An Interdiscipline Vanishes:

a science fiction approach to understanding Translation Studies

Brian Mossop 2017©

A popular branch of science fiction is the alternative history. What if Hannibal had successfully conquered Italy? What if the Axis powers had defeated the Allies in World War II? What if the Netherlands had emerged as a world power after its conflicts with England and France in the second half of the 17^th century? These and many other scenarios have formed the basis of science fiction novels and stories.

In this article, I’ll look at three alternative histories in which Translation Studies (TS) as we know it never emerges because of some imaginary event that causes a divergence in the timeline. My purpose is to shed some light on our ‘interdiscipline’. Today, some 40 years after Translation Studies emerged (under various names in different languages), it at first appears to be a great success story, if we consider the ongoing proliferation of journals, congresses and university departments. But in another sense, the situation is—for many of us at least—disturbing: as is frequently pointed out, there is still no widely accepted understanding of the object of study. TS continues to be an unfocused grab-bag of topics and methods united only by the use of the word ‘translation’ in one or another of its dictionary meanings.

Before coming to my first scenario, I should mention that I will be concerned only with TS as it has developed in the ‘European’ world (defined to including European settler societies where TS flourishes, such as Canada, Brazil and Israel). For lack of personal knowledge, I will not be considering either the spread of European TS to other parts of the world, or the traditions that exist or have existed independently outside Europe so defined.

Scenario 1: The MT revolution of 1976

Machine Translation Newsflash

Moscow USSR

October 18, 1976

A team of Soviet computer scientists has announced the successful testing of a machine translation system that provides fully automated high-quality results for all types of text. …

What if, in the mid 1970s, a group of researchers figured out how to program computers to provide fully automated and high-quality translations for all types of text—yes, even poems and novels! Bear in mind that in scifi alternative history, the event at the origin of the divergence in the timeline is of no importance in itself. There may be a brief explanation of how, for example, the Netherlands became the world’s sole superpower, but it does not matter whether the explanation is plausible[i]. The novel is about what happens after the divergence. In the scenario I am painting, the actual workings of the astounding MT program are therefore beside the point.

The obvious consequence of the MT revolution is the disappearance of the translation profession and, consequently, the shutting down of translation schools. As a result, there is no longer any basis for TS as we know it. That is because, contrary to what is often imagined, TS did not simply emerge within the academy through an uncomfortable union of linguists and literary scholars. Rather it emerged principally under the aegis of translator training programs whose main purpose was to provide professional translators to meet the huge expanding demand for translation in the post-war world.

The MT scenario points to the fact that the origin of the ‘interdiscipline’ brought together three rather than two groups; it was partly intellectual and partly practical. Linguists and literary scholars found themselves having to train students for the profession, or else they had to operate alongside actual practitioners hired to teach these students. These were mostly practitioners of non-literary translation who mostly had no special scholarly interest in translation (especially literary translation) but knew how to meet the demands of the new post-war ‘translation industry’.

The uncomfortable relationship with the translation industry (even on the part of scholars who had at one time been translators or even still spent a small amount of time translating) is perhaps suggested by the English name of the interdiscipline. In the early 1970s, two English names were suggested: translatology and translation studies. The latter was preferred because it associated translation research with the humanities and social sciences, which have been the main centres in universities of resistance to the transformation of universities from educational institutions into training grounds for business and government needs. Despite its financial dependence on students training for the translation industry, the interdiscipline preferred to name itself in a way that suggested a purely intellectual humanistic pursuit rather than an applied science, as would have been suggested by the –ology suffix.

What happens after the divergence in the timeline caused by the MT revolution in this first scenario? Linguists, literary scholars and people in a few other university departments never move out into a new translation department or ‘centre’ or ‘school’ (or form more or less autonomous translation units within old departments). In real history, that move depended on the multiplication and expansion of translation schools, but in the alternative timeline, these schools serve no purpose.

Of course, within the old departments, translation continues as a small specialty interest of a few isolated people: someone in a comparative literature program is interested in comparing the various translations of Anna Karenina, including the new MT translation; someone in the education faculty is still interested in translation as a language learning method; someone in the psychology department uses translation in an experiment to cast light on how bilinguals process language.

