1

Indeterminacy of Translation and a Quinean Approach in Translation

Studies1

The thesis of indeterminacy of translation found in Willard V. O. Quine’s philosophy is a

series of arguments on language, translation, meaning and reference. These arguments, or

these theses of indeterminacies, conclude and argue that there is no uniquely correct

translation of one set of sentences into another, and that different translations of the same

source material could be equally correct instances of translation where the differences

between translations are not merely stylistic or connotational differences but are also related

to what the translations imply; that it is possible to come up with divergent translations of the

same set of sentences that are all compatible as translations of their corresponding source

sentences, “yet are incompatible with one another” (Quine 1960, 27).

Quine’s theses of indeterminacies have produced three distinct but related forms of

indeterminacies. These are the thesis of indeterminacy of translation, the thesis of

indeterminacy of reference and the thesis of underdetermination of scientific theories 2 (1990).

In this paper I shall attempt to provide a brief introduction to Quine, analyze the thesis of

indeterminacy of translation as well as the other two indeterminacies found in Quine’s

writings along with some analyses of them found in secondary sources. In the second half of

this paper I shall attempt to see how indeterminacy of translation could relate to translation

studies, and examine in what respects it would be useful for an inquirer of translation to study

Quine.

I. Background to Quine and His Methodology

1
This paper was originally submitted to Martin Cyr Hicks, PhD, in June 2016 in fulfilment of the requirements of
the Graduation Project (TR 428) for the department of Translation and Interpreting Studies in Bogazici
University.
2
Even though the first two are called an indeterminacy, and the last one is an underdetermination, all of them
together have been called to be indeterminacies in both Quine’s writings and also in secondary sources.
 2

Quine was somewhat a radical philosopher as well as a mathematician and a logician,

and almost all of his philosophical writings focused on the central issues of epistemology,

ontology and philosophy of language, none of which was distinct from one another in Quine’s

understanding of philosophy. But as far as we are concerned with the topic of translation, I

believe two aspects of Quine are a must to be informed about: his naturalism and his holism.

Quine’s philosophy followed to a large extend the philosophical tradition of empiricists,

who more or less agreed on the claim that “sense experience is the ultimate source of all our

concepts and knowledge” (Markie 2015). But he was also dissatisfied with the dominant

empiricist thought of his age. The empiricist thought before Quine was a certain movement

called the logical empiricism, which was a quite dominant and influential movement in 1920s

and 30s in Europe and in 1940s and 50s in the United States (Creath 2014). One of the key

notions they held was their strict distinction between empirical and philosophical statements, 3

hence natural sciences and philosophy. For them, philosophers ought to concern themselves

only with non-empirical matters, especially with matters of language and concepts, and the

empirical world and empirical studies were to be left to the scientists.

What set Quine apart from his fellow empiricists and what still sets him apart from a lot

of philosophers is his advocacy of a naturalized philosophy. Quine argued that there are no

essentially different two forms of content that human beings can get to know. He argued in his

infamous paper Two Dogmas of Empiricism (1951) that there is not a clear-cut distinction

between empirical and non-empirical (categorical, conceptual, necessarily true by definition)

statements, which was the basis for the logical empiricists’ distinction between philosophy

and natural sciences. He argued that with sufficient differences to our background beliefs,

each and every statement we accept as true could end up being false: “Any statement can be

held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system.”
3
Between synthetic and analytic statements, as their terminology goes. They held that meaningful statements are
either contingent, a posteriori and synthetic, or necessary, a priori and analytic.
 3

What follows is that even those statements which we think of as necessarily true by definition,

such as “No bachelor is married,” could be shown to be of a falsifiable nature, a property that

is traditionally attributed only to empirical, scientific statements (Andersen and Hepburn,

2015).4 On this basis Quine asserted that there is not a categorical difference between

philosophy (including metaphysics) and natural sciences, but they are deeply intertwined

disciplines that go hand-in-hand.

Quine’s naturalism interests translation insofar as his holism is accounted for. In the

second half of Two Dogmas of Empiricism, Quine introduces his holistic account of meaning

and truth. Under this account, meaning is not attributable to sentences in isolation, but to

whole frameworks, to whole languages. He argues that a great deal of background

assumptions take place in every single statement within a language that are not paid much if

any attention when evaluating one statement, and that we can attribute neither any truth-value

nor any meaning to a statement in isolation, but only within a broader framework.

Quine’s naturalized philosophy and meaning-holism together informs us of how he

thought about the study of translation. In his writings, one senses the notion that translation is,

above anything else, an empirical phenomena. Since no theoretical work could be completely

abstracted from the empirical world, the theoretical and philosophical aspects of translation

studies, therefore, ought to be consistent and coherent with what happens in the actual

practices of translation. Moreover, a theoretical account of translation is never only a theory

of translation, but it is a part of a unified account of language, sometimes found in Quine’s

writings as “the theory of language”, which is in turn interconnected to the whole body of

scientific knowledge; for the concepts and assumptions found within a translation theory

inevitably leads one to concepts and assumptions which fall into the subject-matters of a

4
Karl Popper argued that what distinguishes a scientific statement from others was that the scientific statement
could be falsifiable in principle in the light of evidence. He put forward falsificationism as a solution to the
demarcation problem in philosophy of science.
 4

variety of other disciplines such as philosophy of language, linguistics, anthropology, social

biology, logic, etc.

