There has been an increasing amount of published scholarly work on hermeneutics and translation studies. However, hardly any work has been done to connect hermeneutic approaches to translation and hermeneutic approaches to psycholinguistics. This essay accordingly seeks to identify some of the key features common to both translation theory and psycholinguistics. At issue is finding areas of interaction and overlap between these two areas of enquiry, especially in relation to the hermeneutic account of text understanding processes.

Many of the apparent impasses and/or paradoxes in Translation Studies result from the lack of greater coherence between our basic assumptions about the relation language/world and the theories we derive from them. One of these apparent dilemmas is the concept of hypothetical untranslatability, which is logically dependent on the premise that translation is a phenomenon of language as a system, as opposed to the primacy of the practice from which language itself emerges. Paul Ricoeur, in three conferences published posthumously, coined a formula capable of dissolving this impasse: translation as the Construction of the Comparable. My aim here is to show the profound implications of this insight of Ricoeur, assuming a conception of language informed by the philosophical therapy of the later Wittgenstein and considering authors who start out from this therapy to formulate philosophical theses on how language and perception are articulated. This is another step towards an Epistemology of Translating, tributary of the later Wittgenstein and in line with Arley Moreno’s Epistemology of the Usage.

This essay presents a portion of a long-term project designed to develop, refine and test methods that can be employed in research in Translation Studies. The research depicted here is a joint project between Adam Mickiewicz University (Poznań, Poland) and Technische Hochschule in Cologne, Germany. In the spring of 2014, eight students from each university took part in a project designed to compare the relative strengths and weaknesses – pedagogical as well as epistemological – of two methodological pairs: one being the phenomenological method and the hermeneutical analysis; the other was think-aloud and IPDR (Integrated Problem and Decision Reporting). The students were asked to perform role plays, four of which took place in Poznań, and four of which took place in Germany, which simulated job interviews or employee evaluations. Although the long-term goal of the project is to enhance introspective methods for use in Translation Studies, for methodological reasons this joint project deals medially with role plays and focuses on face-to-face interaction. Upon completion of the role plays, the authors of this essay used both quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze extensively the various reports from the role plays and to compare these reports with the video recordings made of the role plays. In this article we discuss the design of the role plays, the methods used to analyze them, and our conclusions.

Although Husserl’s phenomenology constitutes one of the major sources of inspiration for modern hermeneutics and involves a vast and important philosophy of language, rigorous phenomenological approaches are rare within translation studies. In this paper, I attempt to carry out such phenomenological analysis. I base this analysis on Husserl’s phenomenology of language and its basic concepts. I shall then examine the fundamental mechanisms involved in what I call “translation consciousness” and I shall try to describe its intentional structure.

After the author explicates how his academic relationship to Paepcke began in the 1970s, he proceeds to discuss critically the latter’s reflections on language and translation. Latent contradictions in Paepcke’s conceptual framework and in his understanding of the relationship between theory and practice are brought to the fore. This conceptual tension shows that Paepcke’s understanding of and approach to dealing with texts is problematic. Using concrete examples, the author demonstrates that Paepcke did not rely on the text as the criterion for constituting meaning. Rather Paepcke relied on historically mediated conceptual constructs which were given the status of authoritative units of sense, and these units guided Paepcke in his process of establishing the meaning of the whole. The reason for this can be found in unreflected preliminary decisions that are seen as “a priori evidence.” This also explains why Paepcke’s real achievement lies in the contrastive analysis of comprehensive concepts – of traditionally rich concepts developed over the course of time (human orientation) as well as in rationalized contemporary language (functional orientation).

Evidentia is a concept passed on to us from rhetoric – more precisely from the third of the five canons of classical rhetoric, namely elocution. The goal of this canon is to achieve a stylistic quality that enables the listener to see what (s)he hears with his or her inner eye, i.e. to enable the listener to really visualize what is being said. Fritz Paepcke – whose one hundredth birthday we celebrated at this conference – applied the concept of evidentia to the field of translation studies. Within his conceptual framework, he portrayed it as a new experience – one which arises immediately, i.e., not through induction or deduction, but “as a result of the rule-governed and yet playful process of developing the most adequate wording of a translation” and from one’s interaction with the text. Paepcke did not, however, elaborate on this “intuition of intuition.” This article attempts to further develop the concept evidentia rhetorically and philosophically and to apply it to the field of translation studies. Two conceptions are particularly instrumental here: 1) The concept of fidélité créatrice as elucidated by the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel – to whom Paepcke often referred – as well as 2) the conceptual approach underlying and informing the research center Hermeneutik und Kreativität. In the latter, the processes of understanding and translating / translating and understanding are conceived of as being bi-directional and interdependent; this conception, which fuses understanding with empathy, is making new, significant inroads into translation studies. The notion of evidentia will be exemplified here using an empathetic Italian translation of a very young poet – Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger.

This article seeks to shed some light on the experience of interpretation and translation from a hermeneutical point of view, more precisely on how the subjectivity of the translator plays an essential mediation role in the process of rendering the meaning of a text in a new language, a role that certainly goes beyond the sole linguistic transfer, without being per se subjective. This idea can best be understood through the concept of “game” as developed by the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer and introduced in translation theory by Fritz Paepcke, because it offers a model in which the participation of the individual is necessary without being arbitrary, since the players have to abide by the rules of the specific game they are playing – in this case, the text itself. However, the aim of this article is not to offer a method of translation, but is rather an attempt to consider the adequacy of translation on the basis of subjective and intersubjective factors – including the translator’s own prior knowledge and experience, his openness towards the text and his critical self-awareness – and therefore to propose an alternative to the overly normative and restrictive theoretical framework strictly focused on linguistic equivalence between ST and TT.