SOME APPLICATIONS OF HEISENBERG'S UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE

IN THE FIELDS OF TRANSLATION STUDIES

NARCIS ZARNESCU, Ph. D.

Romanian Academy
Academy of Romanian Scientists (AOSR)
ISPF (University of Sheffield (GB),
«German-Romanian Academy» (Deutsch-Rumänische Akademie-Mainz)
narciss.zarnescu@gmail.com
presedinte.usr@gmail.com

Abstract. The latest tendencies in the fields of translation studies establish some
communication competences in order to translate: the grammatical competence,
the sociolinguistic competence, the discursive competence. Cohesion and
coherence are indispensable for these competences. If translation shares some
metalinguistic experiences or procedures of transformation and textual
transposition whose existence is possible thanks to the structure of the already
existing writing, to which we should refer, to translate the mentality and its
intertextuality means to project translation and translatology in the mysterious field
of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.

Keywords: the Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, metalinguistic experiences,

translatology, sociolinguistic competence.

1. Everything would be simpler if there was only one world and one language. But
neither in Leibniz's Monadology nor in Humboldt's linguistic theories, two
paradigmatic landmarks of neo-translatology, despite their efforts to discover the
"unique language» or the invariables, no argument can be found for
communication / translation, trans-ambiguous or univocal. On the contrary, their
works reveal a dramatic awareness of differAnce (Derrida) or difference. On the
other hand, both globalization and translation have been key factors in the history

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of the Western church, state, universities, corporations, as a late effect of the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance scholars’ initiatives (John Wyclif in the
fourteenth century, Lorenzo Valla in the fifteenth century, Sebastian Castellio in the
sixteenth century, Christian Thomasius in the seventeenth, many heretics who
advocated for vernacular translations of the sacred texts), and an effect too of the
perspective derived from the re-readings by Wittgenstein, Austin, Bakhtin, Whorf,
Kristeva, Derrida, and others. Scholars have always been involved in the mixing of
societies, the sharing of languages and literatures, and the teaching of their findings
and understandings. In recent years, with globalization redefining national and
cultural boundaries, translation and translatology are now emerging as a
reformulated subject of interdisciplinary debate. The leading voices, including
Gayatri Spivak and Edward Said, provide a broad perspective of current thinking
on nationality, globalization and translation: Jonathan E. Abel, Emily Apter, Sandra
Bermann, Vilashini Cooppan, Stanley Corngold, David Damrosch, Robert
Eaglestone, Stathis Gourgouris, Pierre Legrand, Jacques Lezra, Françoise Lionnet,
Sylvia Molloy, Yopie Prins, Edward Said, Azade Seyhan, Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak, Henry Staten, Lawrence Venuti, Lynn Visson, Gauri Viswanathan, Samuel
Weber, and Michael Wood. ‘One world and one language’ is a utopia just like the
Babel tower! Waves of migrating people and, in the same time, the international
trade, finance, and information technology have transformed the World into global
sites with multiplicities of languages and cultures. So, this discipline, called
translatology, seems to be governed by the principle of uncertainty, often called the
principle of indeterminacy of Heisenberg. The use of these two terms to designate
the same notion evidently results from a problem in the English translation of the
Heisenberg study. Indeed, at the first drafting of his article, Heisenberg uses the
terms Unsicherheit (uncertainty) and Ungenauigkeit (imprecision), then,
understanding that these terms may be confusing, he decides to use the term
Unbestimmtheit (indetermination). But the study is already translated and it is the
term of “uncertainty principle” that will be the standard term (Jean-Marc Lévy-
Leblond, 1998: 278-279). For the mechanism of the uncertainty principle, its
functions and its applications to translation / translatology see our study The
principle of uncertainty and translatology (Zarnescu, 2011: 34-45, 76; Idem, 2013:
sqq.).

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1.1. If Humboldt is aware that every idea can be expressed in each language, there
is a specificity of the text that must be recognized in order to be able to preserve it
(Denis Thouard, 2000). He does not pursue the difference since it is the very one
he wants to define and render by the exercise of translation. Humboldt writes that
translation reaches its goal when it can (de)codify for the foreign element (das
Fremde) and does not fall into the rut of strangeness (die Fremdheit). This chosen
choice marks the Humboldt's interest in alterity, which requires a decentering of
the perspective on the other language. It is the essence of the individuality of the
language that is involved in the Humboldtian approach to translation. The
Humboldt concept of internal form refers to the creative interdependence between
language / thought / nation:

« Si le langage est un élément constitutif de la pensée, il est aussi une création dans
son fonctionnement et son évolution. Cette dynamique structurante et créatrice est
alimentée par la nation. La langue est investie d'un rôle organisateur et générateur
dans la réalisation de la nation. Seul en effet le langage a cette capacité d'absorber
et de convertir en lui cette spécificité spirituelle collective. Il contient et forge à la
fois cette alliance d'influences aussi profondes et internes que difficilement
circonscriptibles entre un peuple, son histoire et son enracinement dans la réalité
culturelle. » (Anne-Marie Chabrolle-Cerretini, 2000: 136).