Scenario 2: The FIT Institute for the Study of Translation and Interpreting

Communiqué de presse

Paris, le lundi 7 juin 1971

La Fédération internationale des traducteurs annonce l’établissement d’un Institut pour l’étude de la traduction et de l’interpretation. Sous l’égide de la FIT, l’Institut sera responsable de recherches qui pourraient améliorer la formation des traducteurs et par la suite la qualité des traductions. …

[Press release. Paris, June 7, 1971. The FIT (international federation of translators) is pleased to announce the establishment of an institute for the study of translation and interpreting. Under the auspices of the FIT, the institute will carry out research aimed at improving translator training and thus the quality of translations.]

In this second alternate history, the Fédération internationale des traducteurs sets up an Institute for the Study of Translation and Interpreting in 1971. The federation had been established in Paris in 1955 to organize the profession around the world, encourage the formation of groups of translators in countries where no such groups existed, defend translators’ interests and set out their duties. Its official language was French. The new Institute is funded partly by FIT member fees, partly by the European Economic Community, forerunner of the European Union, and partly by a few countries that have government translation services or a well established private translation industry or both. In short order, branches of the Institute pop up in various locations around the world. The researchers are former translators and interpreters; a few may have also worked in universities, but the Institute has no formal affiliation with any university.

The Institute’s mandate is to study translation with a view to improving the training of translators and interpreters, improving the qualifications of translators and interpreters in both the public and private sectors, and more generally improving the quality of translating and interpreting. While the Institute is entirely a centre for applied research (it does not train translators), it does take in, for a few weeks or months at a time, a small number of practicing translators as well as university-based translation students, in order to test research findings.

A few denizens of university departments of literature, linguistics, philosophy, computer science, and so on, do still investigate translation, but these sites never gather the ‘take-off velocity’ required to launch a separate academic discipline. In every country, the local branch of the FIT Institute is the place where most translation research is carried out.

Under the FIT Institute scenario, research in translation is very closely wedded to its practice. Translating and interpreting are understood to mean what members of FIT’s affiliates around the world do to make a living. No ‘interdiscipline’ arises within the Institute because there are no university-based disciplines involved. What the researchers ‘apply’ is mainly their experience as translators and interpreters.

Some of the ideas that arose within TS, such as norms and universals, eventually make their appearance, but in a very different context. The Institute’s researchers occasionally report their results in the FIT journal Babel, or, in the case of the Canadian branch, the journal Meta, these being two old journals, both founded in 1955 under the aegis of the translation profession[ii] rather than within a university. No academic translation journals like Target or The Translator ever see the light.

Scenario 3 Translation as Applied Linguistics takes off

Éditions Gallimard - Lancement de livre

À l’occasion des Journées de traduction, qui se tiendront à Paris du 16 au 19 mai, Gallimard a le plaisir d’annoncer la parution de Pour une nouvelle traductologie par Edmond Cary et Andrei Fedorov. Le lancement aura lieu à 16h00 le mercredi 17 mai au Centre…. La version russe sera lancée à Moscou le même jour. …

[Gallimard publishing - book launch: On the occasion of the translation fair to be held in Paris May 16-19, Gallimard is pleased to announce the publication of Pour une nouvelle traductologie by Edmond Cary and Andrei Fedorov. The launch will take place at 4 pm on May 17 at… The Russian version will be launched on the same day in Moscow.]

In our third scenario, translation as a branch of Applied Linguistics does not fade away as the new interdiscipline of TS steps onto the stage of history. Instead, it goes from strength to strength, attracting most young researchers. As a result, TS as we know it is strangled in the crib.

The triggering event leading to the timeline divergence is the publication in 1972 of a book by two well-known figures: the Russian-French interpreter and officer of the FIT Edmond Cary (who in this alternate history does not die in a plane crash at age 54 in 1966) and the Russian literary translator and translation theorist Andrei Fedorov, who had strongly advocated a linguistic theory of translation in a book he published in 1953[iii]. In the 1950s, Cary had severely criticized Fedorov’s linguistic approach, but gradually he and Fedorov each modified their views and arrived at a single understanding, through east-west exchanges assisted by a thaw in the Cold War during the 1960s. That new understanding is set out in their bilingual programmatic publication Pour une nouvelle translatologie / Na puti k novoy nauke o perevode…..

The fact that the book is not available in English is irrelevant because in 1972, that language had not achieved a lingua franca status in the world generally or in academia in particular. People in Western Europe and the New World read the book in French while East Europeans read it in Russian. (An English translation eventually appears in 1990 under the title A new foundation for the study of translation.)