II. Radical Translation

On his quest for an understanding of the notion of meanings, Quine expressed his

methodology as follows: “The meaning of a sentence of one language is what it shares with

its translations in another language, so I propounded my thought experiment of radical

translation. It led to a negative conclusion, a thesis of indeterminacy of translation” (1992,

37). What follows here is the imaginary case of a radical translation, leading to the conclusion

that translation is an indeterminate process.

The thought experiment of radical translation is as follows: there is a language called

Jungle, which is to be our source language that is going to be translated into English, the

target language. Jungle is hitherto an unknown language that “is inaccessible through any

known languages as way stations, so our only data are native utterances and their outwardly

observable circumstances” (1992, 38). It is a language of which we have no prior information,

nor we have any information regarding the community of Jungle, and our attempt to translate

it can only be fulfilled by having translators, or “field linguists” as Quine calls them, observe

the community of Jungle, try to understand the language and translate it into English.

The process that the translator is going to be going through is called constructing a

manual of translation. A manual of translation, though it may seem as a negative term to a

student of translation studies because of the prescriptive connotations of the word “manual”,

is not a simple list of which English words stand for corresponding Jungle words. It is a list of

not only words as some bilingual dictionaries are, but the translations of all accessed

expressions of Jungle along with the contexts in which said expressions take place, including

and especially complete sentences.

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The first steps toward constructing a manual of translation of a language that is

completely unknown before would be problematic for obvious reasons, since the translator

might never understand what some expressions might mean only by observing the contexts,

the environments, the observable data, that accompany those expressions. “Usually the

concurrent publicly observable situation does not enable us to predict what a speaker even of

our own language will say, for utterances commonly bear little relevance to the circumstances

outwardly observable at the time; there are ongoing projects and unshared past experiences”

(1992, 38). Nonetheless, there are some sentences that are almost only constructed within and

relate to the concurrent publicly observable situation. These are observation sentences.

An observation sentence is a sentence, the truth or falsity of which can be agreed upon

by the speakers of that language on witnessing the occasion in which that sentence is uttered

(1992, 3). It is a sentence that only refers to the object of concurrent observation, and that is

uttered only in relation to the stimulation of the concurrent observable data. Some examples

are “Rabbit!”, “It’s raining” or “It’s a bottle.” Observation sentences are what the construction

of a manual of translation would have to begin with in the case of radical translation because

they are the results of linguistic communities’ speech dispositions to natural concurrent

stimuli. The meanings of observation sentences, the roles they play in a linguistic community,

the criteria for their being true or false, or their metalinguistically interesting properties in

some sense, are inferred from the concurrently observable verbal behavior of the members of

a linguistic community. Someone who does not speak English could not understand the

sentences “I feel empowered” or “This is a reminiscent of my childhood” only by observing

the concurrent data that stimulates the speaker, whereas observation sentences could be

understood. This is why the radical translator would have to look for observation sentences

and try to understand what they mean as the first step towards constructing his manual of

translation.
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Observation sentences themselves, usually one-word long sentences, along with the

stimuli accompanying them, are only half of this first step. Their complementary factor is the

element of assent and dissent. Because Jungle is a complete mystery for the translator as of

yet, he or she would have issues with identifying which utterances are observation sentences.

In order to identify whether or not a native utterance is an observation sentence and if so,

understand what it might mean, the translator could do the following: (1992, 39)

The linguist tentatively associates a native’s utterance with the observed

concurrent situation, hoping that it might be simply an observation sentence
linked to that situation. To check this he takes the initiative, when the situation
recurs, and volunteers the sentence himself for the native’s assent or dissent…
[However,] the linguist must be able to recognize, if only conjecturally, the signs
of assent and dissent in Jungle society. If he is wrong in guessing those signs, his
further research will languish and he will try again.

The first tasks of the radical translator, then, is to recognize the signs of assent and dissent.

Quine seems to believe that it is a possible task even though a very difficult one. The issues

such as the non-universality of body language and gestures might posit challenges to the

translator as some linguistic communities have almost the exact reverse gestures for the

notions of simple yes and no (1960, 29). There might also be the problem as to whether or not

the community of Jungle have the notions of assent and dissent in the same sense that the

English speaking community have them. Assent and dissent are answers to questions about

the truth-value of declarative sentences in English, but the logical structure of English assigns

either truth or falsity to declarative sentences that have a truth-value. It might be the

improbable case that Jungle is a language that employs a radically different system of truth.

But for the sake of the thought experiment, Quine assumes that the translator has managed to

figure out how assent and dissent functions in Jungle despite such imaginable problems.
 7

Imagine the case in which the translator observes one native utter “Gavagai” 5 under one

occasion. He notes it down along with the related observable situation and perhaps some

hypotheses as to what it could mean. As the translator hears “Gavagai” again under further

situations, he analyzes all of the times in which he has observed it being uttered, and

hypothesizes the conclusion that the utterance “Gavagai” has something to do with the

stimulation of rabbits on the part of the speaker. The next time the translator and one native

are in a situation in which there is a rabbit present, the translator could turn their attention to

the rabbit, utter the word “Gavagai?” in a manner that would resemble a question, and if the

native assents to it, then the translator could hypothesize that the translation for “Gavagai”

into English is “Rabbit.” He will continue testing his hypothesis again in further similar

situations, but this process is the central method of the radical translation especially at the first

stages.

