FOR EMPIRICISM
ANTHONY PYM
THE ARGUMENT
• The one thing an activist cannot say, and which
any empiricist must say, prior to all else, is this:
• “I don’t know.”
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ERIC PICKLES
If you translate for immigrants, they
will not learn English.
Stopping the automatic use of translation and
interpretation services into foreign languages
will provide further incentive for all migrant
communities to learn English, which is the
basis for an individual’s ability to progress in
British society. It will promote cohesion and
better community relations. And it will help
councils make sensible savings, at a time
when every bit of the public sector needs to
do its bit to pay off the deficit.
https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/t
ranslation-into-foreign-languages
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DATA
• 138,000 speak no English – census: The number of
people living in England and Wales who could not
speak any English was 138,000, latest figures from
the 2011 census show. (BBC News 30 January 2013)
• In 2011, less than half a per cent (138,000) of all
usual residents aged three years and over could not
speak English. (Office for National Statistics 2013: 2)
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DATA
• Lindholm et al. (2012) study 3071 patients with
Limited English Proficiency (LEP):
• “the length of hospital stay for LEP patients was
significantly longer when professional interpreters
were not used at admission or both
admission/discharge”
• “patients receiving interpretation at admission
and/or discharge were less likely than patients
receiving no interpretation to be readmitted within
30 days”
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DATA
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Diamond LC, Schenker Y, Curry L, Bradley EH, Fernandez A. 2009.
Fagan MJ, Diaz JA, Reinert SE, Sciamanna CN, Fagan DM. 2003.
Flores, G. 2005
Gallagher RA, Porter S, Monuteaux MC, Stack AM. 2013.
Hampers Louis C., Cha S, Gutglass DJ, Binns HJ, Krug SE. 1999
Hampers, Louis C., and Jennifer E. McNulty. (2002).
Hudelson P, and Vilpert S. 2009
Jacobs, Elizabeth A., Laura S. Sadowski, and Paul J. Rathouz. 2007.
John-Baptiste A, Naglie G, Tomlinson G, Alibhai SM, Etchells E, Cheung A,
Kapral M, Gold WL, Abrams H, Bacchus M, Krahn M. 2004.
Karliner, Leah S., Elizabeth A. Jacobs, Alice Hm Chen, and Sunita Mutha. 2007.
Levas MN, Cowden JD, Dowd MD, 2011.
Lindholm, Mary, J. Lee Hargraves, Warren J. Ferguson, George Reed. 2012..
Quan, Kelvin JD. 2010.
Wallbrecht J, Hodes-Villamar L, Weiss SJ, Ernst AA. 2014.
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GOOD RESEARCH
•
•
•
•
Identifies problems.
Helps to solve them.
Has an empirical component.
Contributes to the collective constitution of
knowledge.
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EPISTEMOLOGICAL GIVENS
All data is interpreted.
There is no neutral description.
All research is motivated.
The researcher is never external with respect to the
object of knowledge.
• One most expose oneself to falsification (hypothesis
testing).
• Our knowledge is always probabilistic.
•
•
•
•
© Intercultural Studies Group
EPISTEMOLOGICAL GIVENS
• Empiricism opposed theocratic knowledge in the
12th century
• And in the 19th century (positivism)
• Became relativist and probabilistic in the late
nineteenth century.
• And included the observer in the 20th century
(Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminacy).
• Is quantitative, qualitative, and self-reflexive
• And can upset (“une science qui dérange”).
© Intercultural Studies Group
WHEN THE GIVENS ARE NOT GIVEN
• Some activist positions preclude falsification through
double binds:
• We must boycott Israeli scholars.
• Something good happens: The boycott is working.
We must continue.
• Something bad happens. More boycott is needed.
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NARRATIVE ONTOLOGY
• Narrative is “the principal and inescapable mode
by which we experience the world” (Baker 2008: 9).
• [No dialogue?]
• Narrative theory further allows us to piece together
and analyse a narrative that is not fully traceable to
any specific stretch of text but has to be
constructed from a range of sources, including nonverbal material. (4)
• [No linearity?]
• [No narrator?]
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ONLY THE PURE?
• Translators without Borders (TWB) is taken to task
because it purports to do good things while in
reality it is nothing more than “an offshoot of a
commercial translation agency” (159).
• TWB “proudly lists among its top clients several
companies that are widely thought to be
implicated in the very atrocities that TWB presumes
to bring to our attention, including General Electric
and L’Oréal” (160).
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STORIES FROM GNOMELAND
• We soon configure something like skopos theory as a narrative
in our minds: the theory evokes (for me at any rate) an
industrialized, affluent society populated by clients and highly
professional translators who belong to the same ‘world’ as
their clients, who are focused on professionalism and making
a good living, and who are highly trained, confident young
men and women. These professional translators and
interpreters go about their work in a conflict-free environment
and live happily ever after. They do not get thrown into
Guantánamo or shot at in Iraq, and they do not end up on
the border of Kosovo and Albania in the middle of a nasty
war, where they would have to decide whether or not to fulfil
their commission at the expense of treating potential victims
with compassion and respect. (2008 .
