The Thanksgiving break afforded me the opportunity to finish a handful of books, one of which is The Philosophy of Translation by Damion Searls (Yale University Press, 2024). A friend gave me this book, and I thoroughly enjoyed it (Thanks, Hayden!). In this post, I’ve collected several quotes and a host of thoughts to share some of what I found most interesting about the book.

Reading & Writing

Translation is an act of reading and writing. A writer demonstrates his own understanding of a text by translating it.

The defining feature of the act of translation is the kind of reading the translator is doing, and the philosophical account of translation in this book is of what it means to read like a translator. (p. 5)

I was immediately drawn in by that sentence because it stood out to me as a new idea, one that made sense, and one I wanted to think more about. Throughout the book Searls reflects on what happens in the act of translating, and he persuasively demonstrates that translation is neither objective nor subjective (p. 6).

Possible

I appreciate the point made throughout the book that translation is always possible. To say otherwise is to misunderstand the nature of the activity.

The claim that all translation is a “forcible replacement of … linguistic and cultural differences” implies that a culture can exist in its respective language only … The problem as always is that once we posit a conceptual gap, we can no longer conceptually bridge it, however hard we try. (p. 46)

Realignment

Searls prefers to think of translation as “realignment” (p. 48). The translator realigns “the text’s relationship to its audience” (p. 49). Searls will unpack this idea later in the book in terms of an original text’s arc.

What a translation has to match from the original is not the words — of course not, every word is going to be in a different language — but the interrelations and proportions, the constellation, or I would say: the arc. (p. 96).

I repeatedly reflect on how I appreciate the honesty with which Searls writes. He is a sort of realist. He is aware and honest about what he knows and doesn’t know. There describes the experience of translation with a humility that makes me want to keep reading.

Perception & Affordance

I find the concept of “affordance” a particularly helpful alternative to the idea that translation is either objective or subjective. Here, Searls is quoting James Gibson’s The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception:

To perceive things in the environment “is to perceive what they afford. This is a radical hypothesis, for it implies that the ‘values’ and ‘meanings’ of things in the environment can be directly perceived” and also that they are “external to the perceiver.” … To identify something, Gibson writes, “is to perceive what can be done with it, what it is good for, its utility.” (p. 73–74)

Searls applies the concept to translation. To produce a translation of a text is to grasp what the text affords — a finite range of translation options — and to choose the affordance that seems best. Both the translator and the original text determine the translation.

As a translator I take up the affordances of the original, moving through its world and constantly invited to respond in certain ways … Perceiving means activating (or not) the possibilities the environment affords us to move and act within that environment; reading like a translator lets us take up (or not) the possibilities the language affords. Both processes are complex interplays of the self and the world, neither objective nor subjective. We read the book itself, but we read it, from a particular perspective, moving through it in a particular way. And a translation both is and isn’t the same as the original — it’s the translator’s path through it. (p. 80)

Searls doesn’t “argue” a position regarding what translation his. He describes the experience, and his description of perception and affordance here rings true to me. I’ve spent a lot of my life over the past two decades reading and translating ancient languages, and this idea of perception and affordance clicks.

Differential Experience

Related to the idea of perception, Searls talks about reading and translation as an act of defamiliarizing (chapter 2) and “deviation from a ‘baseline’” (chapter 4). Reading is a “differential experience” because “we don’t just see what’s in front of our eyes, we see its difference from other objects and perspectives” (p. 82).

With this idea, too, Searls makes clear that translation is not bridging the gap between two disconnected contexts. It’s not objective or subjective. Here’s my best attempt to translate the idea into my own words: The act of understanding happens on a mental stage with a background of what something is not. The act of translation is similar. We demonstrate our understanding of the original text as we defamiliarize the concept for readers. We use our words to communicate something new to readers with a conceptual background they are familiar with. Our world and their world are connected by familiar background, and that familiar background makes our new words shine. Good translations starkly and dramatically stand out from the familiar background. To translate and defamiliarize well is like a good performance on stage, versus a flat boring performance.

