HERMENEUTIC MOTION AND THE STAGES OF TRANSLAION

О.О. Мормуль
Національний технічний університет України «КПІ»
 
Hermeneutics is an interpretive method developed by the German Romantics, especially Friedrich Schleiermacher (German tradition) and Wilhelm Dilthey, which means 'to understand'.  It involves an empathic projection of the interpreter's desire to understand the activity.
The term hermeneutic motion is George Steiner's. He claims to be exploring not his typical act of translation but the act of translation in its entirety, translation as it has been experienced from within by every translator who ever lived.
Steiner envisions the hermeneutic act of translating as a “movement or motion” through four stages: trust,aggression, incorporationand restitution. The translator first surrenders to the SL text, trusts it to mean something despite its apparent alienness. This is the step that typically stymies people who say they can't learn foreign languages.  “After trust comes aggression. The second move of the translator is incursive and extractive”.
Here Steiner draws on Hegel and Heidegger to explore the aggressive nature of all understanding, all interpretation — of every hermeneutic. The translator goes abroad, enters the SL text, driven no longer by passive trust but by the active intention of taking something away, of grabbing up fistfuls of meaning and walking off with them.
The third stage or move for Sterner is incorporation. In the second stage the translator goes abroad with plunder in mind; in the third, s/he returns home with plunder in hand. The translator who stops at this stage produces assimilative translations – translations thus thoroughly conformed to TL norms as to bear no trace of their origins in the SL.
The fourth and the final move is restitution.  This is Steiner's attempt to shift the grounds on which fidelity has been understood, from a static one-to-one correspondence between SL and TL texts to an ethical process whereby power seized is relinquished in restorative ways. The translator has invaded the SL and stolen some of its property; now s/he makes restitution by rendering the SL text into a TL that is balanced between the divergent pulls of the SL and TL cultural contexts.
Taken as a whole, Steiner's hermeneutic motion is a revision of Goethe's three epochs of translation. Goethe's first epoch is appropriative, the radical domestication of a foreign text, exemplified by Luther’s Bible. Steiner expands this into his second and third stages of the hermeneutic motion, aggression and incorporation, under the assumption.
Goethe's second epoch is fuzzy. “You either bring the author home to the reader or you take the reader abroad to meet the author. You either domesticate or foreignize”.
Goethe's third epoch is that of the mystical interlinear translation. Steiner significantly secularizes his predecessors' mysticism, reads it as ethical rather than eschatological – as directed toward good translation rather than the redemption of the world.
Numerous problems remain with Sterner's formulation. One is that, while he explicitly wants to make his fourfold movement an ideal model of every individual act of translation, he also wants to illustrate it with specific translations from the past — and in the course of illustrating the four moves he begins to treat them like stable categories for the classification of translations.
Another problem is that Steiner does allow Goethe and Benjamin to inject a little of their dialectical mechanism into his hermeneutic motion: “The true interlinear”, he writes, “is the final, unrealizable goal of the hermeneutic act.” Clearly, here, he wants literalism to serve both as a crude device at the beginning of the hermeneutic act, in the form of trust, and as its final, unrealizable goal, in an escalation of restitution. The vagueness of Steiner's fourth move, and of the hermeneutic motion as a whole, surely has something to do with his desire to retain something of this romantic synthesis while not quite falling into the trap of unattainability.
For all its problems, however, Steiner's hermeneutic motion stands as a salutary alternative to recent linguistic and sociological systems models developed for the process of translation.
References:
1. http://v2.educonv.com/docs/index-239623.html?page=16