After Babel

When After Babel. Aspects of Language and Translation by George Steiner was first published in 1975 it was heralded as the first comprehensive work on language and translation in modern times. Nevertheless, most critics were ambivalent in their response to Steiner’s theoretical analyses and his style of writing. Ullendorff (1976: 28) concludes that After Babel is an ‘extraordinary tour de force, a work that was clearly designed to be a masterpiece and so narrowly and peculiarly falls short of that aim’. Steiner acknowledges Ullendorff’s ‘review-essay of magisterial severity’ in his preface to the second edition, of 1992. The ‘errors and imprecisions’ pointed out by Ullendorff and others are gratefully accepted and duly corrected (Steiner, 1998: 9–10). In his defence, Steiner (1998: 9–10) further states: ‘After Babel attempts to map a new field, a space for argument’ in the field of translation studies. There had indeed been no previous attempt at a comprehensive, exhaustive treatise on the subject, encompassing all the relevant disciplines. Furthermore, Steiner had been conscious, while writing the book, of being ‘marginalised and indeed isolated within the academic community’ (1998: 9). In his 1992 preface, Steiner mentions the risks involved in attempting a philosophical enquiry and synthesis of ideas in an academic climate where over-specialisation, academic boundaries and a narrow perspective tend to limit and fragment intellectual investigation. Steiner reiterates the ‘central tenets’ of his work (1998: 12), which he suspects are ‘misunderstood or threatening’. By the third edition, Steiner is gratified by a ‘reassuring modesty in more recent claims made for a ‘theory of translation’ (1998: 7), and by the fact that many investigations in the field are turning rather to the description of ‘translational praxis’ (1998: 8). The hope is expressed that After Babel had contributed to this shift. Despite the controversy surrounding the book, After Babel has seen a third edition and is still in print 32 years after publication. What then is the significance of this work for the student of translation studies today? Steiner’s model of translation, the hermeneutic motion, is widely regarded as his main contribution to the theory of translation (Robinson, 1998; Shuttleworth, 1996). However, a consideration of the work as a whole confirms its far-reaching and significant implications for the way we think about language and translation today. George Steiner’s study of language as a phenomenon within a philosophical framework is both comprehensive and detailed. In the first chapter Steiner establishes the point of departure for his approach to language and translation, namely that all understanding, whether of spoken or written language, involves interpretation. The interpretative process of determining the full semantic reference of the words is, in essence, translation, for which the interpreter needs certain ‘preinformation’ (Steiner 1998: 11). Steiner discusses two main barriers to interpretation, or intralingual translation, namely time and space. Language changes along with human experience, and at different rates of transformation, depending on historical circumstances. In the interaction between language and society, hackneyed usage can impoverish language, while creativity can renew a language and reformulate reality, e.g. through metaphor. While ‘every language-act has a temporal determinant’, interpreters, or readers, have various tools that help them to restore the ‘immediacies of value and intent’ of language: dictionaries, awareness of the history of that language, knowledge Book Review