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The double bind (Gregory Bateson, slightly expanded): (1) Do X. |
Double Bind 1: Source vs. Target
(1) Respect the source author and text.
(a) Think of the source culture as superior
to your own, more conducive to spiritual depth, philosophical profundity,
or artistic creation. Wish you had been born in it. Long for the advantages
that this would have yielded you.
(b) Admire the source author, his or
her brilliance, genius, courage, experimentation, etc. Identify with him
or her, wish you could have been him or her, or, barring that, been his
or her close friend, spouse, lover, child, student, or devotee.
(c) Immerse yourself in the source text,
make yourself a part of it, learn to know it thoroughly. Feel its greatness
on your tongue, in your ear, with your whole body.
(d) Come to understand just how thoroughly
grounded in the source culture the author's achievement is, how source-language-bound
his or her expressions are.
(e) Come to understand how difficult
it is for you, coming to it from the target language, even to appreciate
the source author's achievement.
(f) Believe that the source author is
counting on you to take his or her text to the world.
(g) Believe that taking that text to
the world means translating it as faithfully as possible.
(h) Believe that fidelity to the source
text means clinging as closely as possible to its felt textures, to every
word-choice and turn of phrase, to every verbal sound and color, to every
prosodic feature, to everything that you love so much about it.
(i) Believe that your primary loyalty
in everything must be to the source culture, language author, and text.
(2) Respect the target culture and reader.
(a) Affirm and appreciate the target-cultural
tradition, its illustrious history, its rise to greatness, its modern
innovations.
(b) Recognize the fact and the significance
of the many translations from your current target language into your source
language. Recognize that the target language of your translation has much
to offer its source language.
(c) Reflect that your translation, if
it is accepted by its target-cultural readership, will contribute to the
target culture.
(d) Remember all of the target readers
who have no knowledge of the source language, and thus no access to your
source text. They need you. They are counting on you.
(e) Believe that they are counting on
you to make the source text as accessible to them as possible.
(f) Believe that accessibility means
assimilating everything alien in the source text to familiar target-language
syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.
(g) Believe that your primary loyalty
in everything must be to the target culture, language, author, and text.
(3) Internalize the command to do both,
and expect censure for failure at either.
(a) Believe, and work hard to make others
believe as well, that target-language fluency is the only true goal of
translation, but not, of course, at the expense of loyalty to the source
text.
(b) Ignore any frustration or despair
you feel at your inability to live up to your own principles. Don't think
of this "ignoring" as repression; it's just a matter of focusing
on what's most important and not sweating the small stuff.
(c) Let your determination not to sweat
the small stuff mystify the practical application of those principles,
so that, for example, you can never quite put your finger on what constitutes
"accurate fluency." You can point to it when you see it, but
can't analyze it, let alone provide working prescriptions for it.
(d) If someone disagrees with you, claims
that some text you think is accurate and fluent is in fact inaccurate
and difficult to read, resort to huffy demagoguery in support of your
unshakable position.
(e) Believe, and work hard to make others
believe as well, that giving the target reader a feel for the foreignness
of the original text is the only true goal of translation, but not, of
course, at the expense of target-language readability.
(f) Ignore any frustration or despair
you feel at your inability to live up to your own principles. Don't think
of this "ignoring" as repression; it's just a matter of focusing
on what's most important and not sweating the small stuff.
(g) Let your determination not to sweat
the small stuff mystify the practical application of those principles,
so that, for example, you can never quite put your finger on what constitutes
"readable foreignism." You can point to it when you see it,
but can't analyze it, let alone provide working prescriptions for it.
(h) If someone disagrees with you, claims
that some text you think is readably foreignized is in fact domesticated
or unreadable, resort to huffy demagoguery in support of your unshakable
position.
(i) Understand without being told that
what is at stake here is not just your professional integrity as a translator,
but your worth as a human being. If you can successfully put both the
source language and the target language first, respect both the expressive
textures of the source language and the linguistic and cultural norms
of the target language, you are not only a good translator, but a good
person.
