The Linguistic Argument

       Tadashi Ogawa attempts to tackle the problem of translation with a two pronged approach: discussing both the linguistic and cultural implications of creating a translation. She sees the two being intimately intertwined with one another, and uses each side of her argument to support the other. She sees the strong relationship between culture and language, and mentions that in some cases they are one and the same. Much of any given culture lives within its own language. But for our purposes here, her discussion into the linguistic particularities of translation is the most effective. She boils language down to what she calls the “highly abstract” concepts of signifiers and signified, or using her terms, signans and signatum. She defines these terms in the following way: "The signans is that moment of the sign through which it comes to sensual appearance as sound or written mark. This signans is always perceptible. The signatum is the sense or concept that is expressed by the sign: its translatable aspect" (Ogawa 21). This can be simplified. The signans is the letters and words on the page, outside of their meaning, and the signatum is the meaning we prescribe to it. And her argument is essentially that the act of translation is at its very core the act of navigating this linguistic field. The signatum is translatable when the thing being signified is common between cultures. For example, a device that tells time that you wear on your wrist is the same thing whether you call it a watch or a montre (French). Only the signans changes with different languages. She goes on to say that translation is only possible in virtue of this commonality (22). But from this argument we can see exactly where the problems in translations arise from a linguistic point of view.
       Not everything is universal amongst different cultures, and with this in mind, there can be no perfect translation for those things or concepts. In other words, when there isn’t a signatum common to both languages, there simply cannot be perfect translations between the two signans’. An example of this would be xenia in Greek, which means the cultural obligation of any person to treat any friend, or stranger, who crosses their mantle as if they were a member of the host’s own household. In English the word that best describes this would be hospitality, but what hospitality doesn’t cover is the cultural obligation to adhere to xenia for the Greeks. English does not have a signans that fully captures the concept of xenia. To simplify this even further, unless the thing being represented exists in both cultures, it cannot be translated from one culture to another. This presents the translator with a massive problem, especially when one is considering a translation of an ancient work. Not only is the translator working with a text from another part of the world, but the text is also separated by roughly three thousand years for a translator working today. The differences between Homer’s cultural situation and a modern translator’s are nearly endless, and thus the linguistic gap between the two becomes even harder to manage. The concept of xenia mentioned above is but one of the these differences; even the Greek polytheistic religion, which dictated so much of their daily life, is largely out of practice now. Menachem Dagut discusses this very problem under the name of “semantic voids”, and the “equivalence” of two languages.
       Dagut claims outright that translation is an attempt to find “equivalence” between two languages, an attempt which “by its very nature, focuses attention on all those incommensurabilities of the two languages concerned that render such ‘equivalence’ difficult (if indeed possible)” (Dagut 61). Dagut’s equivalence is the very same thing that Ogawa is talking about. The two scholars seem to point to the same issue, that is, that languages and the cultures they belong to are different, and this difference creates the “semantic void” that Dagut seeks to explain. Dagut claims that the translation theorist must, “concentrate on the still smaller unit of the word, as the true meeting point between language and what language signifies” (Dagut 62). He goes on to say that what a translation theorist or a translator must do is acquire “as deep an understanding as possible of the way in which it [the word] performs its unique semantic functions” (62). These “unique semantic functions” are the window through which he enters his discussion of the “semantic void”. 
       He says that “void” manifests itself when “there is no single English designator which provides the required equivalent encapsulation of the situational features” (Dagut 63). Following these claims, he begins to discuss several examples of specific “voids” which come up between English and Hebrew, and after laying out those examples, he turns back to the issue of translation and says, “we have seen that the translation problem arises from the conflicting requirements of compression and completeness, and that the compromise solution of the conflict is likely to result in only partial equivalence” (Dagut 69). When he refers to “compression”, Dagut is talking about the need for the translator to translate a concept in the original language into the new one in as few words as possible. If we look to the example of xenia again, that one Greek word requires several words in English to fully capture its meaning. “Completeness”, the other half of the equation for Dagut, is the need for the translator to capture as much of the original concept as possible in the new translation. The attempt at “compression and completeness” could be seen as the very essence of what a translator is trying to do. It is of course possible to accurately put into English words the meaning of nearly any term in another language, but often times, compression must be thrown out in order to do so. The translator is forced into this “compromise solution” in which he cannot achieve neither compression nor completeness satisfactorily.
       From a linguistic perspective on translation theory, these “semantic voids” are precisely the reason translation is an imperfect art form. They force the translator into compromise, and with each compromise the translator makes, the gap between original text and translation grows bigger and bigger. But if these voids are inevitable in creating a translation, why then do we continue to translate? If the translator is doomed to failure from the start why is it such a common practice? I believe this semantic void is precisely where the window for artistic interpretation of a text comes in. If a purely literal translation is impossible by nature, then the translator must seek to capture the essence of the text in some other way. This is where the discussion must turn toward the literary, and eventually to the question of authority and authorship.