What follows the translation of observation sentences is an attempt to understand and

translate the rest of the Jungle language; whether they be nonobservational sentences,

sentences that express internal, subjective experiences, or even the syntactical components of

Jungle, its connectives, conjunctions, etc. This process involves a great deal of guesswork and

conjecturing. The translator accumulatively acquires “a tentative Jungle vocabulary, with

English translations, and a tentative apparatus of grammatical constructions” (1992, 45).

These enable him to understand and translate nonobservational sentences, which actually

account for the majority of expressions in a language. The process of testing translation

hypotheses according to the assent and dissent of the native community continues as the

translator continually extends and revises his manual of translation. The success of

negotiation and the smoothness of conversation could function as criteria of the success of the

5
The word “Gavagai” is actually the word Quine uses as his example for the indeterminacy of reference, which
will be mentioned in the later sections of this paper.
 8

manual, as well as the “reactions of astonishment and bewilderment on a native’s part” (1992,

47) for speculations as to whether manual has gone wrong at some point.

III. Indeterminacy of Translation

The procedures at the translator’s disposal for radical translation are of the sort that we

have been looking in the previous section. The process of assent and dissent only shows if the

translator has understood the native utterance on the occasion in which it is uttered.

Nonetheless there is always a possibility that the manual of translation involves some instance

of translation in which the native community would assent to almost always, but would

dissent from in certain contexts; and that the translator has not yet prompted the natives’

assent and dissent in such contexts that would yield dissent. Still such fallible procedures and

inductive inferences are the only means the translator could employ.

Analyzing the process of radical translation and reflecting on it, Quine concludes that

the translation manuals of “two radical translators, working independently on Jungle, might

be indistinguishable in terms of any native behavior that they give reason to expect, and yet

each manual might prescribe some translations that the other translator would reject. Such is

the thesis of indeterminacy of translation” (1992, 42-48). In other words, the thesis of

indeterminacy of translation suggests that two independent manuals of translations from one

language into another might both explicate the sentences of Jungle correctly and might both

be compatible accounts of how Jungle sentences and behaviors of the Jungle community

correlates; yet they would be incompatible with one another. We may not construct a

consistent and coherent manual of translation if we take some translations from one manual

and some from the other. The translations of the same one Jungle sentence in two different

translation manuals would not be used interchangeably in English contexts. (1992, 48)
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Even though under this analysis indeterminacy of translation has occurred as a result of

radical translation, Quine suggests that it is not limited to radical translation, but in principle

to all translations, “even to home language” (1992, 48) in the sense that we can translate

English into Jungle by one manual of translation and back into English according to the other

manual, and end up with a different, but still not wrong, English. The thought experiment of

radical translation only allows us to see the indeterminacy much easier.

As to what the thesis of indeterminacy of translation implies, Quine holds it improbable

that the indeterminacy of translation would have an impact on the actual translation practice.

(1992, 48) The reason for this is that the translator would assume similarities between his and

the natives’ ways of thinking and beliefs, and he would not assume, mostly out of practicality,

behaviorally equivalent but on the whole radically different ontological and linguistic patterns

between the natives’ language and his own. That is to say that the translators in the actual

practice of translation would most likely assume that the linguistic community of one source

language talk about fundamentally the same sort of things that the English community talk

about. Hence the translators impose their own ontological and linguistic patterns that structure

a language onto the native’s speech as they translate them, instead of coming up with a

radically different linguistic structure for English that could correlate to the same set of

behavioral data but with a wholly different theoretical and structural system of its own. So it

is not the case that the indeterminacy of translation refers to translations of some sentences in

the source language into different possible sentences in the wholly same target language; but

it refers to the multiplicity of different wholly languages, 6 (different Englishes in some loose

sense despite the fact that the translators speak the same English) that could be construed with

translation, all of which equally explain the speech dispositions of the linguistic community of

the source language.

6
This is why the indeterminacy of translation is sometimes also called holophrastic indeterminacy*
 10

If we look at how the indeterminacy of translation could relate to the translator, on the

other hand, it seems plausible to conclude that the function of the translator in the process of

translation is not to express in his original language the meanings, ideas, propositions of the

sentences being translated. Since all that we can know in regards to such notions are only our

postulations of them as we inferentially construct translational hypotheses by observing verbal

behavior, the task of the translator then becomes constructing these hypotheses explaining

verbal behavior and hope that his translational inferences are satisfactory: “What the

indeterminacy thesis is meant to bring out is that the radical translator is bound to impose

about as much as he discovers” (1992, 49).

IV. Indeterminacy of Reference

Quine (1992, 50-51) says of the indeterminacy of translation that because it requires

constructing a whole language through the process of translation, “[it] is a rare achievement,

and it is not going to be undertaken successfully twice for the same language.” This is because

the example of radical translation involves the translation of an entirely unknown language. In

simple translations taking place every day, because the translators already know their target

language, and especially because they already have correlations, equivalences, similarities,

linkings, etc. between their source and target languages, they are already committed to a

certain manual of translation. The extreme rarity of a wholly visible indeterminacy of

translation and the difficulty of providing examples for it may be problematic for the thesis.

But even if we tried to give examples of two different manuals of translations between two

languages, we still would have to do it in one language (the English that this paper is written

in) that is already committed to certain ontological and linguistic patterns, hence the

exampling attempt would fail.7

7
Still, Quine refers to Edwin Levy’s artificial examples of deviant geometrical systems as what might be
plausible examples for the holophrastic indeterminacy of translation (1992, 51).
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So Quine seems to hold that indeterminacy of translation may be realized in actual

translation however rarely it may be if the translators impose radically different ontological

and linguistic patterns onto the verbal behavioral dispositions they are translating. But what

exactly are ontological and linguistic patterns, and how are they imposed by the translator?

