K解构主义与翻译athleen Davis

K解构主义与 翻译 阿房宫赋翻译下载德汉翻译pdf阿房宫赋翻译下载阿房宫赋翻译下载翻译理论.doc athleen Davis Kathleen Davis, Deconstruction and Translation. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, 2006. 解构主义与翻译。上海外语教育出版社。 Derrida consistently works to expose the impossibility of separating theory from practice, or text from context. Readers will therefore find that they must work through the issues important to the topic of deconstruction and translation by working through readings of other tests—readings that are not, and do not claim to be, complete or exhaustive. P2 P2 Specificity of context is essential to the very existence of meaning. Derrida warns attempts to sever meaning from context, and persistently emphasizes the importance of history to deconstruction. P3 P4 So, deconstruction of the subject is first, among other things, the genealogical analysis of the trajectory through which the concept has been built, used, legitimized, and so on and so forth. Deconstruction, then, argues for the inescapable importance of attending to history. It is true that for Derrida a particular historical structure can never be fully closed or have an absolute meaning. Indeed, the meaning of any event is never fully, finally determinable—it can always be translated. The possibility of translation guarantees the impossibility of there being only one, hegemonic version of history or what it means to be human. Thus, as the quotation above suggests, translation ensures the possibility of an ethical relation between different cultures and languages, and between differently positioned subjects. It can also, of course, become a hegemonic tool. P5 the performative role of translation at the intersections of cultural, ethic, and linguistic identities in a globalizing world. Derrida‘s most famous (or infamous) phrase il n’y a pas de hors-texte, which is usually translated as ―there is nothing outside the text‖ or ―there is no outside-text‖ (1967a/1974:158). He has since further explained it as ―there is nothing outside context‖ (1988: 136)…..meaning--- not only the meaning of what we speak, read and write, but any meaning at all--- is a contextual event; meaning cannot be extracted from, and cannot exist before or outside of a specific context. P9 P10 Derrida begins ?Des Tours de Babel‘ by noting that the myth of the The Tower of Babel joins the story of the inevitable multiplicity of tongues with that of a failed architectural structure; it thereby calls attention to the relation between language and structure. The myth tells of the Shemites‘ attempt to ?make a name‘ for themselves by building a tower that would reach the heavens, and thus give them access to transcendence. ―Come, let us make ourselves a city and a tower‖, they say, ―Its head: in the heavens./ Let us make ourselves a mane, / that we not be scattered over the face of all the earth‖ (Genesis 11:4; as trans. By Graham in Derrida 1985: 169). Through a totalized architectural structure, they attempt to construct a unity---one place, people and language---which, if it were to succeed, would ?make a name‘ in the sense that it would achieve a closed system of reference. Such a closed structure would dominate meaning, imposing an unequivocal relation between signifier and signified. …Derrida‘s reading traces the logic of this story‘s demonstration that no structure, linguistic or otherwise, can achieve such full closure and isolated self-identity, and thus guarantee a fully determined meaning. ?Des Tours de Babel‘ focuses particularly on the proper name, which is the most explicit example of the assumption that language names thing--- that words or signs can have a one-to-one correspondence with a referent that exists, as a ?real‘ presence, before and outside of language. The proper name ?Babel‘ deconstructs that assumption. When the Shemites attempt to complete the tower and thus make their name, God intervenes. As he does so, God imposes confusion and division within their language but also within his own name. … Thus, the deconstruction of the tower enacts the structural limitation of language, and it defines this limit as an interior division that is also an opening to its outside. P13 Derrida observes, the signified concept is never present, or a presence, in and of itself; rather, ―every concept is inscribed in a chain or in a system with which it refers to the other, to other concepts, by means of the systematic play of difference‖. This play of differences through which language makes meaning is spatio-temporal…… Moreover, the gesture of signification cannot refer directly to the present: it must rely upon already constituted relations even as it moves to instate a not-yet fulfilled meaning. ―The sign, in this sense, is deferred [spatio-temporal] presence‖. …This play of differences is what commentators on Derrida have in mind when they speak of deconstruction‘s argument that signification proceeds through infinite regress, or an endless process of signs differing/deferring to other signs. Understanding the difference in the structure of semantic fields in the source and target languages allows