INTRODUCTION
In this article I will try to highlight some fundamental convergence points between the practice of translation and the practice of philosophy. More specifically, I will argue that philosophy can prove an effective translation tool, which fellow translators can exploit to fine-tune their skills. I will proceed in three steps. First (1), I will lay the basis for my substantive argument by suggesting that both philosophers and translators are committed to what is normally referred to as the principle of charity. Then (2) I will explain why I believe that an approach wedded to the principle of charity (and to its underlying rationale) is crucial to the enterprise of translation. Finally (3), I will address from a practical standpoint the question of how fellow translators can benefit from a philosophical training.
1. THE PRINCIPLE OF CHARITY
Philosophy is about answering important questions by means of arguments that should be strong enough to elicit rational assent. Insofar as it is addressed to rational interlocutors who can themselves advance arguments and criticisms, philosophical argumentation can be viewed as a dialogue or discourse in which participants ideally seek to reach some common understanding grounded in good reasons, and which should therefore always aim at bona fide justification, without lapsing into a rhetorical attempt at persuasion. Against this background, one of the main obstacles that can block the path of philosophical investigation is the so-called strawman fallacy, which we commit when we deliberately exaggerate or oversimplify the views of others just to turn them into an easier target of our criticism. Sometimes, however, arguments may be misunderstood in good faith, i.e., not because they are deliberately distorted, but rather because they are formulated in an unclear manner, or perhaps because they are too complex and difficult to grasp. It is at this point that the so-called principle of charity comes into play: not only should we avoid skewing the views and arguments of others; we should also endeavor to interpret them in the most coherent and rational way possible, even if they seem puzzling, ambiguous, or even plainly wrong. In other words, the arguments of others should be interpreted charitably.
Interestingly, charitable interpretation is often understood as a form of translation, in that it involves rephrasing prima facie problematic statements in a more intelligible language. This is quite germane to the point I wish to make, namely that the principle of charity also applies (and is equally crucial) to the enterprise of translation. For just as a charitable approach lies at the heart of any inclusive philosophical debate aimed at bona fide agreement, as it reduces the risk of discarding potentially insightful arguments too hastily, so taking the principle of charity seriously is a fundamental commitment of reasoners entrusted with the task of translating source texts that may on occasion appear problematic (i.e., puzzling, ambiguous, or even plainly wrong). To see why, consider the following example:
(1_en) This document contains rows and columns. There are 100 cows and 5 columns in total.
Here “cows” is obviously a typo, which should be fixed accordingly. Now the common practice of fixing typos is a basic case of application of the principle of charity: statements such as (1_en) ought to be rephrased so as to correct the mistake, whereas a literal translation would constitute a major translation error. This is by no means trivial. Translation is often defined as the communication of the meaning of a source text through an equivalent target text, and yet this simple example reminds us that what we should be really looking for is not the equivalent of the source text narrowly construed, but rather the most reasonable interpretation (i.e., the interpretation that makes most sense) of the message that the author wanted to get across.
It is important to note that in order to fulfil this commitment we may need to introduce a certain degree of idealization, in that we may have to go beyond what the author wrote, and rely rather on what she should have (ideally) written, or, which is the same, on what she would have written under ideal conditions (i.e., in our case, had she had more time to proofread her document). At the same time, however, we should be wary of taking this point too far, because the more we idealize the author, the more we depart from the actual wording of the text, thus running the risk of assigning too much weight to what may in fact turn out to be an arbitrary interpretation. Charitable interpretation can be to a certain extent imaginative but must always fall within the scope of what can be reasonably taken to be the author’s intended meaning. With these preliminary remarks in the background, we can now turn to the substantive question of how the principle of charity should be put into practice.
2. CHARITABLE INTERPRETATION, ACCURATE TRANSLATION
In order to interpret prima facie problematic statements charitably, we must first be able to recognize them as such. That is to say, we must be able to spot possible errors and ambiguities even when these are not immediately noticeable – or at least not as straightforwardly so as in (1_en). Doing or reading philosophy can be conducive to improving this sort of skill because philosophy, being concerned with the exchange of rational arguments, requires participants in justificatory discourse to advance their views in an accurate manner, avoiding ambiguities, pitfalls, and fallacies – whereas, conversely, the ability to pinpoint these potential weaknesses is crucial to assessing the real strength of purportedly justificatory arguments.
