Andrew Chesterman’s 2008 article “On Explanation” examines what it means to explain translational phenomena. In doing so, it explores the nature of explanation itself and raises one crucial question: How much is beyond explanation? In other words, to what extent could translational phenomena be due to mere chance? This article addresses this question by drawing on six landmark experiments within the field of psychology. These experiments suggest (1) that we, as translators, might unknowingly be injecting random elements into our translations, and (2) that we, as Translation Studies scholars, might be ‘seeing’ causes in that randomness where there are none. This article also draws on psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s ideas about the ‘illusion of causation’ and on Nassim Taleb’s definition of randomness within the humanities and social sciences. It concludes by arguing that retrospective explanations of translations should pay far more than lip service to the notion of chance.
Explanations are ubiquitous, come in a variety of forms and formats, and are used for a variety of purposes. Yet, one of the most striking features about most explanations is their limitations. For most natural phenomena and many artificial ones, the full set of relations to be explained is enormous, often indefinitely large and far beyond the grasp of any one individual.
References
Bassnett, Susan, and André Lefevere
1998Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Brownlie, Siobhan
2003 “Investigating Explanations of Translational Phenomena: A Case for Multiple Causality.” Target 15 (1): 111–152.
Bruno, Cosima
2012 “The Public Life of Contemporary Chinese Poetry in English Translation.” Target 24 (2): 253–285.
2008 “On Explanation.” In Beyond Descriptive Translation Studies: Investigations in Homage to Gideon Toury, edited by Anthony Pym, Miriam Shlesinger, and Daniel Simeoni, 363–379. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
2009A Dictionary of Psychology. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Darwin, Charles
1872The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. London: John Murray.
Englich, Birte, Thomas Mussweiler, and Fritz Strack
2006 “Playing Dice with Criminal Sentences: The Influence of Irrelevant Anchors on Experts’ Judicial Decision Making.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 32: 118–200.
2010 “Magic at the Marketplace: Choice Blindness for the Taste of Jam and the Smell of Tea.” Cognition 117 (1): 54–61.
Hall, Lars, Petter Johansson, and Thomas Strandberg
2012 “Lifting the Veil of Morality: Choice Blindness and Attitude Reversals on a Self-Transforming Survey.” PloS ONE 7 (9): e45457.
Hall, Lars, Thomas Strandberg, Philip Pärnamets, Andreas Lind, Betty Tärning, and Petter Johansson
2013 “How the Polls Can Be Both Spot On and Dead Wrong: Using Choice Blindness to Shift Political Attitudes and Voter Intentions.” PloS ONE 8 (4): e60554.
Halverson, Sandra
2003 “The Cognitive Basis of Translation Universals.” Target 15 (2): 197–241.
House, Juliane
2013 “Towards a New Linguistic-Cognitive Orientation in Translation Studies.” In Interdisciplinarity in Translation and Interpreting Process Research, edited by Maureen Ehrensberger-Dow, Susanne Göpferich, and Sharon O’Brien, special issue of Target 24 (1): 46–60.
Hubscher-Davidson, Séverine
2009 “Personal Diversity and Diverse Personalities in Translation: a Study of Individual Differences.” Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 17 (3): 175–192.
Hume, David
(1777) 2007An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by Peter Millican. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jääskeläinen, Riitta
2002 “Think-aloud Protocol Studies into Translation. An Annotated Bibliography.” Target 14 (1): 107–136.
Johansson, Petter, Lars Hall, Sverker Sikström, and Andreas Olsson
2005 “Failure to Detect Mismatches between Intention and Outcome in a Simple Decision Task.” Science 310 (5745): 116–119.
Johannsson, Petter, Lars Hall, Sverker Sikström, Betty Tärning, and Andreas Lind
2006 “How Something Can Be Said about Telling More Than We Can Know.” Consciousness and Cognition 15 (4): 673–692.
Johansson, Petter, Lars Hall, and Nick Chater
2012 “Preference Change through Choice.” In Neuroscience of Preference and Choice. Cognitive and Neural Mechanisms, edited by Raymond Dolan and Tali Sharot, 121–141. Amsterdam: Elsevier Academic Press.
Kahneman, Daniel
2011Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Allen Lane.
Kahneman, Daniel, and Amos Tversky
1974 “Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases.” Science 185 (4157): 1124–1131.
Kaplan, Michael, and Ellen Kaplan
2006Chances Are… Adventures in Probability. London: Viking Penguin.
Keil, Frank C.
2006 “Explanation and Understanding.” Annual review of Psychology 57: 227–254.
Mussweiler, Thomas, and Fritz Strack
2000 “The Use of Category and Exemplar Knowledge in the Solution of Anchoring Tasks.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 78 (6): 1038–1052.
ed.1992Translation/History/Culture: A Sourcebook. London: Routledge.
Pinker, Steven
2007The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. New York: Viking
Pym, Antony
1998Method in Translation History. Manchester: St. Jerome.
Pym, Antony
2010Exploring Translation Theories. New York: Routledge.
Robinson, Douglas
1991The Translator’s Turn. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Saldanha, Gabriela, and Sharon O’Brien
2013Research Methodologies in Translation Studies. Manchester: St. Jerome.
Salmon, Wesley C.
1998Causality and Explanation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Scott, Clive
2012Literary Translation and the Rediscovery of Reading. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Strack, Fritz, Leonard Martin, and Sabine Stepper
1988 “Inhibiting and Facilitating Conditions of the Human Smile: A Nonobtrusive Test.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 54 (5): 768–777.
Taleb, Nassim Nicholas
2010The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. 2nd ed. New York: Random House.
Toury, Gideon
1998 “A Handful of Paragraphs on ‘Translation’ and ‘Norms’.” Current Issues in Language and Society 5 (1/2): 10–32.
Tymoczko, Maria
2012 “The Neuroscience of Translation.” In The Known Unknowns of Translation Studies, edited by Elke Brems, Reine Meylaerts, and Luc van Doorslaer, special issue of Target 24 (1): 83–102.
Vanderauwera, Ria
1985Dutch Novels Translated into English: The Transformation of a “Minority” Literature. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Venuti, Lawrence
2002 “The Difference That Translation Makes: The Translator’s Unconscious.” In Translation Studies: Perspectives on an Emerging Discipline, edited by Alessandra Riccardi, 214–241. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Von Wright, Georg Hendrik
(1971) 2004Explanation and Understanding. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Wason, Peter C.
1968 “Reasoning about a Rule.” Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 20 (3): 273–281.