To Translate Or to Mediate

1

TO TRANSLATE OR TO MEDIATE? THAT IS THE QUESTION!

by Sergio Viaggio, United Nations Office at Vienna

Second Lord - He must think us some band of strangers i’ the adversary’s entertainment. Now he hath a smack of all neighbouring languages; therefore we must every one be a man of his own fancy, not to know what we speak one to another; so we seem to know, is to know straight our purpose: chough’s language, gabble enough, and good enough. As for you, interpreter, you must seem very politic[1]. William Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well, Act IV, Scene I.

Some preliminary notions

Relevance Theory developed

Since much of what I have to say is based on Relevance Theory, and lest you may need a reminder, may I start by resuming its basic tenets: Sperber and Wilson define relevance as the relationship between the contextual effects produced on a specific subject by any act of ostensive communication and the effort that it takes him to process it. Relevance is thus the exclusive domain of (in our case, speech-) comprehension (even though it governs speech production insofar as a speaker, mostly unconsciously, “puts himself in the shoes” of his interlocutor). Let us recall the two Principles of Relevance (1986/1995:260 and foll.):

The first principle is cognitive: Human cognition tends to be geared to the maximisation of relevance.

The second one is communicative: Every act of ostensive communication communicates the presumption of its own optimal relevance.

From these principles, Sperber and Wilson derive a presumption of optimal relevance, which consists of two assumptions:

a) The set of assumptions which the communicator intends to make manifest to the addressee is relevant enough to make it worth the addressee’s while to process the ostensive stimulus.

b) The ostensive stimulus is the most relevant one compatible with the communicator’s abilities and preferences.

There are two decisive corollaries: relevance is always 1) ad hoc, and 2) relative.

I would add that these principles apply to any stimulus that the subject perceivesas one of ostensive communication addressed to him or that he decides to process “as if” addressed to him (he may attribute intentionality when there is in fact none, or miss intentionality when it is actually there, or simply mis-attribute it as directed to him rather than to someone else or vice versa). This qualification introduces the key element of attributed intentionality, which will become decisive when dealing with displaced situationality, typical as it is of written communication and, therefore, translation[2]. Since it escapes their object of study, Sperber and Wilson do not touch upon several additional decisive elements: 1) The intentionality behind the intentionality to communicate proper - the aims that a communicator pursues by communicating or an interlocutor by listening. 2) The motive behindsuch intentionality, which impels a person to communicate or pay attention to something at all in the first place, which can be totally or partially unconscious. 3) The “qualitative” effects of comprehension: what it “feels like” to have understood. I am not referring here to a speech act’s illocutionary force, which is, as it were, part and parcel of it: Illocutionary force is recoverable through propositional enrichment alone, and is normally perceived automatically as constitutive of intended ideational meaning. I have in mind, rather, the complex conscious and unconscious motivations that themselves give rise to and govern the (complex) pragmatic intention behind a speech act, which itself governs the act of speaking - and, crucially, also the act of listening. Neither am I referring to perlocutionary effects (they too are part of the speech act and are perceived automatically together with -if not necessarily as part of- ideational meaning) but rather to contextual, especially qualitative, effects. This distinction is clearly visible at the aesthetic level: aesthetic effects are hardly perlocutionary in the traditional sense. In any event, never mind what we call them or how they work, they are there, and they are independent of ideational comprehension, which explains that we can be affected differently by two acts of comprehension of the same ideational content[3]. Each time we perceive (the same) meaning meant anew, we experience different cognitive and qualitative effects. Such effects are, in the end, a function of our own ability, sensitivity and disposition there and then, which may or may not match our general ability, sensitivity or disposition, or the statistically average ability, sensitivity or disposition of any group of interlocutors.

Once more, understanding what a person means to convey to us propositionally, understanding the set of assumptions that he means to make manifest, though indeed the basic requirement for understanding speech, is seldom enough. Whenever we have a personal stake in understanding (in understanding that the plumber is making manifest to us that in his expert opinion the whole wall must be ripped open, for instance), we want to understand, also, even more basically, what the speaker’s real motives and intentions are, and whence they come. We are not only after understanding what the person means us to understand “officially”: we want to go well beyond that; we metarepresenthis intentions. We do it all the time, and not only when we have reason to believe that there is more to it than meets the ear. True, on many occasions all that counts for the mediator’s purposes is “official” ideational meaning, but by far not always - not even at highly political encounters. Indeed, speech comprehension is consummated once official, directly intended, “official” sense has been understood. But, again, we do not stop at that. We go on peeling the onion as obsessively as required by our perception of relevance. The old joke comes to mind of the two shrinks who cross each other on the street. ‘Good day, Doctor,’ go each of them, only to stop dead on their tracks and wonder suspiciously ‘What the hell did he mean by that?’

