Translation Theory and Development Studies

A Complexity Theory Approach

Kobus Marais

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415840354
• eBook ISBN: 9781135022594
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book aims to provide a philosophical underpinning to translation and relate translation to development. The second aim flows from the first section's argument that societies emerge out of, amongst others, complex translational interactions amongst individuals. It will do so by conceptualising translation from a complexity and emergence point of view and relating this view on emergent semiotics to some of the most recent social research. It will further fulfill its aims by providing empirical data from the South African context concerning the relationship between translation and development. The book intends to be interdisciplinary in nature and to foster interdisciplinary research and dialogue by relating the newest trends in translation theory, i.e. agency theory in the sociology of translation, to development theory within sociology. Data in the volume will be drawn from fields that have received very little if any attention in translation studies, i.e. local economic development, the knowledge economy and the informal economy.

Part I

1 Toward a Philosophy of Complexity

1. Introduction

In their introduction to their new journal, Translation, Arduini and Nergaard (2011, pp. 9-10) argue that, despite its apparent success, translation studies is facing a crisis. They define the nature of this crisis as one of epistemology, arguing that translation studies is caught up in a "repetition of theories and a plethora of stagnant approaches." They argue that new ways of "what we know and how we know" are on the cards and then make the point that these ways have to do with complexity and multiplicity, nonlinearity and hybridity (Arduini & Nergaard, 2011, pp. 9-10). Although I am hesitant about the rhetorical strategy of terming the problems I see as a "crisis," I do agree with them on their analysis that we need a new epistemology in translation studies, and I wish to take their argument further. To my mind, what these researchers are putting up for discussion is the "Western scientific program, in general, and reductionism, in particular, and the way in which it influences the nature of translation studies.

In this chapter, I intend to show that theirs is not an isolated argument. In numerous fields of study, one finds a questioning of the Western scientific program and of the impasses it has left in these fields of study (Heylighen et ah, 2007). This questioning pertains to both modernism and postmodernism, which can both be said to be reductionist, the first to structure, logic, and construct and the latter to anti-structure, non-logic and deconstruct (M. Taylor, 2001, pp. 47-72). In other words, both modernism and postmodernism can be said to be unable to hold alternative, paradoxical, complex views of reality. What scholars all over the spectrum seem to be looking for is an epistemology of complexity, not necessarily to replace reductionism but to supplement it or to subsume it within a philosophy of complexity. Complexity philosophy has shown that replacing one perspective by another, which is assumed to be better but which is equally reductive, does not solve the kind of problems scholars are faced with in both the natural and social sciences. A consensus seems to be emerging that what is needed is the ability to embrace paradoxical perspectives to supplement new insights to existing ones without replacing what may be of use in the existing perspectives. Realizing that reality is complex and that scholarly activity has to deal with this complexity is becoming a Zeitgeist. Thus, this chapter sets out to propose the framework of a philosophy of complexity within which to think about translation.

A second motivation for this chapter is that, to my mind, translation studies is in need of a philosophical foundation. As a field of study, it lacks a philosophical underpinning. Despite much having been written about how to conceptualize translation studies as a scientific field of study (Gambier & Van Doorslaer, 2009; Hermans, 2007; Holmes, 2002; Jakobson, 2004; Toury, 1995; Tymoczko, 2007), I contend that not enough has been done philosophically to conceptualize the field. Except for Tymoczko, the discussions have mostly been of a technical or theoretical nature, as in Holmes's map of translation studies. Also, the discussions tended to be attempts to define translation in terms of other fields of studies, for example, Hermans and Jakobson, who both make use of linguistic approaches. What one does not find is a philosophy of translation as one would with a philosophy of history or a philosophy of mathematics. As I understand it, when the question, "What is x?" is asked of a field of study, x, one moves into the domain of philosophy or philosophy of science. These are the meta-questions concerning each field, which are not strictly questions concerning the content of the field itself but are questions that have moved into probing the nature of the field itself. Thus, discussing the nature of translation is a philosophical endeavor, not a translation studies endeavor. Answering the question, "What is translation?" means that one moves to a meta-theoretical or philosophical level of conceptualizing. To my mind, this has not yet been done for translation studies. Translation has, to my mind, not yet been conceptualized within the larger philosophical framework of Western science, which may be one reason why it is suffering from an epistemological crisis, as claimed by Arduini and Nergaard (2011). The result is that translation studies has been conceptualized either "as" something else, that is, linguistics, literature, pragmatics, culture, sociology, ideology, or as in competition with something else, in order to defend the field against borrowing from or encroaching on other disciplines. I suggest that the time has come to conceptualize translation as translation, an effort started by Tymoczko (2007) but, to my mind, not completed by her. I take this effort up again in Chapter 3.

