Untranslatables of philosophical engineering

It's been five years now since I first wrote here about translation and untranslatables. This paradigm has been on my mind ever since. Thanks to Santa Claus, the Dictionary of Untranslatables - English edition ten years after the original publication in French - has found its way to my bookshelves. This is a huge reference collaborative work which I could not recommend enough to lovers of languages and philosophy. That includes hopefully about anyone reading those lines.

By design, this work is a never-ending story, the untranslatable being, as Barbara Cassin keeps reminding us, what needs to be translated again and again, and we'll never be done with it. That's why adaptation of the Dictionary in more languages is planned or in the making.

It's interesting to explore the Dictionary to see if and how it helps us to understand the terms of our philosophical engineering realm, as Alexandre Monnin  and  Harry Halpin among others now like to call it. Those folks have already done a great job trying to shed a bit of philosophical light over our passionate permathreads about identity, reference, resource, document, work, concept and more of the same. If we are never done with those, it's not necessarily because philosophical engineers are either lousy philosophers or crappy engineers, or even both. Granted, all sorts of people have been involved in such debates, often with great innocence and not enough either philosophical or technical background to tackle such difficult issues. But many more are very good philosophers or smart engineers indeed, and a good bunch of them can proudly claim to be both. If those smart brains can't come after years of debate with definitive and clear agreements about such concepts, and how they should be translated in the Web languages and implemented in its very architecture, it's certainly because they are akin to the hard core of untranslatables that philosophers and linguists have kept trying to translate for ages. And with no surprise, some of them are already important entries in the said Dictionary, because they have a long history in pre-Web philosophy, like identity, reference, thing, work, representation, or word. Some more have minor or side entries, like topic or description, and some are absent because their conceptual difficulty has emerged as a pure product of the Web, like resource, content, or data. 

Translation issues for such hard-core concepts do not only happen when translating them into other natural languages than their original one, most of the time some dialect of Globish. They also happen any time one wants to cross-link or make interoperable different business, technical or domain dialects, even using the same (apparently) natural language. Classes of librarians, knowledge engineers bred in Description Logics and object-oriented developers are different animals, their actual operational semantics are radically different, but close enough to bring about potential confusion when those people try to sit and build something together, an event likely to happen in the context of the Web. The local usages all appear as avatars of some (the same, or not) fuzzy underlying untranslatable, having to do with hierarchy and inheritance, rooted in the pervasive genus-species paradigm, and bearing the same name here and there by chance and necessity of linguistic evolution, involving various contingent reasons such as finitude of lexicons, laziness or reluctance to coin new and specific terms, jokes and puns, lousy semantic extensions etc. 

If the Web is here to stay as a major production of human knowledge, and considered as such by philosophers, a future revision or extension of the Dictionary will (should) include those untranslatables of philosophical engineering. For the greatest benefit of both philosophers and engineers, and the delight of all those pretending to be both.

Representation as translation

Words know more about themselves than we generally do, and one should always take the time to explore their etymology. Take representation, a word which is a bone of contention as soon as linguists, semioticians, ontologists, librarians and Web geeks happen to meet, and look back for a minute at its latin origin. Repraesentatio is built on praesens, which has kept in both french présent and english present its double meaning of "being here and now" and "being given". Re-presenting is therefore giving or making present again, and repetition of the praesens is important to notice. Whatever the representation stands for, signifies, means, points at, suggests ... in one word, gives or simply puts us in presence of, here and now, the praesens has been (re)present(ed) already before, somewhere else.

And since the story of representations is so old, and the beginning of the story so misty, let's assume that in the long chain of representations, each new one is leveraging previous ones, and it's turtles all the way down. So, instead of wondering about the untractable issue of the first presentation, why not focus on the process through which one representation is emerging from previous ones. This process has a name : translation.

In "Traduire - Défense et illustration du multilinguisme" (published may 2009, only available in French so far), François Ost presents the multiplicity of languages as a benediction for the life of thought, and calls for translation as our needed common language and new paradigm. This rich and thoughful book is a must read is your French is fluent enough. I cannot in one post pretend to cover all it brings about, but just re-present here a few main points, enough to show the convergence between Ost's thesis and the line of thought we've been defending here for years.

Primo, as indicated in introduction, every text or production of language is the result of a process of translation, and this process is not only happening at the borders of languages, but inside the language itself, and not only between dialects and individual expressions, but inside the mind of the locutor herself. The dialectics of the "what do you mean?" - "in other words" is not a bug of the conversation, it's definitely a constitutive and essential feature of efficient language.

Secundo, translation, at least when it's a good one, is not necessarily an entropic process through which the original meaning is degradated and betrayed. The meaning, or whatever you want to call the praesens in the original (and I will indeed call it praesens hereafter), is not necessarily lost in translation. If the translation is good, it's also present in the re-presentation. More, this new presentation is likely to enrich the original one, and maybe help to understand it better.

Tertio, to keep the praesens alive, we need to re-present it over and over again. Translation is a never-ending story. And the apparent paradox is that we need to do that the more for things considered to be untranslatable. Ost quotes there Barbara Cassin : L'intraduisible, c'est ce qu'on n'arrêtera pas de (ne pas) traduire. Saying the praesens is untranslatable means simply that no presentation is exhausting its praesens, and new re-presentations are needed to get new viewpoints enlightening the previous ones. Pretending to achieve the final representation which rules them all is falling back again into the arrogance and stupidity of Babel's Tower builders, who had lost the meaning by forgetting the diversity of languages. God's action was then not a punition, but a liberation from this deadly road of the unique thought, as Ost shows in the first chapter of the book, a brilliant hermeneutic analysis of Babel's various translations.

Porting the translation paradigm in our local metaphore is quite easy. The wheel is the never-ending story of living knowledge and languages. So many spokes, so many directions to look from, converging in the untranslatable hub which is beyond, but praesens in all re-presentations. But the translation paradigm is what was lacking to get the wheel rolling. As Umberto Eco put it about Europe : Translation is our common language. Indeed, and to put this paradigm into action, each one of us engaged in the process has to learn several languages, in order to be able to look at one language with the eyes of another. Because no one undertands her own language from inside it, and there is no meta-language to rule them all.

Last but not least, the ethical aspect of the translation paradigm : any other language is the language of one other, including mine. In translation, I learn not only to look at the other as myself, as an alter ego, which is still looking from my own viewpoint and measuring with my own metrics, but to look at myself as another, ego alter. Discovering the other-ness, the alterity inside myself, my own language, my own view of the world, is indeed a paradigm change that we all need.