José Ortega y Gasset

In this, the fifth and final part of his essay on translation, Ortega y Gasset defines translation as a means of accessing other perspectives on the human experience. In this way, translation is viewed as an essential element of a grand humanist project to develop our understanding of what it truly means to be human, a project that can only be achieved by learning about human lives fundamentally different from our own. With this in mind, the Spanish philosopher advocates a style of translating that brings out the peculiarities of the source culture in the target text: an approach that in contemporary translation theory is most commonly identified with Lawrence Venuti’s concept of “foreignizing”.

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José Ortega y Gasset

In this fourth part of his essay, Ortega y Gasset uses the voice of an anonymous French linguist to propound a theory of languages as “anachronistic instruments”, as different catalogues of classifications that impose a system of understanding reality that was constructed by our forebears, making us “hostages to the past”. Although this section deals more generally with language than specifically with translation, the ideas set out here are fundamental for understanding Ortega y Gasset’s perspective on the importance of translation, which will be set forth in the fifth and final part of the essay.

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José Ortega y Gasset

In this third part of his landmark essay, Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset discusses the limitations of language, which is characterized as much by what it cannot say as by what it can. These limitations on the expressible differ between languages, a fact that poses a great challenge for translation, but which also underlines its importance in the greatest human endeavour of all: to fully understand what it is to be human.

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José Ortega y Gasset

In this second part of José Ortega y Gasset’s essay “La miseria y el esplendor de la traducción”, the Spanish philosopher delves deeper into the question of untranslatability. The fact that translation is impossible, Ortega y Gasset argues, does not mean that it should not be attempted, but it must be approached with an attitude that he describes as that of the “good utopian”: the translator who tackles the task of translation in full awareness of its impossibility.

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José Ortega y Gasset

The essay “La miseria y el esplendor de la traducción”, written in 1936, is to this day one of the most widely quoted essays on translation ever written in the Spanish language. In the essay, the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) sets out his highly insightful perspective on the significance of translation for revealing the semiotic gaps that exist between different languages. Many of the ideas expounded in this essay have become key issues in the field of translation studies, particular since the “cultural turn” of the 1980s. Over the next few months, my translation of this landmark essay will appear here, split into the five sections into which the author himself divides his reflections. In the first part, “La miseria”, Ortega y Gasset explores the concept of “untranslatability”. Ortega y Gasset’s extremely personal writing style is both a pleasure and a challenge to translate. Hopefully, my translation is bold enough to subvert the great philosopher’s rather uncharitable description of translators as “timid individuals”.

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Martin Boyd

One of the most thought-provoking presentations I attended at last year’s ATA conference in Chicago was the talk titled “Why Raising the Bar on Your Own Translation Quality is about to Get Deadly Serious”, delivered by Chris Durban, Kevin Hendzel and David Jemielity. The session was something of a wake-up call to freelance translators, alerting them to the increasing stratification in the industry between what they call the “bulk sector” of high-volume, medium-quality translations and the “premium sector” of high-quality work by genuine subject-matter experts. As rates continue to decrease in the bulk sector, the presenters argued, translators are faced with a perilous professional future unless they can distinguish themselves as masters of their craft, specialists in their chosen subject-fields and exceptional writers.

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