of a text, and translation is to convey the meaning in another language. After going through the researches conducted on the issue of translatability, the author of the thesis summarizes three categories of conclusions:absolute translatability, absolute untranslatability and relative translatability.This paper tends to approach the issue of translatability from the perspective of deconstruction. Deconstruction is a post-structuralism trend that has been influential in fields like philosophy, aesthetics, literature, literary criticism, translation, etc. The essence of deconstruction is to subvert, or to deconstruct the western logocentrism and a series of dichotomous oppositions set under it. Deconstructive translation theory is not the one in a traditional sense, for it does not put forward a concrete descriptive or prescriptive criterion for translation, nor does it probe into the specific process of translation in detail. Deconstructing the original does not mean to deny it; deconstructive translation just gets rid of the frame of traditional translation studies, and calls for more attention to various elements outside the text. Deconstructionists raise questions challenging fundamental notions in translation theories. According to deconstruction, there is no absolute one-to-one relationship between the signifier and the signified; thus meaning can not be extracted from a text; instead, meaning is a contextual event. Consequently, translation is not to convey a pre-existing meaning; rather, translation is to expose the differences of languages to complement them with each other. Derrida, the forefather of deconstruction theory, provides a new perspective towards the issue of translatability by deconstructing the translatability/untranslatability dichotomy, using a series of his own terms, such as differance, trace and intertextuality. According to his theory, since there is no stable meaning of a text, the concept of translatability in a traditional sense is thus deconstructed. For deconstructionists, translation means completely another thing; translation is both possible and impossible. Furthermore, translation is not only possible, but also necessary for the survival of a text. Texts are translatable, in a deconstructive sense, where a translation is seen as a "regulated transformation" of the original. A translation is a text which happens in a new context where its new meaning comes, complementing the original text and making it survive. In addition, following the "pure language" theory of Benjamin, deconstructionists see translation as a tool for the fulfillment of both source language and target language. Therefore, translatability from the perspective of deconstruction has been endowed with new meaning, completely breaking the traditional translation studies. In this context, the nature of translation gets its new meaning and translations and translators are put into higher status and translation studies are more and more diversified and prosperous, entering into a multi-perspective era.