STEINER'S HERMENEUTIC MOTION

Slide 1: We have so far discussed literary, linguistic, and cultural translation theories. In this
session, we'll look at contemporary philosophical approaches to translation that, over the
latter part of the 20th century, aimed to understand the nature of translation (mostly literary).

Slide 2: The Greek word "hermeneuin" means "to understand," and the term "hermeneutics"
refers to a process of interpretation. In a word, hermeneutics is the study and methodology of
understanding texts.

Slide 3: Literary critic, essayist, educator, translator, and novelist George Steiner is known as
a polymath and is credited with establishing Translational Hermeneutics.

Slide 4: According to Steiner, trust is an investment in faith.

We acknowledge right away that there is "something there" that has to be understood. An act
of trust is the foundation of all comprehension and its demonstrative presentation
(translation).
The exploration of what it means to "understand a piece of oral or written speech and
the attempt to diagnose this process in terms of a general model of meaning" is the definition
of hermeneutic approach given by Steiner.
The act of eliciting and appropriating meaning is known as the hermeneutic motion,
which has four distinct parts. Initiative, trust, aggression, embodiment, and compensation are
the models used.

Slide 5: Initiative trust is a conviction and confidence that something understandable is

present in the ST. The translator believes that the St. represents something in the world, a
coherent "something" that can be translated even if the meaning is not immediately clear.

Slide 6: The term "agresion" refers to the translator's perception and understanding of the
text, which, as Steiner notes, "is always partial. The translator, at this point, is a reader. He is
different because he must understand, if not to the greatest extent possible, then certainly to a
great extent beyond that of the average reader.
A translator must exclude or modify portions of the original text that he deems
unneeded or inappropriate in order to improve the text's readability when it is translated from
one language to another.

Slide 7: The term "incorporation" describes the process by which the TL, which is already
full of its own words and meanings, is given the ST meaning that the translator extracted in
the second movement. Assimilation can take many different forms, including total
domestication and permanent strangeness and marginality.
Steiner's key argument is that the original structure might be completely dislocated or
relocated when the meaning of a foreign text is imported. He offers two explanations for how
this process works, including sacramental intake and infection.
Slide 8: In this stage, the translator realizes what is being translated and makes an effort to
explain it in his or her own language.

Slide 9: In COMPENSATION, in order to strike a balance, the translator tries to be both as

faithful and as free as he can be. To the same extent that he has taken from the SL, the
translator must be prepared to return the favor. In this level, Steiner places a strong emphasis
on fidelity.

Slide 10: According to Steiner, the idea of "resistant difference" manifests itself in two
different ways: first, the translator experiences the target language differently from his or her
mother tongue, and second, each pair of languages—SL and TL—differ and impose their
distinct characteristics on the translator and society.
The translation of the text is both attracted to and rejected when elective affinity and
resistant difference coexist.

Slide 11: In conclusion, The triadic paradigm, according to Steiner, is flawed because it
lacks precision and philosophical support and ignores the crucial truth that even the most
basic translation involves a fourfold discourse both conceptually and practically.
 SEMIOSIS: FROM PRESENTATION TO TRANSLATION (OSWELL)

Slide 1: The process through which signals are created, interpreted, and linked to objects and
to one another was referred to as semiosis by US pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders
Peirce in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
According to Peirce, a sign can be understood as having an interpretant that is
connected to it and related to an object that the interpretant is about.

Slide 2: Any object or manner of being that serves as a mediator between an object and an
interpreter is referred to as a sign.

Slide 3: But in addition to Peirce, the early 20th-century Swiss linguist Ferdinand de
Saussure, about whom we will speak in more detail shortly, has had a significant influence on
many works on the semiotics of culture.

Slide 4: Saussure thought his linguistic theories could be applied to all communication
events and defined linguistics as "a science which analyzes the role of signs as part of social
life." According to semiology, every culture is something "like a language."
Language, in Saussure's view, is a sign system. Saussure's sign consists of two
components: the signifier, a sound-image, and the signified, a notion.

Slide 5: Signifier and signified have no meaningful relationship to one another. For the same
concepts, many languages use various signifiers.
We can communicate with one another if we can all agree on what the signifier is.
Here for example a literal tree is a signifier while the image shown below is considered
signified.

Slide 6: Language is a system of distinctions. The degree to which something differs from
other signifiers and signifieds determines what it implies. A system of formal relationships
underlies language.

Slide 7: According to Saussure, concepts are wholly differential and defined negatively by
their relationships to other terms in the system rather than positively by their positive content.

Slide 8: As a result, language no longer merely serves as a means of conveying meaning and
cognition, but actually acts as such. many languages, various ideas.

Slide 9: asserts that a text cannot have self-contained units of meaning since a text's
individual words or sentences can only be correctly comprehended in relation to the
language's overall structure.

Slide 10: By using a deconstructive interpretation of Saussure to refute the claim that
language is "a system of distinctions without positive terms," Derrida redefines writing.
Slide 11: Voloshinov argue that the same language is used by people from different social
classes, regardless of class struggles. Second, ideology describes how signs in society
influence people's perceptions.
By uttering or expressing appropriate answers to the speaker's speech, the listener,
according to Bakhtin, also contributes to the creation of understanding.

Slide 12: Semiotics is concerned with the relationships between what are typically thought of
as linguistic and non-linguistic as well as across signifying and a-signifying material.
Language is neither a contained system of signifiers and signifieds nor a field of utterances.

Slide 13: So the idea of the rhizome aids us in understanding the semiosis problem in a
different way than a typical model of representation.

Slide 14: The traditional understanding of semiosis in cultural studies has been the symbolic
depiction of material interactions. This understanding is based on Saussure's systematic
investigation of signs and meaning.
Because Saussure's semiology views significations as existing within an enclosed
system and views the system of signs and distinctions as being coextensive with society and
nation, that’s why it is problematic.
The symbolic and systemic logic is still at play in Derrida's deconstruction of
Saussure.

Slide 15: Focusing on specific utterances rather than entire linguistic systems, being dialogic
and extremely contextual, and basing semiosis on a model of intersubjective social
interaction are all characteristics of the Voloshinov and Bakhtin model.