«If the language is a component of the thought, it is also a creation in its

functioning and evolution. This structuring and creative process/dynamics is
powered by the nation. The language is invested of an organizing and generating
role in the realization of the nation. Only indeed the language has this capacity to
absorb and convert him into this collective spiritual specificity. It contains and
forges both this alliance of influences as deep and internal as hardly circum-
scribable to a people, its history and its rooting in the cultural reality.» (Anne-
Marie Chabrolle-Cerretini, 2000: 136).

1.2. The translating poetics of Meschonnic will later be related to Humboldt's

theory of language.

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For him « Ce n'est pas l'hétérogénéité des langues entre elles qui fait problème.
C'est l'enseignement de la transparence et de l'effacement. L'idée régnante
continue, malgré tout ce qui est dit et affiché, de faire comme si la diversité des
langues était un mal, à effacer. Ou à exhiber, selon une maladie infantile de
l'altérité. Ce n'est donc pas l'hétérogénéité des langues qui fait la différence entre
les traductions, mais la poétique ou l'absence de poétique. » (Henri Meschonnic,
1999: 127).

«It is not the heterogeneity of languages [between them] that which is problematic,
but the teaching of transparency and obliteration. [See also: «‘the invisible theory
of translation,’ the assumption that languages are neutral media for separable
‘content.’ »; Venuti, 1994]. The reigning idea continues, despite all that is said and
displayed, to act as if the diversity of languages would be evil, to be erased. Or to
exhibit, according to an infantile disease of Otherness. It is therefore not the
heterogeneity of languages that makes the difference between translations, but the
poetics, one or the absence of poetics. » (Henri Meschonnic, 1999: 127).

2. Historical premises. In the 1950s, Vinay and Darbelnet (1958, 1995) proposed a
comparative method, inspired by the work of Saussure, which is more a matter of
language than of speech. According to this school of thought, equivalence is at the
level of language: it is necessary to make the language of departure as
idiomatically as possible, in accordance with its genius and the division of reality it
imposes. In this logic, a linguistic system is replaced by another, considering the
comparable phenomena can be designated by different linguistic codes, provided
that the formal specificity of the target language is respected. Usually, the
translations are divided into three categories: (i) word-for-word or essentially
literal; (ii) thought-for-thought or dynamic equivalent; (iii) exposition-for-text or
expanded paraphrase. On the other hand, some translation models could be focused
on the sentence level and the analysis of deep sentence structure. Nida's (1964,
1975) proposed the idea of using sentence grammar in the case of Bible translation.
As Sapir-Whorf argues, different thoughts are brought about by the use of different

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forms of language. Translating Truth, for example, advocates essentially literal
Bible translation (C. John Collins, Wayne Grudem, Vern S. Poythress, Leland
Ryken, Bruce Winter). Catford (1965) on the other hand, refined Halliday's
grammatical 'rank scale' theory to «underline the hypothesis that the translation of
equivalence depends upon the availability of formal correspondence between
linguistic items at different structural levels and ranks». (Hartmann, 1980), and
more so at the sentence level. In the transfer of text from the source language to the
target language, the binary action-reflex mechanism results in the translation
product. This transfer can be illustrated as follows (Ali Darwish, Williams and
Chesterman [2002: 6-27]):

(1)

(2)

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(3)

It is therefore the structure of the text that takes precedence, i.e. apart from the
authority of the author who, at the same time, becomes an obsolete concept,
because he/it is related to the idealistic tradition centered on the Logos which
guarantees transparency and the setting of meaning.

2.1. Extralinguistic reality, that which remains outside language, that is to say, the
sphere of speech, discourse, and living language, becomes the object of studies by
theorists proposing the interpretative method, the practice of the interpreters in
consecutive and simultaneous, also called the theory of meaning. Its basis is
developed by Seleskovitch and Lederer of the ESIT, which part the translation in
one act of communication or in the semantics of the speech centered on the
meaning of the idea expressed, and not on the linguistic meaning: the meaning of a
statement has been always contextualized, put in a predetermined situation and
destined for an interlocutor. Understand the statement means understanding the
intent and the will to say of the locutor that are re-articulated from the knowledge
of the translator.