a translator to assess the value of a given item in a lexical set. If you know what other items are available in a lexical set and how they contrast with the item chosen by a writer or speaker, you can appreciate the significance of the writer‘s or speaker‘s choice. You can understand not only what something is, but also what it is not. P 13-14 Meaning, then, is an effect of language, not a prior presence merely expressed in language. It therefore cannot be simply extracted from language and transferred. P14 P14-15 In order to express the spatio-temporal differential movement of language succinctly. Derrida has coined the neologism (or, more precisely, the neographism) différance. Derrida notes that while the French verb différer has two meanings, roughly corresponding to the English ?to defer‘ and ?to differ‘, the common word différence retains the sense of ?difference‘ but lacks a temporal aspect. Spelling différance with an a evokes the formation in French of a gerund from the present participle of the verb (différant), so that it recalls the temporal and active kernel of différer. The –ance ending in French also ―remains undecided between the active and the passive‖, so that différance ―is neither simply active nor simply passive, announcing or rather recalling something like the middle voice‖. But différance, Derrida cautions, is not a concept or even a word in the usual sense; we cannot assign it a ?meaning‘, since it is the condition of possibility for meanings, which are effects of its movement, or (p15) ?play‘. Derrida‘s use of the word ?play‘ in this context is often misunderstood, most grievously when taken as an argument for complete ?freeplay‘ in language: that is, the suggestion that a signifier can ultimately mean just anything at all……. All language, in order to be language, generates meaning through this systematic movement, or play of differences. Since meaning cannot precede différance, there can be no pure, totally unified origin of meaning, as the story of Babel reminds us. P15 Closely aligned with différance in Derrida‘s discussion of signification is the trace. In the interpretation of meaning, any signifying element that seems ?present‘ (both in the spatial and the temporal sense) ―is related to something other than itself. Thereby keeping within itself the mark of the past element, and already letting itself be vitiated by the mark of its relation to the future element‖. These relations to past and future are often called retentive and protentive characteristics, and the trace is where the retentive/protentive relationship with the other is marked. Derrida usually speaks of the trace, rather than the signifier, partly to recall its sense of a ?track‘ or even a ?spoor‘. Pursuing meaning is not a matter of ?revealing‘ some hidden presence that is already ?there‘; rather, it is relentless tracking through an always moving play of differences. When we speak of the trace as a place ?where‘, we must keep in mind, as I noted above, that this is not a positive spatial presence; rather, the trace carries within itself the mark of other elements that are, technically, absent. P16 The trace is difficult to think because it seems somewhat paradoxical: it is where the relation to other signifying elements is marked, but it is not a ?real‘ place and the other is always absent from it. Neither pure presence nor pure absence, the trace marks the weave, or textile, of differences: Whether in the order of spoken or written discourse, no element can function as a sign without referring to another element which itself is not simply present. This interweaving results in each ―element‖—phoneme or grapheme—being constituted on the basis of the trace within it of the other elements of the chain or system. This interweaving, this textile, is the text produced only in the transformation of another text. Nothing, neither among the elements nor within the system, is anywhere ever simply present or absent. There are only, everywhere, differences and traces of traces. (Derrida, 1972b/1981:26) P16 In order to exist as meaningful events, texts must carry within themselves traces of previous texts, and are, therefore, acts of citation. The source text for a translation is already a site of multiple meanings and intertextual crossings, and is only accessible through an act of reading that is in itself a translation. The division between ?original‘ and ?translation‘, then—as important and necessary as it is to translators and scholars today—is not something pre-existing that can be discovered or proven, but must be constructed and institutionalized. It is therefore always subject to revision. P18 Deconstruction rejects the idea that meaning is before or beyond language, and can thus be safely, or cleanly (?properly‘) transferred from one linguistic system to another. Deconstruction emphasizes that the failure of translation in this traditional sense demonstrates the failure of the philosophical thesis of meaning and the purity of its oppositions. It also demonstrates that this issue is not, and never was, merely a question of philosophy in