There are several categories of problematic source texts that a philosophical training can help detect, and in what follows I will review just a few. One of these is certainly that of terminological inconsistencies – because if anything is distinctive about philosophy, it is the importance it places on attaching a well-defined, warranted, and consistent meaning to the relevant terms used in justificatory discourse. A further category is that of ambiguities of natural language, which range from lexical and syntactic ambiguities to ambiguities involving the use of operators. Ambiguities are often to be found also in conditional formulations, such as:
(2_en) This recipe is loaded automatically only when: (a) X is within the default range; (b) Y is greater than X; (c) the “Enable All” box is checked.
The problem with (2_en) is that it is unclear (and hard to tell without additional context) whether conditions (a), (b) and (c) are all jointly necessary in order for the recipe to be loaded automatically. We should therefore check whether the remainder of the manual (or some other sources) can provide some guidance on how to properly interpret (2_en), so as to dispel the ambiguity in our translation. But of course, this presupposes that we notice the ambiguity in the first place, and a philosophical training can prove useful in this sense (more on this in section 3).
Another typical category of problematic source texts that a philosophical training can help detect is that of logical fallacies. Consider the following sentence:
(3_en) No breach was reported through our whistleblowing platform, which means that our company displays a high degree of compliance.
Taken in isolation, (3_en) sounds like an ad ignorantiam fallacy: considering that employees may fail to report or even to notice potentially major breaches, the lack of evidence of non-compliance does not in itself constitute sufficient evidence of compliance. Unlike the other cases of problematic source texts that we have sketched so far, however, (3_en) does not seem to fall within the scope of the principle of charity. Recall that this principle requires introducing only a moderate degree of idealization, so that the target text is not arbitrarily detached from what can be reasonably taken to be the author’s intended meaning. But if that is the case, then the fallacy contained in (3_en) could hardly be translated away, since the author clearly intended to establish a connection between the absence of negative reports and the compliance level of the company. In other words, the error should be retained in the target text as well, and this in turn may seem to imply that here the ability to spot potential fallacies is of little avail after all. But this would be too hasty a conclusion. To see why, suppose we discover that (3_en) is itself a translation of an internal guideline originally written in Italian, which reads:
(3_it) Tramite la nostra piattaforma di whistleblowing non sono state segnalate violazioni, fatto questo che si concretizza in un quadro di elevata compliance aziendale.
(3_it) is open to different interpretations, and (3_en) is certainly one of these. However, (3_it) could also be taken to mean that the company already achieved a good compliance record, and that the absence of reported breaches is in tune with this scenario (in that it does not undermine it). This alternative reading is just as plausible as (3_en) but contains no fallacy. Things being equal, then, the translator should have ranked it above (3_en) on grounds of charity.
This example shows that being familiar with logical fallacies is indeed important to interpret source texts charitably, as it enables us to filter out fallacious variants such as (3_en) – provided alternative interpretations are available. Moreover, it is worth stressing that by picking (3_en) the translator introduced a fallacy that in (3_it) was not clearly phrased as such. And this, in turn, helps us shed light on a fundamental risk that lurks beneath the enterprise of translation as such: especially when we move beyond a sheer literal translation, we may end up introducing errors that were not (explicitly) present in the source text. Thus, while it is true that some problematic source texts cannot be reworked in a charitable manner, as this would involve stretching the principle of charity beyond its reasonable scope, it is equally true that being familiar with these problematic formulations is crucial to avoid letting them slip into the target text by mistake.
This last bit of reasoning can also be extended to the other cases we reviewed above. For instance, being acquainted with the ambiguities of natural language is useful not only to deliver (if possible) translations that are less ambiguous than their corresponding source texts, but also to avoid making the former potentially more ambiguous than the latter. The same applies of course to terminological inconsistencies as well: translators should (if possible) fix the inconsistencies found in the source text, but they should be equally wary of translating potentially key terms inconsistently. This general rule of thumb, which is applicable in general but relevant especially in case of non-problematic source texts, could be called the principle of accuracy: target texts should be at least as accurate as their corresponding source texts. The principle of accuracy and the principle of charity complement each other and rest on the same rationale: as translators, we are committed to conveying the message of the author in a proper way – and philosophy provides us with the tools needed to do so.
