READING AND TRANSLATION – CLIVE SCOTT

 The critical preoccupation is with the translation of the linguistic experience of text, that
sequence of sensations activated in the readers by language and linguistic structure, in
the process of reading.
 Reading constitutes a whole body experience in which words, and grammar, and syntax,
an typographic phenomena such as type face, margin, punctuation, activate cross-
sensory, psychophysiological responses prior to concept and interpretation, at a stage
when essences, thanks to language, “reposent encore”.
 BAUDELAIRE  grammar becomes something like an evocative sorcery; words are
restored to life, cloth in flesh and bone.
 Translation, for its part, is equally a process of phenomenological rather than
interpretative recontextualization. If translation relocates a text from the “there and
then” in the “here and now”, the question is: what is the “here and now”? What
constitutes it?
 Two obstacles in achieving the phenomenological ambitions
o Concentration of Translation Studies on interlingual translation, at the expense
of intralingual and intermedial translation.
Interlingual translation has produced a preoccupation without an excessively
narrow conception of language, a conception of language which ignores the
paralinguistic, that is, consideration of vocal inputs.
Intralingual translation encourages us to experiment with the reformulations of
our native language, more boldly incorporating the paralinguistic. Giving
intralingual and intermedial translation a full role alongside interlingual
translation will help us rethink the form and functions of translation as a broad
transtextual practice, and will draw interlingual translation out of its
preoccupation with a narrowly linguistic, with issues of fidelity and equivalence.
Fidelity and equivalence are not simple terms.
NIDA  functional and dynamic
TOURY  relatability to shared relevant features
PYM  necessary illusion
Translation begins in equivalence, but is itself the very process or superseding
equivalence, of setting language on the move; in translation, we use words
precisely in order to reinflect them towards, or away from, the languages they
confront or summon up indeed.
o The second one grows from the first and has already been adverted to:
interlingual translation tends to assume that the reader has no interest in the
source language. But translation should be designed to increase the circulation
of languages, to encourage the reader actively to participate in that circulation.
Familiarity with the ST is indispensable, because the significance of translation
lies in the fruitfulness of the relationship established between the ST and the TT
and what that relationship sets in creative motion.
o Distinction between interpretation and phenomenology, namely the distinction
between hermeneutic reading and constructivist reading.
 HERMENEUTIC  it represents the development of linear decoding, of
extracting from word sequences what is already presumed to be there
in the way of meaning.
  CONSTRUCTIVIST  it begins with a passionate interest in how one
negotiates the act of reading itself, an interest in what kind of
performance readerly perception requires.
It looks to multiply and elaborate reading styles, and this in turn implies
the proliferation of different versions and editions of the text.
The constructivist assumes that language is always in progress and to
that extent we can never control it.
The text is a living organism, sensitive to, and accommodating of,
changing readers and other texts.
Constructivist texts are based on language as a material performing its
own body and expressive resourcefulness.
The act of translation is the fullest realisation of the reading experience.
Translation will tend to multiply obstructions to a fluent, linear,
recapitulative kind of reading.
Phenomenology does not ask what a text means, but what reading is,
as a pshyco-sensory response to the mechanics of language. Translation
of the phenomenology of reading requires he development of a new
kind of translation, a multilingual and multisensory translation.
Multilingualism here refers not only to national languages, but to
textual languages, the languages of textual presentation and projection:
the acritical marks, punctuation, type face, layout, etc.
 Reading is not primarily about interpretation, but about reading itself, as a complex
dynamic of perception and consciousness of language.