the narrow, disciplinary sense. P21 languages do have standardized rules of grammar and usage, and their lexicons function according to ingrained codes normalized by repetition. But these systems can never be fully contained or made permanent, as every linguist and every grammar teacher knows. Languages constantly borrow and mutate elements from other languages, and every generation and dialect will ?break‘ and reshape the rules of standardized grammar. We can always repeat differently, and the play of traces, within and between languages is always open-ended. P22 The importance of the structural interdependence of singularity and generality cannot be overemphasized: every event, or ?mark‘, is both irreducibly singular—it is a new and unrepeatable performance in a particular context—and it is a repetition conforming to already established codes, or laws. This relation enacts the limit of translatability. P22 A text lives only if it lives on [sur-vit], and it lives on only if it is at once translatable and untranslatable […] Totally translatable, it disappears as a text, as writing, as a body of language [langue]. Totally untranslatable, even within what is believed to be one language, it dies immediately. (Derrida, 1979:102) If a text were totally translatable, it would simply and purely repeat what already exists: it would have no singularity and thus no identity (Such a text us an impossibility, of course, since even verbatim repetition must occur within a new context and is therefore different). Totally untranslatable, a text would bear no relation to any meaningful system: fully self-contained, it dies immediately. (Again, such a text cannot exist, in the sense that it could never be recognized as a text.) The object of translation theory, paradoxically perhaps, is the untranslatable—the singularity of a text—signaled by the elements most inextricable from context, syntax, or lexicon. P22-23 Deconstruction demonstrates the non-existence of a transcendental signified—that is, a meaning that exists outside of language. Meaning is an effect of language, of a singular play of (p23) difference in a chain of signifiers—and in this sense ―every signified is also in the position of a sifnified‖ (Derrida 1972b/1981:20) P25 ―One of the definitions of what is called deconstruction would be the effort to take this limitless context into account, to pay the sharpest and broadest attention possible to context, and thus to an incessant movement of recontextualization‖ (Derrida, 1988:136). Deconstruction does not offer a method for establishing a final, authoritative interpretation, but rather practices an ongoing, integrated analysis of texts (in the narrow sense) and not our methods for identifying texts. P26 Saussure‘s demonstration that language is a system of differences with no positive terms goes a long way toward undermining the metaphysics of presence, or what Derrida calls ?logocentrism‘—the belief in a transcendent self-presence founded on the logos (?speech‘, ?logic‘, ?discourse‘, and ?reason‘ in Greek, and, in biblical terms, ?the Word of God‘). Logocentrism is also a phonocentrism, which presumes that the voice, often associated with breath and spirit, ―has a relationship of essential and immediate proximity with the mind‖ (Derrida, 1967a/1974:11). It suggests that the speaker‘s consciousness is a fully isolable self-presence, an independent self-identity. Speech has thus been understood as the direct expression of this presence and the truth of its meaning. Conversely, logocentrism also understands writing as a derived system that simply represents speech. Because it functions in the absence of the speaker/writer, and thus breaks the unity of consciousness and expression, writing poses a threat to the conveyance of truth. In spite of his observations regarding difference, Saussure reinscribes logocentrism when he insists that speech, to the exclusion of writing, is the true object of linguistics, and that writing exists for the sole purpose of representing speech (Saussure, 1959:23-24). Saussure posits a typical logocentric relation between speech and writing: while speech is ?narural‘, writing is ?artificial‘; speech forms the ?true bond‘ of unity in language, while the bond of writing is ?fictitious‘ and ?superficial; speech presents language directly, but writing obscures and disguises language (Saussure, 1959:32,25,30). Speech, then, becomes the essence of language, the thing-in-itself that could be revealed, or grasped directly, if only the graphic form could be stripped away completely. Saussure not only complains that writing usurps speech as the proper object of linguistics, but that writing continually (and improperly) affects language by changing speech: such mistakes are ―pathological‖, caused by the ―tyranny of writing‖ over speech, and result in ―orthographic monstrosities‖ (Saussure, 1959:30-32). P27 Writing is often considered as a recording mechanism for speech, which it inscribes in a ?durable‘ (repeated and repeatable), institutionally encoded system. Because it functions in the absence of the subject (the