(j) Understand without being told that
you can't do both, and thus will never be either a good translator or
a good person.
(k) Expect to have your nose rubbed fiercely
in your failures: you will be attacked as incompetent in the target language
if you obey 1 and as no translator at all (only a paraphrast, a rewriter)
if you obey 2. In either case expect reviewers to list "howlers,"
whether those are construed as the places where you clung too closely
to source-language words, phrases, and sentence structures and thus wrote
"bad target language," or the places where you interpreted source-language
words and phrases freely and wandered "too far" from "source-language
meaning."
(l) Internalize the negative conception
these conflicting commands mandate not only of you but of your profession.
Think of the translator as intrinsically a traducer.
(m) Fight the negative conception of
translation that the impossibility of obeying both 1 and 2 mandates by
working harder, and calling on other translators to work harder as well,
to obey both 1 and 2. If only translators would show more respect for
both the source and the target language in their translations, people
would respect you and your profession more. Let this transform 1-2-3 into
a vicious circle from which there is no escape.
(4) Repress all this, and despise anyone
who reminds you of it.
(a) Believe that translation may occasionally
be difficult, but it is certainly not impossible — certainly nothing
to imagine in terms of a vicious circle from which there is no escape.
It is only high-falutin' theorists, estranged from the realities of day-to-day
translation practice, who portray it as impossible.
(b) Show some scorn for these nay-sayers,
but ignore them as best you can and go on doing what you do best.
(c) Believe that translation is impossible,
but nonetheless absolutely essential.
(d) Scorn those naive translators who
think translation is easy, who fail to recognize the massive, indeed insurmountable
difficulties to be overcome in order to translate well (or perfectly).
Despise them for their compromises — but be willing to compromise
yourself in order to go on practicing a profession that you firmly believe
is impossible.
(e) Remain convinced that your compromises
(insofar as you allow yourself to become aware of them) are of a higher
order than those made by your naive colleagues who do not understand how
high the stakes are. You can feel yourself compelled to compromise, and
even then you yield only slightly, and ache with the cost of that yielding;
those others compromise unconsciously, with blithe indifference to what
is lost in the process.
(f) Laugh (un)easily at any suggestion
that in any of this you are struggling in vain to obey conflicting commands.
The very idea is absurd. You're a translator. You try to do your best
as you see fit, according to your best lights, with help from other professionals
in the field. If that help sometimes comes in the form of friendly advice,
or a professional query regarding the correctness of some word or phrase,
does that mean you're some sort of soldier obeying orders? Of course not.
If you occasionally lose your temper at people who suggest that you're
doing things all wrong, that's just because they make you so mad. Nothing
more. You're a professional who knows what s/he's doing, and it really
irritates you when someone comes along and tries to rearrange your whole
professional life.
(g) Ridicule translation theorists who
dredge up all this unpleasant stuff and then have the nerve to peddle
it as "translation theory" — as if it had anything at all
to do with translation! Dismiss them easily, being very careful to control
your anger and the anxieties that drive it, as unserious people, hardly
worth the effort it takes to tell people not to read them. This new stuff
is useless not because it bothers you (it doesn't), but because it's irrelevant
to the proper study of translation — which your group defines, but
don't say that outright, as an admission of that sort might tend to localize,
motivate, and thus deidealize the group's approach.
(h) Ridicule translation theorists who
present all this unpleasant stuff as "new," innovative, groundbreaking,
revolutionary, when of course everyone (in your camp) has known it all
along and has said it many times before, and much better; call it "reinventing
the wheel," a futile undertaking that could have been avoided had
the offending theorists only read a bit more extensively in the writings
of your group. This new stuff is useless not because it bothers you (it
still doesn't), but because you're sick and tired of hearing the same
old thing over and over, especially when it is deceptively offered in
the guise of the new.
(5) Idealize the command-giver.
(a) Believe that there is no command-giver;
there is simply a factual state of affairs. Don't even deny the existence
of a command-giver; just never let the possibility arise. If it is difficult
(or impossible) to respect both the source and the target language simultaneously,
that is not because you have been commanded (or trained, or programmed)
to do both, and to conceive translation as doing both. That's just what
translation is — not what someone told you it is, not some artificial
restrictive definition of translation, but the facts.
