This paper introduces some of the most infl uential fi gureheads in the emerging field of Translation Studies in East and West Germany after World War II. It outlines the reasons why Translation Studies parted from the traditional hermeneutical approach to translation. On the other hand it traces theresurgence of a new hermeneutical inquiry into the process of translation in the new, basically linguistic approaches and their science orientation.

By neglecting to integrate the final step of rhetorics into theory, i. e. pronuntiatio and actio, modern text linguistics passed a theoretical deficit on to modern translation studies. Literary texts must be read aloud in order to realize the acoustic potential programmed into the text by the author. The rhetorical tradition of writing and reading aloud was marginalized in the course of the 18th century when reading became a private and silent affair. Herder’s (and others’) foregrounding of the ‘tone’ or the ‘voice’ in literary texts and their translations is a theoretical attempt to return to the holistic view of text production, integrating performance into the process of literary production and reception. In practice, however, great literary translators always paid attention to the ‘voice in the text’. The tradition of orality – distinguishing precise voices in literary texts – seems to come to an end in Jelinek’s anti-individualistic texts.

The historical overview covering Schleiermacher and the disciplinary status of translational hermeneutics was written by Cercel, the sections on important concepts and research within the paradigm of translational hermeneutics was authored by Stolze, and Stanley wrote the last three sectionsdealing with language games, a concrete research project and the role of phenomenology in research. The text was geared towards providing some background information on translational hermeneutics, a field which has bearing not only on the practice of translation but also on research in TS. From the vantage point of translational hermeneutics, research in translation studies takes its point of departure from the translator’sperspective: The guiding question is one centered on how a translator deals with the texts he or she has to translate.

The purpose of this essay is to explore the place Hans-Georg Gadamer makes for the activity of translation within his philosophy of interpretation. In general terms, the interest of Gadamer’s approach lies in the effort to inscribe translation within what is described as the ‘hermeneutic circle’. This essay accordingly offers a brief, but detailed account of the Gadamerian arc of interpretation, but suggests that the critical issues – along the lines suggested by Werner Hamacher in his book Premises – concern the way in which the circle begins to turn, and furthermore, how one actually enters the hermeneutic circle. If these are matters basic to the Gadamerian way with textual interpretation tout court, the principal claim of this essay is that it is the translatorwho experiences the most serious diffi culties in beginning, and indeed, in entering the ambit of hermeneutics. In detailing these particular difficulties, one reaches a limit-case of the hermeneutical interpreter – the translator as one to whom Gadamer grants a privileged place in his philosophy, but also as one who reveals to hermeneutics the nature of the problems that beset hermeneutic philosophy from the outset.