In this chapter, I first provide a brief historical overview of the development of complexity philosophy/theory. Then I consider some of the major lines of thought in a philosophy of complexity. This is followed by a section on complex systems theory, and the chapter concludes with a broad overview of the implications of this philosophical position for translation studies.

Before proceeding, I need to point out a problem I had in writing this chapter. I found myself caught between a number of demands. On one hand, I had to provide a thorough discussion on complexity for the sake of intellectual honesty and for the sake of not falling into the first trap of transdisciplinary work: shallowness. On the other hand, I had to provide an understandable overview of complexity. If the discussion becomes too technical, I may lose the translation studies audience. Also, I have not been trained as a complexity theorist, so I cannot claim the depth of knowledge and insight that experts in the field have. I thus acknowledge that I am probably the fool storming in where the more expert angels fear to tread. I cannot, however, refrain from writing about this mode of thinking that has gripped my imagination.

2. Situating Complexity

The philosophical roots of complexity have been with humanity for a very long time. The philosophical tensions between Plato and Aristotle, one focusing on the universal and the unchanging and another focusing on the contingent and change, bear testimony to this tension (see, for instance, Mitchell, 2009, pp. 15-22; Stumpf, 1975, pp. 48-113). In a sense, the modernism/postmodernism debate is still based on this tension. Modernism claims to be able to explain reality by reducing it to some universal, unchanging principle(s), which is obviously a reduction, while postmodernism claims to explain it by considering everything as contingent and context dependent, which is just another reduction. This kind of binary thinking has permeated all of scholarly reality. In philosophy, one finds the binaries of subject and object, universalism and individualism, constancy, and change. In anthropology, the battle rages between the self and the other. In sociology, the individual and society are posited against one another, and in translation studies, source and target remain in tension, to name but a few. All of these tensions are based on a logic that is not able to deal with complexity, such as that source and target are both needed and related to one another in a complex way for a theory of translation. It is also based on a fear of uncertainty (see Callon et al., 2011), such as that the exact relationship between the two components of the binary will forever remain a complex matter which scholars may not be able to explain in detail and that this inability to provide exact knowledge may lead to academics losing face. Also, these tensions are not able to deal with the complex nature of translation as a phenomenon that has its roots in language, literature, culture, society and power—and all of this at the same time.

A philosophy of complexity thus represents an attempt to solve these tensions by taking some kind of meta-stance (Hofstadter, 1979, pp. 103-152), standing back at least one level—and possible many more—and viewing the universal and the contingent, consistency and change as constituent factors of reality. In this sense, it moves away from linear logic toward paradoxical or nonlinear or complex logic to be able to do justice to the complexity of reality. Also, through this stance, it hopes to do justice to the wholeness and interrelatedness of reality. In this sense, the interest in complexity can be seen as an epistemological effort which tries to see whether some of the age-old binaries and tensions cannot be resolved if one looks at them from a different point of view, or a different level of view. At the same time, it would not suffice to call complexity theory a shift in perspective only. As will become clear from the chapter, the interest in complexity has also been sparked by advancements in computing power (Mitchell, 2009, pp. 56-70) and the development of network culture (Castells, 2000a; Latour, 2007; Taylor, 2001). Before computers, most complex problems were merely inaccessible to scholars. One cannot build mathematical models of weather prediction by hand. So, it was the work of Alan Turing and John von Neumann that provided much of the technological backup that is necessary to study systems (Coveny & Highfield, 1995, pp. 43-88). To this, one can add developments that have led to the demise of the Newtonian ideal of reductionism such as Einstein's relativity theory, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, and Godel's incompleteness theorem.

