13 – TRANSLATIONS DU CLG

Organizer : JOHN JOSEPH, School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, The University of Edinburgh.

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PLEASE NOTE THAT THESE COMMMUNICATIONS ARE AVAILABLE IN

CAHIERS DE L'ILSL, 2018

DESCRIPTION OF THE SESSION

If one wanted to create a science of metaphrasometry, the aim of which would be to measure the international reception of a book through the appearance of its translations in other languages, it would first be necessary to destroy all evidence of the translations of the Course in General Linguistics. No science could take account of all the motivations, conditions and accidents that determined, for example, why the Russian and Japanese translations preceded those in Western European languages, or why no English translation appeared before 1959, despite the capital importance of the Course for Bloomfield in the USA and Firth in the UK.

Yet there are considerable lessons to be drawn from the translations. They provide us with an incomparable source of details about how the Course was read within the linguistic cultures of its translators. The value of these details should not be underestimated, since, with readers who did not produce translations, such evidence appears only implicitly in their commentaries and above all in their interpretative quirks (one hesitates to say “errors”) if by chance they have come under public scrutiny.

In giving the lectures from which Bally and Sechehaye fashioned the Course in General Linguistics, Saussure was struggling not only with the linguistics of his time, but with the French language and the obstacles it present to a logical and unambiguous understanding of linguistic phenomena. Translators must recreate these battles fought by Saussure on terrain different from his, sometimes massively, sometimes subtly. For the translator, the small differences are often harder to manage than the big ones.

For this session papers dealt with any of the following questions:

1. The diffusion of the CLG by translation in Europe, in historical context
2. The diffusion of the CLG by translation outside Europe, in historical context
3. Saussurean terminology in translation
4. The practice of translation as manifested in one or several versions of the CLG
5. Readings and interpretations of the CLG as manifested in the choices made by one or more translators
6. The ‘untranslatables’ of the CLG in one or more languages and how translators have dealt with them.

We hope to cover a wide range of languages in which the Course has been published, and possibly language in which no translation has yet appeared. What we are aiming to produce is not a metaphrasometry, but a metaphrasology that will open up new perspectives on the problems and enigmas of Saussurean translation as well as on the history of transcultural readings of the Course in General Linguistics.

PLENARY SPEAKER

Haun Saussy, (Professeur, Department of Comparative Literature, University of Chicago.

Page web : https://complit.uchicago.edu/faculty/saussy