Poythress on Hermeneutics and translation

Poythress on Hermeneutics and translation November 18, 2004

Vern Poythress gave an excellent paper at ETS on truth and fullness of meaning. It was typical Poythress ?Earguing against any reductive account of meaning and language, insisting that Scripture speaks in all sorts of ways (propositions, metaphors, allusions, etc), well-informed about contemporary trends in linguistics and philosophy. Here are some highlights:

1) He spent considerable time on the reductive character of structural linguistics. Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics deliberately eliminates context from its consideration of language as a system; one could almost say that linguistics as a discipline is constituted by its elimination of context. The Saussurean distinction between langue and parole is precisely a distinction between contextless system ( langue ) and context-laden use ( parole ). Poythress suggested that this was necessary to get linguistics off the ground as a discipline, but went on to say that the elimination of context is sometimes ignored in linguistics, and consideration of structure is sometimes thought of as an exhaustive account of the functioning of language. He also suggested that Saussure’s definition of “sign” as a combination of the sound-symbol (signifier) and the concept (signified) leaves out referential considerations entirely. In real-life language use, speakers use sound-symbols that evoke certain concepts to speak about THINGS, and children learn meaning partly through knowing real-world instances of the things they are beginning to name. In short, referentiality is a crucial component of meaning in language use, and structuralism’s concept of the sign is thus reductive. Poythress dismissed Saussure’s claim that meaning is determined solely by difference, pointing out that this eliminates the possibility of intertextual relations, allusion, and the historical connotations that are packed into words. Though Saussure and other structuralists eventually attempt to restore these elements to consideration, Poythress thinks that the reductionist damage has already been done.

2) Poythress brought some of the same criticisms against Nida’s use of Chomskyan generative grammar in his 1964 treatise on the science of translation. Though Nida recognized that meaning is not merely “linguistic,” but also emotive and referential, his treatment of translation method tends to reduce language to its “linguistic” meaning. By “linguistic” meaning, Nida is referring to the meaning that can be gained by reducing complex sentences to kernel sentences and their connectors (Chomsky). Translation begins, Nida argues, by reducing the original text to kernels, which then can be translated into the receptor language, since kernels are fairly constant across languages. This is a multiple reductionist. It ignores the speaker, it cannot function at any level beyond the sentence level, it reduces figures to literal speech, it effectively eliminates emotive and referential meaning. He made the intriguing point that kernel sentences are sometimes “reductive” precisely because they are more definite than the actual utterance. “The love of God” is ambiguous (or, Poythress would say, rich) while the kernel “God loves you” is not. (The kernel requires an object.)

The main practical upshot of Poythress’s paper in my mind was that no translation can capture all the dimensions of the original language, which seems to suggest that a proliferation of translations is a good thing. Each will highlight certain features of the text and downplay others, but as long as these emphases are understood and acknowledged, there is no problem. It would be a problem to have one final translation.


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