Now 1972, as it happens, is the year when, in real history, James Holmes published his poorly circulated article ‘The Name and Nature of Translation Studies’, based on a paper he read that same year at—interestingly—the Third International Congress of Applied Linguistics. However in the divergent timeline we are considering, the work of the Dutch-Belgian-Israeli group with which Holmes is associated soon peters out, overshadowed by the excitement generated by the Cary/Fedorov book.

Details of that book cannot be given here. Suffice it to say that it takes a new approach to the notion of a linguistic theory of translation. For Cary and Fedorov, ‘linguistic approach’ does not mean an approach based in linguistics, in the sense of comparative syntactic and lexical analysis leading to the establishment of objective regular correspondences between two language systems or between the wordings of texts in two languages—a notion which, the authors show, cannot provide a satisfactory basis for translation theory. Instead, ‘linguistic approach’ simply means that translation is understood first and foremost as language activity rather than socio-cultural activity. Specifically, it is seen as a special kind of reading and writing, or listening and speaking activity (Cary being an interpreter, the study of the written and oral modes of translation start out as one enterprise rather than two).

As a result, unlike in the first two scenarios, the study of translation flourishes in the academy. But it does not become associated with the study of communications or culture or literary systems. Instead, it flourishes inside the very linguistics departments where, in real history, the study of language was taught with only the tiniest mention of translation (in relation to lexical fields). In the alternate timeline, translation flourishes as part of Applied Linguistics, which, as it happens, is commonly described as an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics that investigates real-life language-related problems. It is not limited to applying the findings of syntactic or phonological theories, comparative grammar and the like.[iv] In our alternative timeline, findings from several disciplines are brought to bear on the special reading/writing act that is translating, with a view to improving translator training and thus translation quality. The goal is the same as the goal of the FIT Institute in Scenario 2, but the location of research is inside rather than outside Academia.

In the entry ‘Institutionalization of Translation Studies’ in the Handbook of Translation Studies published by John Benjamins, Daniel Gile points out that writers who we retrospectively think of as precursors of TS were in fact operating entirely within the mental framework of linguistics or literary studies. Taking up this line of thought, I would suggest that the title of linguist Eugene Nida’s 1964 book Toward a Science of Translating is misleading when read from our present vantage point. Nida was not proposing the creation of a new discipline. He was simply entering the contemporary debate about whether the practice of translation is an art or a science. By ‘science’, he meant ‘applied science’, and in his introduction, he mentioned several sciences, including linguistics, psychology and anthropology. In real history, by the late 1970s, the notion of translation as applied linguistics was on the way out, the latter being identified with a certain understanding of the widely rejected equivalence paradigm. In every country where European TS came to be influential, the study of translation under the aegis of Applied Linguistics dwindled to almost nothing.

This third scenario raises the interesting question of the extent to which the interdiscipline we have today was shaped by just one or two publications that had a special impact, or perhaps one or two groups of scholars who had a special direction-setting impact at the time of ‘take-off’ around 1980. The scenario also raises the vexed matter of the highly unfocused nature of TS as we know it, for in the alternate timeline, the object of study becomes clearly defined as a particular reading/writing activity.

The Upshot

Readers will not have failed to notice the agenda underlying all three fictional scenarios: to show how the amorphous nature of the interdiscipline known as TS could have been overcome. In Scenario 1, things continue as they were before TS: translation is studied as a specialty interest within a variety of old disciplines—comparative literature, anthropology and so on. In Scenario 2, TS is replaced by the investigation of translation in close association with the translation industry. In Scenario 3, TS is replaced within universities by a newly defined Applied Linguistics that seeks to improve (interlingual) translation in order to solve social problems.

Some of what is now done within TS is also done under the three scenarios, but in a different context, depending on how translation is defined. In Scenario 1, translation has a different definition in each of the old disciplines: philosophers see it one way, linguists another way, semioticians yet another. In Scenario 2, empirical studies of translation workplaces and translators’ cognitive processes would for example flourish, since translation is here defined extensionally as the activity of people who translate for a living. In Scenario 3, where translation is defined as a special instance of reading and writing (or listening and speaking or signing), theory is prominent, but heavily restricted by the definition.

Whether the study of translation can now, in real history, be saved from its amorphous state—indeed whether there is any widespread desire to save it—is an open question.