Research Articles

Reason, understanding and the limits of translation

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Abstract

All language description and documentation is an exercise in translation. Obviously, in the descriptive and documentary tasks that most field linguists of endangered languages engage in, a more radical form of translation is required: the linguistic forms of the language under study (the object language) are described and analyzed (not to mention providing metadata in the process of documentation) in a completely different language, typically a European metropolitan language like English (the metalanguage). This holds true regardless of whatever theoretical framework one wishes to cast their description in: the framework itself needs to be elucidated ... In practical terms, field linguists tend to be guided by two heuristic principles in their necessary tasks of translation: effability and the Conduit Metaphor. These two principles gel together so that the task of translation is mainly seen as one in which the translator needs to align the containers in the object language and metalanguage, as effability guarantees that there will be a match up in the contents of these containers across languages.

This view of translation, albeit not one often explicitly articulated, but taken as a working methodology, is simply not tenable, as this paper will endeavour to demonstrate.

Keywords: language description and documentation, translation, field linguistics, endangered languages, object language, metalanguage, effability, Conduit Metaphor, methodology

How to Cite:

Foley, W., (2007) “Reason, understanding and the limits of translation”, Language Documentation and Description 4, 100-119. doi: https://doi.org/10.25894/ldd262