nonetheless forces us to ask a real question: If that is not what is meant by foreign-soundingness in the translation of a foreign text, then what exactly is foreign-soundingness? What allows us to judge whether the following passage retains some authentic trace of the Frenchness of Jacques Derrida, or whether it is just terribly hard to understand?
The positive and the classical sciences of writing are obliged to repress this sort of question. Up to a certain point, such repression is even necessary to the progress of positive investigation. Beside the fact that it would still be held within a philosophizing logic, the ontophe-nomenological question of essence, that is to say of the origin of writing, could, by itself, only paralyse or sterilise the typological or historical research of facts .
My intention, therefore, is not to weigh that prejudicial question, that dry, necessary and somewhat facile question of right, against the power and efficacy of the positive researches which we may witness today. The genesis and system of scripts had never led to such profound, extended and assured explorations. It is not really a matter of weighing the question against the importance of the discovery; since the questions are imponderable, they cannot be weighed. If the issue is not quite that, it is perhaps because its repression has real consequences in the very content of the researches that, in the present case and in a privileged way, are always arranged around problems of definition and beginning. 7
We know that the content of this hard-to-follow extract isn’t related to whether it “sounds like” English or not—Celentano’s song has shown us already that you can make completely meaningless concatenations sound like perfect English if phonetic English-soundingness is all you want to achieve. However, one detail that marks it as a translation from French is the anomalous use of the word research in the plural, matching a regular usage of a similar-looking word in French, recherches . Obviously, that can be seen only by a reader who knows French as well as English: the foreignness of “researches” is not self-evident to an English-only speaker, who may well construct quite other hypotheses to account for it, or else accept it as a special or technical term belonging to this particular author. But if the bilingual reader also has some additional knowledge of French philosophical terminologies, then the word positive preceding researches becomes transparent. A bilingual reader can easily see that “positive researches” stands for recherches positives in the source. What that French phrase means is another issue: it is the standard translation of “empirical investigation” into French.
We could say that “positive researches” is a poor translation of a standard French phrase that the translator seems to have treated as something else; or we could see it as a trace of the authentic sound of the original. Indeed, unless an English phrase is perceptibly anomalous, we would not be able to see it as containing any trace of not-English. But it is equally clear that we would not be able to see the “authentic Frenchness” of the phrase if we had no knowledge of French.
Back-translation of the foreignism “positive researches” into a number of other languages, among them Modern Greek, would produce the same result—that is to say, would allow its meaning to be identified as “empirical investigation.” Without the information that the work in question has been translated from language A, foreignizing translation styles do not themselves allow the reader to identify which foreign language A is.
Foreignizing translation styles bend English into shapes that mirror some limited aspect of the source language, such as word order or sentence structure. But they rely for their foreignizing effect on the reader’s prior knowledge of the approximate shape and sound of the foreign language—in the quoted case of
The positive and the classical sciences of writing are obliged to repress this sort of question. Up to a certain point, such repression is even necessary to the progress of positive investigation. Beside the fact that it would still be held within a philosophizing logic, the ontophe-nomenological question of essence, that is to say of the origin of writing, could, by itself, only paralyse or sterilise the typological or historical research of facts .
My intention, therefore, is not to weigh that prejudicial question, that dry, necessary and somewhat facile question of right, against the power and efficacy of the positive researches which we may witness today. The genesis and system of scripts had never led to such profound, extended and assured explorations. It is not really a matter of weighing the question against the importance of the discovery; since the questions are imponderable, they cannot be weighed. If the issue is not quite that, it is perhaps because its repression has real consequences in the very content of the researches that, in the present case and in a privileged way, are always arranged around problems of definition and beginning. 7
We know that the content of this hard-to-follow extract isn’t related to whether it “sounds like” English or not—Celentano’s song has shown us already that you can make completely meaningless concatenations sound like perfect English if phonetic English-soundingness is all you want to achieve. However, one detail that marks it as a translation from French is the anomalous use of the word research in the plural, matching a regular usage of a similar-looking word in French, recherches . Obviously, that can be seen only by a reader who knows French as well as English: the foreignness of “researches” is not self-evident to an English-only speaker, who may well construct quite other hypotheses to account for it, or else accept it as a special or technical term belonging to this particular author. But if the bilingual reader also has some additional knowledge of French philosophical terminologies, then the word positive preceding researches becomes transparent. A bilingual reader can easily see that “positive researches” stands for recherches positives in the source. What that French phrase means is another issue: it is the standard translation of “empirical investigation” into French.
We could say that “positive researches” is a poor translation of a standard French phrase that the translator seems to have treated as something else; or we could see it as a trace of the authentic sound of the original. Indeed, unless an English phrase is perceptibly anomalous, we would not be able to see it as containing any trace of not-English. But it is equally clear that we would not be able to see the “authentic Frenchness” of the phrase if we had no knowledge of French.
Back-translation of the foreignism “positive researches” into a number of other languages, among them Modern Greek, would produce the same result—that is to say, would allow its meaning to be identified as “empirical investigation.” Without the information that the work in question has been translated from language A, foreignizing translation styles do not themselves allow the reader to identify which foreign language A is.
Foreignizing translation styles bend English into shapes that mirror some limited aspect of the source language, such as word order or sentence structure. But they rely for their foreignizing effect on the reader’s prior knowledge of the approximate shape and sound of the foreign language—in the quoted case of
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