The Translator's Role in the Knowledge Society

Abstract

Today's world is witnessing, more than any other epoch before it, the coming together, or maybe we should say, the confrontation of numerous visions of the world we live in. An interesting character in this situation of unprecedented communication is the translator, who, given his gift of intercultural understanding of the world we live in, could contribute to the lessening of the present tensions by explaining where the they come from and even by proposing possible solutions to alleviate them.

Headnote

Abstract:

Today's world is witnessing, more than any other epoch before it, the coming together, or maybe we should say, the confrontation of numerous visions of the world we live in. An interesting character in this situation of unprecedented communication is the translator, who, given his gift of intercultural understanding of the world we live in, could contribute to the lessening of the present tensions by explaining where the they come from and even by proposing possible solutions to alleviate them.

Keywords: intercultural communication, translator, solutions to the world's tensions

JEL Classification: M14, A13

1. Intercultural communication: definitions

We could start our presentation by clarifying the meaning of the syntagm intercultural communication according to the Explanatory Dictionary:

* communication has several general meanings: the action of communicating and its result, on the one hand, and contact, relation, connection, on the other hand.

* culture has two main general meanings related to our domain of interest: 1.the totality of the material and spiritual values created by mankind (and the institutions needed to communicate them); the totality of the knowledge from different domains (and the fact of possessing the respective knowledge).

Summing up the meanings of these definitions, we can conclude that intercultural communication deals with the communication, relations, contacts and connections between people belonging to different cultures, its result being the exchange of material goods, knowledge from different domains and spiritual values (sometimes via certain institutions created to communicate them).

In other words, cultural communication comprises the circulation of three levels of values: material, intellectual and spiritual.

The three types of knowledge - natural, intellectual and spiritual - can be verified in different ways: the natural knowledge is accessible to all those who can perceive reality through their five senses (vision, hearing, smell, touch, taste); the intellectual knowledge realizes connections between the different pieces of information coming from the senses, acquiring new information, more comprehensive than in the case of natural knowledge; the spiritual understanding allows man to see what he can perceive naturally and intellectually from a new perspective, the perspective of the spirit, of the heart or of the soul, a perspective in which the past, the present and the future become accessible and reveal some of their mysteries by man's living in harmony with the spiritual world (here two main possibilities exist: living in harmony with the eternal law of love for God and mankind, its best illustration being Jesus Christ, and living in contradiction with the law of love; only the first possibility gives birth to real knowledge, the second giving birth to delusion and decay, according to the Orthodox spiritual perspective).

Seen as a triple opening towards reality - natural, intellectual and spiritual - knowledge has given birth to culture, and cultures, through intercultural communication, have always had a natural tendency towards a better knowledge of reality. As far as the natural and intellectual knowledge are concerned, continually improved measurement tools, analysis and synthesis methods and techniques have been developed, in the search of a total knowledge of reality. One may say that, in the case of these types of knowledge, people have been able to agree more easily, and extraordinary progresses have been made during the last few centuries. Ironically or not, all these progresses have done nothing else except to highlight the infinity of the visible world, without being able to say anything conclusive about its meaning. In the spiritual domain, the instrument of knowledge is man, and the method of knowledge is specific for each culture. There is a greater difficulty in harmonizing the different types of spiritual knowledge of the world, the gaps between them being significant and each culture considering that its own understanding of reality is the correct one. Today's intercultural communication is putting the world's different types of spiritual knowledge to a test - and by checking the results (or fruits) of these different types of spiritual knowledge people may get to understand the true and comprehensive spiritual meaning of reality.

2. Topical problems in the domain of intercultural communication

A careful analysis of the intercultural domain will highlight the role of culture in communication and the other way round, the influence of communication on culture. Culture (together with the art, the faith, the traditions and the customs of a society) may be known only through communication, and our communication defines the culture in which we live. The discipline intercultural communication is considered to belong to the sciences of culture, "along with cultural anthropology, ethnology, ethno-linguistics, ethno-psychoanalysis."

Different studies have shown that the impediments in communication may be generally valid, the general ones being joined, in intercultural communication, by impediments related to ethnocentrism, prejudice, stereotypes.

We should note that the specialists in communication have noticed that most of a message is transmitted not through the actual words (which realize only 7% of the communication), but by the tone and the voice (38%) and the body language / non-verbal communication (55%).