Fortunately this is an illustratable subject, and for this purpose comes the indeterminacy of

reference. Reference, also called denotation, designation, pointing out, signation, and some

other terms, in the context of philosophy of language and also in other disciplines regarding

language, is the supposed relation between words and objects. The word “cats” refers to cats,

and the phrase “the smallest positive integer” refers to the number one. But Quine holds that

reference is also responsible for ontology; the references that a given language or theory

makes also present the things that are assumed to exist according to that language or theory.

The process is called an ontological commitment, and a theory or language is committed to

the existence of those and only those entities that are treated existing in that theory or

language (Quine 1948).

Through ontological commitment, Quine holds that ontology, namely the things that

exist, are relative to languages and theories. The view that existence (both physical and

non-physical) is dependent on and relative to the use of language has been a popular belief in

philosophy, especially since the second half of the 20th century, though the modern form of

the belief has its traces in Kant. Assuming that ontology is indeed relative to language without

further discussing on the issue, let us return back to the example of the Jungle word

“Gavagai.” Imagine the case now again, that the radical translator has hypothesized that the

Jungle word “Gavagai” refers to rabbits, and that its translation into English is “Rabbit.” But

the ontological question of exactly what entity or entities “Gavagai” refers to is not as easy as

translating the term for ordinary purposes. It is not a matter of fact actually that the one-word

sentence “Gavagai” makes a determinate ontological commitment, which is then translatable

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into English as “Rabbit” that also ontologically refers to the same entity. For imagine the case

in which the translator observes the same set of verbal behavior under which “gavagai” is

uttered, and imagine that he translates it as “undetached rabbit parts” or “a temporal physical

manifestation of rabbithood.” They indeed sound unusual and awkward in English, but those

translations are as warranted as the translation “rabbit” in terms of their ontological

implications. All three possible translations are co-referential in terms of physical reference;

they all refer to the same “total scattered portion of the spatiotemporal world that is made up

of rabbits” (Quine 1969b). But even though they refer to the same physical phenomena, they

differ in what they refer to in terms of non-physical, conceptual entities. The translation

“rabbit” seems to ontologically commit the language into assuming that “rabbit” is an

individuated, conceptualizeable part of the physical world. The translation “undetached rabbit

parts” lead to the assumption that the white, little animals the community of Jungle call

“gavagai” is a collection of undetached rabbit parts, each of which exist separately. It also

calls into the question as to whether “gavagai” is a singular or plural term. “A temporal

physical manifestation of rabbithood” is even more radical in that it commits the language

into thinking that rabbithood, a non-physical stage of being rabbit, can manifest itself into the

physical world, which is a similar idea to Platonian forms. Each different translation leads to

quite different ontological and linguistic patterns in the language in which they are used, and

even though they are incompatible with each other, all of them are as correct and justified

translations in terms of their ontological implications as one another. This is the thesis of the

indeterminacy of reference.

Indeterminacy of reference is different than indeterminacy of translation in that the

latter is holophrastic, it relates to the whole language, whereas the former occurs at the level

of singular words or sentences. Studying the cases and examples of indeterminacy of

reference is possible within one language, for we can artificially distance ourselves from the
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examples, as we have done with “Gavagai” above. Indeterminacy of translation, however,

cannot be shown with examples, for the language we would use for our examples too would

be in the scope of one manual of translation, one certain translated language: perhaps if we

could transcend to a stage in which we had a publicly available supralinguistic form of

communication that is not language, then we might be able to give examples of it.8

As for whether the indeterminacy of reference affect actual practices of translation, it

can and does affect it. Since it shows that use of language does not determine unique referents

publicly available to the whole linguistic community, one can argue that the translator’s job

description should not contain the impossible task of expressing in his target language the

correct unique referent of the term to be translated.

V. Underdetermination of Scientific Theories

The thesis of underdetermination is commonly applied in philosophy of science, but its

contrast with the thesis of indeterminacy of translation is actually the core of much

philosophical discussion on the issue. According to the thesis of underdetermination of

scientific theories, “the evidence available to us at a given time may be insufficient to

determine what beliefs we should hold in response to it” (Stanford 2016). In other words,

assuming that we have multiple scientific theories, which differ among themselves in their

theoretical aspects but have the same empirical implications and equally explain the evidence

available to us, our evidence does not determine which theory we should choose. 9 Quine’s

discussion of indeterminacy of translation also subsumes the underdetermination of scientific

theories; one of the claims of the former thesis is that there could be different manuals of

8
This is also likely an unsatisfactory case, though. If such a case were to happen or if someday we could move
our consciousness into computers and communicate through cables wired to our nervous system, and abandon
language completely, then we would not understand the examples because we would have abandoned language.
9
The famous method of Ockham’s razor, also called the law of parsimony, is also related to underdetermination.
Ockham’s razor suggests that in the cases of multiple theories that equally explain the empirical evidence, the
best scientific method should be to choose the theory with the fewest number of assumptions for the sake of
simplicity.
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translation that equally explain the verbal behavior relevant to translation, yet the behavioral

data at our disposal could not determine which manual of translation we ought to choose. But

Quine holds that indeterminacy of translation is something more than a simple case of

underdetermination, an argument quite a few philosophers reject.