consciousness of the speaker/writer) and the referent, writing appears as a secondary, external, and dangerous representation of the living presence available in speech. By contrast, speech has been understood as the direct expression of this living presence, of the presence of consciousness to itself, which yields immediate access to the truth of the speaker‘s meaning. Deconstruction suggests that all signs—spoken or written—must repeat ?durable‘, already recognizable structures in a differential network, and their ability to function in the absence of the subject and referent is necessary to the process of signification. Thus, signifiers are ?written‘ even if they are ?phonic‘. P28 (Derek Attridge) ―The pun is seen in this light because it undermines the basis on which our assumptions about the communicative efficacy of language rest: in Saussure‘s terms, that for each signifier there is an inseparable signified, the two existing in mutual interdependence like two sides of a sheet of paper‖ (Attridge, 1988:140) P31 First of all, I never proposed ―a kind of ?all or nothing‘ choice between pure realization of self presence and complete freeplay or undecidaability.‖ I never believed in this and never spoke of ?complete freeeplay or undecidability‘ […] There can be no ?completeness‘ where freeplay is concerned. P32 While stability gives us access to texts, it is also limited, for several reasons. First, there is always difference at the origin. … Stability is also limited because neither a text‘s author nor its enactment in one context can fully determine its repetition in another context (without this openness, of course, there would be no possibility of translation). … (p34) The fact that a sign can never be fully determined is made especially obvious by—but is certainly not restricted to—cases of adaptive translation and wordplay. The possibility that any sign may break with its context, or transgress the boundaries of any ?intended‘ meaning, is a structural necessity of its inception. … The letter must be routed in a process of dissemination, which Derrida has elsewhere likened to a postal system, whose circulation can never be perfectly regulated. This may seem an obvious point: we all know that our letters may not arrive, just as our ?intended meanings‘ may be misunderstood. P35 I like the translation as it is, a rendering with a flaw, like the grain of sand in a cultured pearl. (Holmes 1988:60) P35 We must take our chances, then, if we are to produce meaning: a letter may always be miscopied, or it may not arrive; a meaning may always be mistranslated, and a remedy may always somehow turn to poison. P39 the plurivocal sign is open to interpretation and therefore to translation – translations can and necessarily do supplant their sources and perform historically. … ―Derrida bemoans what has been ?obliterated‘ by translators and takes us back to what is in the original text‖ (Gallop 1994:52-53) P40 Benjamin maintains the duality of original and translation, but shifts their relation: the translation is not dependent upon the original for its existence; rather, the original depends upon the translation for its survival. Benjamin‘s notion of survival here refers to his idea that a text has ?life‘, but despite his use of organic terminology—life, seed, germination, ripening—Benjamin does not suggest that a translation bears an essential, organic relation to its source. P40 (Derrida) ―There is life at the moment when ?sur-vival‘(spirit, history, works) exceeds biological life and death‖ (1985:179). P41 Survival in translation exceeds the biological life and death of its author, it illustrates the structure of death, or absence, in textuality: translation, like ?writing‘ can live on, take on life and meaning in the absence of its author. By emphasizing the necessary possibility of a text‘s reiteration beyond the meaningful conditions of its author‘s life, Derrida is not rejecting the importance of a work‘s historical context. Indeed, it is precisely because the meaning or force of the ?original‘ is not extractable from, but singularly inherent within its syntactic and contextual web, that it requires translation for survival. P41-42 translation transforms the receiving language as well as the original because through it different, incommensurate signifying systems interact, and because the translated foreign text necessarily performs new meanings in the target system. Gideon Toury similarly notes that a translation‘s ―introduction into a target culture always entails some change, however, slight, of the latter‖(1995:27). He explains: the likelihood of causing changes in the receiving system beyond the mere introduction of the target text itself stems from the fact that, while translations are indeed intended to cater for the needs of a target culture, they also tend to deviate from its sanctioned patterns, on one level or another, not least because of the postulate of retaining invariant at least some features of the source text—which seems to be part of any culture—internal notion of translation. (Toury, 1995:27) however reductive and