Douglas Robinson > Quotes

“Welcome to the world of translation—a compromised world of half-rights and half-wrongs.”
― Douglas Robinson, Becoming A Translator: An Accelerated Course

“Translation theorized as a purely technical and linguistic matter, concerned with the transfer of meanings from one language to another, not associated with political issues of domination,submission, assimilation and resistance.”
― Douglas Robinson

“Translating’ property is more than an ideology of conquest. It is a clash of cultures, ideologies that demonstrates the difficulty of translation.The colonists benefit from the encounter with the Indians but it is disturbing and daunting.”
― Douglas Robinson

“No one can experience everything first hand; in fact, no one can experience more than a few dozen things even through books and courses and other first-hand descriptions. We have to rely on other people's experiences in order to continue broadening our world - even if, once we have heard those other experiences, we want to go out and have our own, to test their descriptions in practice.”
― Douglas Robinson, Becoming a Translator: An Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Translation

“Pym argues that highly specialized technical texts are typically embedded in an international community of scientists, engineers, physicians, lawyers, and the like, who attend international conferences and read books in other languages an so have usually eliminated from their discourse the kind of contextual vagueness that is hardest to translate. As Pym's "tomography" example shows, too, international precision tends to be maintained in specialist groups through the use of Greek, Latin, French, and English terms that change only slightly as they move from one phonetic system to another. "General" texts, on the other hand, are grounded in less closely regulated everyday usage, the way people talk in a wide variety of ordinary contexts, which requires far more social knowledge than specialized texts - far more knowledge of how people talk to each other in their different social groupings, at home, at work, at the store, etc. Even slang and jargon, Pym would say, are easier to translate than this "general" discourse - all you have to do to translate slang or jargon is find an expert in it and ask your questions. (What makes that type of translation difficult is that experts are sometimes hard to find.) With a "general" text, everybody's an expert - but all the experts disagree, because they've used the words or phrases in different situations, different contexts, and can never quite sort out in their own minds just what it means with this or that group.”
― Douglas Robinson, Becoming a Translator: An Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Translation

“Translatio studii et imperii is a battle, it operates through a movement of incorporation and rejection: everyone must become like us (converted or ‘translated’); because of the necessity of translation you will be a second‑class citizen in the empire.”
― Douglas Robinson

“Conversion, like conquest, can be a process of crossing over into the domain–territorial, emotional, religious, or cultural–of someone else and claiming it as one’s own.”
― Douglas Robinson

“Translation has been used, and should be used, to resist or redirect colonial or postcolonial power.”
― Douglas Robinson

“Translation has been used to oppress to ways in which it has been or can be used to fight oppression, to liberate minds and bodies.”
― Douglas Robinson

“Translation in terms of power struggle: not a simple process for achieving equivalence but a conflict a question of ‘bind or be bound’, ‘chain or be chained’, ‘capture or be taken captive”
― Douglas Robinson

“Weick urges leaders to continually discredit much of what the think they know - to doubt, argue, contradict, disbelieve, counter, challenge, question, vacillate, and even act hypocritically.”
― Douglas Robinson, Becoming a Translator: An Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Translation

“Memory (...) should be treated like a pest; while old solutions retained in memory provide stability and some degree of predictability in an uncertain world, that stability - often called "tradition" or "the way things have always been" - can also stifle flexibility. The world remains uncertain no matter what we do to protect ourselves from it; we must always be prepared to leap outside of "retained" solutions to new enactments.”
― Douglas Robinson, Becoming a Translator: An Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Translation