Noam Chomsky (1969), in his paper Quine’s Empirical Assumptions, analyses Quine’s

thesis of indeterminacy of translation. He explains indeterminacy of translation as follows:

translators construct translational hypotheses to understand and explain the source language,

and in the construction of these hypotheses, they unverifiably impose their own linguistic

structures. He acknowledges that since these hypotheses go beyond the evidence, it is

plausible that they might be incompatible among themselves. But, for Chomsky, “the

situation…is, in this respect, no different from the case of physics” (61). Then he looks at why

Quine seems to think that there is a difference between them, and quotes Quine’s remarks on

truth (1960) that in almost every use of language, we are already within an inclusive linguistic

system, which makes our remarks capable of being true or false. But in the case of

translational hypotheses of radical translation, since there is not as of yet an already

constructed language, there is not a matter of fact to be right or wrong about the translational

hypotheses. Chomsky then argues that apparently for Quine, the difference between

translation and science is that in the case of translation, “we are, for some reason, not

permitted to have a ‘tentative theory’” (62). He expresses that the case of translation or

language is no different than any other case of underdetermination of science, and also asks

that “but why should all of this occasion any surprise or concern?” (62).

Moving from underdetermination of empirical data to an indeterminacy of translation

indeed seems to be the controversial step. Imagine two cases; in the first one we have an

utterance in Jungle, and we are presented with the question “what did the native mean?” In the

second case, we have another natural phenomena, say electromagnetic polarization, and the
 15

question “what does this mean?” The explanation of our theory of physics and chemistry will

answer the latter question, but the theory will be methodologically underdetermined, but so is

our linguistic and translational theory that will answer the first question. As for their

difference, Quine (1969c) writes in his response to Chomsky that even though

underdetermination of science is also present in our theories of language (manuals of

translation), “the indeterminacy of translation is not just inherited as a special case of the

underdetermination of our theory of nature. It is parallel but additional.” What is additional is

that the thesis of underdetermination results from our humanly limitations to acquire

knowledge about the world. If, though seemingly impossible, we had acquired the truth about

the nature, all of the truths about the universe there ever were and will be, underdetermination

in principle should go away. So underdetermination amounts to an epistemic skepticism. But

even in such a case, indeterminacy of translation would still withstand the totality of facts,

because there is no matter of fact to be grasped, to be acquired, to be known in what the native

uttered. There is nothing deep or hidden in utterances that could be determinately known; and

this is not because human beings are incapable of knowing them, it is because there simply is

nothing to language, to the meanings of sentences, beyond their incompatible indeterminate

interpretations, all of which are equally correct.

In his analysis of Quine’s indeterminacy of translation, Scott Soames (1999) mentions

two routes that Quine uses to get to the indeterminacy of translation from underdetermination:

behaviorism and physicalism. Soames defines Quine’s doctrine of behaviorism as “since we

learn language by observing the linguistic behavior of others, the only facts relevant to

determining linguistic meaning must be publicly observable behavioral facts” (329), and

physicalism as “All genuine truths (facts) are determined by physical truths (facts)” (331). I

think Soames’s argument that the above two notions are the pillars of the thesis of

indeterminacy of translation is correct, but it is important to remember that Quine does not
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advocate physicalism in the sense that all that there is and that matters is physical. Quine’s

position on physicalism is rather the idea that the all truths are dependent on physical truths,

which allows there to be truths regarding non-physical entities such as meanings. But unlike

Soames’ description of Quine, I don’t think there is a first-order or second-order truths in

Quine’s ontology, for he admits that he believes numbers, for example, are as real as anything

else real. As for behaviorism, it is indeed a doctrine Quine embraces, but also note that it is

not behaviorism in the sense that it is used in psychology. Rather, it is the approach in studies

of language that since we learn language, including abstract use of it, only through observing

linguistic or linguistically related behaviors of others, it is only the behavioral implications of

utterances that grant them their meanings. Words are not expressions of publicly unobservable

entities, such as ideas or propositions in the speaker’s mind; but they are only instances of

social behavior that are constructed within observable sociolinguistic contexts that is use of

language by a community, and there is nothing private, subjective, mental that gives use of

language a meaning.

Physicalism and behaviorism in the above senses give us the picture of language that

leads to the indeterminacy of translation. Whenever a speaker uses language, his audience

hypothesize meanings based on their observation of the speaker’s verbal behavior and their

prior information (speaking the same language, to say the least) on how to interpret such

behavior. Because there is nothing more to what linguistic behavior may mean than the

linguistic behavior, different and even incompatible interpretations of the same linguistic

behavior may all be equally correct.

When Chomsky asked his question that why all of this matter should anyway, he

referred to underdetermination of translational data. But it still matters to revise the question

and ask: what changes could the thesis of indeterminacy of translation bring about in either

our theoretical understandings or in our actual practices? Quine’s answer is that it shows “the
 17

notion of propositions as sentence meanings is untenable” (1992, 102) and that the “stubborn

notion” of seeing sentences as expressions of ideas, of propositions, of meanings, of

something mental that transcends the sentence, should be abandoned (1969c, 304), which

undermines an understanding of translation as the act of carrying meanings across languages.

But what I add to that answer as an inquirer of translation itself is that Quine’s thesis of

indeterminacy of translation actually extends the scope of translation as well as translation

studies, and also offers some challenges to what we may say have become a part of the canon

of translation studies.