univocal a translation, its performance in the target language must, however slightly—to put it in Benjamin‘s terms—make language ?grow‘. Growth, indeed survival, through translation comes of necessity. The original calls for a complement ―because at the origin it was not there without (p42) fault, full, complete, total, identical to itself‖ (Derrida, 1985:188). P42 The disruption of such nostalgia through a demonstration that there was no ?original‘, along with a rethinking and revisioning of philosophy and thus translation in terms of difference, has been the project of deconstruction. P43 Lawrence Venuti has noted that both source and translation ―are derivative and heterogeneous, consisting of diverse linguistic and cultural materials which destabilizes the work of signification, making meaning plural and differential, exceeding and possibly conflicting with the intentions of the foreign writer and the translator‖ (Venuti, 1992:7) P44 ―in copyright law‖, Lawrence Venuti observes of these codes, ―the translator is and is not an author‖, and the translation is and is not an original (1995:8-10). P45-46 Derrida emphasizes that meaning is always context-specific and always requires translation. Because translation (p46) is founded on the difference between languages (1971/1990:83), it assures the survival of languages and the correlative impossibility of fully determined, totalitarian meaning. Deconstruction does not impose its own ?truth‘ nor does it erase all sense of truth. As Gayatri Spivak puts it: Deconstruction does not say there is no subject, there is no truth, there is no history. It simply questions the privileging of identity so that someone is believed to have the truth. It is not the exposure of error. It is constantly and persistently looking into how truths are produced. That‘s why deconstruction doesn‘t say logocentrism is a pathology, or metaphysical enclosures are something you can escape. Deconstruction, if one wants a formula, is among other things, a persistent critique of what one cannot not want. (Spivak, 1994:285) P50 Because deconstruction challenges and reworks traditional ways of thinking, it has reworked traditional language use as well. This reworking is as inevitable as it is necessary: if meaning is an effect of language, then a challenge to prevailing conceptualizations of meaning must perform its differences through language. The differences enacted by deconstruction take various forms, such as neologism or the specialized use of an available word in a way that exploits and develops its history. P51 Deconstruction does not ?load‘ words with new and strange meanings. Rather, it ?unloads‘-- or deconstructs—them through an analysis that shows what they have been doing all along. P51 Undecidability is taken, or mistaken, to mean a pathetic state of apathy, the inability to act, paralyzed by the play of signifiers that dance before our eyes, like a deer caught in a headlight. But rather than an inability to act, undecidability is the condition of possibility of acting and deciding. For whenever a decision is really a decision, whenever it is more than a programmable, deducible, calculable, computable result of a logarithm, that is because it has passed through ?the ordeal of undecidability.‘ One way to keep this straight is to see that the opposite of ?undecidability‘ is not ?decisiveness‘ but programmability, calculability, computerizability, or formalizability. Decision-making, judgment, on the other hand, positively depends upon undecidability, which gives us something to decide. (Caputo: 1997:137) P51 The meaning of any text is undecidable, since it is an effect of language and not something that can be extracted and reconstituted. Translators must therefore make decisions in this strong sense. The decision-making process is one of the reasons that translations are performative events, rather than replays of events that have already happened. These implications cut two ways: they support the arguments, advanced by Venuti, for instance, that translators should receive treatment and recognition comparable to that of authors; on the other hand, they destroy the ruse that one can ever ?simply‘ translate—translations are ethical-political acts. P52 (Holmes) uses a mathematical example to demonstrate that a true equivalence relationship is only possible in cases of pure calculation, but for translation, ―[t]he languages and cultures to be bridged [..] are too far apart and too disparately structured for true equivalence to be possible‖ (Holmes, 1988:53-54). The translator, he suggests, is not searching for a calculable answer that pre-exists, and does not even strive to do so. Rather, the translator works through the text, seeking ?counterparts‘ or ?matchings‘, and is ―constantly faced by choices he can make only on the basis of his individual grasp (knowledge, sensibility, experience…) of the two languages and cultures involved, and with the aid of his personal tastes and preferences‖ (ibid:54). Even though Holmes describes this process in terms of ?choices‘ that apparently pre-exist, it seems that his