3. PHILOSOPHICAL TRAINING
The practical upshot of what I have said so far is twofold. On the one hand, translation can be a sensible career path for philosophy graduates who also master foreign languages. On the other hand, professional or prospective translators can benefit from a philosophical training. With regard to this latter point, however, the question must be raised as to what kind of philosophical texts could be a useful reading for translators. If we consider the examples we discussed above, the answer seems not far to seek: if what matters is the ability to detect ambiguities and errors against the background of a general principle of charity (and accuracy), as our examples suggest, then all we need is arguably a sufficiently good grasp of some basic notions of logic and theory of argumentation. Call this a basic philosophical training.
Notice, however, that although a basic philosophical training is probably the best place to start (and ultimately the substantive part of philosophy that is most likely to be put into practice during translation), knowing the rules of logic and argumentation is not the same as mastering them in real-life situations – just as knowing the rules of baseball is quite different from actually playing by the rules on the ball field. Take for instance the case of contradictory statements, which constitute yet another category of problematic source texts: on a purely theoretical level, we all know that one cannot affirm and deny the same thing at the same time; still, what we really need is the ability to keep track of the text as a whole during translation, and so to tell whether – say – what the author claims on page 60 contradicts what she wrote in a footnote on page 5. Or consider formulations such as (2_en): from a translator’s perspective, it is not enough to know the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions, which in itself is fairly straightforward; what really matters is the ability to detect and/or avoid a potentially ambiguous or inaccurate use of conditional statements in actual texts and under actual working conditions, under the time pressure imposed by increasingly tight deadlines and increasingly lower rates, while juggling between e-mails, quotes and queries.
Now in my view, a good way to strengthen this kind of abilities is to look at how the standards of accuracy and precision needed for the job are employed in argumentative contexts in which they play a pivotal role. In other words, I believe it is worth looking more closely at how philosophers work. This is why a basic philosophical training should be if possible complemented with a more extensive philosophical training, so as to cover other areas of philosophy as well. The choice of topics here is relatively free and will depend on one’s interests and level of expertise in the field. As it should have been clear all along, my argument does not favor any particular philosophical topic (let alone specific philosophical views), but is only concerned with the practice of philosophical investigation per se – quite regardless of the substantive issues it tackles. What is relevant is the way in which philosophers proceed: they try to answer difficult questions by means of sound arguments while critically assessing the strengths of competing arguments (ideally in a charitable fashion). And it is precisely this critical capacity that can prove an important tool for translators.
Let me add a final consideration before concluding. It is uncontroversial that translators must be good writers, and a formal training in philosophy can be useful in this sense, as it usually involves a substantial amount of writing. However, since this article is addressed to the community of translators at large, I should like to stress that, even without a formal education in the field, reading philosophy (extensively) can offer some benefits in terms of overall writing quality. This is so because the philosophical method typically merges accuracy with creativity: insofar as they put forward new ideas, philosophers must be creative; at the same time, however, they must proceed logically and follow up (charitably) on the ideas of others, while fitting their views consistently into the broader framework of the existing research in the field. This is what we might call an instance of “bounded creativity”: philosophy is a creative enterprise bound to standards of precision, consistency, and charitable interpretation. Now in a way, this is pretty much what translators are supposed to do: although they are not required to come up with new ideas in the way philosophers do, but only to bridge the linguistic gap between the author and her target audience, translators must still be (trans)creative enough to turn source texts into elegant, captivating and overall well-written target texts, whereby their creativity must always play out within certain boundaries, so as to reflect the original message as accurately and charitably as possible. On this view, then, philosophy makes us better writers in the sense that it prompts us to tread the path of a “boundedly creative” approach to writing: if a good reader makes a good writer, then readers of philosophy will arguably be more likely to inject into their work a well-balanced combination of accuracy and creativity – which is ultimately what sets apart human translation from machine translation outputs.
CLOSING REMARKS
A common worry about philosophy is that it seems unable to produce real progress, as it keeps fracturing into different schools of thought while fundamental questions keep defying satisfactory solution. Still, even if we admit that philosophical inquiry can yield nothing but essentially contested worldviews, none of which can claim full epistemic authority over the others, it does not follow that the philosophical method should be jettisoned altogether. Quite the contrary, in this article I suggested that philosophy can be turned into a valuable tool – at least for translators. I mentioned essentially four reasons in support of this view. First, philosophy reminds us of the importance of the principle of charity, which is crucial to our profession. Second, philosophy makes us better equipped to detect problematic source texts and rework them in a charitable fashion. Third, and by the same token, it helps us live up to the principle of accuracy. Finally, doing or reading philosophy can be a good exercise to fine-tune our writing style.
Italy