Interpretive and descriptive use

According to Sperber and Wilson, utterances can be used as representations in two basically different ways: 1) an utterance can propositionally resemble a state of affairs in the world, in which case language is used descriptively, and 2) an utterance can propositionally resemble another utterance, in which case language is used interpretively. In the first case, the utterance describes a (possible) state of affairs in the world, in the second - it reproduces the propositional content of a previous utterance, or, if you wish, of a previous description of a (possible) state of affairs in the world. For instance, you say ‘this theory is rubbish,’ and I can re-say descriptively that this theory is rubbish or interpretively that according to you this theory is rubbish. In other words, a descriptive utterance’s truth and relevance are, initially, a function of the state of affairs it describes and the way it describes it, whilst the truth and relevance of an interpretive utterance lie in the way it propositionally resembles another utterance. This leads Gutt (1990 and 2000) to define translation as second-degree interpretive use: A translator says, by means of an utterance in the target language, what the original speaker communicated by means of an utterance in the source language - the translated utterance is thus supposed interpretively to resemble the original one, i.e. “say what the original says.” Parallel texts -viz., the different language versions of an owner’s manual- in which language is used descriptively to “describe” the device and the correct way to use it, would not be translations (regardless of the fact that they may have been arrived at by translators basing their own descriptions on the description verbalised in the source language)[4].

I have no major theoretical quarrel with this definition, but it poses a practical problem: according to it, most translators do not translate at all, and most translated texts are not really translations. Indeed, the relevance -i.e. functionality- of a translation will be limited to making it possible for (ideational) meaning as meant by the original speaker to be identical to meaning as comprehended by the reader of a translation, regardless of the state of affairs described by the original speaker. And there is a second problem as well: if interpretive resemblance is to be assessed exclusively at the propositional level, how are we to assess literary translation? What about formal resemblance? Where is the translatologically relevant difference between two Spanish texts, one in prose and the other one in sonnet form, both “interpretively” resembling the same original Elizabethan sonnet? Unless the door is open wide to allow for the invasion of qualia, translation theory will remain crippled: no matter how close it gets to universality, it will always fail the ultimate test.

The overall importance of qualitative effects

The basic limitation of relevance theory in its original formulation, I submit, is that it takes contextual effects to be merely cognitive, i.e. changes in the individual’s beliefs (which become strengthened, weakened, or altogether altered). The end effects of comprehension on an individual are always emotive, or qualitative, and have to do more with the phenomenal aspects of beliefs (again, “what it feels like” to entertain them) than with their ideational, propositional or ideational aspect. If we incorporate this, then relevance theory neatly explains aesthetic and other qualitative effects, even without going into their physical and social nature (a vastly unexplored realm). This is what Pilkington (2000) has tried to do, contributing the last stone that I needed to finish my theoretical building as it presently stands before you.

In the first volume of Durrel’s Alexandria Quartet, Justine, who as a young girl had been raped by sinister Capodistria, winces when, reading a musical score, gets to “d.c.” She immediately understands, of course, that “d.c.” stands for “da capo,” a normal instruction for the performer to play the passage once again from the beginning, but she immediately associates it with “Capodistria” and the qualitative effect produced by her comprehension of this perfectly innocent intended meaning devastates her. I have an even more illustrative example, and from a most unexpected source. In one of the episodes of the old TV series Bonanza, old Cartwright and a painter now gone blind are standing atop a cliff overlooking a wonderful landscape. The former painter starts bemoaning the loss of his sight and evoking the landscape he had transferred to canvas so many times in the past; he then starts describing it as he visualises it in his mind. Cartwright comments that what the blind man has just depicted is more beautiful than what he, Cartwright, sees. The moment is rather corny, but most revealing: What Cartwright would have told his blind friend if he could use the metalanguage in this piece, is that the qualia of the second-degree perception produced in him by his interlocutor’s utterance were aesthetically more satisfying than the qualia of his optical perception. Thanks to the intermediate semantic representation flavoured by the non-semantic trappings of speech, transforming the second-degree perception into an imaginary first-degree one simply “felt better” or “more moving” than perceiving the landscape directly. Such qualia could not have been induced by ideational content alone (itself a propositional abstraction induced from the semantic representation): there is something about both ideational content and, in this instance, the way it was verbalised that did the trick. This “something that does the trick” is what a general theory of communication, translation and, even more so, mediation cannot shy away from conceptualising and incorporating.

