Translation: Literary Interpretation and Interdisciplinary Thinking

The methods built from the art and craft of translation will revolutionize the way we approach and interpret texts. These methodologies can not only serve to intensify intercultural communication and understanding but also to revitalize the act of reading, writing, and interpreting texts in the humanities.  The modes of translation thinking that accompany the activity of successful transplantations of cultural texts from one language to another are also fundamental for strengthening and modifying interdisciplinary studies in the arts and humanities.

Essay 1

Literary Translation: An Anchor of Interdisciplinary Thinking
By Rainer Schulte

Several attempts have been made in recent years to establish interdisciplinary programs in various institutions across the country.  Narrow specialization or over-specialization within one discipline no longer seems to meet the demands of our present educational needs.  It is not clear in all cases what these needs might be, but in general, humanistic studies have lost a great deal of the vitality and enthusiasms that they had in earlier periods of our civilization.

It is my contention that the art of translation can play an important role in developing interdisciplinary thinking, and that Translation Programs will rapidly assume the same importance that Creative Writing Programs now enjoy in most literature departments.  Translation can be considered one of the most intense ways of revitalizing the study of literature.

A few maxim-like statements might capture the thrust that humanistic studies will have to take in the next few years.

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Essay 2

Translation Methodologies: Re-Creative Dynamics for the Reading of World Literature
By Rainer Schulte

The exposure to literatures outside of American and British literatures should be considered an essential feature of any college or university literature program. Yet, works from other languages and countries have to be read in translation in most instances, since very few people will be in a position to read fluently more than one foreign language. Each language is a way of interpreting the world, and involvement in the literary imagination of foreign writers expands our own view of the world and introduces us to the various perspectives with which situations and emotional states can be interpreted and experienced. To enter the foreignness of other languages, we have to be willing to open ourselves to the realization that people from other countries perceive and understand the world through the window of their own language. Natural phenomena are the same in different cultures, yet the perceptions vary from language to language. The Asian moon is not very different in appearance from the American moon. However, the way that the moon has been interpreted and transplanted into metaphorical images greatly changes from one nation to the next. In German the moon is masculine (der Mond), in French it is feminine (la lune), the sun is masculine in French (le sol) and feminine in German (die Sonne). The immediate associations that a French person has with "la lune" and "le sol" diverge from those of a German. Furthermore, throughout the centuries,these words have taken on unique affinities in the writings of novelists and poets in the respective languages. 

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