VI. Dualism in Translation Studies

There are two pillars of meanings to be found in Quine’s writings; one is the empirical

meaning, the other is the verbiage. He defines empirical meaning, or stimulation meaning, as

“what remains when, given discourse together with all its stimulatory conditions, we peel

away the verbiage” (1959). Accordingly, what constructs meanings of linguistic expressions

is both the empirical constituents of a given expression, the linguistic sign itself and its

position in the whole of language. The empirical relevance of a given expression is the

empirically observable situation under which that expression is uttered. “Rabbit” and

“undetached rabbit parts” for example, may have the same empirical meaning up to the point

speakers of a language would use them interchangeably under the same context, even though

their references as a whole are different due to indeterminacy of reference. On the other hand,

verbiage constitutes the ontological and linguistic constructions of an expression as well as its

relation to the rest of language, and according to the thesis of indeterminacy of translation,

verbiage is indeterminate also. What follows is a conception of language where, since both

the verbiage and the reference are indeterminate and only the empirical relevance of linguistic

expressions is directly accessible to the community, there is no true or false choice of

verbiage as long as its empirical relevance can function sufficiently to provide

 18

communication, the success of which can be measured by assents and dissents of the

speakers.

Translation, according to such understanding of language, is an act of constructing a

certain set of linguistic signs that may be interchangeably used with another set of linguistic

signs under the same situation; it is to provide empirically synonymous utterances. Note that

for two expression to be used under the same situation does not mean that they ought to refer

to the same object, or rather due to the indeterminacy of reference that they ought to refer to

the same portion of the spatiotemporal or mental world however that is linguified. But what it

means for two expression to be interchangeably used is simply that the speakers of a linguistic

community may use them in place of one another under the same sociolinguistic context.

Consider the expressions “anarchist” and “communist”10 In 1970s, many people in Turkey,

especially in Anatolia, would refer to left-wing activists as “anarchist” or “communist” with a

pejorative connotation. Imagine a conservative in 1970s in Turkey, who utters “These

anarchists!” upon reading newspaper. In this context, “These communists!” would progress

the conversation, or the monologue, in exactly the same way, making both terms empirically

synonymous. However, we understand and use both terms quite differently today, at least in

academic environments, so using them in place of the other in a political science conference

would be disastrous in terms of the flow of communication.

Such conception of translation could be quite explanatory and powerful in analyzing

some of the historical texts in translation studies, especially considering that in some cases

there are going to be conflicts between Quine’s writings and those of others’. Roman

Jakobson (1959), for example, argued that “the meaning of any linguistic sign is its translation

into some further, alternative sign.” This is one of the views that Quine denies, the view that

10
Actually Turkish equivalents “anarşist” and “komünist” would better suit the examples here, but disregard any
complication of translation for the sake of the argument for now, and imagine a complete, ideal equivalence
between the two pairs.
 19

while defining meaning only as a product of language, abstracts language from its empirical

roots. When Jakobson argues that “there is signatum without signum,” it is true that what is

signified, the thing itself, acquires what it means to be that thing through the linguistic sign.

This is actually what the indeterminacy of reference shows, that the thing being referred to

acquires its ontological nature only through a linguistic construction. But abstracting meaning

and language from the empirical world, upon the stimulation of which the very language is

constructed, also fails to capture the nature of meaning. While translating the term “bachelor”

into “unmarried man” might yield an empirically synonymous translation with the original, it

does not give away the meaning of the linguistic sign, for that is still indeterminate

considering possible different translations of “bachelor” that could be incompatible with

“unmarried man” under different interpretations of the English language.

Eugene Nida (2000) argued that “since no two languages are identical, either in the

meanings given to corresponding symbols or in the ways in which such symbols are arranged

in phrases and sentences, it stands to reason that there can be no absolute correspondence

between languages.” He holds that interpretation on the part of the translator is unavoidable in

translation. While this is a common ground in both Nida and Quine, some issues of

correspondence that will emerge due to the impossibility of complete equivalence as Nida

theorizes have quite different presuppositions than a conception of language to be found in

Quine’s writings. Nida makes a distinction between formal and dynamic equivalences; the

former “focuses on the message itself, in both form and content” while the latter is an attempt

to produce equivalent effect on the audience. I believe this is an abstraction of language in the

sense that Nida keeps linguistic expressions themselves categorically distinct from its effect

on the audience. What is seemingly presupposed in the distinction between two forms of

equivalence is that there seems to be a semantic value to be found in the message that is

categorically distinguishable from its use in the world.

 20

But it is true that there are generally two orientations in translation practices as Nida’s

theory appears to explain. Nida’s two equivalences appear because of his three categories of

the causes of different translation: linguistic utterances themselves, the reasons behind these

utterances, and their audiences. A Quinean understanding of language might suggest that

instead of postulating these two fundamentally different types of equivalences based on these

three categories, in order to explain the phenomena at hand we may rather hold that there is

only one category under which differences in translation can be explained: the possibility of

different behavioral dispositions, including translation and interpretation, under linguisticly

related situations. What this means is that instead of attributing a semantic value to the

linguistic utterances themselves in isolation independently from the reasons for which they

are uttered or from their audiences or any other element, we can see linguistic utterances as a

continuation of the linguisticly relevant situations, among the constituents of which one may

find the purposes behind the utterances as well as the target audience. Linguistic utterances, or

uttering linguistic expressions, then becomes a type of behavior, just as purposes are

expressed in behavior too, and just as the information about the target audience is acquired

through their behavior too. What entails is a theoretical framework of language under which

the translator is not following either of the two categorically different approaches to

equivalence, but under which the translator is merely making a choice among what part of

empirical reality counts as more relevant to the translation.

