THE TRANSLATION PARADOX

Another gem from Pippa Hall:

Translation is, according to some dictionaries, the rendering of something into another language or into one’s own from another language. In yet others, translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. The new text is also referred to as a translation. It is a change or conversion from one form to another, a transformation. In mechanics it refers to the motion in which all particles of a body move with the same velocity along parallel paths. In telegraphy the transmitting, forwarding and relaying of messages. In mathematics it is effectively a type of displacement, a function obtained from a given function by adding the same constant to each value of the variable of the given function and moving the graph of the function a constant distance to the right or left. In genetics, the process by which a messenger RNA molecule specifies the linear sequence of amino acids on a ribosome for protein synthesis.

Translation is the act of translating as well as the state of being translated. It is a continuously shifting sign.

In my archaeology of the sign, I am forever in the realm of translation, displacement and what Jacques Derrida refers to as Différance.

“Derrida indicates that différance gestures at a number of heterogeneous features that govern the production of textual meaning. The first (relating to deferral) is the notion that words and signs can never fully summon forth what they mean, but can only be defined through appeal to additional words, from which they differ. Thus, meaning is forever "deferred" or postponed through an endless chain of signifiers. The second (relating to difference, sometimes referred to as espacement or "spacing") concerns the force that differentiates elements from one another and, in so doing, engenders binary oppositions and hierarchies that underpin meaning itself.”

Saussure stated:

In language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system. The idea or phonic substance that a sign contains is of less importance than the other signs that surround it. [...] A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas; but the pairing of a certain number of acoustical signs with as many cuts made from the mass thought engenders a system of values.

Julia Kristeva commented:

“Différance is the systematic play of differences, of the traces of differences, of the spacing by means of which elements are related to each other. This spacing is the simultaneously active and passive (the a of différance indicates this indecision as concerns activity and passivity, that which cannot be governed by or distributed between the terms of this opposition) production of the intervals without which the "full" terms would not signify, would not function.[…]"The a of différance also recalls that spacing is temporization, the detour and postponement by means of which intuition, perception, consummation - in a word, the relationship to the present, the reference to a present reality, to a being - are always deferred. Deferred by virtue of the very principle of difference which holds that an element functions and signifies, takes on or conveys meaning, only by referring to another past or future element in an economy of traces. This economic aspect of différance, which brings into play a certain not conscious calculation in a field of forces, is inseparable from the more narrowly semiotic aspect of différance.”

So where does all this leave the Chinese ‘translator’ who produced the extraordinary texts depicted in Pippa Hall’s photographs?

Derrida commented that ‘What must be translated of that which is translatable can only be untranslatable” The Chinese have clearly understood the paradox. 

This is an add on - a little sentimental at times: