Translating social science: Good versus bad utopianism
Joshua M.Price
State University of New York at Binghamton
Abstract
Dedicated to the memory of Daniel Simeoni
Insufficient attention has been paid in Translation Studies to the challenges particular to translating social scientific texts. Of the few who have taken up the topic, Immanuel Wallerstein has argued that one of the distinguishing characteristics of social scientific texts is that they traffic in concepts. Wallerstein wants the translation of social science to further the possibility of a universal conversation in the social sciences. I argue that a universal conversation in the social sciences is neither possible nor desirable. Instead, this article proposes that translating social science can contribute to conceptual clarification and elaboration. In this way, the translation may complement and further the flowering of the ‘original’ concept. The essay concludes with an extended example—how ‘bewilderment’ might be translated into Spanish.
Always melancholic, frantic, manic... man is always marching towards failure; human tasks are unrealizable. (Ortega y Gasset)
References
Bal, Mieke
1999Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary art, preposterous history. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Benjamin, Walter
[1923] 1968 “The task of the translator”. Illuminations, tr. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books 1968 69–82.
Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar Núñez
1907 [1542]. Spanish explorers in the southern United States, 1528–1543[sic]: The narrative of Alvar Nuñez Cabeça de Vaca, ed. Frederick W. Hodge. (No translator listed.) New York: Scribner.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh
2007Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial thought and historical difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press. [Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History.]
DaMatta, Roberto
1994 “Antropologia da Saudade”. Conta de Mentiroso: Sete ensaios de an-tropologia brasileira. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Rocca Ltda 1994 17–35.
Eoyang, Eugene Chen
1993The transparent eye: Reflections on translation, Chinese literature, and comparative poetics. Hawai’i: University of Hawaii Press.
Feyerabend, Paul K.
1975Against method. London: Verso.
[ p. 363 ]
Freud, Sigmund
(1961 [1930]) Civilization and its discontents, tr. James Strachey. New York: Norton.
1995Translingual practice: Literature, national culture and translated modernity 1900–1930. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
Lugones, Maria
2003Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing coalition against multiple oppositions. New York: Rowman and Littlefield.
Maranhão, Tullio
2002 “The politics of translation and the anthropological nation of the ethnography of South America”. Tullio Maranhão and Berhard Streck, eds. Translation and ethnography. Arizona: University of Arizona Press 2002 64–84.
Mignolo, Walter D.
1995The darker side of the Renaissance: Literacy, territoriality, and colonization. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich
1977 [1873]. “On truth and lies in the nonmoral sense”, ed. and tr. Daniel Breazeale. Philosophy and truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s note books in the early 1870s. Amherst, New York: Pronetheos Books 1990 79–91
Ortega y Gasset, José
2000 [1937]. “The misery and the splendor of translation”, tr. Elizabeth Gamble Miller. Lawrence Venuti, ed. The Translation Studies reader. New York: Routledge 2000 49–64.
Pandey, Gyanendra
2005The construction of communalism in colonial North India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Price, Joshua M.
2004 “Critical race theory’s dream narratives—A method for an anti-racist social science?” Austin Sarat and Patricia Ewick, eds. Studies in law, politics, and society 32. London: Elsevier Publishers 2004 39–77.
Rabassa, Gregory
2005If this be treason: Translation and its dyscontents, A memoir. New York: New Directions.
Sahlins, Marshall
1976Culture and practical reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
2004 “A critique of lazy reason: Against the waste of experience”. Immanuel Wallerstein, ed. The modern world-system in the longue durée. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers 2004 157–197.
Simeoni, Daniel
1998 “The pivotal status of the translator’s habitus”. Target 10:1. 1–39.
Stavans, Ilan
2002 “Introduction”. Chronicle of the Narváez Expedition. New York: Penguin Books 2002 ix–xxxii.
Venuti, Lawrence
1986 “The translator’s invisibility”. Criticism 28:2. 179–212.
Venuti, Lawrence
1994The translator’s invisibility: A history of translation. New York: Routledge.
Wallerstein, Immanuel
1981 “Concepts in the social sciences: Problems of translation”. Marilyn Gaddis-Rose, ed. Translation spectrum: Essays in theory and practice. Albany: State Univer¬sity of New York Press 1981 88–98.