translator is making decisions by facing ?undecidability‘. P53 Translation involves two maps, (Holmes suggests,) one abstracted from the source text, and the other projected for the target text. (Holmes) ―all translations are maps, the territories are the originals‖ P56 (Derrida explains the word déconstruction in ―Letter to a Japanese Friend‖ says that) he chose this word in order to translate and adapt the Heideggerian word Destruktion, or Abbau, which signified in Heidegger‘s context ―an operation bearing on the structure or traditional architecture of the fundamental concepts of ontology or of Western metaphysics‖ (Derrida 1987c/1988:1). Fully aware that the fortunes of a word largely depend on what it repeats, he avoided the French ?destruction‘, with its negative connotations of annihilation or demolition, and instead chose ?deconstruction‘, a nearly obsolete word meaning, ―to disassemble the parts of a whole‖. It had an advantageous history of grammatical application, as well as a reflexive form ―to deconstruct itself […] to lose its construction‖. It also signified an ambiguous affinity with structuralism, desirable since deconstruction was both a structuralist gesture, in that it ―assumed a certain need for the structuralist problematic‖, but also an anti-structuralist gesture that would undo, decompose and desediment structures. Despite his careful selection and his attempt to give ?deconstruction‘ a particular use value in the context of his work, this word, as well as its application to an interpretation of his work, quickly exceeded Derrida‘s intentions. While he had thought of it as one of many words, such as trace, différance, and pharmakon, which had similar attributes, ?deconstruction‘ has taken a central role in reference to his discourse, and has assumed meanings beyond his own ideas. P57 The relation of stability and instability in language—is, of course, both the plague and the possibility of translation. P57-58 The suggestion that the ?subject‘—an actor or what we think of as the ?self‘—is a system of relations rather than a discrete entity may seem shocking if it is new to you. This approach to subjectivity has a long philosophical history, and has recently been articulated in various ways in psychoanalysis, Marxism, and the many different strands of poststructualism. … Everything meaningful—not just the language that we speak and write, but everything that holds significance—participates in a system in which each signifier refers to the others by means of the systematic play of differences. No sign gives access to a ?real‘ presence that can be experienced outside an instituted system of differences. Things that we reflect upon as the most intimate markers of ourselves—character, personality, sexuality, ethnicity, gender, physique, etc.—are only (p58) thinkable as they exist in a system of meaning; they are, therefore, relations of difference in complex, mobile systems of signification. In its very constitution, then, the subject is divided, and, like meaning, is never fully present (even in speech) but also never fully determined. P58 In order to function, that is, in order to legible, a signature must have a repeatable, iterable, imitable form; it must be able to detach itself from the present and singular intention of its production. It is its sameness which, in altering its identity and singularity, divides the seal. (Derrida, 1972c/1982: 328-9) Signing may seem a singular event, but a signature must repeat an already recognizable and verifiable (as well as forgeable) form, and it must function in the absence of (and can therefore detach from) the signatory. P60 Communication refers to the transmission and reception of information (a ?message‘) between a source and receiver using a signaling system: in linguistic contexts, source and receiver are interpreted in human terms, the system involved is a language, and the notion of response to (or acknowledgement of) the message becomes of crucial importance. In theory, communication is said to have taken place if the information received is the same as that sent: in practice, one has to allow for all kinds of interfering factors, or ?noise‘, which reduce the efficiency of the transmission. One has also to allow for different levels of control in the transmission of the message: speakers‘ purposive selection of signals will be accompanied by signals which communicate ?despite themselves‘, as when voice quality signals the fact that a person has a cold, is tired/ole/male, etc. (Crystal, 1997:72) P65 (Rosemary Arrojo) ―Instead of trying to make predictions, a theory of translation should attempt to empower translators-to-be and raise their conscience as writers concerning the responsibility they will face in the seminal role they will play in the establishment of all sorts of relationships between cultures‖. P66 This is not to say that the translator is a ?sovereign subject‘ whose decisions become isolable objects. Rather, these decisions perform in the signifying field of already instituted traces and relations of force, which they may reify, resist, question, transform, support, subvert ... but which they can never leave untouched. P69 (Spivak) translate Derrida‘s trace with the English ―trace‖, although the reader should keep in mind the track, even the spoor, contained within the French word. P75 (Bass) ― translator then, must be sure that he has understood the syntax and lexicon of the original text in order to let his own language carry out the work of transformation‖。 