Activity: Talk or presentation types › Invited talk
Description
This lecture reflects on the logic of translation that emerges from an encounter between the Eastern and Western philosophical traditions. Taking as a point of departure the classic formulation of Friedrich Schleiermacher (1819) of the translational problem as a hypothetical movement between the author and the reader, I demonstrate that it draws a binary, unidimensional model, unable to account for the complexities of translation. Positing a continuum that stretches between the extreme options removes a strict dichotomy but does not solve the problem of unidimensionality. In an attempt to construct an adequately rich, multidimensional model of translation, I examine certain 2-D and 3-D concepts proposed in translation studies, before turning to Lin Yutang, who in his essay 论翻译 (1932) proposes the following three pillars of translation: 忠实, 通顺, and 美.