In other words, it is not so much the words that convey the message, but especially the tension lying beyond them, in the warmth or harshness of the voice, in the peaceful and loving, or indifferent or menacing attitude.

A good translator needs, as the translation-theorist Jean Delisle very correctly noticed, to know not just the language of a population, but to have an understanding that goes beyond words, an understanding that comes from a real interaction with the cultural, religious, economic and social institutions of the community; the translator needs to know the soul of the community whose words he wishes to translate.

3. The unique intensification of intercultural communication during the last centuries

What we now call culture is the best results of each human group on Earth in matters of art, science and spirituality. At the same time, the sociologists operate with terms such as: subculture (conceived as the culture of a minority by comparison to the dominant culture), counterculture (a culture opposed to the previously dominant values of a culture)... and even anti-culture (a culture at odds with all the previous cultures).

While during the centuries that preceded the great geographic discoveries (the period until the 15th century), the contacts between different cultures were mainly local, due to the difficult circulation of both man and of the written information (the printing press will witness a flourishing period beginning with the 16th century), the situation has gradually changed. Whereas in the past the material and spiritual exchanges took place especially in the areas in which the geography allowed it (Eurasia and N Africa; S Africa; S America; N America - each of these areas coming rarely in contact with one another through their cultural representatives, during the period after the 15th century, new intercultural exchanges became possible, both through the printing of the first books in numerous cultures, and through the colonial policies of the great powers of the epoch.

The industrial revolution permitted an unprecedented intensification of the production and trade on a global scale. The discovery of the steam power and the appearance of the train, of the automobile and of the air traffic decreased more and more the time needed to cover large distances. In parallel, this has also become valid for information. While, a few hundreds of years ago, in order to take a book to a destination situated a few hundreds of kilometers away, several weeks were necessary, and the dangers to be faced were doubtlessly considerably higher than the present ones, today it only takes a few hundredths of seconds and some modern equipment (computer and Internet) to send an electronic book anywhere on Earth (even simultaneously).

The situation of the cultural exchanges today is practically, totally new in the history of mankind. Not only from the perspective of the material exchanges (because going to the supermarkets, even in the small towns, we can find merchandises from all the continents of the globe), but especially from the viewpoint of the informational exchanges. Pieces of information that maybe any one of our great-grandfathers would have liked to have known, are now available to us, being just a mouse-click away. Natural knowledge (satellite images, photographs etc.), scientific and artistic knowledge (theories, books, scientific papers), spiritual knowledge (old manuscripts and numerous translations and interpretations of some religious texts representing spiritual landmarks for extremely large populations) - all these have become accessible especially by means of the English language, known nowadays at least in part by every third or even second person on Earth (according to different sources) or at least partially accessible thanks to the translation tools (of different qualities) available on the Internet.

Conclusions

How could we synthesize the translations' role in a global culture as the present one? Expression of very various wills and beliefs, the contemporary world of translation brings side by side different cultural-spiritual views of the human thinking and feeling.

The translator has a talent, a gift, namely the possibility to open a communication bridge between people with different cultural experiences, with different faiths and with diverging, sometimes opposite desires and interests. By his minute toil, he is able to feel the text he is translating much deeply than many of the future readers of that text. From here comes his responsibility of spreading the kind of visions concerning life and mankind that are the most profitable for the most numerous ones that he is serving, namely the public at large. Beyond the allegiance to a certain person requesting a translation, the translator should have in view his commitment to the human being in general, in a way similar to that included in the Hippocratic Oath, but on an informational level: never do harm by the information translated.

As Romanian translators, while remaining understanding in relation to the cultural-spiritual level attained by other traditions, we should keep in sight the essential coordinates of our millennial becoming, our cultural-spiritual dimension, which has given life and has the force to continue to enliven our lives. From the perspective of the traditional Orthodox Christian spirituality, man has been created in the image of God and should tend towards the likeness of God, always pursuing physical and spiritual cleanliness, and collaborating with the gifts (talents) received from God towards the sanctification and the accomplishment of his life and of the lives of those around him. This should also be the translator's mission: to use his talent to bring light in his life and in the globalized society represented recently through the image of the global village.

References

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