From Cultural Translation to Untranslatability: Theorizing Translation outside Translation Studies

This article discusses two recent influential conceptualizations of translation that arose outside Translation Studies: cultural translation and untranslatability. It addresses the ambivalence in both conceptualizations toward interlingual translation, or translation proper. As a metaphor, cultural translation tends to elide or mystify interlingual translation, while untranslatability impoverishes our understanding of interlingual translation by focusing on a discrete set of words, implying that everything but those words is easily transposable. The author advocates for a poor translation theory, one that refuses to let translation as abstraction become untethered from interlingual translation, while recognizing incommensurabilty to be distributed across natural languages.