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NARRATIVE ONTOLOGY APPLIED
• Translators and interpreters play a crucial role in
disseminating public narratives within their own
communities and ensuring that all members of a
society, including recent migrants, are socialized
into the view of the world promoted in these shared
stories. (36)
• [What about schools?]
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“ARGUABLY”
• “[The narrative paradigm] is radically democratic
where the traditional rational paradigm is arguably
elitist” (163)
• TWB has “a casual and charity-based attitude to
‘doing good’ that is arguably self-serving and
exploitative” (162)
• “Arguably […] we are constantly being socialized
into barbarous narratives even today” (12)
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“ARGUABLY”
• “[The narrative paradigm] is radically democratic
where the traditional rational paradigm is arguably
elitist” (163)
• TWB has “a casual and charity-based attitude to
‘doing good’ that is arguably self-serving and
exploitative” (162)
• “Arguably […] we are constantly being socialized
into barbarous narratives even today” (12)
© Intercultural Studies Group
VENUTI CHANGES EMPIRICISM
• “empiricist epistemologies claim direct or
unmediated access to a reality or truth” (2013: 67).
• “the past decade has witnessed relatively few
projects in which translations have been studied in
specific cultural situations at specific historical
moments” (2013: 6)
• “the empirical orientation of translation studies
marginalized research into issues of philosophy and
cultural politics” (61).
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VENUTI CHANGES EMPIRICISM
• “Translation theory, for instance, cannot do without the
solid, specific data yielded by research in descriptive
and applied translation studies, while on the other hand
one cannot even begin to work in one of the other fields
without having at least an intuitive theoretical hypothesis
as one’s starting point.” (Holmes 1988: 78, cit. Venuti
2013: 8)
• Here Holmes makes the empiricist assumption that
knowledge is merely given to observation rather than
constructed on the basis of theoretical concepts. […]
Holmes’s model is scientific, deploying the inductive
method […] treating translation theory as derived from
empirical fact. (Venuti 2013: 9-10)
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VENUTI CHANGES EMPIRICISM
• “Translation theory, for instance, cannot do without the
solid, specific data yielded by research in descriptive
and applied translation studies, while on the other hand
one cannot even begin to work in one of the [two] other
fields without having at least an intuitive theoretical
hypothesis as one’s starting point.” (Holmes 1988: 78, cit.
Venuti 2013: 8)
• Here Holmes makes the empiricist assumption that
knowledge is merely given to observation rather than
constructed on the basis of theoretical concepts. […]
Holmes’s model is scientific, deploying the inductive
method […] treating translation theory as derived from
empirical fact. (Venuti 2013: 9-10)
© Intercultural Studies Group
VENUTI CHANGES EMPIRICISM
• “Translation theory, for instance, cannot do without the
solid, specific data yielded by research in descriptive
and applied translation studies, while on the other hand
one cannot even begin to work in one of the two other
fields without having at least an intuitive theoretical
hypothesis as one’s starting point.” (Holmes 1988: 78, cit.
Venuti 2013: 8)
• “theoretical speculation is reduced to a ‘hypothesis’” (2013: 9)
© Intercultural Studies Group
EN TI LA TIERRA
my arm scarcely manages to
encircle the thin
new-moon line of your waist:
in love you have loosened
yourself like sea water:
I can scarcely measure the
sky's most spacious eyes
and I lean down to your mouth
to kiss the earth.
• mi brazo alcanza apenas a
rodear la delgada
línea de luna nueva que
tiene tu cintura:
en el amor como agua de
mar te has desatado:
mido apenas los ojos más
extensos del cielo
y me inclino a tu boca para
besar la tierra.
© Intercultural Studies Group
EN TI LA TIERRA
my arm scarcely manages to
encircle the thin
new-moon line of your waist:
in love you have loosened
yourself like sea water:
I can scarcely measure the
sky's most spacious eyes
and I lean down to your mouth
to kiss the earth.
• mi brazo alcanza apenas a
rodear la delgada
línea de luna nueva que
tiene tu cintura:
en el amor como agua de
mar te has desatado:
mido apenas los ojos más
extensos del cielo
y me inclino a tu boca para
besar la tierra.
© Intercultural Studies Group
EN TI LA TIERRA?
O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the enameled plain!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee,
“The unconscious desire in Walsh’s translation is that a major
Chilean poet, noted for his leftist attacks on American
capitalism, should instead express his affection towards the
United States…”
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EMPIRICALLY…
Venuti cannot say “I don’t know”.
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ACTIVISM?
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