The Myth of Translatability: Translation as Interpretation

Abstract

All experience including sense experience is interpretative and moral experience.¹ The point of Nietzsche’s pithy aphorism is that on the simplest of planes of existence and at the most complex levels of abstraction human beings engage in interpretation. Further, the moral nature of interpretation implies that freedom with entailed responsibility is at the root of all human activity. According to Nietzsche there is nothing that is given by itself. For Nietzsche, rightly, all activity is a dynamic relational endeavour between persons and otherness. What is true of negotiating the flux of experience, existence, is most emphatically true of all communicative acts: speaking, reading, interpreting and translating. The activity of translation is just a sub-category of all knowing and doing in the world. Although the translation of biblical texts is archetypical of translation and interpretation, the process of translation is the same for biblical texts as for all others. Its only privilege is in its demand that speech account for itself and avoid falling into self-contradiction.