Both Jakobson’s and Nida’s texts seem to advocate a conception of translation, in which

translation is primarily related to meanings of linguistic signs which are determined in relation

to other linguistic signs. Jakobson was in particular interested in arguing against an

understanding of meaning as the correspondence relation between linguistic signs and objects

in reality that they correspond to, which was a particularly popular view in the first half of the

20th century, found in the writings of philosophers such as Bertrand Russell and the early
 21

Wittgenstein. But the move from the positivist picture theory of meaning to the point of

abstracting language too much to strip its empirical relevance is also mistaken, Quine argues.

Language is not a relation between words and objects, or among words, but it is a

reconstructive, interpretive sociolinguistic behavior that is inseparable from both other types

of behavior and the contexts that lead to them. It is not separable from its empirical

foundations.

Another important scholar of translation is Ernst-August Gutt. His theory of translation

as an interpretive use based on relevance theory is quite interesting to compare with a

Quinean understanding of translation, for it too is an account of translation heavily based on

pragmatics. In his theory of translation, Gutt relies on the relevance theory of communication

as developed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson. Relevance theory presupposes a distinction

between encoded (or descriptive) and interpretive communication (Wilson and Sperber 2004).

Encoded communication occurs when a speaker communicates his thought, idea, intention,

etc., namely something mental,11 something inside, directly by encoding it in a set of linguistic

signs, which is then decoded by the audience. Interpretive communication is, on the other

hand, occurs when a speaker’s utterances are supposed to be representing someone else’s

internal thoughts or ideas, etc. A central focus of relevance theory is briefly how people

happen to achieve successful interpretive communication despite endless possible

interpretations of a message, and the theory’s central claim is that “the expectations of

11
It may seem mistaken to qualify intentions as mental here, as Gutt usually refers to intentions as cognitive
processes, and brings them into the framework of empirical research. Nevertheless, intentions are treated as
mental states in ontology and in philosophy of language (perhaps except the case of reductive physicalism which
reduces all mental states to brain states), because the existence, the nature and the properties of intentions are
only accessible by the agent that intends. This is why behaviorist psychologists influenced by Skinner proposed
to eliminate the study of mental states from psychology. But even though cognitive scientists, cognitive
psychologists or like-minded researchers now claim to scientifically and empirically study mental processes,
what actually happens is they either study mental states that are reducible to brain states, or they study what they
interpret as the effects of mental states, which remain as postulated entities, similar to studies of unobservable
entities in physics, such as subatomic particles, the force of gravity, etc. But what differs in physics is that the
postulated entities are of physical nature, unlike intentions. This is why Quine favors terms like “speech
dispositions” or “dispositions to language” to explain cognitive processes linked to language.
 22

relevance raised by an utterance are precise enough, and predictable enough, to guide the

hearer towards the speaker’s meaning (Wilson and Sperber 2004, 250).

Gutt brings relevance theory into the framework of translation by claiming that

“translation is the interlingual interpretive use of language in which the translator tries to

faithfully express the thoughts of the original author in another language (Smith 2002, 2-3).

Gutt acknowledges the underdetermined nature of translation, in fact he acknowledges the

underdetermined nature of all interpretive communication. For him, interlingual translation

poses no difference in what kind of communication it is than mere intralingual paraphrases,

reported speeches, giving accounts, etc. In all of them, the message of the original speaker is

conveyed in an interpretive form of communication, which is determined by considerations of

relevance (Gutt 2000b). Translation, for Gutt, is a use of language that ought to resemble the

original “in respects that make it adequately relevant to the audience” (1991).

Although a Quinean understanding of language would be compatible and coherent with

understanding translation as always an interpretive use, the dualistic account of

communication presupposed by relevance theory leads Gutt to limit the scope of translation

quite a lot. Because Gutt assumes it possible to use language descriptively, in which an

internal, mental property could be represented in language, which is then decodable by the

audience, his scope of translation is limited to interpretations of such mental entities as

intentions, intended meanings, ideas in mind, etc. He, for example, denies the status of

translation from what is ordinarily considered as covert translations. He uses the definition of

covert translation as provided by Juliane House that “covert translation is a translation which

enjoys or enjoyed the status of an original ST… in the target culture" (House 1981). Gutt

follows that translators do not aim to reproduce the intended meaning of the source text, say,

in the “translation” of an advertisement, but “what is called for is not interpretive

 23

resemblance, but descriptive accuracy and adequacy” (2000a). Hence, it is not translation per

se.

Lawrence Venuti (2000a) says of Gutt in his introductory commentary on Gutt’s essay

in The Translation Studies Reader that “his stress on cognition is admittedly reductive: it

effectively elides the specificity of translation as a linguistic and cultural practice, its specific

textual forms, situations, and audiences.” I think Venuti’s remark here is actually assumptive

and redundant; it presupposes some value of translation and translation studies, and criticizes