P87 (It is important to remember that) deconstruction is not a method or an approach. Texts deconstruct themselves, in that they are always inhabited by difference. P89-90 Derrida‘s work endows the translator ―with the right, even the duty to ?abuse‘ the source text‖ (Arrojo, 1994:156) … As Derrida‘s ?letter‘ suggests, not even the ?original‘ author herself could produce a totally faithful, non-abusive translation of any of her texts precisely because there is nothing definite or stable that one can be (p90) faithful to once and for all […] In this sense, translation is truly subjected to what we could call, via Derrida, a ?double bind‘, that is, it is, at the same time and in some level, both possible and impossible, both protective and abusive, both faithful and unfaithful, both a production and a re-production of meaning. (Arrojo) P91 The ―subject‖ of writing (such as a translator or author) does not exist as a sovereign solitude, a pure singularity that deals with others or with texts fully separate from him or herself. Rather, this ―subject‖ becomes as a relation to systems of difference, which make thinking meaning and ―self‖ possible in the first place. P92 As Arrojo suggests, translators must recognize their indebtedness and ultimate ―faithfulness‖ to their own circumstances and perceptions. P92-93 The structural problems of responsibility operate precisely like those of translation. Just as absolute translation would require perfect identification between two languages, which would therefore mean that they were the same language, so a complete response to the other would require that no difference, (p93) and therefore no otherness, exist. Such total identification is of course neither possible nor desirable, which is to say that despite the systems and general laws that render foreign texts meaningful and interpretable, they maintain an irreducible otherness. A translation is a responsible response only if it answers both to the general laws guiding and safeguarding interpretation of the text and to that which is singularly other within it. P93 The possibility of a decision depends upon its undecidability, for if a problem is settled through the application of a formula or a pre-specified program, then nothing is decided. Only in the face of undecidability do we actually make a decision and therefore take responsibility. P94 ―the identity of a language can only affirm itself as identity to itself by opening itself to the hospitality of a difference from itself or of a difference with itself‖ (Derrida). The many untranslatables faced in translation, those unique conjunctions in a language that prohibit clear passage across the border to another language, result not from the clear delimitation of one language from another but from the border inside ―one‖ language. P95 The undecidable is not merely the oscillation or the tension between two decisions; it is the experience of that which, though heterogeneous, foreign to the order of the calculable and the rule, is still obliged—it is of obligation that we must speak—to give itself up to the impossible decision, while taking account of law and rules. A decision that didn‘t go through the ordeal of the undecidable would not be a free decision, it would only be the programmable application or unfolding of a calculable process. (Derrida, 1990:24) Clearly, a decision in the face of competing interests cannot respond to all involved. Thus a responsible decision is paradoxically condemned to act irresponsibly toward some: ―I cannot respond to the call, the request, the obligation, or even the love of another without sacrificing the other other, the (p95) other others‖ (Derrida 1992b/1995:68). What could demonstrate this sacrifice more clearly than translation, which, in the face of inexhaustible textual nuances, must respond to some while sacrificing others? If the problem, the aporia, in any of these cases is resolved not through experience, through the ―ordeal of the undecidable‖, but through recourse only to calculation or a formula—which must always be somebody‘s formula—then it will have been a sellout, a set-up by and for one economy, ―fixed‖ from the start. ―Justice is an experience of the impossible‖ (Derrida, 1990:16) P97 Translators always face decisions in their translation process (no matter how technical the text may be), as well as in the larger context of their work. They must decide, for instance, what jobs to accept and what projects to initiate; what businesses, institutions, individuals, governments or presses to work for, to patronize, or to boycott; and what (p98) political stance to take in regard to the support or repression of certain projects. P94