In a sense, complexity thinking seems to be inevitable. The whole program of Western science has focused on analyzing the parts of reality in order to understand them better (Johnson, 2009, pp. 4-16; Van Kooten Niekerk & Buhl, 2004b). Now, the realization is dawning on scholars that analysis can only take you so far, because only a small part of reality is to be explained by the way parts are, or only a small part of reality can be understood by understanding the parts of it. Much of reality is to be explained not by the parts themselves but by the way in which they relate to one another or by the way in which they are becoming, the way in which constituent parts form wholes (Latour, 2007; Van Huyssteen, 2004). The focus has thus shifted from an analysis of parts to a focus on the relationships and connections between parts and between parts and wholes. Also, the focus has shifted from an interest in phenomena to an interest in processes, that is, the way in which phenomena are the result of the interaction of their constituent parts. The philosophical problems of stasis and movement, and of how both constitute reality, are what are within the purview of complexity thinking. Let me hurry to say that I do not suggest replacing analysis with synthesis or being with process. I hope to incorporate these binaries in a complexity view in which both sides of the binary find their rightful place in thinking about a particular phenomenon.

Another historical pointer is the late nineteenth century when basic ideas of (chaotic) systems thinking came to be (Heylighen et ah, 2007; Sawyer [2005] also provides an interesting overview of this history in the first half of his book). Scholars such as Maxwell and Poincare started questioning the implications of Newtonian science (Mitchell, 2009, pp. 20-21). Sawyer (2005) provides quite a detailed overview of what he calls the three waves of social systems thinking, that is, structural functionalism, general systems theory and chaos theory and emergence and complexity, as well as the historical roots of emergence and complexity. Although not everybody will agree with his division, he clearly indicates that complexity thinking did not suddenly arise on the scene; it has been in the making for at least a century. Sawyer (2005, pp. 31-33) also points to the role that British emergentists played in the development of complexity studies by focusing their efforts on the role of part and whole in society. In the South African context, the then prime minister, Jan Smuts (1926), wrote an influential book called Holism and Evolution. In this book, he argued that evolution is driven by the needs or requirements of a whole, not the parts, and that one thus has to focus your interest on understanding wholes. The initial phase of systems thinking was followed by Von Bertalanffy's general systems theory in the second half of the twentieth century (see, for instance, Sawyer, 2005, pp. 14-19).

It was chaos theory in the 1970s and 1980s, however, which provided a huge impetus to complexity theory (Coveny & Highfield, 1995; Mitchell, 2009, pp. 15-39). Out of this development, came the Santa Fe Institute in the mid-1980s, which became the first institutionalized brand of complexity studies (Cohen & Stewart, 1994; Waldrop, 1992), though not the only one. Complexity studies is thus a transdisciplinary field that brings together insights from philosophy, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, linguistics, sociology, economics and other fields in an effort to understand reality as a complex phenomenon.

3. A Framework for An Epistemology of Complexity

My argument in this section is that the Western scientific project has been dominated by "a paradigm of simplification" (Morin, 2008, p. 3), which "mutilates" (Montuori, 2008, p. ix; Morin, 2008, p. 51) reality by imposing a simple conceptualization on a complex reality. This paradigm attempts to provide simple laws underlying complex reality, which is the reductionist (and covertly religious) ideal of explaining all of reality by means of one cause. I do not have space here to go into all the philosophical motives behind this search for simplicity. Suffice to say that this Newtonian paradigm believes that, behind the chaos, there is order, simplicity, and oneness. Implied in this approach is the notion of determinism. Being subjected to precise, simple laws, reality unfolds in a predetermined, mechanical way. Having started in the natural sciences, this paradigm has also taken root in the social sciences or humanities (Latour, 2007) and, I argue, underlies some of the conceptualizations in translation studies. The problem with this paradigm is not that it is wrong in all cases, but rather that it cannot explain all cases, especially in the social sciences and humanities. As indicated earlier, my aim is not to replace it, but to amend it, to make it more complex.

The theory and, to a much lesser extent, the philosophy of complexity have mushroomed over the last three decades to the extent that one chapter does not really do justice to the complexity of the debates among complexity theorists themselves and among proponents and antagonists of the approach. I shall not represent complexity studies as a homogenous field, but I can also not go into all the minute differences in point of view. Hopefully, this representation will honor both difference and similarity in a sufficient way to avoid both chaos and sterile equilibrium, but, being an overview, it will most probably be more biased towards a picture of equilibrium.

