Introduction: (re-)conceptualizing translation in translation studies

Abstract

The classic phrase “a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together”, taken from Ecclesiastes 3:5 of the King James Version of the Bible, is generally interpreted as a reflection on the cyclical nature of life and the inevitability of change. Since ancient times this has been a universal principle, from Heraclitus “change is the only constant in life” to Zhuangzi “all movement involves transformation, all time involves change; whatever we do, or do not do, things will assuredly mutate of themselves”. Everything has its own time and place, and the conceptualization of translation is no exception. The question of how to conceptualize translation has been the topic of a long-standing debate and discussion in the history of translation studies (TS). In his now classic article “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation”, Roman Jakobson (1959) classified translation as intralingual, interlingual and intersemiotic. Although he focused on the linguistic types of translation, Jakobson hinted at the possibility of conceptualizing translation as going beyond linguistics and venturing into the broader realm of semiotics. This triadic system has stimulated a large number of comments, responses and interpretations. George Steiner (1992, 274), for example, challenges interlingual translation from a hermeneutic perspective: if translation involves two equivalent messages in two different codes, does “it make sense to speak of messages being equivalent when codes are different”? Maria Tymoczko, in a complementary way, questions the other two categories: “intralingual translation responds to the problematic of the nature of language, while intersemotic translation addresses the problematic of the concept of text” (2007, 56). Since the early tradition of translation was so deeply rooted in comparative literature and applied linguistics, the understanding of translation at that time primarily revolved around linguistic transfer and equivalence. Translation scholars from the 1960s to 1980s, with Eugene Nida, Peter Newmark and John Catford as prominent examples, in following the “linguistic turn”, regarded translation essentially as a linguistic transfer at the interlingual level; they narrowly defined translation as “the replacement of textual material in one language (SL) by equivalent textual material in another language (TL)” (Catford 1965, 20), or as “rendering the meaning of a text into another language in the way that the author intended the text” (Newmark 1988, 5). The source text was