2.2. Most of the terms that refer to translation in different languages (traduire,
traducir, tradurre, traduzir, übersetzen, to translate) refer to the idea of a shift from
a linguistic but also a cultural space to another. That is why a lot of translatologists
became to investigate the mode of conceptualization that underlies this
metaphorical isotopy. For some of them, the contributions of the Aristotelian

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philosophy and Freudian psychoanalysis, especially, allow to provide clarifications
on the concept of translation itself. For others, displacement presupposes trade and
transport. For others, an unequal or asymmetric trade whose parameters can be
defined beyond the concept of entropy, for example. But the trade of translation is
also an exchange, which refers to the dialectic of the Same and the Other.
Moreover, it may be noted that the word trade is eminently polysemic, as is also
the concept of translation. Ensure that a «theory of the application» (A. Culioli)
would lead to the expiration of a typology of translation whose logic leads to
wonder about the unity of the concept: polysemy or homonymy?

3. For more than 40 years, Antoine Culioli has developed a theory known as the
'Theory of Operations Enonciatives', which he defines as a linguistic whose object
is the study of the activity of language through the diversity of languages, texts and
situations. For a long time limited to the space of the seminary of Formal
Linguistics of the ENS and renowned for its difficult approach, this theoretical
work on language, still under construction, becomes accessible to a wider audience
with publications that follow Since 1990 and, more particularly, with the
publication of interviews where Antoine Culioli (1990, 1999) is brought in to
clarify the different aspects and issues of his theory. His works, which have taken a
major place in the history of linguistics, also open up perspectives on other fields
of research, from anthropology to neurosciences, and more generally interested in
all of the humanities as a whole. This openness led him to dialogue privilegedly
with the philosophers of tradition, especially the Stoics, with modernity
(Humboldt, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Desanti), with logicians (Grize, Desclès) and
psychoanalysts (Lacan, Laplanche, Green, Kristeva). This wealth of interest and
commitment in the dialogue of disciplines give it an original place, and arguably
unique in the contemporary movements of thought.

3.1. But, if one thinks of the «book trade» (Montaigne), the translation of the
works (A. Berman) comes to be thematized, in which there is a central place for
literary translation, without having to be there omit the philosophical translation
and the translation of the sacred texts. Finally, we can't do, not evoke the various
modalities of «pedagogical translation». Would remain to evoke several
fundamental theoretical problems on the horizon of a reflection on translation: (i)
the question of literalism (dowsers versus ciblistes); (ii) the problem of identity,
language, cultural or national; (iii) the situation of 'discursive translations'
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language-culture (LCo) to another (LCt), from adaptation to plagiarism. Hence the
problem of «limited /restricted translation» or «generalized translation»? (Henri
Meschonnic, 2000).

4. Although we may have the intuition of the deepest foundations which define our
options and our errors, we should not forget the major trans-metaphysical and
therefore pragmatic questions, priorities and emergencies in translation studies.
Faced with organized and regulated systems in international organizations and
national institutions, the lack of regulation and delimitation of activities on the
private market raises many questions, fears and reactions: How should the
interpretation meet the needs of a multicultural society as well qualitatively than
quantitatively? * Can or should the conference interpretation now be used in
conjunction [be partner] with other forms of interpretation? * Is the expertise and
quality required in conference interpreting compatible with the expertise and
quality in other practices of interpretation? * Is it a hierarchy in practices or a
segment of practices that would be sealed ‘hermetically’ to each other? * Is oral
intercultural communication only performed/ practiced under different forms of
interpretation? What about the different forms of oral exchange in enterprises/
businesses and in all economic activities? * How can a company make the
difference between an intercultural communication expert specializing in its sector
of activity and an interpreter? How can it clarify its needs? * How can training be
involved in setting up expertise for the different practices in question? Should the
training be a player in the hierarchy or the segmentation of the practices?
(Zarnescu, 2013: 65-123; 244-310). These are many questions that translatologists,
translators and conference interpreters, court interpreters, interpreters in public
services, trainers are considering and thinking about. Reflection carried out in a
context often controversial because of the stakes statutory, financial but also
ethical.

4.1. As for the prospects concerning the evolution of interpretation in the 21st
century, the narrowing of the range of European languages, except the English
through the USA, the French thanks to Francophone Africa, the Spanish thanks to
the American-Hispanic world and possibly German thanks to the CEECs; the rise
of other languages such as Chinese; the return of the consecutive force.