In my view, the paradigm of simplicity is the cause of the binary thinking that dominates the reductionist paradigm. As Morin (2008, p. 39) argues, this paradigm can see the one and the many, but it cannot see that the one is simultaneously the many. It can see phenomena, but it cannot see, or at least it cannot theorize, the interrelatedness of all phenomena (Morin, 2008, p. 84). Put differently, it can see parts and it can see wholes, but it cannot see the interrelationships between parts and parts and between parts and wholes. The simplicity paradigm cannot see that difference is similarity and that the universal is the particular. In short, it cannot deal with complexity, or paradox. In this sense, a philosophy of complexity has a synthesizing aim based on analysis. As Latour (2007) claims, a phenomenon such as the social cannot be thought of in terms of parts and wholes, but in terms of the relationships between nodes. The focus needs to move from things to what is in between things, to how things are related. The focus needs to change from things to movements of things.

As a meta-philosophical approach (Morin, 2008, p. 48), complexity philosophy tries to deal with all kinds of complexities in reality. Rather than trying to reduce complexity to simpler, more manageable notions, complexity theory attempts to face complexity head-on. Philosophically speaking, a philosophy of complexity tries to think about reality without choosing any one explanation thereof. To give a few examples, thought assuming a complexity perspective will refuse to give priority to either part or whole, to either the universal or the particular, to either rationality or irrationality, to either modernism or postmodernism. In this sense, it is a unifying idea claiming that there may be some unifying ideas and that not all unifying ideas hold true. In a sense, it turns recursivity into its logic (Hofstadter, 1979; Morin, 2008, p. 61). The universal is produced by the particular which is produced by the universal or, in Morin's (2008, p. 61) example, individuals create society which produces the individuals that produce society.

Morin (2008, p. 85) further argues that the Western scientific paradigm is disjunctive and reductive, separating or isolating a phenomenon from its environment. Latour (2007) also argues against the tendency to separate the natural and the social, while arguing that they are connected with various links (see also Atkinson et ah, 2008). With this way of thinking, analytical thinking, the Newtonian paradigm believes that it will eliminate the problem of complexity. This paradigm is concerned with dominance, in particular with human dominance over nature and thus with control. One of the principles of Newtonian science is predictability, which complexity science argues does not hold in all cases, especially in the humanities (see Heylighen et al., 2007). By building conceptual structures that are able to predict, humanity, according to the Newtonian ideal, remains in control of the chaotic nature of the future. The Newtonian world assumes that complexity is only apparent; what is real is simple (Heylighen et al., 2007). If one can thus break through the complexity, you can get to a point where you are in control, managing reality and constructing reality. Western science has deep religious roots, putting humanity in control of reality. Prigogine (1996, p. 38) argues that one of the reasons why it has taken Western science so long to arrive at theories that deal with irreversibility and probability is that Western science was dominated by a quasi-divine point of view. Admitting the possibility of irreversibility and probability also meant letting go of this quasidivine point of view. When Western science stepped down from the point of view that the future is determined, certainty came to an end (Prigogine, 1996, p. 183). One could thus argue that the Western scientific ideal is inherently un-ecological, not willing to see itself as part of an infinitely large, infinitely complex system. On his part, Morin advises scholars to conceptualize complexity rather than eliminate it. The implication of this argument is that scholarly thought needs to be able to live with disorder, complexity, paradox, or, as Latour (2007) suggests, it should follow reality like an ant, through all the particular, complex labyrinths to and through which it leads.

Rather than think it out of our theories and philosophies, we need to include complexity and deal with it. Complexity theory tries to deal with complexity by posing a meta-meta-narrative allowing for a complex array of meta-narratives. As a meta-meta-narrative, it is aware of the fact that it cannot know everything about the meta-narratives it is studying (Hofstadter, 1979, pp. 15-27). It attempts to hold onto a complex view of reality while paradoxically conceptualizing a hierarchical view of reality. This hierarchy is not a separating or isolating hierarchy, but a connecting hierarchy where what seems paradoxical at one level could be resolved at a higher level.

Scholars from various fields seem to agree on the problematic nature of aspects of Western rationality. Prigogine (1996, pp. 1-7), for instance, spends the introduction to his book The End of Certainty on analyzing the problematic nature of dete...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Tables
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Notes
• References
• Index