Gutt’s reductive approach for not granting it the same value. However, Gutt openly argues

that translation studies can be reducible to a study of interpretive communication, and

constructs his arguments from empirical points. He openly argues that the principle of

relevance can account for the specificity of translation, so it becomes redundant to construct a

criticism of Gutt by what seems to be a mere paraphrase of his argument. However, Venuti

takes on the burden of proof to argue why reducing translation to communication is an

unfavorable idea in his essay “Translation, Community, Utopia”, and argues for why he

thinks translation is not mere communication. He argues “today we are far from thinking that

translating is a simple communicative act… Translation never communicates in an untroubled

fashion because the translator negotiates the linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign

text by reducing them and supplying another set of differences… (2000b) Here again we see

an understanding of communication proper as a case of encoded, direct communication. His

argument is a valid one in that if one is to assume that communication, such as an instance of

a casual conversation between two friends, ever occurs in an untroubled fashion, it inevitably

leads to the idea that translation must be something more. But it is the assumption that is

wrong, according to Quine, as what Quine shows is that since all sociolinguistic interaction is

indirect, inferential, interpretive, and constitute a single category, all of that category is what

we call “communication.”
 24

A Quinean criticism of Gutt, on the other hand, would actually start with the

presupposed dualistic account of communication found in Gutt. For Quine, that is a huge

misunderstanding of how language works, because for him and often according to a

behaviorist account of language, linguistic expressions are not the representations of what

goes on in one’s mind, but they are only publicly observable verbal behavior that emerges not

as a result of what happens in the mind, but of social contexts. Intentions, intended meanings,

ideas and so on are only postulated notions in our explanations of the linguistic phenomena,

and they are, in turn, among the effects of language, not the causes of language. Coming back

to translation, Quine would argue that human language is always interpretive, and never

descriptive or representational of the mind. In fact, even one’s retrospection of his previous

remarks constitute a case of interpretation, and it is never determinately justified even for the

same individual to claim what his remarks really mean. One conclusion one can draw from

this is that it could provide an account of translation under which covert translation,

adaptation, rewriting, paraphrasing, reported speech, basic conversation, etc. are all under the

same category as translation, and all linguistic interaction is based on interpretation. It even

explains why Quine found it perfectly acceptable to infer from the indeterminacy found in the

thought experiment of radical translation that all semantic entities are indeterminate, because

all semantic entities constitute only one category that is the category of indeterminate

interpretation.

VII. Defining Translation and Conclusions

Provided that a Quinean conception of language and translation is correct, another

central question arises: what distinguishes translation from other forms of communication? If

translation is not the mere descriptive act of the transference of meaning across different sets

of linguistic signs, considering that one can never directly access to some “intended

meanings” behind linguistic utterances, even the “intended meanings” of one’s own remarks
 25

(as accessing them would require the person to utter what he has accessed for that access to

acquire semantic value, and that utterance again is indeterminate, hence an infinite regress),

where do we draw the line of the subject-matter of translation studies?

One can come up with various definitions of translation from Quine’s writings, and

most of them would be probably similar to the following: translation is an interpretation of a

set of linguistic signs, or rather a set of semiotic signs to be more accurate, 12 along with all of

the contextual elements that have played a role in the utterance/occurrence of the original set

of semiotic signs. But a precise definition of translation with necessary and sufficient

conditions is not what matters most now. In fact, what Quine and some other scholars have

attempted to show is that if a line is to be drawn between translation and other forms of

communication, then it is not going to be a fundamental, eternal, essential, formal line. But

rather it is going to be a pragmatic line, and be of a normative nature. If there is any difference

between the property of being a translation and the property of being another form of

communication, then it is a difference constructed in people’s sociolinguistic conceptions of

the world, rather than being in the acts of communication themselves. To be more formal and

precise, all of the things that are translations do not form a natural kind. Theo Hermans (2013)

compares translation to literature in this aspect, and shows how “today definitions of literature

tend to be functional and contingent rather than formal or essentialist” (77). He explains how

definitions of the former type not only captures more accurately the how the word

“translation” is used, but also proves to be more useful. Similarly, if we understand

“translation” primarily as an institutional label, a concept subject to historical contingency,

“we may then be able to get a sense of the concept of translation…” (2013, 77).

12
Quine has not explicitly written on intersemiotic translation, but that what is called “intersemiotic translation”
is indeed a translation is coherent from his description of the process of radical translation in which bodily
gestures may contribute to or provide themselves meaning.
 26

We may list three basic points relevant to translation studies that one can draw from

studying Quine. The first point shows the futileness of formal, fundamental definitions, at

least of translation and at most of anything, 13 under which concepts are taken to be fixed and

have intrinsic, essential properties. For Quine, one of the ways we happen to conceive the

world is by postulating concepts or kinds by finding a similarity (a defining property of the

concept) among different individual instances, which then we group under a concept (1969a).

However, “what the under-determination of global science shows is that there are various

defensible ways of conceiving the world” (1992, 102), and that the standards of definitions

should be their practical use rather than how accurately and precisely they correspond to the

concept they define.

The second is the indeterminacy of translation, and its immediate conclusion that

meanings, even when not understood as internal meanings, but socially constructed entities

that only denote what one interprets, and their translations are indeterminate. Different

translations may be equally correct even when they are incompatible among themselves.

Alternatively one can say that translations are not prone to truth or falsity as if language were

determinate, and as if truth-conditions, or conditions of correctness, of translations could be

determined. What it also shows is that evaluations of translations are bound to be normative

since we are left with only normative evaluation in the absence of empirically verifiable,

universally objective criteria.

The last point is Quine’s controversial call for getting rid of the notions of internal

meanings, ideas, propositions, intentions, etc., which are hidden remnants of the Cartesian

dualist ontology in our theoretical understandings and explanations of linguistic phenomena.

For Quine, ceasing to postulate such mental entities and abandoning the notion of language as

directly expressive of the mind would not only simplify our theories of language, but it also

13
See nominalism.
 27

may allow us to realize, appreciate and reflect upon how language really works: through

empirically observable behavioral dispositions.

 28

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