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5. Since translation is part of the communication challenge, it cannot be considered
as a purely linguistic phenomenon: the meaning is not given, delivered as it is, but
constructed by the speaker / the listener/ the player / the reader (D. Seleskovitch,
1984: 10). However, Lederer's assumption, according to which the translator can
dispense with «any formal reference to the original language». (Lederer, 1981:
345), since only thinking before it is taken into account, simplifies the Act of
translating, by reducing it to an activity language easily decodable, otherwise, to an
efficient transfer of information. It has to be noted that the interpretative method is
successful with translators who practice adaptation, a choice motivated by the
desire to establish an «interaction of the translator with his environment». (G.
Bastin, 1990: 217). The most fruitful of such a translator is probably Nida. The
conception of translation reduced to the act of communication neglects what
speech really means. In this way, we should investigate, in the manner of Foucault,
the manipulations of the statements motivated by the games of power, the laws of
the market, the unconscious with its individual and collective desires. As Derrida
remarks, the effectiveness of communication is not equal to the veracity of
language (Derrida, 1972: 383).

5.1. The aesthetics of reception, which was developed in the 1960s by the School
of Constance, especially by H. R. Jauss and W. Iser, and adopted in translation
studies in the 1970s by I. E. Zohar of the University of Tel-Aviv, continued by G.
Toury and J. Lambert leads to the development of the polysystem theory focused
on the phenomenon of literature (including translations) as a social institution.
From a historical point of view, the study deals with the types of texts translated at
a given time. According to the quantitative approach, the question is how many
authors are translated, retransmitted or forgotten, and which language translates the
most or the least, at what point in time the translation production increases or
decreases. As for quantity, it is essential to know what to be translated, classical
literature, quality books or profitable literature of the popular type. The whole
study provides a global vision of translation in a given culture at a given time, it is
revealing of the receiving society. What are the dominant discourse in the circles
associated with translation? What are the political and economic discourses that
influence translation? In short, from what horizon of expectation is a text
perceived, understood and translated? This horizon is formed, according to Jauss's
extended formula, by the aesthetic, social, moral and religious norms with which

9
the first public and successive receivers receive a work and which together have an
undeniable impact on the interpretation of the text on the diachronic perspective.
Since the horizon of expectations is changing, it gives the possibility to find new
answers to questions asked in the text. The aesthetics of the reception also reveals
asked in the text. The aesthetics of the reception also reveals It is a question of
investigating, as Bassnett-McGuire remarks, "the whole process of the absorption
of a given culture at a given moment in time». (Bassnett-McGuire, 1991: xii).
From this point of view, translation is not limited to the introduction of the authors
of a different cultural space; It not only responds to the tastes of the public in
search of novelties or exoticism, but is an active and dynamic element patterns of
writing and thinking of the new audience. Anthony Pym, raising the
epistemological problems in translation, states that «translation is intimately
involved in the creation of a discourse». (A. Pym, 1993: 98), which corresponds to
the fact that "the function of the work of art Is not only to represent the real, but
also to create it». (H.-R. Jauss, 1978: 33). In turn, each linguistic, cultural and
social zone constitutes the «environment of a literary system» (A. Lefevere, 1992:
14). The translated text is always implanted within a system of several levels,
poetic, symbolic, social, economic, political, ethical, preexisting system that
accepts foreign work according to its internal criteria. If «the life of the literary
work in history is inconceivable without the active participation of those to whom
it is destined. It is their intervention that brings the work into the moving continuity
of literary experience, in which the horizon never ceases to change, in which the
passage from passive reception to active reception, from the simple Reading for
critical understanding of the aesthetic standard admitted to its passing by a new
production ». (H.-J. Jauss, 1978: 45), at the same time, the task of the translator
consists in choosing the enrichment of the text by a new understanding rooted in
the historicity of the recipient, that is, motivated by his horizon of expectation.

6. The translatology is a constantly changing field which oscillates between

restriction and amplification, rigor and laxity. Difference vs family of languages,
identity vs difference, uniqueness of meaning vs multiplicity of forms, search for
fidelity vs congenital inadequacy. If linguists have succeeded in agreeing on a
common set of principles, translatologists have not reached such a consensus: «a
common interest is however not guaranteed, which is acceptable as theory in one

10
area will not satisfy the conceptual requirements of another theory». (Lawrence
Venuti, 2000: 4).

Thus the translatology seems to really be governed by the principle of uncertainty

of Heisenberg, often called the principle of indeterminacy.

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