(b) To the extent that you identify the
command-giver as the source author, convince yourself that you have reliable
access to his or her true intentions and know best how to act on them
in your translation. Don't think of yourself as creating an ideal "construct"
or "fiction" of authorial intention and then imposing it on
the target reader. Idealize the source author not as ideal but as real,
a real historical person whose intentions are patently obvious (to you,
and to anyone else who cares to study the text as carefully as you have)
and binding. You have to translate the way you do, because that is the
way the (idealized) source author would have wanted you to.
(c) To the extent that you identify the
command-giver as the source culture, convince yourself that you are in
a unique position to understand the source culture's importance both historically,
in its own right, and in its impact on the target culture. You have studied
(even lived in) the source culture for years, you speak and read its language
fluently, and not to presume or anything but you feel a certain spiritual
kinship with it, you feel like an honorary member of that culture, and
thus in some sense like a spy for the other in the camp of the self. You
are, not to put too fine a point on it, the source culture's chosen instrument
for the therapeutic transformation of the target culture — your method
the foreignizing of the target language, the importation of source-language
traces into target texts. This is emphatically not just some elitist project,
some sleight-of-mind by which you elevate yourself over your compatriots
and convince yourself (and with any luck them as well) that they should
follow your lead; it is a mandate from abroad.
(d) To the extent that you identify the
command-giver as the target reader, convince yourself that you have reliable
access to his or her true interpretive needs and know best how to act
on them in your translation. Don't think of yourself as creating an ideal
"construct" or "fiction" of target-cultural interpretation
and attempting to shape your actual readers in its image. Don't wonder
whether there aren't hundreds, thousands, even millions of very different
target readers with very different interpretive needs — or if you
do wonder about that, do so idly, without letting your ruminations affect
your actual translation practice. After all, you can't exactly do millions
of different translations, can you? You can only do one, which means that
you have to imagine your target reader as a kind of composite of all the
others — but not as a single reductive idealization that excludes
other possibilities, no, rather a realistic combination that includes
as many possibilities as you can.
(e) To the extent that you identify the
command-giver as the target culture, convince yourself that you and the
people who send you translations (editors, agencies, etc.) are the relevant
constituency of that culture — that you and your employers and clients
not only know the needs and desires of the "people," but adequately
represent them, and not only represent them but are them. A useful tool
in the task of coming to believe all this and getting others to accept
it as well is empirical research, whether marketing studies done by large
publishing firms or objective sociological research done by translation
scholars in the descriptive translation studies school: if you base your
claims on science, hard quantitative methodology, statistical analysis
(especially when done by computers), then people can hardly claim that
you have your own axe to grind, can they?
(f) Whether you identify the command-giver
as the source author/text/language/culture or the target reader/text/language/culture,
believe that your ideal image of either is the only command-giver. Ignore
or repress the fact that you are subjected to constant ideological pressure
to conceive of certain source authors and cultures (the classics of ancient
Greece and Rome, the major European countries) as creative giants and
in certain others (Third-World countries) as stumbling novices.
(g) Even if someone points out the congruence
between your image of your source author and/or culture and these ideological
norms, dismiss it as a mere coincidence, or as an irrelevant fact because,
after all, your image isn't ideal, it's real, realistic, accurate.
(h) Ignore the impact of book production
and distribution on your image of the target reader, the ideologically
charged input of acquisitions editors, copyeditors, marketers, and distributors
on who your readership is or should be.
(i) Whatever you do, don't entertain the possibility that deviating from normative conceptions of your task and taskmaster is so distasteful to you because it is taboo. You are not addicted to ideological conformity. A translation commission or publication contract is not a fix, it's a professional achievement, and if in the process of succeeding professionally your norms come to resemble closely the norms of the people who pay you for your work, well, that's just the way things are. You don't bite the hand that feeds you, obviously, but more important, you just happen to share their beliefs.
Other double binds:
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Source
vs. target
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