There is more to meaning than propositional content

A model of communication through speech cannot ignore the metarepresentation of what might have been said instead of what has been actually uttered: The fact that a wife says to her husband ‘I’m fond of you’ rather than ‘I love you’ may be heavily loaded (and certainly no less the fact that she does not say anything at all). And equally loaded may be the fact that at an international gathering a Spanish delegate of Catalan origin intervenes in French rather than Spanish. Lexical and other positive choices become relevant (as silence itself), in other words, only insofar as an interlocutor can metarepresent the alternatives and the significance of the fact that they have not been chosen or, even, that they have been consciously discarded. Because that is very much a part of meaning meant -if meant indirectly- or, if not meant at all, then of meaning as comprehended by the interlocutor despite the speaker’s intentions. Again, this is fraught with consequences for mediation, since the specific weight of the form of an utterance -especially its semantic form- may be more, or less, relevant as a positive choice. A case most regrettably in point as this chapter was being updated was the Coalition of the Willing. The name was deliberate: the willing meant plainly to establish the difference between themselves and the un-willing or remiss - i.e. Germany and, above all, France, otherwise known also as the politically pejorative “old Europe”. One of the many Spanish translations, “Coalición de voluntades” [Coalition of wills] threw the not all too weak implicature overboard, the alternative translation “Coalición de los dispuestos” [coalition of the disposed/willing] was thus much more adequate. Notice that “coalition” is not as loaded politically: I submit that all that mattered was eschewing “alliance” in order not to activate memories of the antifascist alliance of yore. The mediator must, thus, be wary of what not to say for the first term and what actually to say for the second. Earlier, China and the US were at diplomatic loggerheads over the fact that a Chinese Mig had crashed in mid air with an American intelligence plane above the China Sea, as a result of which the Chinese pilot was missing and presumed dead, whilst the American plane was forced to perform an emergency landing on a Chinese island. All the fuss was over whether the American aircraft was a “spy” plane (as characterised by Euronews), or a “surveillance” plane (as labelled by CNN) legally ogling from afar. In this specific context the semantic difference between an “apology,” which is what the Chinese demanded, and an “expression of regret,” which was as far as the Americans were ready to go, are not interchangeable: they give rise to relevantly different (even contradictory) politically charged metarepresentations. In most other contexts, instead, they would be very much interchangeable: ‘I’m sorry that your father is so ill, Peter,’ will not give Peter much food for metarepresentational lucubrations about whether I said “I’m sorry” rather than “I regret” in order to convey that I feel responsible. Pretending that every speaker chooses his words as an embattled Minister about to lose a no-confidence vote, carefully weighing and then rejecting each and every alternative (which, by the way, is impossible), and that, therefore, every word present counts as much as every absent word, is as preposterous in direct communication as it is damaging when it comes to the notion of fidelity in interlingual mediation.

The rest is silence

And there is more: a model of communication through speech cannot leave out the meaning of silence. True, silence is not a part of the utterance, but can be nevertheless meaning-laden. Very often, what is not being said is also an important part of what we understand, or, rather, of what we end up understanding after we have understood what has actually been said “officially.” Silence can be an ostensive means of communication -a negative stimulus, as it were- and when taken as such, it is interpreted via a metarepresentation of what is being left unsaid and a meta-metarepresentation of why it is left unsaid.

What really counts: The metacommunicative framework

As we can appreciate, the motivations and intentions that bring together the interlocutors -i.e. that give rise to the speech act to begin with- are an important part of the totality of human communication that transcends speech production and comprehension. The ultimate purpose of communication is not simply to “say things” to our interlocutors, but to achieve certain goals thereby - nor is it purely to perceive what others have to say to us, but also to achieve certain goals thereby. What I am trying to bring in explicitly is that we are not simply after understanding the other person’s speech, we also want to understand his motives and metarepresent all that he may be willing to convey to (and/or hide from) by saying what he says. And we do this on the basis of our own emotively laden motivations. I a mediator does not weigh why and what for those who have hired him go about themselves to say things to each other, he may “translate” perfectly well, but he will be incapable of mediating effectively – or at least optimally. If a mediator does not take stock of why and what for the interlocutors who engage him have themselves engaged in “saying things” to each other, he may be able to “translate” most competently, but he cannot possibly mediate effectively - or, at least, optimally. Because what he should do is not simply try to achieve merely some kind of sameness of meaning meant and understood, whatever the ulterior social consequences, but rather ensuring a relevant identity, coincidence or overlapping of intended and metarepresented meaning that will be also as pragmatically adequate as circumstances demand, advise or allow.

Direct communication can, indeed, be conceived of and modelled disregarding the motivations and intentions governing it at either end, as well as the effects of comprehension on an interlocutor. But when we have to deal not with on but with two speech acts, it is impossible to excise the mediator’s subjectivity, who is, precisely, in between both acts. Because a mediator -no matter how hard he try- cannot convey the speaker’s message exactly as he has understood it: He must, of necessity, modify at least certain elements of its perspective. The question, thus, is how he is aptly to choose this new perspective if he has not pondered the metacommunicative purpose of the original act and of his own – which can be very different (as rightly pointed out by the proponents of Skopostheorie).