Winter 2001
Volume 27, Number 2

"What Is a 'Relevant' Translation?" is an English version of a lecture that Jacques Derrida delivered in 1998 at the fifteenth annual seminar of the Assises de la Traduction Littéraire à Arles (ATLAS). A French organization with approximately eight hundred members, ATLAS works to promote literary translation and to protect the status of the literary translator. About two hundred people heard Derrida's lecture, which was subsequently published in the proceedings.1 As might be expected from an audience composed primarily of professional translators, the response was mixed, a range of variations between two extremes: on the one hand, the feeling that the lecture was provocative but too theoretical to be of practical value; on the other hand, the feeling that it was accessible and pertinent, indeed, an illuminating treatment of translation practices.

[...]

Like Schleiermacher, Derrida questions relevant translation. He calls attention not only to its ethnocentric violence but also to its simultaneous mystification of that violence through language that is seemingly transparent because univocal and idiomatic. This view is based on his critique of the sign. The relevant translation, he writes, "presents itself as the transfer of an intact signified through the inconsequential vehicle of any signifier whatsoever." Yet the fact is that any translating replaces the signifiers constituting the foreign text with another signifying chain, trying to fix a signified that can be no more than an interpretation according to the intelligibilities and interests of the receiving language and culture. Unlike Schleiermacher, Derrida sees this practice as inevitable insofar as every translation participates in an "economy of in-betweenness," positioned somewhere between "absolute relevance, the most appropriate, adequate, univocal transparency, and the most aberrant and opaque irrelevance." He is acutely aware, moreover, of the cultural and political implications of relevant translation. His reading of Shakespeare's play gains enormous interrogative power from his view that "everything in [it] can be retranslated into the code of translation and as a problem of translation." Thus he shows how Portia aims to translate Shylock's Judaic discourse of "justice" into the "merciful" discourse that underwrites the "Christian State."

1. Jacques Derrida, "Qu'est-ce qu'une traduction 'relevante'?" Quinzièmes Assises de la Traduction Littéraire (Arles 1998) (Arles, 1999), pp. 21-48.

Lawrence Venuti's latest publications are The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference (1998), The Translation Studies Reader (2000), and the translation of Juan Rodolfo Wilcock's The Temple of Iconoclasts (2000). He is professor of English at Temple University.