I found particularly insightful this observation:

This is why translating — practice in reading like a translator — helps your monolingual writing: you will write with greater awareness of your own language and the conventions you’re operating in. The only difference is that a translator has a sense of how an author is taking up the author’s language, and then has to express that in a different language. (p. 84)

Force of an Utterance

Circling back a bit to the section above on realignment and arc, I like how Searls talks about the object of translation as “the force of an utterance” (p. 107 and chapter 5).

Any word needs to be translated not as a word but as a part of a complex utterance. (p. 110)

In one portion of this chapter, he describes the experience of a friend preparing to take her French language exam for graduate school. This particular exam was a challenging one that students frequently failed. They failed because their idea of translation was too focused on individual words. The friend was successful because she grasped the idea of translation as an act of rendering the “force of an utterance” into another language.

In the margin of page 118, I wrote “my experience with Augustine.” I once took a Latin exam similar to the French exam Searls describes. My experience of teaching Latin based on best practices for second language acquisition prepared me for this exam though I had never before read an entire paragraph of Augustine in Latin. What I did know is how to read and listen for the “force of an utterance.”

Text

As Searls explain more about the idea of translating the force of an utterance, I appreciated this description of what a text is:

The text is a use of language that exerts force, actualizes various potentials in the language, emphasizes or even invents things that the language can do. The utterance looked at in this way isn’t a thought, message or action being communicated through language: it is a piece of language that does something, and not just to the reader but also to the language as a whole. (p. 157)

The Goal

Searls explanation of the goal of translation is insightful. Searls speaks about the goal in terms of sound, register, association, and movement. I won’t comment on each of these, but these lines from the association section were noteworthy:

We have to pay attention not only to the original’s association but also to the translation’s … The word “association” nicely means both the ideas a word evokes and the relations a word maintains with other words it has dealings with. A word’s circle of friends and cabal of enemies … (p. 170)

A Question about Faithfulness

I like the way Searls frames the idea of “translating faithfully.” And it’s on this point that I have a question. He talks about the translator faithfully rendering “how you see the action and ‘force’ of an utterance” (p. 202).

What’s important to preserve depends on what the translator finds in the original — how the translator reads … each is trying to produce a text that matches, or does the same as (has the same force as), not the source text but his or her reading of the source text. (p. 195)

Yet again, he has found a way to help me conceptualize how translation is neither objective nor subjective. I do, however, wonder how Christianity’s unique metaphysic relates to this point. We believe that God has given his Spirit to the church (Acts 2) in a unique way. I spend most of my time pouring over texts that we believe to be the words of God. In the words of Paul and Isaiah, “Who has understood the mind of the Lord? … We have the mind of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:16; Isaiah 40:13).

Here’s the section of the book where I wrote a large marginal note about this idea:

Here we have, perhaps unexpectedly, the most far-reaching consequence of understanding translation as a kind of reading: no one translates a text — they translate their reading of the text, and everyone has different reading experiences (different from other readers’, different over time). The idea of fidelity presupposes a certain fixity — not unlike the fixed constellations of the stars in the sky — while translation as reading makes us insist on the translator as an individual in an interpersonal, social, political world, someone with personal tastes and a history and more or less power than other people and communities, and makes us consider translation an act performed in this specific lived context. (p. 196)

What about revelation? What about the mind of the Spirit that unites the Church? Searls isn’t writing from this vantage point, but I’m reading him this way because, after all, I’m reading him. When I consider Searls’ words with respect to reading and translating Scripture, I want to push back that we are not just individuals. Thinking within a Christian metaphysic, we have to go farther with respect to faithfulness. We believe there is an objectivity outside our individual readings. Supernatural revelation is a thing we confess. The Spirit of God dwells with the church, and through the universal church community we have access to the author — not just from the outside, like a translator talking to the original author, but from within. We have the mind of Christ.

At the same time, this is part of the reason I appreciated Searls’ repeated emphasis on the fact that translation is neither objective nor subjective.

Conclusion

I thoroughly enjoyed Searls’ book, and I recommend it to anyone who wants to think deeply about what happens when we translate texts. My copy is full of underlines and marginal notes: “Yes,” exclamation points, stars, summaries, and question marks. I’m walking away with a (1) fascinating new ways of thinking about the way reading and translation overlap, (2) a renewed conviction that interpretation and translation is often neither objective nor subjective, and (3) a better understanding of what it means to both understand a language and demonstrate that understanding in my own words.